Benjamin Kuttner's Blog, page 5

Blowpipe (blowgun) and having fun making your own.

When I was a kid all my friends had air rifles so I begged my dad to get me one for my birthday (He had seen first hand what a mess guns can make while training to be a doctor in apartheid South Africa so was pretty against the idea). In the end he relented and I had heaps of fun shooting competitions at cans and targets. However, what would have been really great would have been to build my own blowpipe, which would be creative and easily done with readily available stuff. Blowpipes/guns have been in use for thousands of years by ancient jungle tribes.

Wikimedia Commons

For writing they are interesting because certain Amazon tribes dip the darts in toxins secreted from poison dart frogs to hunt monkeys, birds and other game. This would be pretty scary if someone was after you with one of these blowpipes. Especially if it was dipped in batrachotoxin secreted from the skin of the ‘Golden Poison Frog’ of which there is no known antidote.

Wikimedia Commons

Traditional ways to make the blowpipe and darts differ among Amazon tribes. Below are two different techniques I saw on Youtube:

In this video the man uses a hardwood that he drills a hole through over two days. He carves wood away to create the round pipe shape, using a rasp he further rounds it off and then smooths and sands. He is using metal and sandpaper, I haven’t found information yet on what the traditional tools to shape would have looked like. So if anyone knows please post below.

Another video shows a different tribe who takes a variety of bamboo and splits it in half to hollow out the core and smooth down. They glue it together with sap from a rubber tree (latex sap) using plant fibers dipped in the sap heated up as a sticky glue to tie the two halves to together. The tribe glue the edges and seal the whole surface with the latex sap allowing them to wrap a certain kind of bark around it. They carve the mouthpiece out of wood and glue it on with heated latex sap. The darts are made from spines from certain trees and palms. Cotton from the kapok tree is used on the ends to create a seal that allows a blast of air to force the dart out.

Making Your Own

I found this great video on how to make your own.  Below are my fun and successful results!

To make your own blowgun you need:

2 foot length of pvc pipe.

½ inch (1.27cm) pvc pipe

Female reducing adapter from ¾ inch (1.9cm) to ½ inch (1.27cm).

Sellotape/scotch tape

Sticky notes

Glue gun/poster tack

Party hat

nails

 

Can you escape being garroted with a piano/guitar string?

If you’ve seen the excellent first Godfather movie when Carlo, the treacherous brother-in-law of Michael Corleone, is garroted (whacked) it’s seems such a horrible and cowardly way to kill someone (Someone comes up behind you and strangles and cuts through your neck with a guitar or piano string). It also looks like an impossible situation to get out of – the fact that there is very little information online probably reflects this.

In one blog the author and several of the comments listed techniques and thoughts on evasion techniques. The main point is you only have a few seconds to find a way out before you are in deep trouble.

From my various readings the best advice is:

1. Being aware of your surroundings is in the number one defense. Don’t get in the front seat of a car with guys who could potentially do this to you sitting in the back. Added to this, being aware means you may be able to evade or get a hand between your neck and the wire.

2. If it the garrote is around your neck then move backwards towards the garroter and try and turn to face them. This closing the distance and turning and facing opens the possibility of attacking with a headbutt, gouging their eyes,  striking their neck, stomach or groin. Unfortunately it’s easier said than done as your neck is being cut and constricted at the same time you try to carry out the countermeasures.

3. A few commentators mentioned trying to stamp on your attacker’s feet or kick them in the groin. To me, this seems highly speculative as you are facing away and struggling against the garroter so for any backward attacks to be successful it would be a matter of pure luck.

Scenarios:

Carlo in the car – the Godfather: he should have never sat in the front passenger seat as per point 1. I can see virtually no other way he could get out of this situation unless he managed to get a hand under the garrote and had a gun handy.

Luca Brasi in the Godfather: he departed from point 1 but the closed bar seemed an easier location than the front seat of a car to mount a fight back. However, in terms of point 2 he was never going to get out because the knife pinning his right hand and Bruno Tattaglia holding his left meant he couldn’t turn to deal with the gangster administering the garrote.

Tom (aka Joey) evades a garrote in A History of Violence: Joey gets a hand between the garrote and his neck. In terms of point 1, Joey probably should have chosen a safer place to meet but in terms of point 2 after analyzing this scene it seems harder to turn and face with your hand pinned between the garrote and your neck, so Joey going to ground and kicking the garroter in the head was probably the next best thing for him to do.

I’m very interested in anyone who has further thoughts on escaping a garrote.

The useful (and deadly) nail gun.

I do some DIY now and again. In the past I’ve always been a hammer and nails kind of builder. Then one day a guy lent me his nail gun and life changed. This tool is AWESOME. One little canister of butane or propane, a full battery and a box of nails like a machine gun cartridge into the magazine and you can build at such a rate it defies imagination. Here’s my demo:

This nail gun can shoot 50mm and 90mm nails at a rate of 2 to 3 nails a second. Where this gets interesting for writing is not so much the wholesome nature of a nail gun but the more nefarious side you could imagine for some antagonist.

According to the CDC website in 2014 there were 37,000 emergency visits in the US for nail gun injuries.

This guy survived an terrible injury to his head. He thought the nail had grazed his skin and even when he was shown an x-ray that it was in the middle of his brain he was still dubious (one would probably say the nail was affecting his judgment?). The brilliant doctors removed it with some skull then covered the hole with a titanium mesh.

In fact the guy who lent me this nail gun told a story about when he was nailing through some timber in an old house with the gun (stupidly) pointing back at himself up into a piece of timber he was reaching around. He didn’t realise the timber was rotten in places and the nail went right through narrowly missing his eye and nicking his eyebrow. He said he downed tools and went home for that day to reflect on his close shave.

On a lighter note here’s an artist at work with a nail gun!

It’s easy to think of ways some villain could use this as a weapon… A bit like the guy in No Country for Old Men and his cattle killing pneumatic air gun.

Wasp Sting v Bullet Ant

I was at a friend’s birthday party the other day recounting my wasp sting story…

Ouch!

…when someone there told us about a tribe that uses wasps in a glove as a manhood rite of passage. I looked it up and he didn’t get it quite right (I think he had had a few too many) as it’s actually an ant from Brazil – aptly named the bullet ant. Apparently the bullet ant sting is the most painful sting in the Hymenoptera (over 150,000 species recognized) order of insects which comprises sawflies, wasps, bees and ants. (Source: Wikipedia).

This subject of stings was yielding such rich information that I delved further reading that Justin O. Schmidt an etymologist from Arizona developed the Schmidt Sting Pain Index which ranks my paper wasp sting in third place! Each category has an utterly wonderful description of the pain that any writer/reader would find a little devilish pleasure in reading.

1.0 Sweat bee: “Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.”
1.2 Fire ant: “Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.”
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: “A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.”
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: “Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.”
2.0 Yellowjacket: “Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”

2.x Honey bee and European hornet: “Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.”
3.0 Red harvester ant: “Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.”
3.0 Paper wasp: “Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of Hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.”
4.0 Pepsis wasp: “Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).”
Pepsis wasp is bigger than you think. I ran across it at a museum display with a pin through it.
Pepsis wasp’s prey! A tarantula.
4.0+ Bullet ant: “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.”

An indigenous Brazilian tribe known as the Sateré-Mawé take masochism or machismo to new heights when they sedate bullet ants with one of the many naturally occurring drugs  in the rain forest. They carefully weave many of the ants into a glove made of leaves that many commentators say resembles an oven mitt. The stings face inside the glove ready for when the ants awake, angry and ready to cause maximum pain. A boy, ready for manhood, puts his hand into the glove of pain. According to Wikipedia the boy may shake uncontrollably for days, and when the poor kid recovers he has to repeat the ordeal up to twenty times over the next few years to finally prove – he is a man.

To give a taste of what the pain really is like here is a from our friends down under; Ozy’s love to prove their manliness and Haimish could only hold his hands in for a few seconds…

(I’d like to say I’d be as tough as a Sateré-Mawé boy, but I’d probably last as long as Haimish did and with the huge reaction I had to the paper wasp would probably need medical treatment a lot earlier…)

 

A man of action never wears a neck tie.

This is clearly demonstrated in the Keanu Reeves directed “Man of Tai Chi” – Trailer and IMDB.

Wasp sting

I was up a ladder trying to fix a gutter when I put my head directly into a paper wasp nest on a fern frond. I literally flew off the ladder and found myself on the ground (on my back) with a burning sting on my left cheek. I picked myself up and suddenly felt very hot on my face with an itchiness on my chest, under my chin and on my legs. I also felt short of breath and light headed. Like an idiot I continued doing what I was doing on the roof of the house and hours later took two antihistamine tablets and went to bed. The next morning I looked in the mirror and saw the most horrific ‘morning face’ and, of course, took a quick selfie:

Looks like I’d been punched!

My whole face was swollen on one side with significant fluid under my left eye. I first thought I’d been stung by a hornet as the insect was long and thin and bright colored but as the nest was quite obvious – because I’d stuck my head right into it –  I realized it was a paper wasp. These skinny insects gather fiber from dead wood and mix it with their saliva to build nests that look like old cardboard egg cartons. I read that their stings can produce a painful anaphylactic reaction like I had.

Paper wasp – Wikimedia Commons.

I also researched that when bees sting they actually release pheromones with the venom that triggers more bees to attack. I’m guessing it’s probably similar with paper wasps – a natural protection mechanism that produces a deadly swarm of angry, stinging insects.

Bamboo torture

A while back I herniated/slipped a disc in my back digging out bamboo which was further aggravated by kite surfing in cold water. Every few minutes I got an excruciating stab of nerve pain down my leg. There was no rhyme nor reason, no position I could be in to stop this random torture. I was awake for two nights in a row. My father, who is fortunately a specialist in muscle and nerve pain, organized an MRI to access what to do with my back. All this back torture and the digging out bamboo strangely merged in my head to wonder whether the legend (or reality) of bamboo torture is real…

If you’ve ever pulled out bamboo roots they are amazingly resilient plants – actually a type of woody grass . The bamboo sends out a sucker (growth point) with a sharp barb at the end that eventually becomes one of the shoots we see above ground.

If any more sprout I’ll dig up the actual shoots I saw – Wikimedia Commons.

Apparently both the Japanese and Chinese used to torture and kill people by growing bamboo sprouts through their bodies. Myth Busters did an episode (which the Discovery channel doesn’t have available online) that proves a bamboo shoot can penetrate human flesh – they grew a shoot into ballistic gelatin for three days…

Benjamin Kuttner presents the D&E

D&E stands for Discovery & Exploration Club. A reawakening of the Age of Discovery when there were still places left to explore, cultures and treasures to discover. I have noticed in myself and others a growing yearning to break free of modern expectations and allow curiosity and adventure into life again. This is a state of mind where a man, or woman, of action lives by challenging and exploring.

In the world I am creating for my character, Jonathan Lloyd, this is the only way to live…

On this blog I will share interesting anecdotes and facts that may find their way into my writing. My Action-Adventure Thriller is coming out in the next few months, here’s where to find out when it goes live.

Welcome to the D&E!

D&E stands for Discovery & Exploration Club. A reawakening of the Age of Discovery when there were still places left to explore, cultures and treasures to discover. I have noticed in myself and others a growing yearning to break free of modern expectations and allow curiosity and adventure into life again. This is a state of mind where a man, or woman, of action lives by challenging and exploring.

In the world I am creating for my character, Jonathan Lloyd, this is the only way to live…

On this blog I will share interesting anecdotes and facts that may find their way into my writing. My action adventure (mystery) thriller is coming out in the next few months, here’s where to find out when it goes live.