I told him you probably could if you used a machine like a guillotine. He said, “No, I mean like with a sword.” He also wants to know if you could pull off one of your own fingers, and if you could pull off one of your own wrists, if you were, like, really really strong, like The Rock or Stone Cold Steve Austin.
I told him I didn’t know, but I’d be happy to submit it to the Teeming Millions.
Well? Anybody out there remember what it’s like to be 13 years old and wonder about stuff like this?
I dunno I might consider a question about oral sex a little healthier than a question about self-decapitation but I’ve been removed from the teen years awhile now.
Swinging a sword at one own’s head is at best an awkward manuver and would be unlikely to generate the force necessary to sever the spine. Such an act could easily be fatal though, does that count?
So unless one positions a sword within a holder so that it rests with the blade up and then falls upon it with their neck from some distance, no - self decapitation with a sword is not a reasonable goal.
I’ll admit, I’m relying heavily on no other board member proving me wrong through a demonstration.
I found the Azninski story on the Darwin site. He used a chainsaw, for what that’s worth. It says that he and his crew were doing a lot of damage to each other before that; the report says they were hitting each other on the head with “frozen swedes”. I assume that doesn’t mean soda or Anniz.
Swedes are a type of turnip. Possibly what you lot call a rutabaga but I am not going to go down to the wire on it. Thye’re horrible eating in any case. Bleurgh.
Proably not with a normal swing. Maybe if you took a really sharp blade, braced it against something, and headbutted or ran into it as Blackclaw mentioned. Those things are REALLY stuck on. Even people with Ichabod Crane-style necks require a LOT of urging before parting with them.
In any case, it’s not a good area for experimentations. Odds are, even if you managed to do it, you’d never know it.
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“The LEAST sucessful werewolf of all time . . .”
Thank you all for taking this seriously, you’ve made a 13-year-old boy very, very happy. He is going to be the Star of the Middle School lunchroom tomorrow.
This is alot like the problem of self-crucifixion. Namely: you can never manage to get that last nail in (learned that one the hard way).
Okay, lets say you try to cut your own head off with a steak knife. Fact is, you wouldn’t be able to cut it completely off because you’d die/lose consciousness before you’d finish cutting through the spinal cord, leaving a nasty, dangly, hinge-thing on the other side of whatever angle you’d started from.
I can forsee a similar problem with a bow saw.
No, clearly what you need is a large pair of pruning shears or a really large-size cigar cutter.
My bet would be that the sword would get stuck in your spine, killing you in the process. Unless you managed to hit it between the discs, in which case you might be able to get all the way through.
BTW: I know nothing about the spine, but I thought it was made up of discs connected by some sort of cartilage.
No-one’s answered this bit so I thought I’d have a go. Seems to me your finger’s no more firmly attached than a chicken’s leg and they can easily be pulled off with a bit of twisting. Sure thre’d be a bit of pain, but after a beer or twelve you wouldn’t notice.
I assume that doesn’t mean soda or Anniz.