Old Stuff: Pt One

[I’m kind of on vacation this week, so what I’m posting is some of my old stuff from before I had a site]

Weapons! With the exception of “balm” and “areola”, is there a sweeter word in the English language? Maybe, but what incentive do I have to find out what they are? Your entertainment? Don’t make me laugh…

And, weapons are GREAT. Each one is another step up the food chain. You wouldn’t believe the animals that were pushing us around BEFORE we got weapons. We were being slapped around by pandas… honest to God pandas… and not Kung fu Pandas but the normal kind that sit around in zoos NOT reproducing. You see, before weapons, the only way we had of defending ourselves was pummeling. And, most large animals can handle a pummeling if there is a meal on the other side of it.

But, something as simple as a sharpened stick is enough to send pandas, coyotes and even house painters running for easier prey and rooms without so much crown molding… Sure, lions, tigers and bears found sharpened sticks laughable, but laughing tigers are definitely more entertaining than the somber kind… even if it is a derisive kind of laugh.

Eventually, we found a way to even kill laughing tigers so we moved on to killing our own kind. Murder is the very worst thing we can do so we are immediately sorry, afterwards. It isn’t our fault that we are greedy and bloodthirsty because those just happened to be the humans that procreated with other humans. Reasonable cave men tended to go stag a lot…

Now we sit at the very top of the food chain but we STILL invent new weapons. Five minutes later, our opponents have the exact same weapon because SOMEONE is going to drop something eventually. It’s the law of averages which states that the average guy always drops something. Whereas, Murphy’s law states that the guy who dropped the weapon wasn’t Murphy. Sure it was Murphy’s gun, his name was right on the side, but he LOANED it to the guy who doesn’t speak English very well. Go ‘head and ask him…

Weapons are almost sacred to us. Everyone admires the secret agent who can “turn any object into a weapon”. Problem is, with the exception of pirates, we don’t use weapons very much anymore. I could name a dozen tools that we use more than weapons (I’m mostly impressed that I could name a dozen tools). Would we respect a man who can “turn any object into a miter saw”? Maybe in a society that put more value on wooden picture frames…

***

The earliest weapon was the club. The club was used to club other people or, in the case of neanderthal suicides, oneself. For a very long time, the only thing you could club someone with was a club; however, as man advanced, he found he could club others with practically anything: Boards, crowbars, frozen fish and, as in the most famous of all Jewish hair parables, the jawbone of an ass.

As late as the nineteenth century, the Irish were still walking around with clubs because, like gamecocks, Irishmen tended to attack one another on sight. These clubs were called shillelaghs. They tended to be sticks with weighted ends and were often used in philosophical discussions over politics or which football team was better.

Shillelaghs, like most prehistoric weaponry, can be thrown. This functionality evolved naturally through use of the scientific method…