#486 – Shrapnel
Posted on April 15, 2008 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comics
I’m sometimes astounded at the velocity that fingernails can shoot across the room. I had one bounce off the mirror in front of me an hit me in the face. It actually hurt!
Tags: bathroom
Sounds like you’ve found yourself a superpower! Launch your fingernails at criminals!
Okay, the grooming thing was my next guess. 😀
Is the theme this week grooming/self maintenance?
Flying fingernails are like tiny crecent shurikens-boomerang…things… That start to stink if kept in a little box for too long.
i brake the clippers some times.
Yeah, I know the feeling of having clippings come flying like little shuriken at you.
But I don’t get the punchline of this comic >_< What’s the joke?
*dies of shame*
The thing I hate about flying nail-clippings is that they invariably get lost in the carpet, and every so often one escapes the vacuum cleaner, too. The escapee will lie in wait like a little razor-edged boobytrap, waiting for you to step on the keratin bodkin.
Hurts surprisingly much, that does.
Yeah, when I clip my nails, I stand over/near the trash can in my bathroom to try to catch them.
About one in three actually hit the intended target.
About one in twenty fly up and get me right in the eye.
x_o
Yeah, i try to get them in the bin.
It never works.
Use scissors. The tiny variety – very preditable trajectories. Or at least you can choose the general direction of nailfire.
@ Murudai: The funny bit is that when you clip your fingernails, as biff is doing, they fly off at high speed. In biff’s casse, they went so fast they hit a vase or mirror or something and broke it. Biff is thinking “oops”, after this little fiasco.
I don’t actually clip my nails (yes I’m a guy). I just wait until I’m clumsy enough to break them and they go back to normal fingernail length.
Clip them underwater (in a sink, while taking a bath, while scuba-diving…)
Happy birthday to me, habby birthday to me…
I have to wait until my nails grow out a few centimeters before I dare try clipping them. I’ve tried trimming them when they’re too short to’ve gotten brittle and wound up bending the nail clippers instead.
What nails does Biff have???
There’s a reason that Fairly Oddparents had a supervillain once by the name of The Titanium Toenail. His evil superpower was clipping his nail. Infinite ammunition. That could slice through tank guns without even slowing down.
Fingernails, the scourge of hygiene. Although sometimes toenails are worse >_O oww….
More truth than poetry to this one. You seriously never know where those things will go!
happy birfduy fred!
Yes, predicting fingernail trajectory before they fly off is a difficult problem–especially when they have a mass great enough to break stuff.
@K: A few CENTIMETERS!? You could almost make weaponry from that! Deadly slingshot ammo, arrow tips, the ever-popular shuriken. . .
@gaeamil: The problem with the concept of the Titanium Toenail is, how does he aim his clippings? (Also, the ammo is somewhat limited by nail length, but in an animation that counts for rather little.)
I didn’t get it until I realised that he’s not looking at his nails but at something in the distance… I guess he broke something.
@MaskedMan: I think we’ve all been there. Especially those of us who vacuum every, oh, nine years or so.
@stonehydra
I’ve done that before. Totally put me in the “… What the heck… ?” spot for a moment or two until I fished up a new pair hiding somewhere else in the house.
But… SUPER VELOCITY NAIL CLIPPINGZ! Those are always a blast… when they don’t hit you! Hehehe… though I’ve certainly never broken anything with them before. Poor Biff. There’s probably a $40,000 dollar vase or something lying around his house in pieces by now.
When I clip my nails, I always squeeze the clipper a bit, then shut my eyes before going all the way, and almost every time the nail hits me on or around the eyelid, even getting caught in my eyebrows occasionally.
Whoa, someone predicted the velocity element. Friday.
I have a different strategy- I just sit in the middle of my floor with glasses on, and put trashcans in various places where you wouldn’t think clippings could get to them. Since the trashcans are obviously where I don’t want the clippings to go the most, because some are behind closed doors, they invariably land in one or another trash can.
maybe a robber is in the house and Biff is preparing his weapon.
seriously Biff looks like he is about to open a can of whoopass.
You should have drawn a bullet hole in the window.
I’ve found that if you clip your nails just after getting out of the shower, they’re a lot softer and don’t go flying around like that. They just sit right in the clippers so you can dump them in the bin.
Heh, it took me a second (or two) to get this one.
What, is this going to be a Biff reoccurrence? 😀
The eyebrows, the mustache, now super powered toenails?
But yeah. Toenails can seriously hurt. I was clipping my dog’s nails once… *shudders* God, that was a nightmare. Those ****ers are sharp! It stabbed me right in the eye…. Five minutes later, another one up the nose.
+1 to post-shower clipping. Also shaving, beard trimming, self-haircuts, etc. And there are clippers that have a plastic shell that holds the clippings, which works wonders. Pain to get the shell off too dump it, though. My such clippers also have cutting edges with an over or under-bite, which oddly seems to cut well, and not as abruptly, so it shouldn’t shoot even without the shell. I wish the same went for teeth and cheese sticks when I was younger, before braces.
I love this one. Biff’s look as well as the off-“camera” mayhem.
I’m not sure but didn’t Biff have a gas powered nail clipper? Or was that a tweasers…
To clip my nails, I use a combat knife…