We had a TV weather man named Guy Sharpe when we first moved to Atlanta. I, and probably half the guys in Atlanta, called him "That sharp guy, Guy Sharpe." By the time we got here, he was a little older than he is here and working at a different station. I read the other day that he passed away at 75 back in 2004. Apparently, he was a pretty heavy smoker and had emphysema, lung cancer, and congestive heart failure. He had a great voice, though, probably from all that smoking.

When I was living at home, my mom had a knife sharpener. It was an electric contraption that had a round whetstone in it. There was a button that started the whetstone spinning, then you ran the knife through one of the two sides. It made all kinds of noise, but it got the knives nice and sharp. It worked on scissors, too, though we never used it on those, because every time we needed scissors, we couldn’t find any.

By the way, you can get a knife sharpener at The Sharper Image, though it’s not electric. $80? Ain’t cheap, either. For that price, it should come with someone to sharpen your knives for you.

As long as I’m on the subject, I was watching The Andy Griffith Show last night or the night before, and there was a guy who came around offering to sharpen knives, scissors, hedge clippers, axe heads, anything that had an edge on it. You don’t see that any more. I remember (vaguely) a man making the rounds of the neighborhood asking if we wanted anything sharpened. This woud have been in the early ’60’s.

Anyway, Tex, my stepfather, used to keep the knives really sharp. He did a lot of cooking, especially on his Weber kettle. He’d cook Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys on that. He’d be out there, even if it was snowing or colder than a snowman’s rear end. It always came out perfect. I never could duplicate his results.

My grandfather had a pencil sharpener that had a spring-loaded arm that would hold the pencil while you sharpened it. I always thought that was kind of ingenious. You don’t see things like that any more…