Wednesday, May 16, 2012

It’s just a flesh wound …

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Last night, I was slicing a potato with a super-duper slicer that makes potato chips in the microwave.  They are surprisingly good.  Unless the gadget they have to push on the top of the potato slips and your finger drops down to the blade just as you push!  But, under the handy dandy repair the Lady F and I did, it isn’t even serious enough for pity points and will be mostly healed by the end of the weekend.

It reminded me of what the cowboys always used to say on TV when they had been shot, “It’s just a flesh wound.”  Now that I’m an adult, I wonder what else it could have been, like maybe a bone shot up or something.  I guess if it isn’t a support member, it’s nothing of import.  Unless it’s an organ, of course.  Tendons are probably grey areas.

Violence was sanitized back then, in the days before Sam Peckinpah.  In fact, as we ran around with our cap guns, we would ambush somebody and he would declare it didn’t count, it was just in the hip.  That shows just how much it was totally a game disconnected from real gun violence, the idea that a bullet “just in the hip” would be no problem.

What do you think about kids running around and “shooting” each other with cap guns?  Do you think it leads to later violence or do you think that later generations who got to see all the faked blood and gore were more encouraged?  Maybe neither and the breakdown of the family structure has led to devaluation of life.

I don’t know, but I do know that in America we seem to be shooting each other on a fairly regular basis and I guess the equivalent of just a flesh wound is the intonement of “the injuries are not life threatening” on the evening news.

10 comments:

  1. Those mandoline slicers are lethal. You were very lucky.

    I dislike guns of any kind. Perhaps living in Northern Ireland through some very dark times, makes me feel that way. Toy guns these days are made to look like replicas of the real thing and have on occasion lead to the death of the person sporting it by the Police or army personnel who were living and working in difficult circumstances.

    Fos, we lived in more innocent times and the days of tomato sauce was rather obvious. Nowadays the props and the programmes look so real. The gaming world of war games does nothing to help the situation.

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    1. I have expperienced murder in my family by handgun, as you know, and I am no fan of them. However, they are available in Canada without causing much problem, yet here they are used on other people all too often.

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  2. I'm glad that your name is not John and Mrs. Floss 's name is not Lorena! Only a potato accident-- good!

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    1. Since the Lady F is a Dental Hygienist, she will love being called Mrs. Floss, Mayo!

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  3. Commiserations. None of us will go to our graves unblemished. What worries me more than anything else that nails, so I am told, keep growing after you've bitten the dust.

    I don't buy into our youngsters being corrupted by violence on the screen. They aren't. A psychopath is a psychopath even if he's never played one of those truly awful computer games.

    It's not much fun for my son to watch certain films with me: "Mama, what's the point us watching this? You keep looking away!" Yeah, well. Can't stand guys bashing each others heads in. What does he say: "Mama, it's ONLY a film." Brilliant. Good. Excellent. I thought when watching a film we are meant to suspend disbelief. But then I was brought up on the grimmest of all Grimm's fairy tales. What the devil.

    U

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    1. My nails will likely not grow after my cremation, Ursula. I tend to agree partially with you about not being corruped by screen violence, for I think it runs at a different level. However, I also don't think it is just psychopaths, unless one culture spawns them much more easily than another.

      I tend to think that poverty and hopelessness, coupled with breakdown of the family is a strong source. That doesn't mean I think the family needs be classic, just that a kid needs to have a sense of belonging in the family more than in external affiliations, like gangs.

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  4. Welcome to the club of sliced fingers TOF. It happens to me so often that I have stopped even noticing the scars any more. Any way, I am grateful to you for teaching me that there is something called microwaved chips and I am just about to try one recipe.

    In India, firearms are difficult to come by. But, instead of firearms, our youngsters use their parents' vehicle, two and four wheeled, to achieve the same purpose that American kids do.

    Not a day passes that we do not see such news in our papers. Some of them are from high profile families, the perps I mean, and then the press goes ballistic for a while too.

    A recent development is to kidnap classmates for ransom and kill the poor kid when the parents bring the cops in. You want more gory stuff, I shall send separately

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    1. Rummuser, this won't even develop any scar. It really is very minor.

      I agree that the choice of weapon isn't the whole story. I grew up in a hunting culture where guns were plentiful, but homicide was rare.

      And, if it is gore you seek, swing attention to Mexico for awhile as the killings are particularly brutal and plentiful. 50,000 was the recent count I saw in the war on drugs and gangs there.

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  5. Cap guns didn't make anyone I know more prone to violence. Nor did my Mattel Shootin Shell guns that actually shot real projectiles. I distinctly remember seeing a good action flick and then re-enacting the good parts in Viurgil Barnhart's back yar - it was huge. Dang Indians kept hiding in Tommy Samberson's lilac bushes from whence they ambushed us regularly. They never fought fair.

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