Advice on Topics I Know Nothing About

This Sunday, it looks like I’ll be participating in our local Dagorhir game.  Dagorhir, translated loosely as “Battle Lords” from the Sindar tongue, is basically just an excuse for grown men to dress up in tunics, pick up foam swords, and beat one another.  It sounds like fun.

So, in the spirit of Sunday’s activities – and given the fact that I’ve never actually done this – I present today’s expert advice on fighting in a Dagorhir battle.

Find someone that knows what he’s doing and follow him. You’ll know the guy when you see him: graceful movements, long, flowing hair, dancing about the battlefield as he slashes his enemies.  Follow him.  Just kind of dance about in the merry trail of carnage he leaves in his wake.

If someoone’s down, hit them again to make sure. The last thing you want is to get taken out because someone just tripped over his … jerkin.  Or bodice.  Or whatever he’s wearing.  So if you run past someone face down, whap them on the back for good measure.

“Huzzah!” Yell that a lot.

Attack the weapon. This is actually somewhat informed advice; while I’m not a seasoned veteran of Dagorhir, I know fencing.  If someone’s running at you, attack the weapon.  A good, powerful hit on their weapon will knock it right out of the way, eliminating your enemy’s ability to wage war.  Then you haul off and smack them upside the head, yelling, “Have at thee, foul orc!”

Use subturfuge. If you see the enemy nearby, encourage him to help you go attack one of your other teammates.  In his moment of confusion (or in the case of a particularly dense enemy, when he turns to go after Timmy), shank him.

You cannot use two swords. You just can’t.  You seriously lack the dexterity to do it, and the martial benefits of having dual blades as opposed to a traditional sword and shield are, at best, dubious.  Unless you’re playing Monster Hunter, in which case dual swords are the way to go, but we’re not here.  This is (a loose approximation of) real life, and all you’re going to do with dual swords is get yourself taken out in an efficient fashion.

Learn the Elvish tongue. Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, was a linguist.  There’s an entire Elvish language, complete with construction rules and an expansive vocabulary, that permeates his work.  Those fancy words peppering the books aren’t just randomly made up, but rather painstakingly constructed from the language that serves as the backbone of the book’s mythology.  Failing to at least shout out one or two Elvish catchphrases at an event literally named after an Elvish catchphrase would be like going to a Star Trek convention and not knowing a single Klingon insult.

It would make you a filthy p’tak.

And now I’ve confused myself and broken my brain.

Bubbles.

Because I was sick last week and I’m running behind on some things, I have chosen to break format so and dispense advice in an abbreviated, lightning round format for this week’s post.

• When running behind on things, short change the things that are least important to your survival first. Less phony advice and more actual work, for example.
• If you’re a basketball player, try spring shoes. I’m actually talking about shoes with springs on the bottom of them.  Inspector Gadget kind of stuff.  There can’t be a rule against it because it’s so stupid.  It’s like how we didn’t have notices on lawnmowers that you shouldn’t use them as hedgetrimmers back in the day because nobody was dumb enough to do it.  Mr. Naismith never imagined spring shoes.
• Move to Indiana. Yeah, we’ve got no real fall or spring to speak of here, but there are very few natural disaster risks.  They build huge data centers here because of that, so you should be safe, too.  You’re at least as important as data, right?
• Load up your ‘Mech with PPC’s. Medium lasers are acceptable, too.  Avoid autocannons at all costs, except possibly for the really big bore ones.  I’m looking at you, AC/20.
• Don’t walk around outside barefoot. Before you go and tell me how comfortable it is, go find a patch of your grass about a foot square and stare at it for ten minutes.  You’ll be amazed what you find crawling around down there.
• When time traveling, don’t go visit yourself. The space time continuum thanks you.
• Black 17. You’ll remember this next time you’re at a roulette wheel, then you’ll laugh all the way to the bank.  Or the poorhouse.  Either way.
• The ball’s under the shell on the right. Every single time.  They hide it there because it’s easier, because most of your typical shell game guys are, surprisingly, lefties.  That’s why they can trick us; their southpaw motions are deceptive.

As a fat guy, I don’t see how there’s anyone more qualified than I am to offer advice on dancing.   Don’t think a lot about how that makes sense.   Just go with it.

Don’t care. If there’s anything I know from experience, it’s that you can’t be successful as a dancer if you give even the slightest crap about what other people think about you.  None of the following are helpful thoughts:

• Are they laughing at me?
• Can they see my underwear?
• Did that guy just lick his lips in my general direction?
• Did they hear me fart?

 
Just pretend they’re not there.  A good way to practice this is to clear your living room of furniture, buy like a hundred cardboard stand-ups, and put them all in a circle facing your dance area.  Then you just have to crank up the tunes and start busting your move.  Or whatever the kids are saying these days.  You get used to being surrounded by people, and you’ve also got the makings of a very nice, low-budget terracotta army.

Yours will just be cardboard.

Avoid backflips. Yeah, they look impressive, but I want you to do two things before you throw this advice out.  First off, do a Google search for “broken neck” and read for a while.  Secondly, LOOK AT YOURSELF!  YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS DOING BACKFLIPS!

Seriously, no backflips. Stick to cheeseburgers.  They’re great, and while they exclude you from backflips, the backflips aren’t necessary.  You can do plenty of spinning, which is both relatively safe and still quite visually impressive, and that should compensate for your lack of backflips.

Guys, avoid the splits. You’re not CroCop.  You’re not Johnny Cage.  You’re just not.  All that you’re going to accomplish by doing the splits is pain beyond anything you could ever have possibly imagined.  That’s it.  Even if you can actually split successfully without tearing your groin, in your over-enthusiasm at your awesomeness, you’re probably going to hit the ground too hard.  There’s just no good way that you can do this without causing significant injury to yourself.

Ladies, split away. You’re good.  Go right ahead.

Two final words: outlandish costumes. Think about every great dance routine you’ve ever seen.  Go ahead, close your eyes real quick and do it.  This article isn’t going anywhere.

Seriously, do it.

The lynch pin that holds those routines together is the dress of the participants.  Whether it’s a leisure suit or a flashy, tear-away dance outfit, you’ve got to have the threads to pull off something memorable.  Also, when you hit the dance floor wearing something like John Travolta out of Saturday Night Fever, people are going to automatically assume that you know what you’re doing.  If you’re dressed properly, you can just hang around and do the prom shuffle with yourself while onlookers think, “Thank goodness he’s keeping it simple and not blinding us with most of the doubtlessly incredible moves from his repertoire.  I wish I could dance like he can.”

This outfit is the key.

Zombies are popular these days, so we’re going to jump on board.  Want to survive the inexplicable zombie uprising that’s plaguing your town?  We can help.

Plaguing.  Heh heh.  I did it again.

Seek other survivors. This one comes with a qualifier, though, because not all survivors are a good idea for hanging about with.  For example, you don’t want to hang around with a bunch of old ladies and/or babies.  In a zombie outbreak, that’s like hanging out at the buffet.  Not a good idea.

Likewise, you don’t want to go hang out with your local military.  I know, you’re probably a little puzzled at this one, because you’d think that you’d want to hang around with the highly organized fighting men who have all of the weapons.  Well, you don’t.

Why not?  It’s simple.  They work for the government, and in any sort of large-scale zombie outbreak, it’s best to just assume that the government’s responsible.

I want YOU ... r brains.

So, who do you run to?  Well, depending on your part of the country, you either run to the rednecks or the urban gangs.  Both will be well stocked on both weapons and on some sort of alcohol, two things that are highly necessary in a situation like this.  Find them, make friends, and enjoy surviving.

Don’t be a hero. Wouldn’t it be awesome to be at the head of your pack of survivors, bellowing out like Rambo while you lay down a hail of fire from the assault rifle your new friends gave you?  Yeah, for like thirty seconds, then you’d get eaten.

If you want to survive, stay in the back.  Lay down a little suppressive fire while Jim Bob goes up front with his shotgun and becomes some zombie’s lunch.  The idea is to be able to run as quickly as possible when things go bad, which they will.

The hardware and sporting goods stores are, in fact, very good ideas. Yes, they’re the stuff of classic zombie movie and game tropes, but that’s for a good reason.  They’re packed full of useful stuff.  I’m looking around my office right now as I type, and I see one or two things that would be useful for killing zombies or surviving in adverse conditions.  Walk into Dick’s Sporting Goods and you’re going to be tripping over stuff that’s useful: shotguns, rifles, knives, you name it.

Convince your friends to head to the nearest convenient location and take it over.  Just bust in with what weapons you already have, inform anyone else inside that you’re in charge now, and boom; your chances of survival go up significantly almost immediately.  Assimilate any survivors inside into your gang/band of rednecks, pass out weapons, and live very happily inside your new castle until the zombies die out.

Headshots are unnecessary. You don’t really need to kill the zombies, quite honestly.  Incapacitating the zombies works just as well.  If you’ve crippled a zombie’s motor functions so it’s just crawling across the ground, you’ve won; it’s not even shambling any more, and it’ll be easy to evade or finish off.  If you, who’ve probably never shot a gun at something in real life before, start aiming for the head, you’re just going to miss and die.  So, just spray bullets until the zombies fall.  Bullets aren’t going to be as rare as Resident Evil would have you believe, anyway.

Whatever you do, don’t try to get away. You want to be indoors, behind a bunch of barricades, ready to shoot anything that comes your way.  You do not want to be driving to the next town thinking that you can plow through the barricade of zombies on the road.  You can’t.

Think about basic physiology for a minute.  All of these shambling, reanimated corpses are going to have a shelf life of a few days before they just break down thanks to the sun.  All you have to do is wait the zombies out.  Enjoy some beef jerky and Milwaukee’s Best with Bubba and Cletus from the comfort of the new camp chairs you’re using as thrones until nature does the job of eliminating your enemies.

So, you want to create deadly poisons for a living, eh? Obviously some of you do, because this was actually requested. Never wanting to disappoint our fans, we now give our advice on how to become a professional poisoner.

Stay away from ingestibles that make people vomit. The whole point is to get someone to swallow the poison if it’s ingestible, right?  Then you don’t want people yakking up your poison.  Doctors do that to treat people for poisoning, so it seems like something you’d want to avoid when you’re brewing your own.

I think that a descriptive caption is somewhat unnecessary here.

Be discrete. Stay with me here for a minute.  I understand that you’re trying to be an evil poisoner and you want to craft horrors to unleash upon an unsuspecting work.  Such work naturally demands that you have an appropriately evil lair (probably in a cave somewhere) and that you wear a cape with either a hood or a very high collar at all times, right?  Right?

No.  Absolutely no on all of these things.

This is the big trap that you’ve got to avoid when you step into any sort of evil mastermindery.  Why would you build an outlandish, multi-million dollar hidden underground lair?  For a few thousand bucks, you could have a shed rigged with explosives that would work just as well, plus you’d have nearly a million dollars left.  Yeah, capes are cool, but they also make people ask, “Why on earth are you wearing that hideous cape?”  There’s just no good answer there.

Also, filming a message to the world about the horrible poison that you just created so that every television station (and YouTube!) can broadcast doom out to everyone?  That’s the worst idea you could ever have.  You’ll get busted by sundown.  It’s like capturing the hero and explaining your plan to him before you slowly torture him to death instead of just shooting him when you have a chance.

So, be subtle.  Just be a normal guy with a shed and nobody will be any the wiser.  Avoid all of the evil mastermind tropes at all costs, though, because they’ll just lead to failure.

Do not experiment on yourself. Probably a common sense thing, but you’re not making spaghetti sauce here.  Hmm, let me see how this batch of Black Ichor I’m working on turned out is not a good thought to have in your shed-turned-poison-lab.  Just saying.

But you’ve got to experiment, you say?  You’ve got to have something to test your creations on?  One word for you: kittens.

The perfect solution ...

Think about it.  They come by the basketful, and you can usually get them for free.  Set out some cat food on your back door and you’ll have two or three in a day without even trying.  Plus, they’re basically people: they’ve got eyes and mouths and … four limbs … and … hair.

You know, just don’t think about it much and it makes sense.

By popular demand, we now give you advice on performing a totally successful brain surgery.

Yeah, there will be no pictures of actual brain surgery. Ick.

Scrub up and wear gloves. A brain infection sounds like a very, very bad thing.  Lets try to avoid them.  Scrub your hands extra shiny clean and wear gloves.  I don’t know where your hands have been, but they don’t need to be near anybody’s brain.

Anesthesia.  Lots of it. If the patient writhes and squirms and screams and such, it’s not going to make your job any easier.  Brain surgery is hard enough and you don’t get any points for your degree of difficulty, so knock the patient out.

Whiskey.  Lots of it. This is going to be an ugly thing.  You don’t want to see it.  Get drunk beforehand so you’re not grossed out and you’ll hopefully forget everything.  The last thing you want to do is to open up the skull, see the brain and blood and such, and then yak on the sick brain you’re trying to fix.

Know the brain! Study this chart and learn where things are.

Memorize this. There will be a test later that will involve you cutting into one of these things.

Now, when someone tells you that you relieve the pressure on the cerebellum, you kind of know where you’re going.  Relieving the pressure is the easy part; you just cut and pop until the swelling goes away.  Knowing where the cerebellum happens to be is the important part.  Yeah, you could probably just guess by looking at things, but you’d have to take off the whole skull to look at stuff, and that’s no good.

Use a small saw to get in. Opening up the skull is a job for a delicate tool.  I’d strongly suggest using a Dremel, not a Poulan.  I think the reasons are obvious and have very clearly been illustrated by dozens of slasher flicks over the years.

Don’t throw anything away! Again, this one is vital.  Don’t throw away the skull or bits of brain.  The last thing you want is to have a successful brain surgery and not be able to close things up because you tossed away the top of the skull like it was a lid from a can of potato chips.

Close up with style. Brain surgery brings huge, nasty scars.  You’re opening up the skull, so scarring should be expected.  Why not help make things better and bling up the skull a little bit as you finish things up.  Maybe you can put in some big, Frankenstein style staples if someone’s a fan of horror movies.  Throw in some shiny gold staples for some other people, maybe, or perhaps some dangly butterflies for the ladies.  Make it pleasant.

Well, as pleasant as possible.  It’s brain surgery, and you’re drunk.  This probably isn’t going to end well.

You’ve all had this problem: you and a friend are walking through the woods, then suddenly, a giant bear jumps out at you.  We’ve all been there.  Well, you’ve got to be ready and prepared to deal with things like this when they happen.  We can help.

You must be prepared to deal with this.

First off, don’t panic. That’s the worst thing you could do.  The bear’s obviously already freaking out because you’ve walked into his territory, or else it wouldn’t have jumped out at you and been all “RAWR!” in the first place.  You don’t honestly think that you running around yelling, “Oh no!  I’m gonna die!” with your arms flailing above your head is going to do any good, do you?  So stay calm, because it’s really your only chance.

If you’re actually with a buddy, have him make the ultimate sacrifice. Chances are good that you’re both going to die, anyway, if you actually stay and try to fight off the bear.  So, drawing inspiration from our lion tamer talk earlier in the week, shove your buddy immediately in the bear’s arms.  While he’s getting mauled, you run away as far and as fast as possible.  When you finally make it out of the woods, be sure to start a scholarship in his name and tell everyone how brave he was.

No, I don’t care if he wasn’t brave and was actually kind of a jerk.  You don’t mention that.  You just fed him to a bear, so he better become Paul Bunyan to anyone you talk to him about, understand?

If there’s no buddy with you, you at least have a gun, right? Good, then shoot it up into the air.  Why not shoot the bear?  Because you probably aren’t a good enough shot to hit it between the eyes and kill it when you’re not trembling from fear of the giant bear that’s ten feet in front of you, let alone now.  So even if you do manage to hit it, all you’re going to do is make it more angry and convince it you want to fight.  Fire it into the air, and you’ve used your magic thunderstick to make a loud boom to hopefully scare the bear away.

If you don’t have a gun, you have to have a flashlight, so shine it in the bear’s eyes. Again, we’re just trying to scare him off.  Granted, this will probably just end up getting you mauled; I know how angry I get when someone shines a light in my eyes, and I’m not already a honked-off bear that just had someone walk into the forest he spent weeks peeing on until it got just right.  But, it’s really all you’ve got at this point, because running away or fighting it is just going to get you killed, anyway, so give it a shot.  Maybe the bear’s prone to migraines or something.

What about if you don’t have a friend, a gun, or a flashlight, you ask? WHY DON’T YOU HAVE ANY OF THOSE THINGS?  Just lay down and die.  You deserve it at this point for not being prepared.  Maybe the bear will have mercy on you for being dumb.

Seriously. Why did you come here without a friend, a gun, or a flashlight?

So you want to be in the circus as a lion tamer, eh?   This seems like a bad idea.  Have you thought this through?  Life as a circus performer seems hard enough, if you ask me; you’re travelling constantly, you’re around a bunch of animal poop all the time, and with a steady diet of peanuts and cotton candy, you’re going to get fat real quick.   Top that off with the fact that your job description consists entirely of trying to die by putting your head in a lion’s mouth, and it’s just not a good career choice.   If you’re dead set on it, though, you need a place to start, so here you go.

Heh.  Dead set.

Two-words: metal gorget. A gorget, for those of you who aren’t well-versed in the ways of personal armor, is throat armor.  Essentially, it’s a big, high collar that goes around the throat, theoretically preventing damage.  Get one of these made out of a few inches thick of metal, and you should be protected against getting your head bitten off by a lion.

But what about the fact that the crowd will essentially know you’re cheating them out of the spectacle of you cheating death?  Cover your tracks with costume!  Wear something outlandish with a big, high collar made of flashy cloth to cover your big, high metal collar.  Be sure it’s covered in sequins, so that if the metal on the gorget peeks out and sparkles, it’ll just look like more sequins.  There’s no reason anybody has to know you’ve got a three-inch band of steel around your neck.

Bust out the lion’s teeth. This one should be a no-brainer, quite honestly.  What’s the lion going to do with no teeth?  Gum you to death through a big, metal collar?  I don’t think so.

Go easy on the whip. Now I know that all the lion tamers you’ve ever seen have used the whip on their lions liberally.  They’re just dumb.  Seems to me that the last thing you’d want to do to try to get them to perform is make them angry.

As an alternative, consider rewarding them for good performance instead of punishing them for bad performance.  Throw them some chunks of a wildebeast when they do something good.  First off, this will endear you to the lion and make them less inclined to bite your head off; why would the lion eat the guy who’s constantly tossing him chunks of tasty, tasty wildebeast?  This is also going to fill the lion up, too, so even if it’s just got a bug in it’s fur and it thinks about biting your head off, it’s not going to want a meal that size.  Lions are notoriously finicky when it comes to overeating, as they’re prone to acid reflux as a species.  That’s why they’re always lying down when they’re not eating; it’s to help digestion.

Didn’t know you’d learn any zoology today, did you?

Have a beautiful assistant. Be sure that she’s wearing something extremely tight and is in high heels.  This will make your act popular with the male segment of the crowd.  This will also make her very slow.  That way, if the lion goes on a rampage, you can outrun her and get to safety.

But seriously, don’t be a lion tamer. Again, this is just a bad idea, people.  There’s no benefits, it’s not really a growth field, and there are better ways to get to travel for free.  Let the dream go.

This is not a good life choice.

So, you want to compete in an MMA fight, but you don’t know where to start, huh?  Well, you’ve come to the right place.  Nobody is better equipped to help you than I am, with the possible exception of an actual MMA trainer.  They’re expensive, though, and most of this is just common sense, anyway.

Talk a bunch of crap before the match. MMA is bascially pro wrestling, except the guys are actually trying to beat the stuffing out of one another instead of just making it look like they’re actually trying to beat the stuffing out of one another.  This means that interviews before the match are vital for drawing interest in the match.  The more people care about your match, the bigger the draw for the show is, and that’s ultimately going to affect your paycheck.

So, badmouth your opponent as outlandishly and as often as you can.  Any time you have a platform, talk about how you’re going to rip the other guy’s leg off and then kill him with it.  If you don’t have a platform to do it, make one by calling into sports talk radio and doing impromptu interviews.  Threaten the guy with bodily harm, talk about how it’s widely known throughout the business that he’s shooting dogs full of horse steroids, eating the dogs, and then shooting himself full of what horse steriods are left for dessert.  Be sure to scream a lot, because people love that in their promos.

Oh, and if you get a chance to actually do one of these interviews on video instead of just in audio or in print, there are two words that are vital for you to remember: feather boa.  When’s the last time you remember a rough, tough, MMA dude wearing a feather boa in a promo?  That’s right, you don’t.  You’d be a star instantly.

Don’t get hit. This one’s pretty vital, especially since you’ve just spent weeks threatening the other guy and accusing him of outrageous and totally untrue things.  Seriously, have you seen these guys?

Do not let this guy punch you.

Can you imagine getting hit by him?  It wouldn’t be pretty.  There’d be a lot of cracking and breaking, and you’d end up falling down in a big heap on the mat.  Bodily fluids would be flowing liberally.  To make matters worse, all of this would probably be getting televised, so you’d be bleeding and peeing all over yourself and crying like a little girl on pay-per-view while guys in Affliction shirts in bars all across the world laugh at you and criticize your technique:

“Bro, look at him.  He totally should have ducked that then gone for a double leg.  I’d have Brock in a keylock by now.  Is he crying?  Bro, check it out, is he crying?  Cry, baby, cry!”

You don’t want any of this.  So, avoid getting hit entirely and you’ll be fine.

Try to run the time out on the match. Yeah, the entire crowd will boo you and you probably won’t get invited back by the promoter, who will doubtless spout some nonsense about a boring fight and how you need to get out as quickly as possible.  But when it’s all said and done, even if you lose, your record in Wikipedia will look like this:

Loss, unanimous decision - 0-1

That’s a whole lot more impressive than this is:

Loss, KO (meaty hamfist through face) - 0-1

Now, I know what you’re saying right now: “But what about all the ‘boring fight’ stuff that will be there in Wikipedia?  Won’t that look bad?”  Yeah, it would if anyone read it, but they won’t.  They’ll go straight to the pretty pictures and shiny graphs.  Wikipedia is basically the USA Today of internet reference materials.

Talk a bunch of crap after the match. What you did before the match, do it again later, except this time be sure to direct some of it at the judges for screwing you out of the win.  Demand a rematch.  Yeah, the promoter doesn’t want to have anything to do with you at this point because you’re actually a pretty terrible MMA fighter, but if the people are demanding you back, who is the promoter to argue?  He’s just in it to make money, and if we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that guys in feather boas who don’t shut up draw money.  Isn’t that right, Hollywood Hulk Hogan?

That's right, brother! We draw a ton of money! Whatchugonnado?