Thugs approach you with all manner of street weapons, the weapons of the street! Pipes, shards of glass, unshapen rocks, none, flamberge! Quickly! Read this!
It’s Weapons of the Street, 1984’s toughest guide to dick crushing. Like hundreds of other books, it was written by Dr. Ted Gambordella, and since I’ve already mentioned the dick crushing I am 80% done describing it. It’s what any karate expert would call “a perfect book.” Its cover looks like a game called Bash Stormers 2 for the Azargo Vextrack, and sorry I need to Photoshop something real quick…
… okay, I’m back. Where was I? Right, the sweet cover, but also it has the tone of a kick murderer’s alibi. Let me show you what I mean:
“There are a few instructions in offensive techniques,” is what Dr. Ted says right before he shows you 200 pictures of him turning his friend’s penis into a memory by way of stick and fist. “I do not condone any harm to your fellow man,” is what Dr. Ted says before building the largest, most beautiful monument to harm. Like many books before and after it, Weapons of the Street seems to think a disclaimer is a magic spell making all extrajudicial executions legal. And he’s right. I do not support any of this rad penis trauma. But fucking do it. Spin kick every problem you’ve ever had in the balls, which I do not intend nor condone.
So as we read, keep in mind that Dr. Ted wrote Weapons of the Street only for de-escalating club attacks peacefully. I’m not setting up some bit where he actually caves in every attacker’s dick and throat, I promise. Anyway, here’s the first move of the book, a standard non-harm defense against a stick attacker:
Step one: kill this fuck with his own stick.
I was lying, and so was Dr. Ted. The book contains only one defensive tactic and it is lethal vengeance. Here’s the second move of the book:
If someone is killing you with a bat, step on their dick. It is great advice and better karate. I’d tell you more, but the end of Dr. Ted’s sentence is missing. It was a stomp so powerful the text describing it was sucked into the vacuum the groin left behind. Or maybe this one was written by the attacker? “Hit the karate doctor in the head with a bat, wait, he’s throwing me into the ground, I should still be okay, hold on it looks like he’s lifting his foot to oh n”
Okay, we did two counter moves to never be used against stick maniacs. Enough defense bullshit, and that’s both me and the book saying that. It’s time to move on to situations where we are the stick maniac.
It’s only the third move of the book about never using karate to hurt someone and we are charging a man with a club, “preferably” one we stole from him, and breaking both his arms with a move Jackie Chan would need three days of rehearsals to land. Like I said, “a perfect book.”
Most self-defense manuals assume you have never heard of violence, much less this exotic style from the Orient. Not Weapons of the Street. By page eight, it is advising you to take a guy’s bat, knock one of his punches out of the air with it, and then snap his arms off at the shoulder. Well, not “advising” if a cop asks you where you learned how to do this, the sweetest goddamn shit he and the boys downtown have ever seen.
If you were worried all these moves were going to be complicated, don’t be. Sometimes Dr. Ted’s advice, well, again, not “advice,” you know what I mean, is to just hit the son of a bitch in the knee with your club. When someone’s kneecap is in fifty pieces, you can consider your punching issue with them resolved. If you’re a baby-penised coward. Dr. Ted is only halfway done with this move:
I think this is my area of expertise, and I’m genuinely confused. Dr. Ted wants you to use your stick to take away your enemy’s ability to walk and pee, and now he’s built some kind of lever on the remains of his dick? I’ve been staring at this picture for hours, for days, and don’t know how or why two men would find themselves in this situation. It looks like an alien improv team after an audience member suggested “Earth humans fucking!” It looks like Dr. Ted had this item in his inventory the whole game and his desperate guess at “use stick on balls” somehow did something. From concept to performance it is glorious, and sorry, I need to Photoshop something real quick…
… okay, I’m back. Where was I? Oh, fuck yeah: karate.
For information on how to squeeze the life out of a man with a chair leg, excuse me– detain a man’s neck until help arrives, please see figure 18a or 18a again. I don’t know why this picture appears twice. There’s no way it could be a simple error. Dr. Ted doesn’t make mistakes because missing any of these moves by even one penis length would mean certain death. So I think doubling up this photo was a last-minute idea after the publisher saw how Dr. Ted finishes a choke. It would take a Photoshop genius to recreate the original, but luckily I know one:
I’m having a fun club choke messaround, but seriously, look at Dr. Ted’s next club choke:
That head is coming off. Weapons of the Street has assured me many, many different ways it’s only going to demonstrate how to peacefully deflect sticks, but this is how you turn a headed man into a spurting torso and grim trophy. Either I or the author are going crazy. The section on stick choking even ends with a man being pulled into two parts under the words “NOTE: I am not showing offensive techniques with the club.”
“Control the attacker till the police or help arrive?” This is how an excited spokesperson changes the way you slice cheese forever. And this is going to sound like I’m splitting hairs, but I’m not sure we needed a third stick strangle variation in a book explicitly about not hurting people with weapons. If you want that, Dr. Ted suggests you “refer to [his] book of karate weapons.” And now we have a whole new problem because I’m looking at the Dr. Ted Gambordella section of my library and he’s written “book of karate weapons” so many times I’m only 20% sure he’s talking about this one:
I know I keep getting distracted this article, but there’s no way we’re not going to open The Complete Book of Karate Weapons. I’ve seen how Dr. Ted uses karate weapons. The section on Karate Knife is going to be “easily use a foot kick to the dick.”
Holy shit, no penis kick guess has ever been so right so hard. But let’s get back to his book about not hurting people.
This plainly rules. Dr. Ted is suggesting we catch a baseball bat with our hand, easily, because we have sufficiently trained our hand. I’m going to pretend I know what that means so I don’t look like a pussy in front of Dr. Ted, but I’m worried I die if I miss this, and spend six months in a cast if I don’t. “Shut the fuck up and punch their stick in half,” says Dr. Ted, and it brings me so much joy to tell you I’m not kidding. The second part of this move is punching their stick in half with your non-shattered hand.
I imagine you’ll want to practice this a few times before you have a club suddenly swinging at your head, so the combo is club catch, club punch, club steal, twirl, club stab, side kick. Blue belts and above may want to add a flame cyclone or wolf summon, and remember you can triple twirl if you go into the combo with your jeans meter fully charged. Let’s move on to defense against chains.
Dr. Ted uses the standard ABCD defense for chain attacks. A.void the chain, B.lock the chain, C.ute dick attack, D.estroy the neck. People may criticize this for being too complicated, but not cool people who survive chain attacks. This is all you need for any manner of ropey attack, but for purely academic reasons, let’s take a look at a chain attack defense with fewer steps.
Is this simple enough for you? Field goal kick their fucking face. There’s no need to add a groin attack and a murder to every single one of these. That being said, there’s a couple more steps to this move. Let’s add a groin attack and a murder.
The best thing about Dr. Ted is he can’t help himself. Something inside him won’t let him say “use a back kick to create distance and escape.” If you swing a chain at him, he’s stomping on your heart until it stops. He can write “never do this” all he wants, I know Dr. Ted will be so proud of me when I kick someone’s heart out. “I didn’t teach you how to do that,” he’ll say with a tear in his eye. “In fact, what are k-kicks? You say they’re called kicks?” he’ll add after his lawyer whispers in his ear, then giving me the subtle nod of a withholding father.
Like he keeps doing, Dr. Ted forgets his book’s thesis and shows us how to kill someone with the weapon we’re defending against:
This one is a pretty technical defensive maneuver; you’ll know you’re doing it right if your enemy makes a gurgling sound followed by silence forever. But once again, enough defense. Now that we have that dead guy’s bike chain, let’s fuck some shit up.
Dr. Ted escaped from a Nintendo game and has no idea our world doesn’t work like this. He screams things like, “a chain can be used in place of hands for a +2 to all clinch moves I never showed you how to do this,” and no one has ever been brave enough to correct him. There is no other explanation for this:
Lure him into a trap so we can lasso his leg and pull him into a groin stomp!? This is a God of War quicktime event. Dr. Ted is teaching us special moves like we’ve spec’d ninety points into Whipmaster. Can you imagine the final thoughts of the poor bastard who brought this weapon to this fight? “I’m going to hit that unarmed guy with this, because what are the odds he’s specifically trained in bike chain and I’m upside down hold on it looks like he’s lifting his foot to oh n”
Let’s go over some broken bottle defenses, and by that I mean I stab you in the face with a broken bottle, which you’ll block, but it was all a trap so I can stab you in the dick with a broken bottle. It’s worth reminding ourselves again what we’re supposed to be doing here– NOT HARMING ANYONE. I feel like even without all the strangulations and donkey stomps to the heart, if your book on non-harmful weapon defenses includes any more than zero broken bottles in someone’s dick, you blew it.
I don’t know why you need a second attack after it occurs to you to introduce a broken bottle to someone’s penis, but here’s an idea: you could try stabbing someone in the punch with your broken bottle? The only danger with this one is that if I perform hand surgery slower than a punch, as unlikely as that is, I get punched. But I’m starting to think I might deserve it? I maybe started as the good guy in some of these scenarios, but that is not how any of them ended. When the police find me in a room with all these human heads, it’s hard to picture the conversation that leads to my Best Hero Citizen Medal. Sorry, I’m going to duck away for one last Photoshop…
… that was a fast one because the Humanitarian Service Medal already had a karate chop on i– where was I? Oh, right! Defending ourselves against broken bottles! Did Dr. Ted ever consider grabbing one and pushing it into our prisoner’s eye so the filthy worm can get a reeeaal good look at how we’re going to carve him into minute steaks? Oh, he did? Fun!
So now we know the three basic ways to defend against a broken bottle– hog stab, punch stab, and I’m not bluffing please make me prove it I’ll fucking kill you eyeball-first. So with that dickless scumbag’s life in your hands, let’s move on to Intermediate Pootie Tanging.
In another masterful understanding of time and how it flows, Dr. Ted suggests responding to a stab by taking off your belt and whipping your stabber’s eyes. He’s obviously dead from this, a corpse with no idea what killed it, but the move’s not done…
… pull your belt back and slap your attacker in the eyes a second time. By now, regret should be reaching their dark heart, so use this opportunity to whip your belt again, locking itself around their neck the way belts work. Pull them by the improvised noose and bash their dick with whatever hands and feet you have free. Some Kung Fu fans might recognize this deadly technique, but not from the style of martial arts.
I think it might be time for a fun one.
Dr. Ted has gone fully karate hysterical. This is choreography for a movie called Hollywood Cat Cop, not a self-defense option. This is the base instinct anyone would have; it’s literally your only option here other than waiting to die. I’d also argue that despite finding ourselves in this unlucky situation, this move counts on a lot of things going our way. Here’s the next part:
None of this plan comes together unless your bashing is being carried out by Burpy and Clod Bulges, two twins playing themselves in Hollywood Cop Cat. An eight-year-old knows this wouldn’t work, and I know because I showed it to one and she laughed. With the honesty of a child, it truly didn’t occur to her these men could be serious. It’s so beyond the boundaries of possibility that even these men, who have dedicated their warrior lives to the impossible, are starting to realize how it must look. From this point forward, Weapons of the Street is a scrapbook of best friends henchman-goofing. For example, here is this combo’s finisher:
“Ha ha ha this is fucking stupid,” says Ted’s friend. “Ha ha, guys, let me do a dumb one,” says the other one.
This is what street weapons are all about. Sharing a laugh while you accidentally stab a dear friend. It’s my favorite book. “Alright, shut up, you knuckleheads. We need to get serious and wrap this thing up,” says author Ted Gambordella, Karate PhD…
… “Just kidding! FOOT AND STICK TORNADO!” Dr. Ted screams as he demonstrates the stupidest, button-mashingest idea. They took dozens of pictures of him flopping any limb in every direction and included every single one of them. There’s no way to know if they’re in the right order, nor any reason to care. This is how (spoilers) Hollywood Cop Cat drowns in a bag, not how you fight a crowd of men.
You could almost forgive this if it said, “Go nuts, die like a man,” but Dr. Ted has every detail of your battle planned out from the opening jumping jacks to the finishing eye poke. He’s calling out specific positions of these hypothetical gang members after multiple stick bashes. It’d be like a palm reader telling you, “Watch for the color green, and kick the man that’s to your left with a back kick into the stomach. You can then smash your club into the eyes and mouth of the man in front of you as you jab your fingers into the eyes of the man to your right.”
In the final move, the final move, Dr. Ted introduces the one thing his karate will never survive– comedy, comedy. And I don’t mean it messes up the timing by repeating the setup twice on the same page. I mean, does he think these self-defense moves hold up in a world where absurdity exists? The fact that any of these moves could be a joke means they all might be, right? Was he kidding this whole time? I don’t think so, but Dr. Ted being secretly sarcastic for 170 straight books is more plausible than someone using this karate to defend themselves. Still, it changes nothing. The fact that Dr. Ted botched a joke about shooting his friends only adds to the perfection of Weapons of the Street. Let’s go out on one last karate photo masterpiece. I love you, and karate blessings.
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