I don’t know why, but ever since the Holidays, I’ve been spammed with ads for Coolina knives. They show up on my phone. They show up on my computer and my iPad. They even started showing up in my dreams, which is the only place I can prepare food without cutting my fingers off. And while I admit it’s a tangent, here’s a true story.
When my first wife, Marianne, was pregnant with my first son, Sean, we’d invited my Aunt Maryellen to dinner one evening. Marianne didn’t cook. So, that gave me the opportunity to have two ideas:
- I thought it would be a good idea to serve turnips.
- I thought it would be a good idea to cut the raw turnips with a cleaver.
I was wrong on both counts. The bad news is I removed the tip of my left thumb with the cleaver. The worse news is I don’t like the sight of blood, especially my own. The good news is we lived directly behind St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. I wrapped my thumb with a dish towel, sheepishly excused myself, and walked across the street to the hospital.
Once I checked myself into the Emergency Room, I was escorted to an exam room to begin my interminable wait for a doctor. At long last, a young man walked in and said with disarming cheeriness, “So, wadda we got here?”
I held up my left hand with the dish towel wrapped around its thumb.
He said, “Okay. Let’s take a look.”
As soon as he removed the dish towel, blood started squirting across the room.
Now in full elation, the doc exclaimed, “Oh! A pumper!”
I went out like a light.
After reviving me, the doc applied enough pressure long enough to stanch the blood. Then he put some goopy coagulant stuff on what was left of the tip of my thumb, covered it with some bandages, told me to steer clear of cleavers, and sent me home.
Picking Up Where We Left Off
Where were we? Oh, yeah. Knives. Anyway, I was okay ignoring the Coolina ads for a while. But then I saw an ad for the Gator. It caused me to recall the TV commercials for Ginsu knives. Those things could cut through all manner of things without losing their edges. And they apparently remained antiseptic enough that the dudes in the commercials could still use them for cooking. At that point, I was thinking, “Hell. If Ginsu knives could do that in the ‘70s, the Gator must be capable cutting down trees, dismembering bodies, and still peeling grapes with ease.” That was all the challenge I needed.
Since Gator was a carnivorous reptile with close relatives in the dinosaur community, I wanted to choose a suitable, similar name and species for my brand. I discovered somebody had beaten me to the punch on the T-Rex knife. (Drat!) So, undaunted, I decided to invent the Bahari knife. I named it after Bahariasaurus, a dinosaur roughly the same size as Tyrannosaurus Rex but much uglier.
I engineered the Bahari to be so tough and sharp that it can cut through a wall of reinforced concrete, hack through structural steel I-beams, and still shave a baby’s ass without leaving any nicks, scratches, abrasions, or — most important — infections.
It’s such an amazing product, Robben Ford even wrote a song about it.
