*Keep your hand on your wallet — and if you get apparently rich, cold storage for those alleged assets. https://www.decentralised.co/the-reading-list/

*I’m a big fan of the MoMA, but I’m not crazy about those screwdriver bits embedded in a knife handle. *On the other hand, this proves that Opinel is chic enough to be an artist’s knife.

*And who better to review these French devices than the prolific Youtube personality “Crazy Russian Hacker” aka “Taras Kul,” who is a resident of the USA from the breakaway Russian-ethnic region of Ukraine. *It’s endearing that Taras is not a design fetishist; he’s a Walmart-style consumer who is ready to shred those boxes to pieces. […]

*The blacksmith pitting on the blade is especially attractive. *One would like to have an authentic shade-tree blacksmith’s burachin two hundred years old, but the truth is that folding-knives rarely last that long outside of a collector’s cabinet or a museum vitrine. The hinges go, the handles go, they rust.

*Here’s a bunch of Sardinian local knives laid out in a booth in a tourist market. Did I buy one? Yeah, I did. Because the locals are so pleased about them, and so happy for you to have one. Or a dozen. A dozen would be better. *Also, the Piedmontese have a peculiar historical relationship […]

*I could go buy a burachin — I know where to get one — but wouldn’t I then need a “frabusan” and a “puragnin” for my sudden, growing “personal collection”? Also, an Opinel (which is clearly a French cousin of the “Occitano”) is modestly priced, is in most every hardware store, will do most everything […]

*That’s a handsome chart, but really, that’s scarcely the beginning of it. The island of Sardinia alone has a wide variety of knife styles from villages just a few kilometers apart. *Also, that slender Piedmontese model isn’t even the stereotypical Piedmontese “local product” “prodotti tipici” knife, which would be the time-honored “burachin,” a nice, sturdy […]

*It’s hard not to like European regional heritage craft propaganda. Especially when it’s handsomely composed and shot, like this. *It seems that every Alpine valley, no matter how small, had a blacksmith with some local scheme for how to do even the simplest matters in ironwork. It’s like a tool version of odd regional dialects. […]

*These modestly-priced but remarkably efficient folding knives are from Savoie, on the French side of the local Alps. They’ve been a particular success in the last few decades, with a lot of new different models and sizes. *The tiniest Opinel blades are ignored airport security guards, so I generally have one and they’ve been of […]