The lad we sometimes call Big Rock Head (BRH), who has now adopted "Rock Head" as his Official Rock & Roll Stage Name, proved that he deserves this monicker late Friday during a nighttime game of Capture The Flag at a park in Urbana. It is reported that some drinking was involved, not that it's unusual for drinking to be involved in anything that grad students might do on a Friday evening. Much more unusual is the fact that the youth of today were out playing like kids of yesteryear on a weekend night, at a baseball diamond in meatspace, exerting themselves physically.
It seems that BRH, in defending his goal, was pursuing his quarry with a singlemindedness of purpose that led him to become unaware of a chain-link fence installed along the third-base line. The slanted fencepost with which BRH posed for this photo spread this morning brought his sprint to an abrupt halt, skullwise (upper right). The placement of the split could not have been executed any more purposefully by a Hollywood makeup artist. So if the 10 stitches shown above leave a scar as a legacy, then the graphical layout makes a fine style statement in addition to its reeking of masculine essence.
After getting his noggin rattled, and the contents probably lightly concussed, the poor baby was surprised in the dark by what a sweat he had worked up---it was even streaming into his eyes! As we now know, this was actually leakage from his circulatory system, which still dotted the dirt on the dugout floor Saturday morning (center right), along with a fat drop on the left Converse sneaker which he had discovered a bit earlier.
The fencepost is not one of the security-grade jobs you find at industrial and government installations, but it is a steel fencepost after all. Because I am not a trained incident-site investigator, my forensic analysis was necessarily informal. I judged the post to be well-anchored, with indications of some ductility when the cap was pushed back and forth. The slant of the post is significantly more pronounced than the corresponding post at the far end of the first-base line (not shown), and the direction of the lean corresponds well to the vector of the BRH sprint. At the base of the subject post I found well-defined buckling (bottom right). The discolorations above the buckling are ambiguous. They could have been made by a previous impact with the post, such as might occur when scuffed by the deck of a riding lawnmower. However, the marks do not make any obvious sense as an effect of the deformation of the post, either Friday night or at a previous time. Therefore, I judged the markings to be a red herring, forensics-wise.
Finally, if you click on the spread and look closely at the enlargement of the lower-right picture, you may see a few crisp cracks in the parched mud in the lower-right quadrant adjacent to the base of the post. These cracks show up better on the high-resolution images, so you may take my word that they are there. These cracks radiate out from the base of the post opposite of the direction from which BRH impacted it. This is a geological artifact I would expect to see as a result of such an impact.
Big Rock Head is somewhat over 6 ft tall and weighs approximately 200 lb. Having some knowledge of his physical capabilities and the joie de vivre with which he plays, I do not think it is farfetched that he might have struck the post at 15 mph---a sprint that could produce a 4 minute mile, but which need be sustained only for a few moments of alcohol-assisted galumphing to produce the documented effect on the pole.
Therefore, it is concluded that solely with the hardness of his cranium, body mass, and autolocomotion, BRH caused a ductile failure in a steel fence post during a nocturnal session of Capture The Flag. The young gentleman whom he was tracking at the time should feel thankful for the good offices provided by said fence post, bodily-harmwise.
Oh, look....
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