« PREVIOUS ENTRY
The glory of white-out

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!)


blog comments powered by Disqus

Search This Site


Bio:

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!

More of Me

Twitter
Tumblr
Flickr


Recent Entries

The “Milky Way Transit Authority” map

Should automobile software be open-sourced?

My Bookforum review of Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”

Molecular secrets of the “iron-plated snail”

Garry Kasparov, cyborg

» visit the Collision Detection archives

Clive Thompson's Tumblr
a bunch of stuff

January 31, 2010 » 07:29 PM
V. A. To me death seems to be an evil.
M. What, to those who are al­ready dead? or to those who must die?
A. To both.
M. It is a mis­ery, then, be­cause an evil?
A. Cer­tain­ly.
M. Then those who have al­ready died, and those who have still got to die, are both mis­er­able?
A. So it ap­pears to me.
M. Then all are mis­er­able?
A. Ev­ery one.

January 24, 2010 » 03:22 PM

One of the more interesting trends is family, which came in at number five. Specifically, discussion about family, moms, dads, daughters, etc. jumped during 2009. With Facebook users getting older, this isn’t a big surprise. However, the fact that the mention of “kids” jumped by a factor of five this year is rather dramatic. It’s tough to know what this means, though. (via Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009

)

January 15, 2010 » 01:36 PM

BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.

January 14, 2010 » 10:04 PM

“To order, please TYPE “YES” IN CHECKBOX BELOW TO AGREE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PLUSH MUST BE KEPT AWAY FROM KIDS (it is a sex organ, after all). If it is not checked, WE WILL NOT SEND THE UTERUS.” (via @ibogost)

January 11, 2010 » 01:45 PM

I watched Space: 1999 back in the day, but I swear to god I do not remember this scene.

» visit my Tumblr

Recent Comments

Photos

» see all of my photos on Flickr

Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson