A carnival of technology

I find it useful to be able to cut things in the normal course of a day. I’ve been carrying around some variety of a Victorinox Swiss Army knife nearly every day since sometime in high school. I guess I wasn’t really supposed to have a knife at school, but I knew the principal fairly well, so I didn’t really care. Knives get dull, of course, but I haven’t had to actually sharpen one in years. I end up losing them first.

The first knife I lost in recent memory was taken by a TSA employee since I had forgotten to ditch it before a flight. My flying habits are to take MARTA to the airport and to stuff everything into carry-on luggage, so I didn’t have much of an option. I think I lost another knife in between that one and my most recent one, but I can’t remember how. Most recently I lost a knife last week, a dull knife that I had been thinking about sharpening, but I think I dropped it somewhere on Mansell while trying to fix a problem with a bungee cord holding bags to my bike. Whoops.

So it’s time for a new knife, and I’ve been thinking about which one to buy. My past string of knives have been the Tinker model. It has two blades, a can opener, a bottle opener, that thing on that back that closes on your hand when you try to use it, and a Phillips screwdriver. The punch thing on the back is pretty useless (see hands, closing on), and I’ve had very few times where I needed the screwdriver and could actually fit it into whatever I needed to turn. I find everything else on the knife useful. I don’t really want any of the heavier tool options, like the saw, and I don’t think I’ll find a knife that doesn’t come with the punch thing, but there a few options for the screwdriver’s spot. The standard option is a corkscrew, and this got me thinking: would I find a lot of use for a corkscrew?

My parents are wine drinkers, and they’ve tried at various points to guide me down that path. It never really took, though, and I ended expressing my snobbery through beer, instead. I find beer easier to understand and less intimidating. The different varieties of beer are diverse enough that it’s very easy to understand to basic characteristics of each, and, though some varieties that take better to cellaring are often sold as part of a particular year’s “vintage,” the product from year to year isn’t going to vary as much as (I guess) one would expect from wine. Or if it does, the time that the beer was made at least isn’t advertised to the same extent. Wine is the just a single fruit, fermented, so I would expect more differences from year to year than with beer, the product of many ingredients and a consistent recipe. To me, wine is a bit overwhelming.

I’ve bought wine a handful of times for cooking, and I always feel lost when doing so. However, I recently had something of an epiphany: there’s a lot of stuff on the wine shelves in grocery and liquor stores, and a lot of people seem to like it, so maybe I should give it a shot. I didn’t figure out what beers I like by just looking at them, so maybe I should do something similar to my perpetual mission of malted discovery: try a bunch of stuff and see what I enjoy. So far I’ve had a couple of bottles from South Africa. I didn’t know where to start, but the depiction on the bottle of a giraffe as a “Tall Horse” seemed like a good compromise between the opaque (to me) and plain descriptions of some kind of grape and the ridiculous names that seem to have become popular in recent years. It grabbed my eye without offending me. I had a Shiraz, which (I looked it up) is some kind of grape that makes red wine, and I kind of liked that. I also had a Chardonnay, which was ok but not something I thought was all that great. I’m just a beginner in this and have no clue what I’m doing, but this was an eye-opening experience. I can enjoy wine. A whole new world of drinking is opened to me.

To get back to the knife, wine bottles have corks, and corks need a corkscrew. I have two: one of those big things with the levers that I bought at Target a while back because I thought I might need a corkscrew at some point, and more compact one that I got from the parents that unfolds into a corkscrew sticking out of a handle. I can’t seem to use the big one correctly—I can’t seem to screw it in far enough without going entirely through the cork to pull it all the way out, and once I’m partway out the whole assembly is stuck to the bottle so that I can’t just pull the entire thing out the rest of the way,—so the smaller corkscrew is the winner in my book. The one on the knife would be used in the same style as the small corkscrew, so I could probably get some use out of that. And who knows, maybe I’ll find myself lost in the woods one day and need to open a bottle of wine.