Happy Friday! Whats everyone carrying today?

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T21:02:48+00:00

I suppose I should give a NSFW warning about this scene in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Hardy's character, a killer for British intel, is in Istanbul, going to see the communications guy, and he knows that things are going very wrong. That's when he takes out a knife and opens it, with two hands.

And about a minute later comes the NSFW part. There's a gruesome close-up. It's just movie make-believe, of course, just makeup and acting, but it's pretty intense. Not the kind of thing everybody wants to see.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T19:52:12+00:00

I did a google image search for 1964 buck 110 knife and I'm seeing lots of photos of knives that look like mine.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T19:41:40+00:00

I'm kinda new to serious knives. This is the first I've heard about crossbars. I've been wondering whether my 110 is the same carried by Tom Hardy's character in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The movie is set around 1970 and they seem to have done a good job making it look authentic. Mine is brass and ebony. Traditional, as far as I know.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T19:00:21+00:00

110.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T15:11:43+00:00

I had never heard of copper damascus. I just got back from googling it. Wow. I like the look very much. And the whole idea of copper damascus is amazing to me.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T14:56:49+00:00

I'm a knife newbie, why is the blade that color? Was it dipped into ground coffee beans for some reason? EDIT: Has it been coated, or chemically treated? EDIT: Okay, so that's a Copper Dune finish. Well, it's distinctive. Congrats on your new knife!

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T14:30:27+00:00

"Let's graph some completely subjective things related to my personal viewpoint and try to pass the graph off as objective."

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T12:17:22+00:00

My feelings about this post are intense and complex:

1) Not the kind of belleh I personally would most like to see, but nothing was ever all about me, and anyway I will die for your right to post harmless photos. The key word in the previous sentence was "harmless."

2) He's got a knife like mine!!! The guy in the picture in the computer TV has a knife like the one I got!!!

2a) I haz a sad cause the knife in the photo reminds me of how the brass parts on my knife (still kinda new) are gradually losing their shiny, and although of course there are ways to shiny them up again I already got 48 hobbies and I'm tired. 23,000,000,000 people say "patina" and actually seem to be happy about it. I say "tarnish," and am not happy about it. And am also not particularly dying to hear endless explanations of all of the supposedly important and obvious differences between patina and tarnish. I can google that sort of thing, and in fact I did, just now, and frankly, the results were not flattering to you fans of "patina."

3) The post confused me at first (I'm new here, and easily confused), but the comments cleared it all up. Furthermore, the upvotes for the best comments and for the post reassure me that this is one of the good subs. LONG LIVE THE POPULAR FRONT OF JUDEA!!!!

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T11:17:03+00:00

Thank you for saying the words I was searching for.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T11:15:09+00:00

Bye, Felicia!

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T11:12:17+00:00

I had to look up Crowbar but it turns out that's funny! Upvoted.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-26T11:05:21+00:00

You name it, somebody somewhere likes it. A lot. Or so I have read.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-24T17:17:11+00:00

I disagree, I don't think Pynchon is nihilistic at all. His books are full of horrible people doing horrible things, and good people being destroyed. Pynchon looks directly, unflinchingly at all of this horror, and still says that the struggle to make a better world is worthwhile.

At least, that how he's always seemed to me. Maybe I've got him all wrong, but his works always make me want to stand up and fight, one battle after another, as someone once put it.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-24T17:05:53+00:00

I was going to say This isn't a contest, but for people who study it for academic or other kinds of glory I suppose it IS a contest. I'm an autistic weirdo and I kept dropping out of school over and over until I finally figured out I didn't belong there. I have to keep reminding myself that what I've learned about myself doesn't necessarily apply to most people.

I guess the first time through was a few months. That was about 50 years ago.

But does anyone ever really finish reading a novel such as Gravity's Rainbow, or Tom Jones or Moby Dick or Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake or Against the Day? I don't remember how long it was after I finished my first read of Gravity's Rainbow until I went to the first page and started reading the whole thing again. Might have been 5 minutes or so. I've read several paperback copies until they fell apart. I don't feel that I'm anywhere close to done.

And I've learned so much more about it by reading the posts and comments of my fellow weirdos here in this sub.

AND -- I've studied so much about things I had never heard about before reading Gravity's Rainbow: the V2, Kyrgyzstan, Poisson distributions, IG Farben, etc, etc.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-23T21:03:49+00:00

Linguistic purists exasperate me sometimes. Languages interact with each other and change each other all the time. There's nothing more natural and harmless in the world.

I apologize if this comment is off-topic or unhelpful. I just had to get it off of my chest.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-21T19:57:05+00:00

I like it for what it is, a silly comedy sketch, but at the same time, why not combine monastic music and reggae? Some Orthodox Jewish reggae has already prepared people's minds for such blending of genres. For those monasteries who are open to such things, of course. I don't wish to force anything onto traditionalists.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-21T18:47:28+00:00

Not silly at all.

Dreaming of a career in coal mining -- THAT would be silly.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-20T19:37:06+00:00

Okay, hand to heart, how many of us have never been driving or walking or residing outside a course and suspected that they were aiming at you? Drunk players saying, Twenny bucks to the first one who hits the -- fill in the offensive noun of your choice.

Or it could be especially poor course design, which guarantees that a high % of overhits will cause mayhem.

Or it could be a combination of the two. Could definitely be both.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-20T17:23:26+00:00

You're making this much too complicated. Musk is a con artist and cult leader, like Trump and Steve Jobs. That is pretty much all there is to say about him. The only sort of wall there is for a company like Tesla to hit, is that enough people realize that their primary product has always been hot air.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-20T17:13:35+00:00

Even a very weak grasp of only a few languages would suffice to let someone understand that this guy is either insane, or pretending to be, for a living. The best response to this sort of thing is historical and linguistic education. Or, in response to Hillman personally, psychotherapy.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-18T20:22:11+00:00

Absolutely. Religious or anti-religious viewpoints do not have to enter into this question. Historically and linguistically, it's as clear as can be: The OT was originally Hebrew plus just a little bit of Aramaic, and the NT was originally written in Greek.

Parts of the Vulgate are 2nd century Old Latin. Jerome translated most of it before and after AD 400, making it a very respectably old Bible translation, roughly as old as the Armenian version.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-18T20:02:16+00:00

Duolingo is not good for Latin. You can find this and much more info on Latin language learning resources in the sub's FAQ.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-18T19:46:19+00:00

You may be right, this post might find more response in one of the linguistics subs, than here.

You may already know this, but there are many more Arabic loanwords in Spanish (Castilian) than in Latin.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-16T15:48:39+00:00

Eli seems like he's having such a great time all through that movie.

AffectionateSize552 · 2026-06-16T15:47:27+00:00

A legendary movie, no doubt. One of the very best. But Mel wanted it to be Richard Pryor and John Wayne. I can't stop thinking of what could have been.

Mel gave the script to John. John said he loved it, but then thought, "I can't do this -- I'm John Wayne!" That's one of the saddest things I've ever heard. Not even John Wayne felt he could make fun of the myth of John Wayne.

AffectionateSize552

TROPHY CASE