Punching Day: The Sicilian Blade (Patreon)

What's the best way to stab a man, you know, by nation? Let's find out!

I grabbed six random books from a shelf labeled "etiquette." I got Knife Throwing Techniques of the Ninja by Michael Peters, Warrior's Guide to Knife Fighting by John LaTourette, PhD., Mastering the Knife by Ted Gambordella, PhD., The Sicilian Blade by Don Vito Quattrocchi, Knives, Knife Fighting & Related Hassles by Marc "Animal" MacYoung, and Bloody Brazilian Knife Fightin' Techniques by methamphetamine manufacturing author Uncle Fester and magician author Mad Abe.

Across our six books we got two doctors, three murderers, a meth cooker, and a sorcerer, which is what blade scientists call The Knife Book Golden Ratio. Now go to the map and select your knife country!

You've selected Italy! A great knife choice!

The Sicilian Blade (1993) is a guide to increasing your skill in honorable one-on-one stiletto duels. Huh. It's weird the author chose to illustrate that with a picture of himself killing an unarmed and very surprised man. Maybe it was the only picture they had. I'm sure it's not a book for unrepentant murderers.

In the preface, Don Vito Quattrocchi (you remember him from the murder on the cover (he's a "Don" now)) lets us know this is a book for knife heroes only. He wrote it for you, a righteous paladin of pocket knife! And I think it'll be fun to think back on this as we read the book he actually wrote.

Look at how much this rules. Knifing a man is a noble thing only the bravest, strongest, coolest men do. And this is the HISTORY section! I always knew the history of knife fighting is that since going back to whenever, it's so fucking rad, you guys. Most karate maniacs invent scenarios where they kick a mugger in the crotch, but Vito has imagined an entire universe where all the best guys are knife murderers. Obviously, I'm in. I accept this premise; this kicks ass.

Yes! In a world where police can't find your stolen items, THE SONS OF THE FAMILY WITH LITTLE KNIVES CAN! Don Vito controls every detail of this fantasy, and by page 4 it's completely fallen apart. You are already not a brave man settling matters of honor by blood and blade in the light of the full moon. You are one of several knife goons looking for the guy who took your grandma's TV. I'm still in, though. In fact, this is better.

Holy fucking shit. He accidentally imagined Knife Fight World too hard and he's now working out bizarre, specific details of the lore. Like which body parts of your victim to cut off to tell everyone except the police that you did it. Don Vito has not taught us a single thrust or parry yet, but he's explained that if a man tries to make love to any woman we know, it's traditional to cut his balls off and stuff them into his dead mouth. Crazy is too small a word for this. Awesome does it no justice.

Don Vito writes so casually about the rules of neighborhood corpse mutilation, I thought stabbing must be a big part of his local culture. But, at least in the author's lifetime, people keep track of it when you get killed by a knife and Italy is only 16th place in total stabbing deaths, or 46th place when you measure it per capita. All I'm saying is, statistically, this is like Jamie Kennedy saying, "The best way to celebrate winning an Academy Award is cutting the testicles off the dead man who tried to make love to the female relation of a local family man."

Long before he got to any knife fighting techniques, Don Vito seemed to get a little embarrassed about giving himself the title "Don" like he's a mob boss. But instead of going back and deleting it, he creates another incredible fable. Ah, the title of Don! It comes from the elaborate power of the mystique of Sicilian men! You see, this pocket knife martial arts author is so ceremonial… his mystery so feared and respected, that people kiss his hands. Like everything so far, I love it. It's grandiose, but too stupid to be humiliating. It's like Jamie Kennedy saying, "People call me Sex Mayor because I carry a single breast implant in a jar."

It only now occurred to me– this author is dead, right? So many things can kill you and desperately wanting to get in a stiletto duel for any reason is definitely one of them. Even assuming Don Vito is as good as he claims, you can only get in so many knife fights before something important gets stabbed. So he had to have died decades ago, right? Oh, never mind, I found his Facebook…

Don Vito survived all those honorable stiletto duels to wither away as a Fox News Facebook Grandpa. He still has a shot at a glorious death, though. Because if I understand his book correctly, any tiny disrespect to your honor is grounds for a to-the-death knife battle, and if I understand his Facebook correctly, that's every goddamn democrat, non-White, and local Target employee.

Let's forget I found this and get back to the book he wrote when he was cool.

On page 18, Don Vito introduces himself for the fourth time. He also does a little retcon about the whole "Don" thing. He decides it's not a mafia aura thing, but in fact, more of a weeb pocket knife sensei thing? It's something students call you when you teach them Murder. There's no way to know if the Don/Sensei thing is true in stiletto school since the top 700,000 Google matches for "stiletto gym" are cardio strip tease classes, and I already know you call those instructors Sex Mayor.

Look at this advice! He reminds us to pull our knife out of our enemy quickly because human chests close around them pretty fast! Don't worry about it if you forget, though; a good stomach kick can usually get the dead guys off your knife. We haven't learned a move yet! We are still in chapter two! I'm starting to worry his style of martial arts might not have much to it if the first four things he teaches us are:

1. Communicating with testicle mutilation.

2. Why my name isn't dumb.

3. Never mind, actually this is why my name isn't dumb.

4. How to prevent the dead from stealing your knife.

Here we go, let's learn about the categories of stiletto fighting. The first is dueling, where one guy has a reason, any reason, for being mad at someone, and instead of arguing they agree to a ceremonial death match. For honor! It's adorable. It's a world you fantasize about if you desperately want to stab everyone, but aren't ready to admit you're the problem.

I think I would know Don Vito was an angry little psychopath even if I wasn't watching him post deranged, racist memes this very second. He is a five-foot-three man writing like he's four-foot-ten. He set out to write The Duelist's Guide to Blade Honor, and he mistakenly wrote Brandishing Tiny Knives for Insecure Grouches and Under. He thinks the best way to avoid a death match challenge is by scaring everyone with stories of your expert stiletto fighting! That's, again, adorable. It's something a virgin would practice saying to their katana. But it is a good idea to get everyone to know you as the knife crazy so when your known enemy is found dead of stabs the police won't have any suspects.

Anyway, Don Vito has now imagined a world where two men of honor have agreed to a knife fight, but one with a few rules. Hearts and faces are okay, but no wrists or stabs! Unless it's serious, and then okay fine, some stabs and death stuff. It's a lot of useful, plausible advice from an expert on a real thing he does all the time, but let's skip ahead to the proper stance.

You're a fool if you didn't see this coming, but Don Vito is pretty good at drawing cool pictures of himself fighting with a knife. You might have seen this coming too, but this footwork bullshit isn't Don Vito's favorite part of knife karate. We watched him passionately list all the ways to send a message with a dead body, but he dedicates exactly one sentence to explaining the pros, cons, and reasons for our fighting stance. And like his thoughtful, enlightened thoughts on Barack Obama, I have to agree with him.

This is how you'll be standing when you die, so you should get it right. It's also exercise, the author guesses. I don't know about this. It's already kind of a weenie thing to be a stiletto duelist with zero murder charges, but now this grumpy little guy thinks standing still for three minutes is a workout? I'm worried we're not going to have the tools to carve off any local testicles. So let's take a look at one of the other books, Knives, Knife Fighting, & Related Hassles to see how Marc "Animal" MacYoung teaches knife fighting stances.

This was a mistake. Marc "Animal" MacYoung seems better at knife fighting and racism, but let's get back to Don Vito's book.

Don Vito demonstrates the importance of Correct Posture by drawing someone standing precisely in it exactly as described, and he's still getting stabbed right in the fucking heart. "This shall teach you to lay your lips upon my neighbor's niece, scoundrel! Know that after your death I shall carve her honor from your penis and balls!"

Hold up.

What? Did this guy just say a thrust offers "four and one-half one's body length?" Is Don Vito so short that the math gets fuzzy? Because these figures put my stab at 28 feet away from me. That's four feet behind the NBA 3-point line. Steph Curry wouldn't take that shot. It is literally 15 feet past the broad jump world record. It'd be like you waving to me from a restaurant across the street and me leaning over to instantly stab you. Like, Don Vito, I get you've never had a knife duel with anyone, you fucking idiot baby, but math still has meaning.

Look at this "thrust in action". In its wildest dreams, that knife is about a foot away from Don Vito. Only someone with a zero inch dick would look at this range and call it "four and one-half one's body length." And what does that lunge get you? What does the roaring momentum of a tiny, no-dicked amateur fencer achieve? A dainty slash at your opponent's wrist? That's one of the places we're not allowed to slash in this, our gentlemen's duel! Why spend two chapters explaining the duel rules only to tell us to break them during our first lunge? What's next, honorable Don? Mash our knife into the helpless man's neck until he's dead?

Oh, hey, I was right. Most martial arts books take longer before revealing you've been the villain this whole time.

Don Vito advises you to always stay a full thrust distance away from your enemy, which again, is a number I find suspiciously closer to the length of a restraining order than a knife fight.

For training, Don Vito suggests, you know, just stabbing a punching bag. I don't think you need to be a bag scientist to recognize this as the dumb idea of a man who doesn't know a lot about holes. He's absolutely never tried this. This is half an afternoon of playing knife tops. We already knew Don Vito was a man who's never been in a knife fight, but now I think he might be a man who's never pretended to be in a knife fight.

"You said… no throatsies…" your dueling opponent might say as the light leaves his eyes. Trusting the insecure knife master to keep his word was his first mistake. Not wearing his thick protective stiletto dueling neck strap was his last mistake. I guess it's "winning" advice to slash a throat in a stiletto duel where both participants agreed not to kill anyone, but I'm frustrated Don Vito still thinks there is honor in this. You're clearly a lying, cheating murderer. Maybe we'll find more moral clarity in a different knife fighting book. How about Warrior's Guide to Knife Fighting by John M. LaTourrette, Ph.D.?

This is how you massacre a neck, Don Vito. This move is designed to counter a double throat grab and it's called Ripping Panther. It takes approximately 1.2 seconds, there are 8 steps to it, and six of them are death blows. While Don Vito is writing lusty fan fiction about societies governed by whoever the scariest little knife guy is, John M. LaTourrette has already turned a bully into ribbons in 1.2, maaaaybe 1.3 seconds.

Don Vito will never achieve a level of karate such as this, but let's get back to his book.

Don Vito explains THE KILL: HOW AND WHERE TO STRIKE, and it's, generously, just fucking wherever. Poke them where blood happens is the entirety of his advice. This is a frothing murder fantasy with nothing getting anywhere close to advice. Look at this maniac. "Let him feel the slice of your blade," he says, as if it communicated anything other than impotent rage. This is a man who still has shower arguments with the woman who beat him to a 1988 parking spot. But to his credit, he does go on to explain human body parts and kind of what they do:

"His Hands - They hold his knife," explains the knife fighting expert. "They may be weak to knife," he elaborates. I think we got it! All we need now is an anatomically perfect drawing and we'll be able to find any man's weak points.

Yes! All the weak points are there! Groin Area! Along Arms! This is breathtaking. This is a drawing you'd hand a therapist if you were a 5-year-old who got molested by Shrek. For an adult trying to be taken seriously, it is disqualifying. Don Vito simply can't walk among us now that we know he's drawn this. This looks like a swarm of pubic lice trying to form a human shape from memory. Is that a mustache or is it cumming? Sound off in the comments if you're a pubic louse.

Let's go over some strategies. First, look at your enemy. From everything Don Vito has said so far, I thought this would be someone we knew who has done us a great dishonor, but now it looks like we're stabbing a stranger? Anyway, Don Vito tells us to check and see if he's weak. If so, this could be a weakness. I agree it sounds dumb, but we're here to murder this junkie not for make words goob.

When you never shut up about your fucking knife and you've pulled out your knife and are threatening to use it, don't stab underhand. It will give away your intentions. And don't stab overhand. It will give away your intentions. Speaking of dumb mystery, consider moving left or right. Your enemy will think he is fighting a ghost, and I'm so excited to tell you Don Vito really said that:

I've noticed a pattern in Don Vito's writing, and it's that his hypothetical enemies are always astonished at his abilities. They are always realizing, here in their final moments, they made a terrible mistake by messing with the wrong guy. Once again, he does not explain the footwork you use to side-step in your (now completely different) fighting stance, because he doesn't know and he doesn't care. All Don Vito cares about is for you jerks to know he could, should his honor demand it, kill you. He's a killer born; the kind of man who takes his shirt off and goes skin-to-blade for the local old men. Wait, that can't be right.

Hell yes. Don Vito used to strip to the waist and entertain the local daddies with first blood blade matches. Did I read his impotent rage wrong? Was this a sex thing the whole time? How did I miss something so obvious? Maybe we can learn more by looking at another sexy knife book, Mastering the Knife by Dr. Ted Gambordella.

Like all of Dr. Ted's many karate books, his knife guide is an excuse to shirtlessly groin with the boys. He's having the best time choking hunks and obliterating dicks. While Don Vito is alone, grinding his teeth as he describes the feel of a blade going into his HOA president, Ted Gambordella is under a nude pile of his best friends to get a photo for the caption "Simultaneously strike all attacker groins with your feet and teeth."

Let's get back to Don Vito, man of honor:

What are we doing here, Vito? We're throwing our jacket over this guy's head during our honorable duel? Then why any of this? Why not pull a gun? Why not poison their family and conk them from behind while they're crying? This is pathetic. If we fight like this much of a coward, why fight at all? Why not simply stew alone with our anger and draw pictures of us killing our middle school bully a hundred different times? Oh. Oh no, I stumbled into fully understanding Don Vito again.

This is fantastic; he's won me over again. The most never-knife-murdered-anyone guy in the history of knives is trying to level with us about the haunting path one chooses when taking a life. But men who hesitate here, at the moment of truth, lie buried! Buried on The Plains of Hesitation! It's sweet as fuck. And then, perfectly, he ruins it by explaining it. It's like a 500-pound man describing the joy of squeezing through a tennis racket and then saying, "tennis is a food from France!" I'm not explaining myself very well. I love how stupid it is, but also how stupid it is.

There might not be many ways to stab someone, or if there are, Don Vito doesn't know them. You saw him panic in chapter 3 when he tried to answer the question, "Where does knife go?" So in order to fill space, he is now bashing his stiletto duel opponent with non-stiletto objects like stools and kicks. They both work pretty well! But it's not a great selling point for your fighting style when you concede your main weapon is weak against chair or nothing.

While we're on the subject, Bloody Brazilian Knife Fightin' Techniques also had some good stool tips.

In Brazil, stools in a knife fight are used more like a car, because each of them take a full 30 seconds of karate to destroy. None of this is useful, sure, but before we get back to Don Vito, Bloody Brazilian Knife Fightin' Techniques has some other interesting non-knife knife fighting tips:

Put Figure 74 in The Smithsonian. Okay, back to Don Vito:

You know what's way better than a stiletto? The broom! The versatile, invulnerable broom! Broom stab your enemy! There's no rules against it, except the sacred, historical ones the author told us about earlier. If Don Vito wrote the movie Air Bud, the entire first act would be about making it clear there's a rule saying you can't shoot dogs in basketball. Then, during the big game, the referee would blow his whistle to say, "kids, there are too many dogs in here!" And the movie would end with 70 minutes of the children shooting dogs, with our hero shooting the most, based on a true story. Where were we? Oh yeah, bashing our noble fencing opponent with debris!

I thought Don Vito didn't know what he was talking about, but "Smash him with a garbage can lid!" is fun knife fighting advice. And when we're having a good time like this, it's easy to get lost in the fiction of the karate. It's worth remembering this book is training us to be so skilled at knife fighting that we can do it all the time and still live a long life with all our features and organs. And the entirety of his garbage can lid lesson is two sentences that would occur to anyone. There will never be a person who could know less about garbage can lids than this, and while I'm giving notes, I don't think it takes a lid scientist to know a pound and a half of aluminum spread out over two feet is something most skulls would regard as a "hatlike" impact. If this dumbass ever tried this in a knife fight, he would have called his book 1 Bad Lid Bashing Ideas by Vito "Most of a Face" Quattrocchi, DDS.

From out of nowhere come Don Vito's kicks! Look at this spectacle of foot optimism. This is a man who has spent dozens of pages warning us about how men take way, way more knife wounds than you would think to die, yet here he is ending lives with a single kick. He tells us most of the time you'll use your kicks to merely shatter a bone here and there, maybe stomp some hands into flippers, but if you need a man dead right away, hit him in the head with the point of your shoe. It sounds silly at first, maybe too easy. And yet by my own physics calculations, the tip of one of Don Vito's size 4 boy's shoes would be the lethal opposite of a garbage can lid.

This is cool as hell. Don Vito is out here throwing spinning heel kicks in dress shoes during a knife fight. Even while he has to draw his opponent's arm wrong to keep his knife from going up his taint he's thinking, "This would totally work."

He has kick ideas for miles. The stool and shoe sections are so much more robust than the stabbing sections. Does Don Vito even like knives? It seems like (Good, strong.) dress shoes are his favorite weapon. Maybe we should switch to a knife book where an author's actual favorite weapon is the knife, Knife Throwing Techniques of the Ninja by Michael E. Peters.

You fell for a classic ninja trap! A ninja's favorite weapon isn't knife! A ninja's only favorite weapon is any! Or no! The point is, knife books are the best; back to Don Vito.

If you feel a knife fight coming, construct your own body armor from magazines. Follow the instructions carefully and stuff four of them into your pants loosely and wherever. For extra protection, use pornography. For in Don Vito's world of blade honor, it is considered ignoble to stab a picture of your mama.

Don Vito's section on body armor is the act of a desperate man depleted of imagination. He tries to invent neck armor, a belt, then immediately recognizes this as stupid and tries to hide it with a scarf. Why? Are you afraid the other knife fighters are going to make fun of your neck belt? I mean, probably, but can you imagine how much worse it will be when they find out you tried to hide it with a scarf? Don Vito, you are going into battle with four magazines in your pants slowly trying to form underwear, two things already wrapped around your neck, and everyone is laughing at you. If you wrote a book on homemade anthrax it would be less likely to kill the reader.

If you've got no groin protection, wrap your dong in newspaper! And for an easy chestplate, try a big, metal tray! We are so far past this being reasonable, but let's consider everything Don Vito has told us thus far. Imagine putting a cookie sheet down your pants and lunging 30 feet with a knife in your hand. Really try to picture it, landing from the longest leap ever made by man and the only thing between your genitals and the edge of a loose cookie sheet traveling with you is a pair of gloves. I don't know what you've built, but it's not knife fight armor. It's more like something MacGyver would make to cut off a last-minute penis.

Don Vito shares a secret hidden hand technique called Indraga Mano where you pull out a knife and stab it in an overhand motion. You might recognize it as exactly the stab he criticized earlier for being too telegraphed. I think the difference is this time nobody knew we had a knife. It took us six chapters to get here, but we have made it from "true men of honor solve disputes with steel" to "knives are good for killing people when they're not looking."

Another hidden hand technique is to hide your knife in a magazine, such as the magazine MAGAZiNE. As Don Vito explains, your attacker will think you're threatening them with a magazine, and when they take it away, surprise: knife. Of all the steps included in this book, and remember: we put gloves on our balls, this is the most pointlessly insane. He drew a picture of how it's supposed to work, and it's so much dumber than you're picturing.

"I'll take your strongest weapon– your magazine!" you will think. But look again, fool. This issue's cover feature… IS BLAAAAAADE.

Despite the entire book being only this, Don Vito dedicates chapter 7 to the mental state you need to be in to kill a man with a knife. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say it is the most vulnerable I've ever seen an author. Don Vito has channeled his little man syndrome into a fantasy murder rampage with no storyline or reason. It is the manifesto of every bed wetter against their stepdad. I can't wait to show you the culmination of Don Vito's philosophy of honor:

"They don't know what they've awoken! Even now, after they've witnessed my true power!!!" shouts a fourth grade anime enthusiast and adult knife "murderer," Don Vito Quattrocchi. This kind of fiction can only come from true shame. These must be the kind of vengeful thoughts Star Wars Kid has in his weakest moments, only Star Wars Kid is much better at martial arts than Don Vito.

Using the words you should have said to those teenagers who made fun of your vest and then later screamed into your pillow alone, cut your enemy down with your tongue!

Your mugger can't tell what's more shocking– losing his fingers or the amazing boldness with which you strike! And he'll never get a chance to decide because this handless man has left one of his body's 183 weak spots open to attack– the neck!

The other attacker tries to stab you, but you side step him and carve half his body off with your pocket knife. Like so many others, he made the fatal mistake to not have four magazines in his pants. "I have no idea if these guys should run away or stay here and die," the author thinks, then types. He is too caught up in knifelust to care if this is how stories work.

These cowards made the wrong move attacking you. While you wait for them to bleed out, they realize they made the wrong move attacking you. With unimpeachable honor you laugh at them, because they bit off more than they could chew when they mistook you for somebody not really tough and awesome. In other words, they made the wrong move attacking you.

Pant! Pant! You spit on them! Pant! Pant! Pant! For the first time they realize they made the wrong move attacking you!!!

As Don Vito has mentioned many times, knives don't really work, and the rest of the chapter is (very true) stories about that.

Don Vito grew up in a neighborhood where everyone came together for a community stabbing whenever someone broke up with someone's sister. I don't know what to do with any of this information. Keep my neck away from knives? Dishonor women closer to urgent cares? These are the ramblings of a man who thought his stabbing knowledge would fill up a lot more pages.

A guy got stabbed, end of story. This five-man knife fight only earned two sentences? Don Vito spent three paragraphs earlier just on mean shit you can say to a mugger who never existed. These stories need details. Like earlier, where everyone was stabbing each other over the dishonor of someone's sister? That was great! Do you have any more stories like that, Don Vito?

I didn't mean exactly like that. Still, it supports the main lesson of this knife fighting book: knives don't work! If someone dates your sister, you have to kill him with your toes!

Bye!

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