The Mark of the Butterfly

I ordered a Butterfly Knife over the weekend. You know, the kind that you flip around in some sort of gymnastic fashion in an effort to give the "I'm so dangerous that I don't care if I cut off all my fingers with this contraption" look. Although they were probably standard issue for any street gang during the Eighties, I don't think anybody has actually bought one in the last ten years. The printed invoice even said: "Thank you for your purchase - welcome to 1987."

Why I decided to order a butterfly knife astounds me even now. I'm not a knife guy, I don't like violence, and I've never been in a single situation where any knife would have come in handy. It certainly isn't anything practical; nobody would order a juicy T-Bone at Black Angus and say "Make the steak medium-rare, potatoes on the side, oh, and hold the steak knife, I've got something better."

As cool as they may have been a few decades ago, rarely did they grace the silver screen as a "Whoa this guy is a bad mother, don't mess with him" kind of weapon. But imagine if Crocodile Dundee would have said, "That's not a knife... This is a knife" and proceeded to flip his butterfly knife around for five minutes, long enough to bore his would-be attacker into leaving to find a victim with less of an accent.

Or imagine if Dirty Harry delivered his famous quote: "Do you feel lucky? Punk? Well, do you?" While mercilessly chopping his own fingers into oblivion in an effort to flip his shiny blade around.

The only people that actually used these knives were the unworthy enemy ninja clans that systematically got beaten up by Chuck Norris. It almost makes you wonder if spinning them emits a high pitch frequency that attracts action heroes to come beat the living snot out of you.

Like I said, I'm not a knife guy. I'm not any kind of weapon guy. I don't own any knives, guns, whips, stun guns, or anthrax. My armament collection consists of a .38 caliber stapler and a deadly assortment of ninja throwing socks. I have no idea what I'm going to do with a butterfly knife after I get tired of shredding my fingers into stumps.

Perhaps I'll frame it on my office wall underneath the quotation: "This is the knife that caused Jean-Claude Van Damme to throw me through a window." It should make for an interesting conversation piece, so long as everybody realizes that I'm one bad mother, don't mess with me...