HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#138 :: Balisong

This weapon drips with menace, tribal resonance, ghetto cool. It's a big, lethally thin blade with no obvious place in the world other than tucked into a boot, glinting and whirling in the night air beneath mercury-vapor playground lights or jammed between someone's ribs. Brass handles drilled for grip, steel blade serrated at the spine, it's about 10 inches long when open. It came into my hands in a bazaar in Manila, where I found it in a vendor's stall in a tin cup with a dozen more, surrounded by water buffalo skulls, corroded brass deck guns, capis-shell lamps and other (to me) exotica. I haven't mastered that wicked finger ballet that always precedes a balisong-wielding punk's comeuppance in Steven Seagal movies - I can basically get it open and close it without slicing my knuckles (much). You can learn that - and plenty more - at the nearly encyclopedic www.balisong.net.