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Your knife sucks

It’s been about half an hour now, and I still can’t stop laughing since I watched “Your Knife Sucks.”

“Your Knife Sucks” is the promotional web site for a belt-buckle knife made by craftsman Greg Gillespie. The shiv is, as Gillespie boasts, “the world’s fastest knife”: Mounted on a clip on your belt buckle, it can be drawn and opened in one fluid motion of a single hand. This is actually quite a cool bit of design, and it has obvious benefits for those times when you need to quickly wield a knife — such as when you’re fishing. Or perhaps fending off a bear at a camp. Or maybe just rakin’ it good ‘n hard across the face of some flag-stomping hippie who LOOKS THE WRONG WAY at your wife.

These all seem like reasonable possibilities to Gillespie, and to drive home the superiority of his tool, he shot a little video (using RealMedia) in which he illustrates the lightning-fast draw of his knife, whipping it out and shoving it back into the holster, again and again and again, as he delivers a monologue:

First, mine opens before I move. Makes it ten times faster than yours. So if I’m standing in a river fishing and I need to cut a piece of line, I’m done — yours is still in your pocket. It also allows me to move my hand and move my knife the same as my hand moves, whether I’m opening a box, cutting a spring, or slapping a bad guy in his face and poking his eyes out — it’s all the same to me, it doesn’t matter how I move, my knife’s doing the same thing I’m doing.

It all goes downhill — or uphill, or possibly just straight on through the hill, depending on your point of view — from there. It’s kind of mesmerizing: Gillespie neatly distils the essence of loopy Guns-‘N-Ammo-subscriber paranoia, and also manages two or three times to talk about stabbing various people in the eyes, including, for some reason, Mike Tyson. More excellent yet is the moebius homoeroticism of the whole affair: The constant flourishing of a knife that seems to have been plucked straight out of his fly, his web-site text asking “How Fast Can You Whip Yours Out?”, the endless taunts about how he’ll “poke” you. Man, who directed this thing? Germaine Greer?

That said, I gotta admit, it does look like a pretty awesome knife.

(Thanks to Andrew at Panopticist for this one!)


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I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM

From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:

One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?

Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.

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