There Are Pandas, and Then There Are Pandas.
And this isn't either of them! The Pandas we're talking about here, are watches, not bears. And what got me thinking about them (again) was a link posted this morning by @cm.rook who pointed a few of us to the very attractive (and not terribly priced) Yema "Rallygraph" Panda which, in it's most traditional arrangement, looks like the one on the left, but can also be had in the version on the right: The model on the left is a true Panda, while the model on the right is called a reverse Panda. The reason for that distinction is clear--Panda bears, only come in the first arrangement. Now at this point, everyone should be thinking about the most well-know Panda, The Rolex Panda, which is actually a Daytona, and among Rolex Daytonas, the most famous of which is the Paul Newman Daytona, which was famous first, because it was Paul's, and second because it sold at auction for $17.8 million (US Dollars). The story of that auction is well-known so I'll only...
Nov 8, 2019
To celebrate one year, I thought I'd do something I hadnt ever done: lay out every knife I own, from the customs to the knock-offs, to see them all together and gauge how my collection is measuring up. So if you're willing to put in the effort, lay it on out (your knife collection, of course) and see how yours measures up to mine.
Two notes: I actually don't mean to foster a competitive spirit, that language was just to set up the inferential joke. There are dozens of ways to judge a collection of anything (i.e., quality, quantity, rarity, completeness, and so forth) and far more factors that influence the speed at which a collection grows, most of which are beyond our immediate volitional control ($$$, I mean). To try to compare any two, especially two collections of knives, is the embodiment of "apples to oranges". I'm just interested to see what folks have. Secondly, this will take longer than you think. Doesn't matter how big or small your knife collection, it takes longer than you thought it would to get them out and arranged. Just FYI.
Here's my money $hot, quite literally:
As I had to trim it considerably to get it under the 10 MBs required, I also did a few close-ups:
There are too many for me to name, but they're grouped by brand if there are multiple examples of a brand. There is also various random swag I've gotten from different sellers interspersed.
The one I'll explain is the bayonet at the very top: it was the first piece in my collection, years ago before I knew I'd have a collection of any blades. It is a Japanese WWII infantryman's bayonet that my grandfather took as a "souvenir", as he would call it. He rarely spoke of the war and when he did it was always a story about the bad food, making money on black market cigarettes, or being sea sick. Never combat, or almost never. So I have no idea the story behind it. That a bayonet sat for about 60 years in my grandfather's basement in his original Army footlocker until I found it one day and took it as a decorative piece (with his permission). When my grandfather died a few years ago I volunteered to go through his files (soooo many files, he was an accountant and pack-rat) and found he saved every official piece of paper from the war period: orders, artillery school notes, train ticket stubs, the Xmas dinner menu from the 1943 Fort Sill Officers Club Xmas dinner, divisonal chain of command flow charts, targeting orders from combat, a reprimand for being overweight in 1942. Everything. So based on what I found I'd bet this bayonet came from a solider who was killed in a banzai charge during the final battle for the island of Attu in the Aleutians. They came at dawn and went straight for the artillery park. Look it up. My 25 year old Lt Grandpa was there, Battery C, Commanding.