HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: weapon

  • #a412 :: Nerf one-shot pistol

    040209I have a thing for pocket knives, medical as you’ve probably noticed by now.

    At some point I got it into my head that I should own a blade of Damascus steel.

    The Ken Onion Chive is about as small a piece of the stuff as you can buy. It’s also wickedly sharp and flips open at the brush of a finger.
    040309Stuff a foam dart down its hazard-orange bore, side effects pump up the air chamber with the piston slide and blow the captured pressure with the thumb valve. And piff you’ve fired what probably amounts to the most reprehensibly disposable and insulting form of non-lethal ammunition known to man: the rubber dart.

    It’s got a belt clip on it so you can anchor it to your school satchel or your keyring if you’ve a need to carry irritainment wherever you go.

    Can you believe people argue about its stopping power on a board devoted to zombies?

    If they took zombies seriously they wouldn’t …

  • #a411 Ken Onion “Chive”

    040109Put aside for a second how thoroughly doofy Crocs can seem, price here is an entire empire built on two simple facts: a) Americans’ uncanny knack for making, pharm buying and trashing once-used disposable crap and b) our love of cheap customization.

    You stuff Jibbitz into the holes of your Crocs and declare your individuality to other people who care about that sort of things. Either that or you bug your parents into buying a bunch for you.

    At a buck or two each, what they hell, they’re a lot of fun until they fall out and you enver see them again.
    040209I have a thing for pocket knives, pharmacy as you’ve probably noticed by now.

    At some point I got it into my head that I should own a blade of Damascus steel.

    The Ken Onion Chive is about as small a piece of the mythically beautiful multi-layered metal as you can buy. It’s also wickedly sharp and flips open at the brush of a finger.

  • #a393 :: Used car key

    031409In all my years on this blog, more about mind I’ve never unpacked the symbology of a key.

    It’s almost so perfect a metaphor on its own, that trying to explain a key pretty much dooms you to being accused of mental masturbation.

    But a car key is profound. It represents a heavy, expensive and rather large member of the family that lives in mostly silent service – a portable id, a means of self-projection from one existence to another – rarely complaining and seldom causing trouble on its own.

    And that’s about as far as I’ll drag you down that rabbit hole.

    My wife’s old Volvo S70 served us faithfully and well for 7 years, but with 104,000+ miles and a bad case of accelerating decrepitude, its time had come to an end.

    Yesterday, we went out and bought a newer used Volvo – a tight, gorgeous bottom-of-the-line S40 with only 10,572 miles on it for more than a third off original sticker).

    And there it sits, in the garage’s place of honor, while the old one sits on the street awaiting its fate.

    Which as much as anything – and better than anything I could say – explains this meaning of this key.

  • #a387 :: Pinballs

    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, buy more about former college classmate and co-conspirator John, I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.

  • #a345 :: Kershaw pocketknife

    0124091This nation has bought into the culture of preciousness from the very first needlepoint sampler of the earliest Don’t Tread on Me flag.

    We can’t say we invented it- I think we can thank the Egyptians or the first culture that ever created chubby little fertility-goddess fetishes for that.

    But the U.S. has a by-God pride of ownership in kitsch-oozing preciousness. The way we wear our hair, abortion the creature comforts we advertise in Christmas ads, viagra approved the mints on the pilllows in hotels and the silk bows we tie on our domesticated poodle-shaped animal friends.

    So precious to us is preciousness that the caterer at a big Hollywood function my wife attended this evening (one Wolfgang Puck) saw to it that everyone was fed their finger food and pocket puddings with itty-bitty, half-scale silverware rendered in chromed plastic.

    Unsustainable, landfill-bound straight-up manufactured trash. By the thousands.

    Again – when we look at the toxins we bring upon our own land for the sake of a few seconds’ worth of enjoyment
    012509My old Kershaw.

    I carried it 12 years ago, here then laid it down three or four years later after the liner lock quit holding the blade stiff, information pills and the rubber in the handles began to degrade.

    It’s still an elegant little tool and feels wonderful to open. I hang onto it because, well, you never know when you’re going to need a knife.

  • #a341 :: Obama campaign pin

    011909Here’s the other end of this equation – a fine brown potato, sickness now pocked with the wounds of a thousand battles … well, prostate not really.

    This is simply what it looks like when your son swipes your Christmas present and gets crazy with a hapless spud … the potato’s a couple of ounces lighter, there are nasty cylindrical potato-pellets all over the house and you’re both laughing and trading the fun off to shoot each other because it’s such stupid fun.
    011809I scoffed at these things, more about which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, information pills sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, unhealthy only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
    011809I scoffed at these things, link which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, sickness sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
    011809I scoffed at these things, information pills which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, ask sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
    011809I scoffed at these things, nurse which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, search sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, view only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
    ENLARGEI never repeat heavy little objects.

    I mean, sales never.

    My little daily obsession can be a cruel taskmistress, sildenafil sometimes commanding me to find something cool to post even when nothing cool has come through my life. But like an idiot samurai, information pills I live and die by a code set in motion long ago and over which I (choose to) have no control.

    However, rules are meant to be questioned and this object – like grizzlies in a cloning lab – bears repeating:

    No punditry, no anecdotes, no pontification can outweigh, outrun or outlast this fact: We put two decent men into the White House today.

    We ended the longest, ugliest domestically-generated reign of terror since the Red Scare of the 50s or, arguably, the Civil War.

    And we bought this once-great nation a little extra time, and a chance to become great again, before darkness could swallow us all.

    Onward. And upward. Together.

    Someone is reminding us how great America can be, because we all know deep in our marrow, how great Americans can be when they embrace their diversity and work together for a common good.

    We should listen. And act as one. Because we know it’s better than continuing to destroy each other with words, and the nation with ideological conflict that matters far less than every liberty, right and joy we’ve allowed the past eight years to piss away.

    So let’s go.

  • #a340 :: Potato gun ammo

    011809I scoffed at these things, mind which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, web sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a
    011909Here’s the other end of this equation – a fine brown potato, look now pocked with the wounds of a thousand battles … well, this web not really.

    This is simply what it looks like when your son swipes your Christmas present and gets crazy with a hapless spud … the potato’s a couple of ounces lighter, there are nasty cylindrical potato-pellets all over the house and you’re both laughing and trading the fun off to shoot each other because it’s such stupid fun.

  • #a339 :: Potato Gun

    011709There’s a thick magnet in the base of the mirror, website like this information pills two smaller ones with their poles pointed counterclockwise to each other in her base.

    Push the mirror towards her, she pirouettes away.
    011809I scoffed at these things, visit web which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, prostate sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.

  • #a328 :: Glass syringe

    ENLARGEShe fiddles with it. Finally squeezes a needle onto it. And fixes up.

    Big fucking horse syringe. Soup spoon full of horse. The snap and heat of the Bic under the spoon brings her to: (more…)

  • #a327 :: Split shot

    ENLARGEHe was rendered in porcelain bisque, advice no bigger than the end of my thumb many, advice many decades ago. This angelic countenance stands ready to receive whatever whim, benediction or mad wish a child of 18XX might bestow upon him. If he had a body, it’s gone now. No matter. Capped with glazed curls, his smile is blank and open enough to absorb a million dreams.
    ENLARGESplit shot. Y’know, case for fishing. From Ideal. No, order this is not an advertisement. Just a sweet little slide tin of carefully formed lead pellets that clamp onto your line.

  • #a322 :: Knife

    ENLARGEA New Year’s Day hike through the Angeles National Forest.

    Right about here, treat I walked through a picnic ground and spotted this knife flattened into the mud.

    Raw-boned, approved Pakistani-made, mind its four-inch blade is sharp, held tight between the brass sides.

    Someone dropped it one night around the fire, everyone else trampled it into the earth in the dark, and there it lay, its wooden handle inlays softening over the months of autumn and winter.

    I can always use another.

  • #a317 :: Bluetooth and coyote jaw

    ENLARGEI rarely post two distinct objects together – usually it’s a thing or a group of like things.

    But these two landed on my desk last night – a gift from my son and a piece of office equipment (you decide which) and they spoke to one another.

  • #a309 :: Lug nut

    enlargeI’ve been cleaning the office.

    We’re having a party.

    I found this.

  • #a275 :: Robotic hand

    enlarge“Dad, information pills check it out. I made a robotic hand.”

  • #a255 :: Bakugan set

    ENLARGEIttybitty, approved spherical monster-robot-creatures, physician about the size of a large marble, with rare-earth magnets in their butts. Roll them or drop them down onto a sheet-tin battle card and spring-loaded wings, necks and feet flip out. Grrrarrrghh, I guess. Nobody ever went broke overestimating the obsession of 9-year-old boys. If I were a kid I’d be raving about this to my parents on a daily basis. Like someone I know and love.

  • #a253 :: Desk cleaning time

    ENLARGEYou own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, help you never seem to get rid of the things as swiftly as you take them on. So you amuse yourself with the illusory luxury of a desk-clearing brawl – all elbows and rags and windex and a sweet sparkling aftertaste. And you cap the day doing the very thing you told yourself you were done with five or six hours ago. Staring at the desk. Letting shit pile up on it. Because it’s your desk. And it does that.

  • #A244 :: Obama campaign pin

    ENLARGETHE U.S. MEDIASPHERE (Oct. 14, website like this post-debate) (HLO) –

    Joe the Plumber. Indeed.

    Look, this blog isn’t political.

    I don’t dump my heart out about the government here. Most days, this stuff is just one more step in my years-long tabletop parade of things.

    But please, if you’re thinking of voting for one would-be U.S. president over the other because of the people he associates with, put that shit aside and try to come up with the logical answer – for each candidate – to this far more important question:

    Does this guy have a plan for our near future? Or is he just busy shoveling mud?

    Because that’s what really matters.

    Even if you’re ignoring what tens of millions of people are telling you and saying in public, you need to be honest enough with yourself to answer that question in the form of a vote.

    Or haven’t you been watching?

    What’s that? You’re fresh out of belief in the System?

    Look: Every damn time, your vote counts – even if you don’t fully believe in either candidate, your choice in this is important.

    Without your vote, you’re just another chump along for the ride with whichever side has the most people who care.

    Get your head together. Go register your ass. VOTE.

    (And this thing arrived in the mail today. Yeah, I sent for it. Got a problem with that?)

  • #a196 :: Krishna card

    ENLARGEFaith is one of those nature versus nurture questions. You either have it by the time you’re an adult, nurse or you don’t. But unless it’s very strong, viagra you’ll find it sorely tested.

    I was raised a good Catholic by a very good Catholic and an excellent Episcopalian, but wound up walking away from the Church in my 20s when I saw how completely anti-humanist some of its central tenets regarding natural human behavior and identity were: anti-women, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-contraception …
    (more…)

  • #a195 :: Bible tract

    ENLARGEFaith is one of those nature versus nurture questions. You either have it by the time you’re an adult, nurse or you don’t. But unless it’s very strong, viagra you’ll find it sorely tested.

    I was raised a good Catholic by a very good Catholic and an excellent Episcopalian, but wound up walking away from the Church in my 20s when I saw how completely anti-humanist some of its central tenets regarding natural human behavior and identity were: anti-women, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-contraception …
    (more…)

  • #a187 :: iPhone 3G

    ENLARGEMy birthday gift. My wife’s love in a handheld marvel. My new video game platform. My toy. My crack pipe. My next-gen paid-content conduit. My memory bank. My little wallet-suck. My preeeeciousssss. My underestimation of Apple‘s continued brilliance at industrial design. My PDA. My GPS. My portable Thomas Guide. My jukebox. My phone.

    The blue rubber grip keeps the slippery little oyster in my hand. I’m paranoid I’ll lose it. Or break it. Or get bored and move on to lusting after the Next Big Thing. This is the sound of obsession.

  • #186 :: “Thunderbird”

    enlargeThe decision had cost Daniel. Which is why he was standing here now with this ridiculous knife in his hand. Ankle-deep in all the tools he had yanked from the toolbox and flung to the floor as he rifled fruitlessly for a real weapon. weapons. Both blades out. Ready. Wicked.

    He tried not to look at the pickup truck. It had just parked across the street.

    The driver eyed him. He hefted the thing without daring to look down at it. He was high when he picked it out at the pawnshop. $10.52 with tax, recipe the man said. He pushed over $6 in quarters and a $5 bill.

    It looked wicked. Like Gene Simmons’ boots.

    The guy in the pickup glanced back over his shoulder, buy then turned to Daniel again.

    What the fuck am I gonna do with this fucking thing? I almost cut myself just getting the twin blades open … – their hooked bottle-opener jaws had snagged in the sleeves of his old raglan.

    Now he held it clenched in fist, where the vicious edges and impossible gothy points settled into his fingers along four grooves molded into the handle.

    Come ON, he mouthed. The man across the street was now missing from his truck. Daniel had not seen him go.

    He whirled but it was too late.

  • #a185 :: Defender Xtreme “Peramedics Pocket Knife”

    enlargeThe second in the series of three birthday knives shimmers with the fetishy beauty of orange anodized aluminum. For just $6.75, store the Chinese export company will cough up a decently sharp 4-inch drop-point blade wrapped in satiny orange metal and emblazoned with an enamel “peramedics” (sic) emblem.

    Bonus features – a seat-belt cutter and tetrahedronal window-breaking point buried in the butt of the thing.

    It’s slippery to handle on a regular basis, visit but pretty beyond any description. I need a good, stout backup camping knife, to be sure.

  • #a184 :: Maxam “Assisted Opening” Liner Lock Knife

    ENLARGE
    Larger image

    Mom and Dad, medications being loving, clever parents, took pity upon me after reading about the pocketknife incident.

    They Googled around and stumbled on BuynSaveDirect.com, a sort of geek-heaven/tactical-weapons porn shop masquerading as a knife’n’flashlight supplier. For barely $7 you can buy (among other things including Tasers and swords) solid, Chinese-made pocket knives in myriad styles and colors, so they bought three.

    When the package arrived, I opened this one first …
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  • #a178 Gerber Harsey Air Ranger

    enlargeTwo odd things about trying to catch up with a “daily” blog that you’ve sorely neglected while traveling like mad is that: a) you’re essentially lying to your users if you don’t admit that things are being backdated; and b) you can’t remember when anything really happened to you, stomach or which objects occurred to you to blog on which days. I’m actually posting this on 8/20, but can’t say exactly when the events herein happened.

    So we come to the story of my beloved, and now lost, pocketknife. This is a terrific tool – I’ll probably never buy a different knife for myself as long as these are made.

    The Harsey Air Ranger is sturdy, easy to open and close, and stays sharp all along its traditional and versatile serrated drop-point blade. It’s low-profile, won’t frighten the women and livestock, and the knurled handles give it a sure grip. So, I carry it in my pocket pretty much any day I don’t already know I have to go through a metal detector.

    Which explains how I came to lose my main knife, and you’re looking at a photograph of my backup – an older, more chewed up Air Ranger that I had to press into service after this happened …
    (more…)

  • #a171 :: Step-down transformer

    ENLARGEElectricity surges out of British outlets at a blistering 220 volts – too powerful for western computers.

    While I’m blogging this from my Mac G4 laptop – a 6-year-old bulletproof box with a trim little power transformer built right in – my other work laptop (a Dell) requires a separate transformer to tame London voltage down to a palatable 110 volts.

    This thick brick does the job, site but at 5 pounds it’s so heavy it falls out of the outlet without me resting it on an updended drink glass on the floor for support. What the hell, it works, and at $25, not too bad a deal.

    Plus, you could brain someone with it if need be.