A really strange conversation

I agree @shiney I was in Toastmasters for two years and besides having to speak at a comfortable speed, we also were not permitted to 'grunt', 'um or ah', 'cough', etc.

Believe it or not, but here old men come around on bicycles ringing their bell. They are old fashioned knife sharpeners using their cycle to do the job! We had one recently come down our lane and saw one operating in a tourist area of Albufeira ... absolutely fascinating!

People don't enter people's property here without invitation. They toot a car horn or shout at the gate! We call it the Portuguese door bell!

 

@shiney It was the same here. There was one in this region that became so well known there is even an exhibit in a local museum in his memory.

 

I cannot go into complete details (on the basis forewarned is forearmed) but no ... a kick in the nether regions would not be my attempt ... too predictable

Realistically? He would still get an "M" Special

Let us look at the facts:

• uninvited person on my doorstep
• unknown to me
• waving large knife

I think that is sufficient for me to have a reasonably held belief for fear of my personal safety and to justify taking pre-emptive steps to defend myself and my property.

Ok, I may fall down in the eyes of the law, seeing as I'm a 6 foot 6 inch body-builder and a local boxing champion with a killer dog ( ) but that would be a risk I was prepared to take.

Actually, in the circumstances described by @pete in reality it would only get as far as:

Then the door would have been firmly S.H.U.T!

 

Good. For a moment I was worried that you'd fallen victim to the same terribly misleading advice that mothers and grandmothers across the land have been passing down to their daughters and granddaughters for generations.

 

Sounded reasonable too ... until one day someone pointed out it would hurt a female just as much to be kicked there too! Not saying it might not happen under a life and death scenario, but, hopefully, that won't be put to the test

 

Mothers and grandmas, I apologise in advance. But here's some facts

Being purely objective, sticking to the facts of human evolution, it is incredibly difficult to successfully strike an able bodied fully alert man in the gonads. Due to the Crown jewels themselves being a vulnerable high value target, they are incredibly well defended.

Most parts of the body require conscious effort to defend. If someone tries to strike the face for example, you have to see it coming to have a chance at defending against it. This is actually not the case with the gonads. There are very sensitive nerves in the inner thighs. If stimulated unexpectedly, for example by a boot brushing past en-route to the nads, two things happen. First of all, a completely involuntary physical response. The thighs will tense to deflect or trap the incoming, and the gonads are actually pulled upwards towards the lower abdomen and secondly, the brain gets the message, and full priority goes to defence.

A sad truth is, sometimes women, and indeed blokes or kids, are assaulted too often. If the kick to the goolies was even half as reliable as many mothers and grandmothers would have their younger womenfolk believe, then such assaults would be very rare.

I'm so confident of this knowledge that when my missus didn't believe me, I said I would do a mock attack and she could counter any way she saw fit, and while I'd use playfight force, she was allowed to go full contact. Obviously I had the advantage that I knew what she was going to try, but I didn't know at one point she would launch the strike and having trained in martial arts for a while, I knew shed be fast and accurate. The knee came up, I trapped it, then threw her to the floor (in a controlled way that she is used to from training of course).

A slight modification to grandma's advice will significantly increase its chances of success. Palm of hand to the face first, all attention is diverted to there. Follow grandma's advice while the aggressor is still flinching from the distraction to the face.

 

Driving #2 son to work at silly o'clock this morning, he flicked some ash out of the window of the car (grr!) and it blew back in (! Double grr! ); purely instinctively, I reacted saying:
"Don't flick it *outward*, the wind just pushes it back IN! (GRR) If you have to flick it out, flick it down!"
As I tend to speak with my hands, I emulated a quick downward movement with my left hand as if flicking it out of the window.
He made a strange noise ... ... seems my hand movement had hit him on his penis

See clue? I seem to be able to manage it quite easily without even trying!!

 

Ah but, 1. All the built in defence I mentioned, it's not really typically anticipated that your mam will whack you there and 2. The chopper, although sensitive and vulnerable, is not that sensitive or vulnerable. The chopper is much less well defended than the gonads. The chopper is mostly muscle. As cringey as it sounds, it can withstand quite a lot. Whereas the gonads are exposed sensitive organs. An impact that would bruise but cause no long term damage to a willy could actually prove fatal at the gonads. Hence the latter is so well defended while the former is less so.

 

Years ago a man snuck up behind me and grabbed me by my hair. This was in an apartment building's underground parking lot. Lucky for me, I was holding a wallpaper sample book. You now the ones with the heavy cord handle. I swung round to hit him with it and it landed between his legs on my upward swing. He collapsed, I ran to safety. Lucky shot.

But if I saw a man with a knife on my doorstep, I'm not sure how I would react. Maybe I should keep a rolling pin by the front door.

We do have cctv as well. 8 Cameras around the house but mostly just to discourage our hillbilly neighbour from trying anything stupid.

 

Seems appropriate given the course of the discussion.

 

Bravo, my friend; bravo!!

Maybe ... it just proves how flawed their defence mechanisms actually are then