27 September 2010

Assaults with beer mugs on the rise

"While certain crimes are down at Oktoberfest this year, there have been more attacks with an unlikely, yet readily available, weapon: the one-liter beer stein. Some of the victims have been whisked away in ambulances with concussions and fractured skulls caused by fights involving the heavy glasses...

Erich Schuller, of the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, said his lab has recently carried out tests in which they used brand new steins and hit them against human skulls. "The bones often will break, but we haven't been able to break the steins," Schuller told SPIEGEL. "A hard hit with a stein packs more than 8,500 newtons of power -- the human head in the parietal region breaks with about 4,000 newtons."

In the case of the 29-year-old Canadian it happened the other way. He survived the attack with a concussion, and the stein broke.
Further details at Der Spiegel.  Photo source unknown.

And more or less coincidentally, this is my 7,000th post at TYWKIWDBI, so the "toast" photo is quite appropriate!!

4 comments:

  1. Congrats on 7000 posts!

    Obviously we need 'safe stein' legislation to ensure that the mugs will break before the human skull will. Cue the lawsuits...

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  2. Keep it going, Stan! Congrats.

    As for the stein issue, I wonder if we're going to blame American culture exportation for this one, too. (And I wonder also if it's warranted.)

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  3. I wonder if it true that the reason we clank cups is so that beer from each stein mixes, which is suppose to assure that we aren't poisoning the other person's drink? Perhaps this would work in today's world with GHB date rape drug being used without people's knowledge.....

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