Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Back at Castle Beelzebub,

Mr. B is noting the introduction of a new knife. The gentleman who's name is on it is noted as having "invested much time in designing" the item.

Oh, give me a damn break! It's a freakin' paring knife, for God's sake! How damn much time could he have spent 'designing' the thing?

This is one of two things that piss me off about so many new wonders of the cutlery world; taking some design that's been around since Christ was a corporal, and announcing it as a 'masterpiece of modern design', or some such crap. Or they remake it in cheap stainless steel and state what an 'improvement' it is over ANY PREVIOUS DESIGN! Oh yeah, it won't rust. It also gets dull cutting through a tomato, but who worries about that? IT'S RUSTLESS!

The other? The "New, designed by whoever VULTURE CLAW! Gleaming surgical stainless set off with genuine Chromium-Plated Guard and Pommel! Own the Spirit of the Vulture Warrior!" and other such bullshit. Put together a design for the most useless piece of crap ever held by the hand of man or monkey, shiny it up and give it a WARRIOR name of some kind, and it will sell. It will sell by the casefull, to people who often can't figure out how to sharpen the damn thing, but OOH! SHINY!!!

I like well-designed and built knives. I don't at all mind someone putting things together in a different or new way for whatever reason. And I very much understand the 'make it shiny and they will buy' idea. What bothers me is someone taking an ages-old design and putting up a line of crap about 'years in the making' as to why you should pay them a sizeable amount for one. Not "I think this is the most useful design" or something like that, or just "I think this steel is the best for this design", but "it took me YEARS to design this!".

Bleahh. It's too early in the morning to get ticked off about crap like this.

The other that really

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

the perfect knife does the job it was intended to do, and does it well. I've got a lot of fine cutlery, and I've also got a lot of old crap, like my 8" chefs knife, which is a thin carbon steel blade that keeps an edge and cuts like blazes. I wouldn't trade that knife for a whole SET of wusthof-trident.

Anonymous said...

Went to Dubai, UAE, last year, ( to marry a Russian wench I met on one of them 'internet dating things'. She took me to her place-I announced I was gonna cook supper, and she had nothing there to cut with !?! I picked up a blade called a Jemiah, (something like that), manufactured in Yemen.
Very fine quality, very cheap, took forever to put a decent edge on it.
Up here in Canukistan, they make it so difficult and expensive to own a gun, that most people don't bother. Not to mention the fact that even if your gun is legal, the police will tell you that they are 'taking it back to the station to check the serial nos' and then you won't get it back!

Firehand said...

Could it have been a jambiyah? Curved blade, maybe edged on both sides?

I've seen some knives made with good steel that were so thick at the edge that, as you say, it took forever to get it down to a decent edge.

I'd heard it was bad in the Great White North for gun owners, didn't know it had gotten to that point. Yuck.