Online Book Reader

Home Category

You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [46]

By Root 292 0
an ass-kicking spell he’d found in the pages of a Harry Potter novel.

5. BEER BOTTLE OVER THE HEAD


For years, a beer bottle shattered over the head has been the visual shorthand for “this person got knocked unconscious.” But when real people really smack a real beer bottle over someone’s head, one of two things happens: (1) It doesn’t break and they are enraged, or (2) their head gets wet. If you’re lucky, you might open up a cut. If you’re unlucky, it will be on your hand. Otherwise the body attached to the head it broke against can go about the business of kicking your ass while still fully conscious and, if anything, somewhat refreshed.

You don’t have to take our word for it: Thanks to YouTube and the contents of the beer bottles themselves, there are hundreds of easily accessible failed bottle-over-head experiments. And though each of the amateur scientists involved clearly has a soft skull, they all remain wildly undevastated by their bottle-breaking field work. No one’s saying try this at home, just trust that the millions of years evolution spent building a helmet for your brain trumps an empty Bud Light every time.

The rest of Road House though? One hundred percent accurate. It’s basically a documentary.

4. THE TWIST WITH YOUR HANDS/LEGS NECK BREAK


Even if you do it really hard and your victim is a completely incidental guard outside the enemy’s base, coming up behind someone and cranking their head to the side doesn’t break their neck. You probably suspected this the first time your chiropractor did it to you and you didn’t wake up rolling through heaven in a wheelchair. When the spine is given a choice between simply turning in the same direction as the neck or detaching from the head, it usually picks the first one.

But what if you leap up, wrap your legs around his head, and kind of twist? Surely something that awesome-looking has to be effective! Well, no. And what’s worse, the mythical leg-scissors neck break actually squanders a golden opportunity to do some real damage. If you find yourself in a position to execute a leg-around-the-head move, modern jujitsu would recommend a tight triangle choke, thus matching the puny muscles of your opponent’s neck against your comparatively immense leg muscles. If you instead take your pointers from Jean-Claude Van Damme movies and just twist your hips awkwardly, you’ll be astonished at how much your opponent doesn’t die. In fact, you’ll be lucky if you manage to give him an Indian burn with your jeans before he takes advantage of the prime penis-biting position you’ve put him in. In short: No one will be dead and you’ll both go home with a lot of explaining to do to your wives.

3. THE STANDING ARM-BREAK


If Steven Seagal blocks your punch, there’s a really good chance you’re going to be the bad type of double jointed in the very near future. Whether he’s cracking arms over his shoulder or kicking knees in the wrong direction, all extremities turn to crispy breadsticks under Seagal’s awesome powers. According to martial arts movies, a half pound of pressure shatters a kneecap, while according to real life Hollywood got all its information on bones well before the invention of milk.

It takes a lot more than yanking on an arm to break it. Two much more likely things happen first: Either the body attached to the arm goes in the direction you pull it, or the shoulder simply dislocates. Trying to snap the bone before one of these things happens is like trying to knock a wall down by jumping into the window.

There is actual documentation of a forced arm-breaking, but it took more than Steven Seagal gently leaning his considerable bulk against an elbow to make it happen. At UFC 48: Payback, jujitsu expert Frank Mir locked his entire 250-pound body onto Tim Sylvia’s arm and cranked it as hard as he could, while six-foot-eight Sylvia stood up and pulled in the opposite direction. His forearm snapped. To re-create these kinds of conditions outside the ring, you’d need a gallon of moonshine, a tractor, and the world’s dumbest volunteer.

2. KNOCKING A NOSE

Return Main Page Previous Page Next Page

®Online Book Reader