Beautiful Bokeh

Whips, Guns, Tanks & Zombies

OK, so, our friend and "master of the bullwhip" Dante and his partner "Targetgirl" Tina invited us to join them at something called Shooter's Roundup where they were not only going to be doing their whip show but Mr. Dante was also planning on attempting to regain his world speed-whipping record and he needed our help in documenting that. That by itself would have gotten us there but there was also the promise that there might be a real tank we could drive so we were all over it.

The world record attempt turned out require dozens of grueling attempts. To break it, Dante needed to execute almost 4 whip cracks per second for an entire minute and it's hell on his forearm (he had to keep icing it down between tries). It's also so fast that it's incredibly hard to count the cracks. On the second day he got so close that we couldn't really tell until we analyzed the video tape that he'd done it, but he definitely had!

So it  turns out that this Shooter's Roundup is a surreal, M A S S I V E gun event put on by a gun mogul named Larry Ahlman who owns what has to be the largest gunshop/shooting range dynasty in the state. Thousands of people were there to see hundreds of presenters/shows/gun demonstrations/events. It was like a theme park only the "rides" were areas where you could do things like grab a tommy gun and shoot up a car or watch a famous trick shooter do trick shooting, etc. It was so weird. Obviously the crowd was mostly big-bellied people who wish they lived in a red state. I put on a t-shirt with bombs on it and tried to blend in but it was tricky without a big belly.  Still I have to say some of the stuff was a blast.

My favorites:

—Robert & Tina's whip performance...obviously I'm biased but they were on fire and did some amazing stuff that we hadn't seen before, not to mention the new world record.

—Tank driving...driving a real tank is more fun than my vocabulary allows me to adequately describe.

—The .50 cal sniper rifle...for $7 a shot, one could grab the most powerful sniper rifle on earth and combine extreme precision/accuracy with the loudest sound you've ever caused all in one trigger pull. Incredible feeling, and surprisingly, not much recoil at all.

—Zombie Shooting...the best concept had to be from the Zombie ammo guys who would give you a gun and let you shoot the shit out of some zombies. Really simple, great idea. Only wierd thing is that they only had rifles when anyone who's played video games knows the anti-zombie weapon is the shotgun. Still...super fun.

 

Long Live the Impalement Arts

Our daring friend “target girl” Tina was on the Conan O’Brian show last night getting a bunch of knives thrown at her.

We know her through our precision bullwhip mentor Robert Dante (she’s his on-stage partner and also personally helped me to finally master the ellusive overhand crack). But she also lets her friend The Great Throwdini throw knives at her sometimes and I think it’s cool that an act like that can get a national audience. Mr Throwdini holds the world record for the most knives successfully thrown in 60 seconds (102).

We met Throwdini at a party once and he had some awesome anecdotes of his past shows, like the time he threw an axe and it caught his glasses...he found them unharmed, dangling from the axe-stuck-in-the-board later. I hope we can get to hang out with him again sometime, hopefully after we've had more time to practice our own whipping skills with Robert & Tina. It's hard to practice in the winter indoors because it requires extremely high ceilings.

One thing I love about Tina is that she doesn’t just play the helpless damsel in distress role. She’s an expert precision bullwhip artist herself and in both Robert and Throwdini’s acts, she turns the table on the male and uses him (in this case Conan himself) as the target.

Brenda in her very first lesson (on her birthday) working on the basic circus crack with Robert.

Me, trying my best to master the overhand crack with Mr Dante looking on disapprovingly. (I finally got it with Tina's help)