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Today's "shitty knife" is one I bought a long time ago but never posted about it because I wasn't entirely sure whether I should call it a shitty knife or not. It's one of those extremely rare cases where it's actually quite well made, with only very minor production flaws, and the whole shittiness is in the design. It's also a cross-cultural clusterfuck. (Let's not even think about concepts like "cultural appropriation"; it will only give you headaches.)

So, uh, what do we have here? It's a knife that's made in Ukraine (it took a few months to reach me, but I'm not going to blame the seller for that, at least; blame the inconvenient war) and was sold as a "small Yakut knife", though that's clearly not quite what it is. I'd describe it as "crossover knife with Yakutian-type blade design but puukko proportions, made by someone who culturally understands neither puukkot nor Yakut knives" - and if that sounds like a phenomenally bad idea... that's because it is.

( Full review and pictures behind the cut. )

When do you need this knife-shaped object? Ah, yes. Imagine you're stuck somewhere in northern Siberia, and the mango you brought for lunch is (predictably) frozen solid, but you need to peel it anyway. (Who doesn't know this unfortunate situation...) You'll be very grateful for this amazing tool!

tl;dr: This is amazing craft, but, at the same time, so badly designed it's really fucking useless.

...or, sexist subtitle, "Why Men* Never Cut Bread Properly", because that's what it seems to amount to in real life. ;) Ahem. So, a few nights ago, I met up with some other ladies for drinks. Somehow, this turned into one of us complaining bitterly about how her husband keeps producing Catastrophic!Bread!Spirals when cutting bread. Two others also agreed that, yes, their respective men also produce spirals rather than proper bread slices and how annoying that is. Well. I'm into technology and into knives, so, of course, I immediately took out pen and paper and produced some shitty construction drawings to show why the issue really comes down to hand size...

*I hope it's obvious this is not really a gender issue. Just that, statistically, any technical problem that exclusively hits people with very large hands is going to affect significantly more men than women.



In (1), you can see what cutting bread with an entirely straight bread knife should look like: In order to produce a clean cut, the knife is held completely horizontally, with all the teeth arriving down on the cutting board at the same time. At this point, if your hand is small enough and nothing else went catastrophically wrong, you should have produced a nice, regular slice of bread. (Because I was drunk while drawing, I'll provide translations. Tisch: table. Schneidbrett: cutting board. Brot: bread. Messer: knife. Kleine Hand: small hand. Also, no, this is not supposed to be an illustration of how to hold a bread knife... LOL)

But, oh noes, if the user's hand is too large, suddenly there's a problem! In (2), you can see that the fact that the fingers can't sink into the table surface causes the knife to be held at an angle! Under those circumstances, of course, there's an area of bread (marked orange) that's not going to be cut! And that's where the problem starts: the two main approaches to solve this are to either rip the underside of the bread (which results in really ugly slices for obvious reasons) or to rotate the bread. If you rotate the bread and your second cut does not perfectly align with the first (which it never does, not just because aligning two cuts perfectly always requires unusual levels of precision, but mainly because, hey, bread deforms when you suddenly exert pressure from a different direction, and while it's theoretically possible to correct for that, not everyone wants to fuck around with tensors during an otherwise uncomplicated kitchen task)? Catastrophic!Bread!Spirals are the logical result. Ladies, your men are neither malicious nor stupid, it's just that handing a completely straight bread knife without any kind of offset to a person with large hands is a shitty idea! (The same, of course, applies to any blade that's designed to arrive on the board surface completely horizontally. Like, also, absolutely anything with a sheepfoot blade...)

A possible solution is shown in (3): there are some bread knives with a bit of an offset that lowers the blade in relation to the handle, which means there's extra space for thicker fingers under the handle. (If you now immediately think "but this costs stability!, congratulations, you've been following my knife nerdery closely! Displacing the blade does cost stability. A knife like this will not withstand any hard impact. However, a bread knife is intended for cutting bread. If you are experiencing any kind of potentially blade-shattering impact on bread, there's most likely a bread malfunction... That is, unless you're the world's worst baker, or you intend to go into a knife fight with a bread knife - which I'd strongly advise against, even under the best of circumstances - this should never become an issue.) This extra space means that a person with large hands is now also able to hold the knife horizontally while cutting. YAY!

Other possible solutions to the problem, of course, include...
- using a thicker cutting board (which would also provide extra finger space, albeit in an impractical way... Generally, there's the recommendation your cutting board should be exactly as thick as your fingers* - not just for being able to place cuts in completely horizontal position at all, but also to provide a measure of when you've arrived on the board, with your fingers as the spacer, so you'll stop exerting pressure then, which protects your knives so you have to sharpen them less often - but at some point this becomes impractical as it results in very unwieldy cutting boards...)
- cutting at the edge of the table (which is going to be uncomfortable because you'll have to stand at an awkward angle or strain your shoulder, but, sure, this also provides extra finger space)
- cutting with reeeeaaally long arm motions (which is unergonomic as fuck, and you lose most of the advantage of that lovely serrated edge - as in, unless your knife is excellent, you're likely to shred the bread - so it only "works" in a very theoretical way but comes with other issues in practice)

*Yes, "a finger thick" as a measuring unit is not merely a historical relic; there are use cases when using your finger as a measuring unit actually fulfills an important practical purpose! Generally, when talking about tools, ergonomy, and so on, so much depends on an individual's hand that units like "a palm width" also have to be taken literally, and followed precisely, not as a guesstimate.

...but, really, it comes down to technology. I understand how painful it can be to watch Catastrophic!Bread!Spirals, but really, there's no need for a relationship conflict over this issue! (I simply got my boyfriend a bread knife he can actually use. It's now one of his favorite knives because, hey, if you like bread, the difference between being able to cut bread and not being able to cut bread really matters. Also, I guess it was a relief to learn that, nope, he's not that clumsy, he just had the wrong tool for the task.)

I'm also tagging this entry with Germany, because - obviously - this conversation scored very high on the VFGI (Very Fucking German Indeed) scale: People getting extremely emotional over bread - check. People getting extremely emotional over knives - check. Overly technical approach to, well, absolutely everything - check. Alcohol, alcohol, and more alcohol involved - check. The only reason this doesn't get a perfect score is that one of us arrived at the bar three minutes late.

Boyfriend and I are not really "celebrating" New Year's Eve with fireworks or anything, but we were making Raclette. That's a Swiss tradition and not a German one, technically speaking, but it's common enough in Germany that all the supermarkets have the special cheese as a seasonal product. (Also, it's popular as a party food because you can vary the ingredients so you can accomodate different dietary requirements at least to some extent.) Because I think some of you guys here are interested in food culture, I decided to document it this year with some pictures. :) So, uh, what is Raclette? Okay, so, first and foremost, Raclette is a type of cheese. The word, however, does not only refer to that cheese but also to... Okay, kind of difficult to explain, but I guess we'll need to look at this specific table grill thingy...



Obviously, on top of it, you grill stuff. This part is easy. We are simply talking about a thin metal sheet with a heating spiral below it. It gets hot when you switch the electricity on. You throw food on it.

The interesting part, however, which makes it a Raclette grill rather than a "normal" table grill is that you put these small triangular pans below the heating spiral, so anything in those pans is grilled from above. Look at this, I pulled one of the pans out:



Basically, you put the stuff you want to eat in there, put cheese on it (Raclette cheese, obviously - hence the name of the whole dish. Yes, other cheese will work fine, it will just taste" wrong", that is, like a perfectly normal gratin. LOL) and push it under that lovely heating spiral.

The other ingredients are... extremely flexible. Basically, you can put in there whatever you want. It usually involves various vegetables. This is what we had today:



Those are...
- Red bell pepper. (Only I ate that.)
- Potatoes. (This is Germany, after all. Potatoes need to be added to absolutely every dish. It's a law. Or something.)
- Zucchini. (Because, if you bother to bring out that table grill, not having grilled zucchini is a fucking crime. Seriously. It's just soooo good.)
- Eggplant. (Ditto, though grilled eggplant only really works if you pre-treat the stuff with salt and lemon juice. Also, it always takes more oil than you think.)
- Champignons. (Yes, eating mushrooms while being North German is a cultural crime, but whatever. Sue me. Also, no worries, they are from a supermarket and should be safe to eat.)
- Red onions. (Boyfriend prefers those to the white and yellow ones; I'm entirely indifferent. That is, I like onions just fine, I just don't notice that much of a difference.)
- Beef. (We even put the raw meat on a separate plate and not on the board with the vegetables. Damaged by civilization...)
- Raclette cheese. (Because.)

Technically, the dish also involves bread, and we had bread, but I don't eat much cereal-based food (unless it's cake), so, Boyfriend ate most of that. (Cultural differences.)

Oh, and to be complete, those were the (somewhat nonclassical) spices we used:



Those are:
- Pommessalz. (As required by law! XD Uhh. No. I mean, we're talking about a convenience mix of mostly salt and paprika that's typically put on fries but will work in any food with potatoes... Which is almost every German food... Which is why you'll find this type of mix in almost every German kitchen. It's the quintessential spice that screams "lower-class German" - of course, people will never admit in polite company that they use the stuff. You know the deal. It's the kind of class disqualifier like... uh... I guess the American equivalent of being "very classy" would be the bottle of ketchup to complete that nice, upscale meal?!? Of course, we totally didn't eat that, we only put it on the table for, uhhh, decorative purposes! Also, of course, it tastes really fucking awesome.)
- Black (fermented) garlic. (Totally nonclassical in this context, and this is the first time we had the stuff. It tastes really good, but adding it to a Raclette was maybe not the best idea because it seems to lose some flavor when heated. Oh well, live and learn.)
- Granulated pepper. (This is classical.)
- Hibiscus salt. (That is, a mix of salt and powdered hibiscus flower. Again, something we had for the first time. That is, I had it in my Advent calendar. It turned out to be really tasty, though! Boyfriend and I both really loved the stuff! It's very intense and kind of fruity, which worked really well with the meat.)
- Plum-Chili-Sauce. (Okay, this one is weird. Theoretically speaking, plum-based sauces for meat dishes are classical - in the sense of "archaic", really - in many parts of Germany. Chili is... NOT. XD So, this is a modern variation on something very, very traditional. I found it because a lady in the supermarket was filling her basket with, like, seven or eight jars (!) of the stuff and told me it's "the best thing ever for Raclette". I'm glad to confirm it's really very, very good. I suspect it's even going to work in a traditional roast dish. Will definitely buy again.)
- "Raclette spice mix". (Again, super weird, because afaik there is no classical "Raclette spice mix", so it absolutely has to be a modern invention. I bought that mainly because I saw it in the supermarket and went "WTF???", and obviously, I tend to buy anything that looks weird enough. The ingredients say it's composed specifically for cheese-based dishes and it consists mainly of pepper, nutmeg, onion powder, garlic powder, smoked paprika, parsley, salt and sugar. Somewhat surprisingly, turns out this really works well with grilled vegetables and cheese, so, its existence can be justified.)

At midnight, we'll have some sparkly wine. Until then, we are having a nice, relaxed evening. :)

Today's shitty knife is an authentic example of North German knife culture (which deserves the name 'culture' about as much as bacteria in a fucking yogurt). Of course, the typical North German 'working knife' is rather flexible in shape and material. Being able to make your own knives is considered a source of pride and joy. (Historically, it also used to be way to save money, because hey, large regions of Northern Germany are traditionally dirt poor. These days, it's mostly hobby, tradition, and a nice way to pass the time.)

( People like to improvise. )

According to archaeology, everything has "religious reasons" anyway - but, this time, I'm going to review a shitty knife that really has a folk magic background. That's... not entirely uncommon in Northern Europe, and in many cultures you will find folk beliefs around knives, as well as dual-use knives with worldly purposes as well as an inbuilt anti-evil-spirit function. They're actually kind of hard to avoid unless you stick to the factory-made stuff. (Most knifemakers take pride in making knives that keep their customers safe, and in many European cultures this can include spiritual protection. I'm on the team of: that's nice, I appreciate the thought, as long as it doesn't interfere with the worldly stuff I want the knife for.)

This, uh, fascinating pocketknife is from Bavaria (Southern Germany), made by a lady with a Bavarian name, using Bavarian magic symbolism, and sold with a product description that explicitly listed "protection from evil" - so, Bavarian magic knife, yay! (I'm not a Bavarian, but I know enough about that culture to recognize some of their folk magic elements. Also: they're not what makes it a shitty knife.)

A note about cultural sensitivity: I will be mocking this knife-shaped object quite mercilessly, but not because it works on local Bavarian evil spirits. I'm mocking it because it works on nothing but local Bavarian evil spirits (and maybe some very soft cheese).

( Let's take a look! )

It's just shitty work. The design? Shitty. The execution of said design? Shitty. The useability? Shitty. (And downright dangerous.) This definitely qualifies as a shitty knife all around (except maybe for the magic). I love it.

A little rant, inspired by 'gender-neutral' fashion that's a lot less 'neutral' than the designers and their target group seem to think, and the misogyny in that.

( What is neutral supposed to mean here? )

It's after midnight, so, it's technically Easter Sunday now where I live... Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates, and a wonderful time to absolutely everyone! I actually don't celebrate, but I participate in the fun local traditions anyway - and clearly, the best of those is getting to paint eggs! (I'm just treating it as a generic celebration of spring.) Any excuse for some creative activity! :D



This year's easter egg theme was actually a bit of an emergency solution - I usually prefer having a variety of colors, but the only eggs available in all the local supermarkets were brown (and, let's face it, with the food situation being what it is, we were lucky there were eggs), which means I was somewhat limited. (Green and blue dyes only look good on white eggs, and yellow on brown? Forget it!) I mixed red and orange food colorant to get the background color, because I figured pure red would be too dark for proper contrast with the drawings, and pure orange wouldn't really show up on brown eggs. I drew the chess pieces with a brand new food pen (you know, the kind you also use for drawing on fondant and the like) that will be getting a 1-star review from me because it ran out of ink and I wasn't able to fill the dark areas properly, which if you ask me is wholly unreasonable after only six tiny drawings. Anyway, as improvised as they are, I'm happy I have chess easter eggs now. Silhouette style always works for me! And they were so much fun to paint! Maybe I'll eat them while playing online chess? Then again, I wanted to do some old-fashioned baking tomorrow, so, we'll see. :)

Part 1, Shadow theater, the process
Part 2, Papercuts and storytelling
Part 3, Shadow art, paper art

The little series continues - in part 3, I've mentioned seeing an animation of running animals in a cave with very old paintings, and I've decided to discuss this topic in a bit more detail... From the artistic perspective. (Art critique of paleolithic cave paintings is not really a thing, I'm afraid - not least because an archaeologist who goes "this cave is boring; I've seen better aurochs drawings" will be fired.) The bad news: I still have no idea which cave it was that I saw as a kid. I don't even remember the type of animal! (I was a little kid; I wouldn't have been able to identify prehistoric fauna.) The good news: a bit of research showed that cave art animation was, indeed, a thing in Very!Ancient!France and Very!Ancient!Spain. (So, I'm not completely misremembering things; good to know.) And it's suuuuper impressive: just imagine being in a cave, in the dark, and suddenly you're surrounded by running animals! (There is, of course, no proof whatsoever there were other aspects beyond the visual, but as a performer, I'd also add some percussion soundtrack as hoofbeat.)

There are actually several examples of this described in literature.

Check out, for example, this very nice paper, Animation in Palaeolithic art: a pre-echo of cinema by Marc Azéma and Florent Rivère. The authors argue that cave art was supposed to convey narrative as well as movement, and they back this up with examples from the Chauvet Cave, the cave system of Lascaux, the Baume Latrone, and several others. (The genre must have been popular!) Most interesting to me is that the authors also discuss the techniques used by those prehistoric artists: interestingly, they had both superimposition and juxtaposition of successive images in their repertoire, and they were able to make quite advanced stop-motion animation, which means they must have known and used the principle of retinal persistence. Consider me impressed... (The authors also discuss another animation technique: a very old thaumatrope. There's also a short (2-minute) video by Marc Azéma, showing pretty neat examples:


...you get the idea.

If you want to see actual shadow art... There seem to be several examples of that as well. On Youtube, I found this very nice 1-minute video of a bison shadow of a decorated rock, in El Castillo cave (Spain):


Whoever made that bison shadow was a really great artist. And that's a shit ton of work that went into the piece...

Have I mentioned that shadow art is really fucking old? Here's an interesting article about the phenomenon, including the reconstruction of the light sources that would have been available to the artists, and how that influences the way the art looks.

So, since I talked about shadow theater yesterday, I thought I'd talk a bit about the underlying traditional craft, Scherenschnitt (papercut), today - especially about the performance aspects of it.

I think you've all seen silhouette art before. Pretty much everyone agrees that papercut art was originally invented by the Chinese (who also came up with paper in the first place), but you know how it is with good ideas: they spread. In northern Europe, this traditional craft focuses mainly on portraiture, fairy tales and folk tales - in fact, at least from the 18th to the 20th century, it was considered the most appropriate form of illustration for traditional tales in Germany. I'm not just interested in Scherenschnitt (the German word for papercut art in this style) as illustration, though - in fact, I consider it a cultural loss to reduce it to that. Making a Scherenschnitt is, and always has been, a performance. The process is usually much more interesting than the results.

The first time I encountered Scherenschnitt as a live performance was as a young child (I was 5 or 6, maybe) at a market stall. Someone was sitting there and doing Scherenschnitt portraits of people, and I guess my parents had a bit of spare money at the time, because they paid the artist to do a portrait of me. (It's still in a picture frame on their wall. This should tell you two things: this is a VeryTraditionalHousehold (TM), and proud parents are proud parents everywhere.) Unfortunately, I don't remember the artist at all, not even if that was a man or a woman (and I'd have to take the picture out of its frame to look at the signature, which is typically on the back because you don't write or draw on Scherenschnitt art), but I remember being fascinated by the process of this person picking up black paper and scissors and... a face - my face - just appearing. I guess I don't need to explain it's extremely difficult to do a recognizable papercut portrait of someone without a preliminary drawing? Anyway, that was magical. Interestingly, in the result, it's visible how fascinated I was: some of you (the ones on access, anyway) have seen photos of the very peculiar 'focused' facial expression Kiddo!Eller had while playing chess. The Scherenschnitt somehow managed to capture exactly that. Baby!Eller was watching carefully.

At that time, of course, I didn't make papercut art. I enjoyed papercraft all right, but... Well. I wasn't the kind of artistic prodigy who would have been able to produce anything like that as a child! First, I had to figure out that I really need to use scissors and knives with my right hand despite being left-handed when it comes to everything else, like writing or drawing. (Yes, I know special scissors for lefties exist. No, my parents bought me those - they don't believe all the superstition about lefties and didn't try to re-train me when they noticed I picked up pens with my left - but leftie scissors don't help. I'm simply not capable of cutting properly with my left hand. It's interesting that cutting and drawing seem to require completely different brain activity despite both resulting in a picture, but there you go.) Also, no one in my family practices the art. (And the only shadow play I was exposed to was Mom shaping rabbits and such with her hands - you know. I got to see 'normal' puppet theater from my grandfather and father but was never really into that...) My first papercut was an ATC I made in 2009:



This is very obviously beginner work. The not-very-clean edges are not only my fault; the unsuitable material (a plain index card!) contributed, but, well. I also did not have that much control yet. Still, I'm quite happy how it turned out - as a first attempt, it's fine. Could have been much worse.

In the following years, I practiced a bit, but I was only able to add more detail on that small format when I actually used 'the good stuff', that is, professional-level papercut paper. This exists for a reason: it's thin enough for fast and easy cutting, but doesn't tear. Much. (I have, of coursed, managed even that... My superpower: destroying paper.) The following are two very classical fantasy-themed ATCs I made in 2015, using both scissors and knives. (In case you were wondering: I don't use any expensive tools for this. My favorite scissors came from the Euro Shop, and I really love break-off cutter knives. The only not-super-cheap tool I own is a Japanese swivel scalpel I wouldn't want to miss.)





These are actually okay-ish: I notice all the ways in which I could have done that better, and I shudder, but I guess all artists do that. LOL (I have somewhat better technique these days, but I haven't made any Scherenschnitt ATCs lately. Should probably do that again at some point...) Anyway... These pictures, unfortunately, were made at home, so no one got to watch the process, which is a total waste if you ask me. I think I have mentioned how the making of this stuff is soooo much more interesting than just pictures? Also: traditionally, it's inextricably linked with storytelling.

A famous example of papercut performance art are the papercuts by Hans Christian Andersen who is (unjustly) mainly known as a writer these days, but who was a storyteller really - his performances involved telling stories while cutting paper pictures. (He started his career at a theater, actually was into singing and acting before he began to write, so it's safe to assume he was extremely good at entertaining an audience!) Of course, having really good stories helped. (I mean, how many films are there of the Little Mermaid alone? I believe they recently made a new one though I haven't watched it yet.) Only the written versions lasted until today, but... From a storyteller standpoint it's really obvious his stories were designed to be told - I'll spare you the structural analysis of Andersen's fairy tales and a discussion of storytelling techniques vs. short-story writing techniques, and the (deliberate) use of colloquial vs. 'literary' language, but Andersen's stuff firmly falls into the first category. Just believe me, I would pay a shit ton of money for an opportunity to watch one of Andersen's performances... (Wrong century, alas.)

Later, as soon as film began to be a thing, silhouette animation also became a thing, especially in Germany - I simply have to mention Lotte Reiniger here, who pioneered that art form (and created the first feature-length animated film, before Walt Disney did, but got a lot less public credit due to being, well, female), but since this is getting long-ish again, I guess I'll save an in-depth discussion for another post. I will note, though, that her famous 1922 version of Cinderella (and, nope, absolutely not a coincidence she did fairy tales, too - people come with cultural backgrounds!) not only involves animated silhouette figures, but also animated silhouette hands cutting silhouette figures. She simulated the effect of hands appearing on a shadow theater screen nicely (and used it for effect!), which means she was absolutely aware of (and likely also personally experienced with) the cutting process itself as a performance technique in storytelling.

So. I'm looking for a zither. A proper zither, that is. The search is proving quite frustrating.

The thing is: most zithers on the market are concert zithers. The things with an actual fret-board. Unfortunately, while there is - obviously - nothing intrinsically wrong with that kind of instrument, I can't play it. ;___; I mean, at some point I could learn, but, uh, what I really want is a traditional chord zither based on the Scheitholt concept. I can play chord zither, it's idiot-safe. (It's designed to be idiot-safe, seeing how it's a folk instrument for people without any kind of musical education! You can learn it in half an hour, and playing styles are super flexible. It's awesome!)

Cultural comment: While Wikipedia lists 'chord zither' and 'Scheitholt' as different instruments (with one as the ancestor of the other), in Platt-speaking areas, a chord zither is also still commonly referred to as Scheitholt.

Language comment: Yes, my culture may be the only one that ever produced a musical instrument literally called log of firewood. I'm not sure whether that refers to the shape, the way of making one (that is: draw some log out ouf your pile of firewood, put some strings on it, paint a nice picture - done!), or the general sound quality (BURN IT! JUST BURN IT!)... But... Anyway... Draw your own conclusions about whether you're likely to see or hear this thing in a 'polite', high-class concert setting. LOL

Unfortunately, because the chord zither is not considered a proper musical instrument (where I'm from, it's only played by women, and only in a home/family setting, never in public!), it's kind of difficult to find one. I mean, getting an old chord zither on eBay is easy - but the really old instruments are purely decorative. (The real folk zithers are usually made from cheap wood that warps and/or cracks after some time, so they'll sound horrible. Firewood, literally! People just keep them for the traditional zither art!) And while there are newer models, they all lack the traditional paintings (how horrible!!! I'd never buy one that's not painted!) or they have a modern tuning that's unsuitable for playing traditional music.

I'll keep searching!