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The glory of white-out

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!)
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!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
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