Slicing vegetables with thrown playing cards

This fellow hopes to break a world record throwing playing cards with vegetable-slicing speed and accuracy. If you'd like to learn this useful skill, you might start by reading Ricky Jay's 1977 classic book "Cards As Weapons."

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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http://twitter.com/AntiBoredomTeam Dan Century

The obvious comment is “men, don’t let this guy catch you in bed with his wife”.
slippy0

Oddjob?
- http://twitter.com/nickel Nickel
  
  Random Task
show me

Ricky Jay is one cool dude.
- TooGoodToCheck
  
  My first experience of him was in Deadwood, which continues to be one of my all time favorite shows. And in it, he was excellent.
  - show me
    
    Wow, I have heard of that show but have never seen it and didn’t know he was in it. I’ll have to catch it somewhere.
ZombieOtaku

‘ey, it look like dat Gambit got some competition, eh?
RedShirt77

“Oh, the news is coming to film me practicing my cucumber slicing trick. I better change into my going out underwear.”

I bet if he spent as much time on like a career or something he could probably afford pants.
- http://evilbobdayjob.blogspot.com/ Deidzoeb
  
  If he spent this much time serving in foodbanks, then the Curiosity rover wouldn’t be starving! Or something like that.
  - RedShirt77
    
    Maybe he sends all the circumcised cucumbers over to the food bank at the end of the day.
BBNinja

This was debunked on a mythbusters episode w Ricky Jay. They clocked a card at 25mph and it failed to break human skin which is a lot less thicker than that watermelon.
- http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
  
  Wouldn’t the elasticity of skin be what protects it from puncture?
  - BBNinja
    
    I dunno, I’m gonna drop myself and see what happens though. If I don’t smash into a dozen pieces and make a big mess on the floor I’ll reply back with my findings.
    - relawson
      
      R.I.P BBNinja :(
- phlavor
  
  The difference is that skin has elasticity and a watermelon does not. You can test this by dropping yourself and a watermelon from a height of three feet. Which one shattered?
  - BBNinja
    
    Well another thing to mention might be how close he’s standing to some of the stuff in the video. In some of those clips he looks like he’s practically pushing the cards in versus throwing them.
    - CH
      
      If you try to push the card into a cucumber you just ruin the edge on a perfectly good playing card.
- David Pescovitz
  
  MythBusters clocked Ricky Jay’s card at 90 mph. And as evidenced by this video, he can penetrate the rind of a watermelon from some distance:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1ZGIN0UqJE&feature=related
  Also, slicing vegetables with thrown cards has been done many times. For example:
  
  http://www.ricksmithjr.com/About/guinessWorldRecordCardThrower.html
  
  I see no reason to be skeptical of this man in the above video.
  - BBNinja
    
    Oh well, I guess I need to study up on my watermelontology. That said they did show no one is Gambiting people with regular, uncharged playing cards.
- CH
  
  What was debunked? That you can slice a cucumber with a playing card? You might want to go back and watch that episode again.
- SomeGuyNamedMark
  
  That must be why he has so many egregious photos of nude woman in his book.
DoctorG

The TSA announced today that playing cards are no longer permitted on flights.
dayhat

Cucumber salad again mother?
http://evilbobdayjob.blogspot.com/ Deidzoeb

Getting the card to cut into a watermelon is impressive, but it looks more like shoved playing cards, not thrown. If I was dungeon mastering this, I would call it a melee weapon, not a ranged attack. Use Strength modifier instead of Dex.
- malindrome
  
  A wild cucumber appears!
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=850230397 Philip Bock

If you happen to have a copy of Ricky Jay’s book Cards As Weapons hang onto it. They’re rare and quite collectible. Hard to find even the paperback priced less than $250.
http://www.ecoevolution.org/ Ian G

This skill was one of the secret challenges of the completely awesome Japanese game show of the 90′s called Happy Family Plan. A guy shows up at your house and dad has one week to perfect a skill and demonstrate it flawlessly in front of a live audience. Slicing a cucumber with a card was one of the best episodes…
Gerald Mander

What a wuss — he’s throwing nearly point-blank. Ricky Jay would do it from 20 feet. I learned card throwing many years ago by watching Jay on (!) Merv Griffin & got to where I could hit things from across a room, though I never had the serious speed & accuracy Jay achieved. It’s also cool how much distance you can get from a card if you throw it right.
http://avarana.blogspot.com MarlboroTestMonkey7

Look out Daredevil!
sarahnocal

Silcing?
mmmwright

I had the privilege of watching Ricky Jay do some of this sort of thing in a friend’s living room several years ago. Utterly astounding.
danimagoo

This seems like a really inefficient way to slice vegetables. A knife would be much easier.
- malindrome
  
  We do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard.
- MarcVader
  
  Yeah. And playing poker with knives instead.
SomeGuyNamedMark

I would just like to know the advantage a woman card thrower gets from being nude as illustrated in his book
CTG

“Cucumbers don’t fight back.”
PlutoniumX

We learned to do this back in the 90s when I picked up a large box of comic cards from the baseball card place for $5 during a sidewalk sale. Turned out to be almost all junkers, and like 70% of them were Looney Toon Upper Deck cards. That was a fun year.