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Brianna Rennix is the leftenant editor of Current Affairs, and also its most foremost expert on the topics of immigration, bureaucracies, gender, and… children? Odd, but true! Today, however, they join us to discuss a different subject entirely: knives.
1. So, you’re into knives now. What’s that all about?
I mean, I’ve been “into” knives for a long time, in the sense that I think about murder on a pretty much constant basis, but more recently I’ve become deeply obsessed with the bladesmithing competition show FORGED IN FIRE, where some of the nation’s strangest men compete to turn, like, old car parts into seaxes, so that a panel of judges can then bash the seaxes violently against a giant rock to see if they break.
2. Is it fair to say there is a crisis of knife-awareness in the country today?
I think there is a crisis of awareness of knife-related vocabulary, in that before I started watching this show, I would have thought that sentences like “I need to hog off before I quench my edge” and “I’m struggling to peen this tang” were sexual, but it turns out this is just normal shit you say when making knives.
3. If Joe Biden had a knife policy, what might it look like?
I am not sure, but Joe Biden becoming president is definitely like when a weird blunt knife with a major warp becomes the default competition winner because the other knives all had freak accidents or missed parameters by 1/8 of an inch.
4. Hypothetically, could a knife used to prepare vegetables and whatnot for dinner also be used for crimes, or would a special knife be required, purely hypothetically of course?
Only FORGED IN FIRE edged weapons specialist Doug Marcaida is qualified to tell us whether any given knife will KILL, so if I were hypothetically planning to use a kitchen knife to murder someone I would probably find some excuse to invite Doug Marcaida over for the dinner also and get his opinion then.
5. What is one knife mistake you should never, ever make?
DON’T QUENCH YOUR BLADE WHEN IT’S TOO HOT. Unrelatedly I am furious that in these United States there has been no Forged in Fire product placement in where the judges bellow “TIME TO QUENCH” and then chug a bunch of Gatorade, I strongly feel that this is what the Founding Fathers would have wanted.
