What the deuce?
So just now, I'm a bit drowsy and thinking of turning in, reading along at the Anchoress' blog about the proper response when one comes under fire...
Wait a second. You know the Anchoress, right? Sweet Irish lass from Long Island, mom of two boys, including the seventeen-year-old Buster, blogs about Bryn Terfel operas and Catholicism and the culture of life? Her blog handle comes from the nun who was walled into a room in a church, where she could contemplate mysteries and dispense wisdom. She's had some health problems recently, I know, which led Vanity Fair's Frumpelstiltskin, James Wolcott, to call her an "oxygen-deprived shut-in".
So, the Anchoress. She sees her son is concerned about how to take care of himself in an extreme sort of situation, and she wants to cheer him up. So she says those words that my own sweet momma said to me long ago:
A quick confession: I was not always clumsily arthritic girl; for reasons that are not worth getting into, I have some expertise in the field of blade-wielding (take your best guess, maybe I was a carnival girl who got knives thrown at her in a past life). Once, answering a question on a long car ride, I had occasion to explain to Buster how vital it is for a short woman like me to have a spring-loaded blade delivered quickly to my hand so that I could then thrust it into a pericardium from below the ribcage. I showed him how the sternum extends farther than one expects and I advised him that it’s always dicey to attack from above (unless you’re taller than your opponent, and going for the jugular) as the ribcage would get in the way of the blade and the resulting shock up the arm can cost you your life. Then we moved on to taking someone down - instantly - via the kidney. ...It, um, goes on like that a while.
On second thought, I don't recall my own sweet momma ever telling me that stuff.
So, I'm wide awake now, and having trouble picturing what sort of experiences that expertise* is based on...the mind wanders towards the stockyards and the coroner's office, and from there into much more outlandish possibilities about which if I'm right, I should probably keep my mouth shut.
Michelle Malkin also has a worthwhile column similar in theme, if less rich in anatomical detail: Wanted: Culture of Self-Defense.
(* My own considered theories on the subject approximate those of Antonio Banderas in the first Zorro movie: "Pointy end goes in the other guy".)