PocketKNIFE

Hey kids!

Do you ever think to yourself, "Golly gee willikers, it'd be swell if my knife were infeasible to carry and totally impossible to open with one hand?!?!"

Boy, let me tell you what.

Just when you think you've gotten the Chinese and their search terms all figured out, here's this. It's the Gragi Knives "Interesting Utility Pocket Knife,2.4" All Metal Construction Stainless Steel Blade,Quick Change Retractable Box Cutter,Tool EDC," model G512-A.

I thought I'd seen it all. I've seen the mechanical, the novelty, the elegant, and even the cool-knives-for-men. But now. Now the gauntlet has really been thrown. Interesting. Once again, I feel like somebody's calling me out. I couldn't not click on this.

I assure you I am not making this up.

This sort of thing might give a bird a reputation. Now I know what Dave Barry was on about all the time.

You could probably think of the Gragi Interesting as being broadly related to those "pantographic" knives you see all the time. You know, the ones that are for some inexplicable reason always shaped like the Freemasons' logo? Uh-huh. So here's how it do:

Just fabulous. Three out of ten, with rice. No notes whatsoever.

The Interesting or the G5120A or whatever has exactly the mechanical design that would result if somebody described how a balisong or butterfly knife works in Latin, wrote it on a piece of parchment and stuffed it in a bottle, threw it into the ocean, and it washed up in Quanzhou. It's a double handle, gear driven, half pivoting, out-the-front opener.

I'm also making it look much slicker than it is in that .gif, because I'm now very practiced with it via the expedient of fiddling around with it incessantly at my desk for the past week.

If you grab both halves of the Interesting's handles and pull them apart, a pair of armatures swing out and carry the blade to its halfway position. The tips of them end in little gears that genuinely do mesh with each other, and believe it or not they functionally serve to keep the blade in alignment.

But then it just stops there. If you're deft you can get it to balance in that middle position like I did here. But usually, if you let go it just snaps back into its retracted state and stares at you sulkily from between the handles. In order to actually get the thing to deploy you have to work it into that halfway position and then give either the blade or one of its arms a little nudge forward. Then it'll go over-square far enough that when you let go it'll spring out into its extended position.

Note that this is categorically impossible to do with one hand.

The motive is provided by a little clothespin spring on the hinged end.

The tips of the handles are separated by these diabolo spacers, which are screwed into place. The entire rest of the thing is riveted together other than that, though, so I couldn't take it apart. That's of no consequence; we can see what's going on in there easily enough. It's got brass washers on all the pivots and, believe it or not, none of them wiggle very much.

It's also surprisingly small. Here it is next to my little Böker. You can tell it's the little one because its handle scales are now Flat Dark Earth and Olive Drab. It's pretty much exactly 6" long when open, with a 2-5/16" blade that's sharpened for about 2-3/16" of its length. Closed it's 3-5/8" long and it's 0.361" thick not including the rivets. Being all steel it weighs 63.2 grams or 2.23 ounces overall.

The astute among you will have noticed that the Interesting doesn't have a pocket clip or even a perfunctory hole through which to put a keyring. In fact, it sports no carrying provision at all.

Instead, you get this fittingly dinky nylon belt sheath with a button snap on it. It's 2% better than most, because this one goes so far as to include a plastic stiffener insert in it to help it keep its shape and resist being mashed flat instantly.

Everything you see here is as it comes. That row of spots on the spine, for instance, isn't a consequence of the lights in my photo box. You can just barely feel the divots there with your finger, and I don't know where they came from. I have no idea what the slot in the blade is for, either, since it's not accessible to grip when the Interesting is closed. Its edge is... there, certainly. Capable of slicing open an envelope at least. It's pretty toothy, and not very even. I've seen better. Believe it or not, I've also seen much worse. I still haven't found the "quick change" part alluded to in the product description. If you manage to spot it, do let me know.

I don't know what the blade is made out of. "Stainless steel" is all the specifications will tell you. The rest is useless, e.g. only claiming as usual that its blade angle is "≤60°," which is something specific that crops up so frequently it's got to be some code word, a nudge and a wink allusion to something, but I'll be damned if I know what. Its DIY Type is also Woodworking, as we've seen before. Oh, and the specs also state that its origin is mainland China as if you couldn't have guessed.

That is because the Gragi Interesting may just the single most Chinese thing I have ever seen in my life. Just look at that box. Look at that excuse for a logo. Look at that font.

That font right there tickles my penguin senses in some way that I can't quite put my flipper on. Something about it is just ineffably Chinese, and of the knockoff variety. It instantly screams, "The contents of this container is painted with lead and dusted with asbestos, is covered in grinder marks, and will smell like a communist petroleum refinery. You will be ripped off for purchasing it, but you'll do it anyway because it's 30% of the cost of a brand name one."

On the carton of a cheap Harbor Freight bench vise. The quality control sticker on your $30 pair of fake Jordans. The embossed legend on the back of your flea market LCD game, which reads "NOT DO LNSERT IN EAR."

This is one of those universally understood warnings from nature, like the rattling noise coming from the other end of that snake. We've all seen it and we all know what it means, but what is it?

This drove me to figure it out.

Every bit of the Gragi's pack-ins come festooned with it, like so many stripes on an amazonian poison dart frog. Even its gaudy and shoddily made microfiber cleaning cloth. The name of this font is "Sim Sun," or perhaps "SimSun," and it was the default for simplified Chinese in Windows for decades, from Windows 95 all the way through XP.

(A small selection of very specific people are now triggered. In which way, I couldn't tell you.)

And I'm sure its selection of various Chinese glyphs is perfectly cromulent for native consumption. But precisely like how us gweilo have no comprehension of how ridiculous our generic oriental tattoos look to people who can actually read them, its Latin alphabet rendition looks to Westerners totally out of proportion, shonky, and just slightly uncanny. But since it's been the default everywhere for so long, nobody seems to bother to change it. It's all just the perfunctory minimum — purest "that'll do."

The perfect metaphor, really.