If you go visit that weird guy who lives next door and has his own arsenal, you can come away with enough sharp objects that you can slice up anyone you see. Alternatively, you can fight people completely unarmed, and we shared some stories about how awesome this can be just a few days ago.
Or you can take a third option. You can defend yourself with items that usually aren’t legally defined as weapons at all. Items like…
The Music of Creed
In 2011, a kid in Norway was walking home from school when he came upon a pack of four wolves. This is just a daily possibility you have to deal with if you’re from a place like the Norwegian town of Rakkestad, and 13-year-old Walter Eikrem already knew a thing or two about wolves. For starters, he knew that fleeing is a bad idea. When you flee, that’s when wolves realize you’re scared, and they’ll treat you as prey and chase you down.
Walter had been listening to music on his phone, with earphones in. Now, he unplugged the earphones and turned on this song:
That’s “Overcome,” from the 2009 Creed album Full Circle. Around 2009, there was this meme going around that Creed was the proverbially worst band in the world, and while we wouldn’t dream of supporting that old idea, the wolves seemed to. They turned around and left. Not because the loud boom scared them, said Walter — they “simply trotted away,” finding the noise unpleasant.
If you ever wind up in the same situation and don’t happen to have a phone loaded up with Creed, you’ll have to try singing their songs yourself. Don’t try singing anything other than Creed. We have no confirmation that any other band’s stuff will work.
Your Own Ribs
If someone looks like they’re about to attack your torso, considering stabbing them with your bones. If you bend your ribs so they protrude from your body, anyone who bites you will be in for a surprise, and a single cut on their sensitive mouth may be enough to convince them to leave you alone.
Okay, that might not be a practical strategy for you specifically. But it’s a great strategy for all our readers who happen to be Iberian ribbed newts.
via Wiki Commons
These newts can rotate their ribs 50 degrees, so the tips break through the skin like barbs. At the same time, they secrete poison all over their skin, so these barbs are poison-tipped. When that stuff gets into a predator’s system, it hurts or kills them.
This sounds like the sort of last-ditch move that a newt can only pull off once, possibly even sacrificing their life in the name of scaring predators off attacking others of the species. But the newt is able to swing its ribs back to their original position, and its skin quickly heals, with the newt having suffered apparently no ill effects. That’s because the newt’s other big power is regeneration.
Growing its skin back is a cinch (even you can regenerate your skin, on some level). This is an amphibian that can also regenerate its limbs and even brain tissue. That’s useful for whenever it reads something really dumb.
A Catwoman Whip
Anytime a cosplayer heads for a convention, there’s the risk that someone will decide their costume is an excuse to grope them. At Comic-Con in 2014, one attendee dressed as a zombie saw another dressed as the D.C. character Tigress, and he figured this was a good reason to stick his hands down her pants.
Next to Tigress, was another attendee, dressed as Catwoman:
This Catwoman was Adrianne Curry, whom you might know as the winner from the first season of America’s Next Top Model. Catwoman is a character who just happens to sometimes carry an actual bullwhip, which Curry now used to smash the groper’s face.
On a different day of that same convention, with Curry now dressed as Poison Ivy, some guy grabbed her boobs from behind and yelled “comic books!” before running off. The Ivy costume offered no opportunity for carrying weapons, though it clearly should have.
Expanding Slime
Slimy guys can be a problem. But slime can also be a solution.
Consider the hagfish. If you attack a hagfish, it’ll squirt slime at you, and this substance is a bit weirder than the mucus you yourself release from your nose. Due to the unique structure of the proteins in there, this slime expands to 10,000 its size within a second of the hagfish squeezing it out. It results in a substance that pretty much looks like water and is a thousand times softer than Jell-O — yes, that’s an actual scientific statistic — but has enough substance and volume to ensnare the predator.
Best-case scenario for the predator, it gets very confused and the hagfish escapes. Worst-case, the slime gets in the shark’s gills and suffocates it to death.
The fish might only release this slime once it’s been bitten, and you may think this is too late to do any good. But the hagfish also has a trick for getting out of there: sliding out of its skin (while also shooting out the slime). There’s a lesson we can all use. If you need to get away, just pop your clothes right off. Or, on second thought, don’t do that. That might be exactly what they want.
A Splintered Paddle
In 1797, while rowing around Hawaii, King Kamehameha spotted a couple fishermen on the beach. The men were loaded with a fresh catch, and the king figured he should go and take those fish from them. Because he was the king, and who was going to stop him?
The king chased the men, caught up with one and wrestled the sack of fish from him. In the process, his royal foot got stuck in a crack in the volcanic rock under their feet. This sounds like a setup for lava coming out of nowhere and incinerating the thieving king, and what actually happened was almost as cool as that: The fisherman whacked him on the head with a paddle. This injured the king enough that he needed medical attention from his retinue, and the fisherman got away.
So, did Kamehameha vow revenge and return with an army? No. He went on to forgive the man, and he took this opportunity to realize that grabbing that guy’s sack had been a pretty messed-up move. He now issued a new law, saying that people just minding their own business on the road should be left there in peace. The earliest version of this law said that the penalty for breaking it is death, which might have taken things too far, but his heart was now in the right place.
This isn’t some legend. The tweaked law remains part of the Hawaiian constitution even today. It’s called Kānāwai Māmalahoe, or the Law of the Splintered Paddle. It doesn’t specifically say you’re allowed to hit the king with a paddle, but it says no one should ever put you in the position where you need to.
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