a dream realized

while marta is on a short vacation in mexico my friends chris and casey came down to santa cruz for a man weekend of sorts. we made chili, enjoyed the sunny day, and decided to give sabering a champagne-style bottle a try. sabrage is the technique in which a champagne bottle is opened using a sword or saber. the saber is slid along the body of the bottle toward the neck. the force of the blade hitting the lip breaks the glass to separate the collar from the neck of the bottle. below is the video of our first attempt. as you'll see, we choose to use a meat clever since we didn't have a saber on hand. the female voices in the background are those of our neighbors, not any female attendees of the man event.



i would call that that a success, although i don't think the technique is supposed to involve lopping off the upper half of the bottle. the second attempt was not videotaped, but you can see from the resulting cork that it was a much cleaner operation.