SHIT YOU SHOULD KNOW: #1, Cracking a Coconut

We at Man's Ambition like to consider ourselves voices of a disgruntled generation, part-time rabble-rousers, occasional dissidents, and, for lack of a better description, chroniclers of the things, people, lives, and occurrences men (and, let's be honest, all people) should know about and aspire to. But really we see ourselves as educators, hopefully inspiring and teaching people how to return to the ambitious greatness that had once defined our great nation, long before this current recession, increasing softness, and general stupidity. As such, we've decided to launch a series of educational videos about Shit You Should Know. This will go from basic survival skills (like, say, how to rig and rappel down a cliff or load and shoot a shotgun) to social etiquette (how to drink all day but keep it in the fairway) to basic life (how to play cards or how to parkour your way into a 3rd floor apartment when you've locked yourself out). And, hell, if you have any questions, feel free to comment them and we'll go through our vast (kinda) resources of knowledgeable (sorta) friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and occasional enemies to get 'er done. So today, for the first episode I got a simple but oh so important one - how to crack a coconut.

How's that important, you ask? Oh you foolish bastard. Have you not seen the movie CASTAWAY? You know, where Tom Hanks makes love to a volleyball? Anyway, one of the opening sequences of him on the island is a painful montage of the stranded flatfoot struggling to crack open a coconut.

Miserable, right? What if that's you. Maybe you even got yer wife and kid alongside, all proud that you're gonna take care of 'em but instead you look like a schlemiel and your wife decides to drown herself in the ocean instead of watching you putz around anymore. Yeah. Rough.

Or another scenario, maybe you decide you want to be in some dying reality show that nobody under 60 watches anymore, like SURVIVOR or AMAZING RACE. The prize money has dwindled down to 50 bucks and a voucher for 2 AMC movie passes but, hell, that's still more than you're making in your mom's basement and, even better, the unemployment department doesn't have to know. Wouldn't it be great to pass an elimination or a country or whatever the fuck you do on those shows by showing how you can crack a coconut?

So, you ready to learn? Check this out (or below) for a step by step tutorial, myself the big bald ogre standing next to full-on Hawaii brah Willy B. who once spent a whole month living o a beach doing nothing but cracking coconuts and roasting honu. Some might call that homelessness but I call it "survival."

Oh yeah, and one more note - don't ever use iMovie (miserable to edit and share, if only my computer wasn't acting all antagonistic towards Final Cut) and note that YouTube cuts off the edges. Maybe one of these times I should watch a tutorial on how to upload tutorials. Stupid technology.

- Ryan