Heaven—I’m In Heaven. . . . .

Following the smashing success at the Big Bore Gun Club’s Gun Show–sold about 100 knives, woo hoo!–I sent in orders to three of my wholesalers. since there is another gun show coming up January 17-18 at Wasilla High School.  Only in Alaska–(okay, maybe Montana)–a gun show and sale for a high school fund-raiser.  Two of the orders were in today, so I schlepped into Willow to pick them up.  Hurt myself carrying them to the car, but who cares?. Ever since I got this pesky hernia trying to heave a 23-gallon propane tank out from a snow bank, I hurt myself anytime I lift anything heavier than my, um, voice.  But I digress.

Any time I get a knife order in, it’s like Christmas. Better than Christmas, actually.  No one got me anything for Christmas this year (besides myself, that is). Kathy got Doug a new video game which she was going to hold off on until he finished doing the dishes, but that job seems to be stretching out to the heat death of the universe, and she wanted to play the game herself, so he got it early.  I got Kathy two  rocks which I loved (irradiated smoky quartz cluster  before Yule and  a malachite/turquoise thingie afterwards), but she didn’t care for.   She prefers great big natural cairngorn crystals and big chunks of pure turquoise, which are way out of my price range. Someday I’ll learn.  But I digress, again.

Anyway, Kathy and Doug each got a blade out of the deal.  Doug got a samuri sword made in Pakistan–hardly authentic, the blade curves the wrong way– but surprisingly well-made for the price, even if the leather strap on the cord-wrapped wooden sheath is a tad on the flimsy side.  I got two new Fred Carter Tornadoes made by Gigand–these are great little folders, AUS-8-A steel in the half-serrated wharncliff blade, nickel-plated aluminum handles.  I had one in stock that was on sale due to the box’s being shop worn, which she asked for, and I was happy to give her. She said she’ll use it for an everyday carry knife  if she ever loses her main blade, a Spyderco Police model she has carried for over 20 years.

Me, I just gloated, checking off each knife against the invoices and figuring out an obscene but realistic-looking mark-up, so I could discount it and give the customer a deal.  Frankly, I’m not real comfortable doing business this way.  At one time, I priced my stock as low as possible to begin with, but I soon found out that no matter how low I price a knife, some jackass will come along and try to dicker me down.  So now, if I have a knife for which $19 is a reasonable price, I’ll tag the sucker at $29–or $39 or $49– and put it on sale. But enough about numbers.

I got some more Gerber Chameleons, big slide-lock rascals with a hole in them to put your index finger through (this is hard to describe, but I have them in my on-line knife catalog, check ‘em out), and a Buck Lightening HTA-I with a nifty red anodized aluminum handle and a sweet little Camillus peanut–all made in the good old US of A, no less.  I got some really elegant Kershaw liner-locks from a store close-out sale, at about half the usual wholesale price. And I got a couple of Frost Cutlery framelocks, complete with (to my delighted surprise) “a Jim Frost design” inscribed on the  440-steel blades.  One knife is a half-serrated drop point, the other is a non-serrated modified clip blade and they each have a gorgeous wood inlay handle with amazing richness and depth in the grain.  It looks like natural rosewood, but is probably dyed pakkawood.

 Blackie Collins did it again!  (He is one of the better-known knife designers–sometimes people will come up and ask to see any Blackie Collins-designed knives I have, and don’t even want to look at anything else.)  He recently came up with what I call the super, super knife.  There is a new knife on the market trademarked “Superknife,” which is basically a tricked-out utlity knife–a fancy box cutter, in other words.That is, it’s a folder with a replaceable utility knife blade.  They have become wildly popular–the guy who owns the local general store-laundomat-video rental got two of them for Christmas–but I think they suck. Besides being over-priced, the darn things are blister-packed.  This means you can’t handle the knife without opening the package, and feel is very important in knives.  So I leave the things alone.  But Mr. Collins took his Speedster–one of the first assisted-openers on the market and still the most affordable and elegant in design–and fitted it with a replaceable box-cutter blade.  The engineering of the change-over mechanism is better than anything I’ve seen, and the knife comes with a nylon belt sheath that has a little pocket in it with four replacement blades.  Since each blade can be reversed, what you get is a total of ten fresh edges.  I have mine tagged at $39, which is not too bad since the original ugly manually-opening Superknife goes for $29, but I sold my first one today to a neighbor who is a regular customer for $25.   So much for the name brands.  At least the ones you might recognize.

In the past year or so, some enterprising folks came out with a brand called Combat Ready, made in China.  They have a little cord-wrapped handle dagger that is all iridescent like titanium–how they did it, I don’t know, it is probably just 420 steel at the price.  I think they rock, but that is a minority opinion, having sold exactly one in the last year.   And they make a folding knife that is so extravagant, it verges on the absurd, with a saw-toothed modified hawkbill blade and a black and green micarto handle. But they also make a folding push dagger to die for.  No pun intended.  Now a push dagger is what the name implies–a dagger with a handle that is perpendicular to the blade, so you literally push it.  As a rule, push daggers are crap, flashy schlock with handles made of cast pot metal  made to look like devils or dragons or something.  Kid stuff, in other words.  This one converts from a  regular straight sheath knive by means of a back lock.  The sheath itself is outstanding– great workmanship, looks like pigskin to me, comes in a pleasing  light brown color.  The knife has a wooden handle  that looks like oak.  The first man who bought one ( this summer, at the Wasilla Farmer’s Market, held in the historical area next to the museum) said that he had travelled through Russia with one, and that they are great when you are fighting in the dark. He had a  quiet, matter-of-fact way about him (same  as my Uncle Bill, who was a Green Beret and the highest-ranking non-com in the Army) that convinced me he was telling the truth. You meet the most interesting people in this business.

Possibly the most fun stuff was the no-brand fantasy knives from Pakistan, like the Ocean Bowie.  I don’t know where they got the name–the thing is over 20 inches long and has weird curves and extra blade surfaces and blood holes and a knuckle guard and generally looks as much like a Bowie knife as I look like Michael Jackson.  It has wood inlays here and there that are dyed a sort of blue-green, maybe that is where they got the ocean part.  But I know it will make some young collector–or maybe not so young, you never know–very happy.

Then there are the survival knives–you know what they look like if you saw “Rambo: First Blood”, the guys with hollow handles that contain compasses and fishing gear and stuff.  Plus there’s the Genie Bowie and the Genie Fighter, which I won’t even try to describe.  And then there’s the swords.  They are in the bath tub, on top of the box full of fantasy knives and push daggers, which  is on top of the box with collectable comics and rocks and odds and ends of other knives, which is sitting on top of the storage box containing 11 dozen more knives.  Did I mention that inventory control is a problem sometimes?

But now  it is close to midnight, and I have pretty much all of today’s knives more or less dealt with, all 71 of them.  Okay,  so there’s a couple of samuri swords under the bed, so sue me.  I’ve done the best I can for now, in preparation for the arrival of the BIG shipment due later this week–exactly 988 more knives, somewhere between 150 and 200 pounds of them, including two dozen Triple Threats,  arguably the baddest legal knives on the planet. 

God, I love my job!

A Semi-guilty Confession

I am a vulgar old man, and a Luddite to boot.  I hate new-fangled stuff like computers and cars with automatic transmissions and laser surgery and velcro and word processors–hey, a manual typewriter was good enough for Mark Twain and it was good enough for me.  For years, I was the only PR guy in state government with a manual, everyone else had a fancy IBM Selectric. But I digress.  I must confess–I own a cell phone.

It didn’t come easy.  This summer, when I worked in town fifty miles away, I was spending an  obscene amount of money on pay phones to call my sweety, so a cell phone made sense.  So I go to Wal-mart and talk to the cell phone lady.  “I want one that just makes calls,” I said.  “I don’t want one that will take pictures or play games or do my income taxes.  I just want a phone.”  The closest thing to that was the no-frills Nokia, fifty bucks with a fifty buck rebate–pretty much free, in other words.  I could live with that, I figured.

“I’ll take one,” I says.

“They’re out of stock,” she says.

A few months later, desperate, I’m back.  The free one is still out of stock, so I shell out fifty clams (no rebate on this puppy) for a Motorola.  It had voice-activated dialing, which I thought was pretty cool.  Thing is, you had to first program the numbers into the built-in address book.  I never did get the hang of that, so I never used that feature.

It also has something called text messaging, which I assume is something sort of like email.  Email I can cope with.  Never figured out the ins and outs of that one, either, though so I never used that feature.  It also has a  built-in calculator, and of course, I never bothered to figure out how to use that, since I always have a pen handy and can usually find a piece of paper if I need to do some math.

It doesn’t take pictures, thank God, but it does have three games built in: poker, falling numbers, and blackjack.  I vowed on principle long sgo to never play poker with anyone smarter than I am, so the poker was out. The falling numbers thng requires way more hand-eye coordination that I can muster up, so that’s out.  There have been times, however, when I have been so bored that I did play blackjack with my phone.  I lost every time.

One special whiz-bang I did use was the voice recording.  This I can deal with–push a button and talk.  I CAN push a button, and I CAN talk.  Boy, can I talk.  Ask my wife. I haven’t used this feature for a few months–last time was this summer, when I wanted to document an especially sharp deal I was making and didn’t want the other guy to be able to weasel out of it.  But it’s nice to know it’s there.

I guess the freedom of the thing was one factor that finally sold me, not having to search all around for a pay phone and all.  One of the first times I used it, I called my sweety at home when I was in the men’s room of the Wasilla Historical Museum.  The transmission was great, she said she could hear every tinkle and splash at my end.  I loved  it. Besides being vulgar, I’m a whimsical kind of guy and the notion of standing there, my hi-tech phone in one hand and my lo-tech willy in the other just tickled me immensely.  Hey, when you don’t drink or smoke  or gamble, you get your jollies wherever you can find them.

Plus I liked the idea of being able to call my relatives Outside.  They live about 4,000 miles away, and I got unlimited weekend long-distance minutes.  Quite a deal, I thought.  But the phone company  had the last laugh–when I got home, out here in God’s country, Alaska, I discovered we live in a no-coverage area.  Shucks, I can’t even call the local general store, much less the East Coast. 

But I am still glad I got it, especially on those long drives to town on snowy nights when the car is acting up.  And best of all, today I  saw an ad for the same phone–or one that looks just like it and has the same features–on sale at Fred Meyer’s–for almost twice what I paid at Wal-mart.

Funny Alaskans Part ii — Felony Stupidity

Kathy and I get a lot of laughs from what we call felony stupidity–hapless schmucks who break the law while stepping on their dicks in the process, like the dude who robbed  a bank by writing a note on the back of one of his own deposit slips and leaving it at the scene of the crime. It’s kinda like the Darwin Awards only less fatal.  Anyway, today’s paper had a wonderful example: dateline: Anchorage.

This poor guy’s first mistake was washing down some of his wife’s pain meds (OxyContin would be my guess, pill pushers up here write tons of scrips for the stuff) with a bunch of booze.  Shortly thereafter, he demanded to know the location of the president from his long-suffering wife,. then proceeded to assault her, their home computer, and their color TV (with a hammer).  Then, after strewing his living room with full soda cans–no sense wasting booze– he threw some rifles into his pickup and backed out of the garage without bothering to open the garage door–crash !  She tried to leave in her car, he crashed into IT.

He headed for Providence hospital (maybe he thought the president was there), rammed into a car with a couple and their infant son in it, and scattered three of the hospital’s rentacops, who took off in all directions at once to avoid being smushed. He also scattered a crowd of innocent bystanders (but in a larger metaphysical sense, is anyone really innocent? But I digress.).  A bit later, he rammed a local university’s police car (uh oh–contempt of cop, very serious street crime), and headed home.

The cops found him sprawled on his couch in the trashed living room, talking on the phone and smoking a cigarette. He went quietly.

He is being held on a variety of bad-boy charges, bail having been set at $91,000.  And guess what?  His sheet includes DWI, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.  If he has any sense at all, he will say that he has no recollection of what he did, plead no contest and throw himself on the mercy of the court.  (Hey, it worked for me!)