Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Road Flare

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Victim(s): Vinnie (Lit flare is forced into his mouth)

What do you get when you cross strontium nitrate with a bunch of boring crap? That’s right! Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” covered in strontium nitrate! I would have also accepted “the Arctic (or Indian) ocean filled with strontium nitrate!” “A road flare!” or “Lunchables!” Yup. Typical red-flamed road flares ignite and burn by way of strontium nitrate mixed with a stupid fuel source like dumb sawdust. Or moronic charcoal. Or something extra retarded called a “polymeric resin.” Most flares ignite at around 375 °F and burn at a wicked pissa hot 3,000 °F – the exact temperature of Satan’s bones (for this reason, most Mormon’s refuse to use them).

YOU CAN DRAW SORT OF! Some people have gone as far as to call strontium nitrate “The Best Nitrate” due to its use as the colorant in red fireworks. Can you draw red fireworks? Good. Can you label the picture “fireworks” so people don’t think I asked you to draw a bunch of buttholes? Perfect. Now, go ahead and draw a butthole next to the fireworks. It’s okay. People will just think it’s another firework. Really, though, it’s a butthole. And the butthole is watching fireworks.

What you know as “road flares,” your dead hobo grandparents knew as “fusees” (or “railroad flares”). On ye olde raily ways, when no one had radios and everything was crashing into everything else and then catching on fire and exploding, a train travelling an unsignaled line would drop flares to announce its existence to the train behind it. If that train encountered a burning flare, they stopped until the flare went out. Often, a conductor would use this time to quickly grope as many sleeping passengers as possible. Conductors would share their numerical groping stats with other conductors at the conductor bar. The conductor with the most gropes from a single flare wait won a day off. This is where we get the phrase “groper’s holiday.”

YOU CAN DRAW SORT OF! Railroad flares had spikes attached to them so they could be embedded in wooden railroad ties. Draw whatever you were actually thinking about when I was telling you that boring fact. Extra points if it has more than eight nipples or fewer than one head.

Road flares are also used to prevent forest fires via controlled burns – li’l baby fires ignited to clear away excess plant debris and keep fire breaks intact. Flares are also used in backfiring, a wildfire fighting technique that employs localized, low-intensity blazes, which burn off a progressing fire’s potential fuel sources. Like Smokey the Bear says: “Only you can prevent forest fires. And sometimes that means setting forest fires. But don’t set forest fires. Unless they’re the type of forest fires that actually prevent the other, non-preventative forest fires and… ugh. I tell you what – how about everyone just lights fires in sets of three and we’ll just count on it sorting itself out.”

YOU CAN DRAW SORT OF! Fighting fire with fire! That’s crazy! But sometimes it works. Draw a scene where something you’re afraid of is defeated using more of that thing. Examples might include an erupting volcano placed upside-down on top of a second erupting volcano so the volcanoes just erupt into one another, 2 police lieutenants shooting each other in the face, or something with two sandwiches. Maybe they have flare guns.

You tell me it’s a firework exploding a firework, but all I see is two buttholes inhaling each other.

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Ice Pick

As used by Jason in: “Friday the 13th Part II” and “Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning”

Victim(s): Alice Hardy, Les (during Tommy’s dream sequence)

Refrigerators are everywhere! My house… your house… your friends’ houses. Your teacher might even have one! But that didn’t used to be the case. Back before people had evolved the ability to invent refrigerators, everyone used ice boxes – unwieldy food preservation cabinets that had to be regularly restocked with fresh blocks of ice that folks bought from merchants called icemen (sorry, girls. There weren’t any actual icewomen. That’s just something daddies call mommies who have headaches). To shape an ice block to box size – or to chip off some cubes to cool down some tasty lemonade – people used ice picks. An ice pick is a sharp, wooden-handled tool that resembles a scratch awl.

Oh. In that case, picture a stitching awl with a straight point.

Really? May I ask what kind of awl you can picture?

Nope. Forget it.

It’s nothing like that kind of awl.

FUN WITH YOUR PARENTS’ STUFF! Breaking ice without an ice pick can be really hard! Try it! All you need are ice cubes and some of your PARENTS’ STUFF! Try crushing the ice with your mother’s jewelry box or the butt of your father’s handgun… try to chip it on the computer keyboard or smack it with the buckle of the Time Out Belt… try as hard you can to break it against the big window in the living room. See why ice picks were so useful?

Sure, ice picks were named ice picks because of their ice picking ability, but they can pick other things, too – human brains, for example! Walter Freeman, a famous neurologist (just a fancy word for “head shaman”), used ice picks to lobotomize (just a fancy word for “calm down”) the mentally insane. Freeman customized a van, which he called the “lobotomobile,” and set off on a nationwide mental hospital tour, during which he taught multiple doctors how to perform his violent and irreversible procedure – place an ice pick through the corner of the eye socket and, to quote the ‘50s pop sensation “Dr. Freeman Boogie,” “smack it like a broken Polaroid camera.” Soon, though, lobotomies went the way of the ice box as powerful neuroleptics like Thorazine took the psychiatric industry by storm.

FUNOLOGY PROJECT! How do you think lobotomized patients were treated? Probably not very nice! Try acting lobotomized around your family and friends, and see how they treat you. It’s easy! Tone down your personality. Quietly fiddle with random objects. Turn off your ability to love. Periodically soil yourself. CHALLENGE! How long can you keep it up for? A week? A month? Remember: science is all about the gathering of unrecorded, subjective data by way of long-running, secret deceptions (just a fancy word for “fun”).

Families… head shamans… who else used ice picks? Good question! Have you ever heard of Murder, Inc.? Well, Murder, Inc. was a group of steel-balled Italians and Jews who performed contract killings for the National Crime Syndicate between 1920 and 1940. Some of these Mafia hit men liked ice picks almost as much as Dr. Freeman liked lobotomizing the insane. Abe “Kid Twist” Reles and Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, well known members of Murder, Inc., both considered the ice pick their go-to goomba-elimination tool. Human bone is no match for the shattering force of an enthusiastically swung pick! You may have heard that Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky met his fate at the business end of Stalinist-wielded ice pick. Untrue! Trotsky was actually killed by an ice axe, which is like a super-sized ice pick designed to lobotomize thawed-out dinosaurs.

CONTEST! What sort of weapons would you use if you were an assassin working for Murder, Inc.? What if you worked for the KGB? How about Yakuza? Draw each weapon on a sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper, along with an illustration of yourself using the weapon, and mail each of them to: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500. The more entries you send, the better your chance of winning!

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Barbed Wire

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13th Part II

Victim(s): Crazy Ralph (garroted)

Barbed wire, a twisted metal line boasting sharp points at evenly spaced intervals, was once the ultimate frontier in affordable fencing. Before it became commercially available in the late 19th century, American ranchers contained their livestock using a thorny, high-maintenance plant called Osage Orange, while, in Germany, the earliest vestiges of the National Socialist Party imprisoned Jews in cumbersome icicle jails. Thanks to Lucien Smith, who copyrighted the concept in 1867, and Joseph Glidden, who parlayed the idea into a shiny, affordable fencing material, notions like escape and freedom became the rusty old clutter of yesteryear.

Q: What did the migrating, half-frozen cows say to the southwestern ranchers during the winter of 1885?

A: “Wire you doing this to us?”!

That’s right! Crazy Ralph wasn’t the only one who didn’t like having barbed wire slicing into his fat neck. The 1880s were host to a bovine tragedy referred to by cowpokes as “The Big Die Up.” What with all the competing ranchers ranchin’ and nemesis farmers farmin’, the landscape was criss-crossed and strung-dangled with so much barbed wire, that, come freezing winter weather, southbound migrating cattle found their moseys halted by fence after impassable fence. Ranchers couldn’t afford to let the out-of-towners graze their land and farmers didn’t want to lose their crops to the certified rager that was Livestock Spring Break ‘85, and, as a result, an unprecedented number of cattle died in the thorny maze that had once been the wide open American West. (There was one hero cow that made it all the way to Mexico, liberating hundreds of other cows along the way, but he was shot to death in Sabinas after impregnating the youngest daughter of a famous Vaquero.)

Q: In 1915, what was the most popular extra-curricular activity for allied soldiers at the Western Front?

A: Fencing Club!

Yuppers! Both German and allied troops lined the outside of their trenches with strands and coils of readily available, easily replaced barbed wire, much of which was specially designed to have an unbroken series of points. So everyone hand grenaded and machine gunned each other into a bloody slush until, finally, tanks were introduced in 1918 and crushed that barbed wire right quick. Fortunately, the Nazis still found a use for it during WWII, when the Gestapo made sure to confiscate all of the Jews’ tanks before imprisoning them in electrified-barbed-wire-surrounded prison camps.

Q: What did the imprisoned Jews call the fence-happy concentration camp guards?

A: BARBarians!

The legacy of barbed wire lives on into modern times – often in the form of barbed tape (AKA razor wire), a sharp-edged human deterrent favored by mental hospitals, prisons and Juggalos.

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Pitchfork

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13th Part III

Victim(s): Fox (throat stab), Loco (chest stab)

The pitchfork is a classic agricultural tool known for its long, sturdy handle and sharp, unyielding tines. These handy farming implements first became common in the middle ages, when the entire tool, including its pointy end bits, were fashioned out of wood.

Guess what! All sorts of crazy materials have been used to make pitchforks – Alloys. Iron. Even bamboo! I would like a bamboo pitchfork. What kind do you want?

If the sight of Jason driving these tines deep into the chest of that incorrigible Loco feels more naturalistic than his spear gun attacks or that part in Jason X with the liquid nitrogen, it’s because the pitchfork is a classic weapon of the blue-collar striver. Farmers who couldn’t afford guns, but used pitchforks to lift and pitch hay or grapes or dung, would often repurpose these pronged implements to lift and pitch The Man as if he were just another dung-soaked hay bale sitting atop a pile of grapes. Look no further than every angry mob scene ever to see how a mud-caked pitchfork sits in the hands of a downtrodden irate homesteader as snugly as a washboard in the skilled mitts of a jug band percussionist. So don’t be stealing no pumpkins now, y’hear?

Guess what! In England, pitchforks are called “prongs.” In Ireland, four-tined prongs are called “sprongs.” I call pitchforks “jabbies.” What do you call them?

In many works of cartoon art, the devil is shown to brandish a pitchfork, which he uses to poke angels in the butt. Tempting as it is to draw wild conclusions about the religious elite propagating images linking Satan to a dirty working-class heritage, it’s more likely that the devil’s pitchfork is actually modeled after the mystical tridents used by certain Greek deities, and by Shiva the Destroyer.

Guess what! Old time populist leaders often used images of, or references to, pitchforks in order to garner support from the common folk. In the late 1800s, South Carolina’s would-be governer campaigned using the delightful nickname “Pitchfork Ben.” My pitchfork nickname would be “Pitchfork Matt.” What would yours be?

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!