Atomic Nerds

Wracking my brain has produced a lot more wracking than recognizable brain products, so in the name of getting SOME kind of content up today, here’s a bit of a stew of things I’ve come across that don’t really merit their own post.

Thanks to Steve (read the rest of the post, by the way, there’s at least one other link that got some really funny faces out of me), I appear to have been nearly the last person on the web to have discovered the Dogs In Elk story. What is the dogs in elk story? It is EXACTLY WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE, that’s what. It’s a series of message board posts from a long-suffering owner suffering a dilemma, and it begins:

Okay - I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.

…And gets progressively more hilarious from there. For those of you who’ve never really heard a dog sing for the fun of it or scream in indignation, the involved dogs are a New Guinea Singing Dog and a Basenji. Basenjis are one of the few AKC recognized breeds that are still allowed to import breeding stock from hunting tribes in Africa, and are among the most primitive (and unique) of modern domestic dogs; as for the Singing Dog, it’s really not so much “domesticated” as it is “tame”, and there was some lively debate as to whether they should be counted as their own species or as a sort of northern dingo. Suffice it to say these guys ain’t spaniels, and this is somewhat important to the story.

In the department of hilarious stories, someone on the dog forum I hang out on recently posted a link to a story I used to have filed away but lost somewhere in an upgrade, the tale of the Horror of Blimps, as retold by a denizen of the Straight Dope forums. There is only quite a small blimp involved, but suffice it to say it’s a demonstration of why a skilled writer makes the difference between a short and boring story and one that, like this one, I still can’t read aloud without pauses for helpless crackups.

Via Snarkybytes, a writer’s litany of commonly made gun mistakes. He appears to have film in mind as well as (if not more than) books, and he hits the highlights, but he leaves several out that drive me pretty much insane:

1. Shooting off a lock with a pistol. This does not work, writers! At best it just fuses the lock and creates a problem that you now have no choice to deal with by any means other than bolt cutters. Ludicrously common.

2. The “buzzsaw” .22 round. It’s entirely too common in shows and movies that like to THINK they know better to describe the .22 as acting like a “buzzsaw” in that it continues bouncing around after it enters a body and tears shit up, more than a round with more power, that would “just go through” would. Needless to say with this crowd, but, no. A low-power round of .22 pretty much just enters and stops. Sometimes bullets do bounce, but this has a lot more to do with luck than anything else. While it’s true that a .22 round to the head is a favored method for assassins and execution-style killings, that has a lot more to do with .22s being easy to conceal, easily silenced, and making a relatively small noise regardless than it does with any magic bullet-bouncing*.

3. Fully automatic weapons fired from the hip are the most dangerous weapons in existence. In almost any given movie where the bad guys pounce on the good guy or guys, they’ll leap out, produce a scary black rifle, and proceed to fire an endless stream of bullets at everything and everyone. This leads to, depending on how many important characters are in the scene, everyone dead. In real life, this has the effect of making people take cover, but you’re out of ammunition in about twenty seconds and if anyone was actually hit it’s more due to luck than anything else. Babylon 5 won my heart forever by having a scene in which some would-be assassins try this… and are promptly and resoundingly Kilt Dead by their intended target, who simply takes cover and shoots them one at a time with a pistol he actually aims.

4. Wall-o-energy firing. Bullets may be traveling with enough force to penetrate your body and fuck you up in various ways, but they do not travel with enough force to fling you across the fucking room, or even any significant distance backward. If you want someone to go flying, just hit ‘em with a car, okay?

5. Not all cover is created equal. A car, unless it’s an armored car specifically designed to resit bullets- and in the case of some bulletproof glasses, it’s not necessarily bulletproof when put up against a high-powered rifle- is NOT cover. A table in a bar is really definitely extremely not cover, and neither is a couch, a bookcase, a normal wall, a door, or virtually any other thing the hero ducks behind.

6. Oh crap! Jam! Better throw it away, it will NEVER WORK AGAIN.

7. Fatal gunshot wound equals fatal INSTANTLY. Generally speaking, with a fatal bullet wound, you die because there is either no more brain or because blood is no longer reaching the brain. Flopping over because the victim’s head has just become spread over a ten-meter radius is acceptable- flopping over immediately dead because it hit center of mass, not so much. Even if the heart is literally exploded in the chest, the woundee can still run/fight/whatever until the appropriate oxygen lack kicks in**.

I’m sure y’all can think of others…

*“In contact wounds of the head from the .22 Short cartridge, there are generally no skull fractures, except perhaps of the orbital plates. The bullet rarely exits the cerebral cavity. Internal ricocheting with such a round is extermely common.” - Gunshot Wounds - Practical Aspects of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques 2nd Edition, Vincent J.M. Di Maio, p.162. This one isolated and obviously uncommon set of conditions is quite possibly the entire origination of the deadly .22 Buzzsaw.

**“Experiments have shown that an individual can remain conscious for at least 10 to 15 sec. after complete occlusion of the carotid arteries. Thus if no blood is pumped to the brain because of a massive gunshot wound of the heart, an individual can remain conscious and function, e.g., run, for at least 10 sec before collapsing.” Same source, p. 254, emphasis mine. Just because you shot the bad guy doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods yet.

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