WHAT IF ELVIS HAD NEVER BEEN BORN? But everyone — well, almost everyone – has missed Elvis’s greatest achievement.

Well, one of them: I remember some years ago having drinks with then-Tennessee Attorney General Bill Leech. He said that in the early ’50s he was working in Memphis and used to take his girlfriends to hear some guy sing; he didn’t like the singer that much, but he seemed to get the women pretty heated up. It was pre-fame Elvis.

DAVE HARDY: “At least in Dodge City, you could shoot back.”

MORE ON KNIVES: Okay, I was at the mall buying my mom’s birthday present and I looked at the Ken Onion chef’s knife at Williams-Sonoma. It looked so cool that I almost bought it on the spot, but fortunately I am a man of no small self-control. They had a full set of Ken Onion kitchen knives, too, for (slightly) less than a thousand bucks. Maybe a bit pricey for an impecunious law professor such as myself. . . .

I said I’d get to more mail, so here goes — though in truth it’s like bailing an ocean with a teacup. But here are some highlights. Reader John Morgan offers an economical solution:

For those with less financial resources or for the truly frugal I recommend finding a knife-sharpening store. In the two cities I have recently lived in (Kansas City and Chicago) there are stores (Ambrosi Brothers and Northwest Cutlery, respectively) that supply sharp knives to restaurants. Essentially they go once a week to the restaurants and replace the knives in use at the restaurants with newly sharpened knives. Over time, the knives are sharpened down to a much smaller size and are no longer usable by the restaurants. These stores then put the knives in a bin and sell them for a dollar or two. Aesthetically, they are not the beautiful knives of our dreams, but practically, they are very good and very sharp knives. These stores also will sharpen your knives to an impressive, almost scary, sharpness for a few bucks per knife.

Another reader echoes what a lot of people have written: “Forschner is the best. Go to any reputable butcher shop or meat cutting operation….for example, Butler and Bailey in Knoxville. Ask what knife they use and they’ll show you a Forschner.” That’s fairly economical, too, especially compared to the Ken Onion.

Reader Christian Gils emails:

I can wholly recommend a Dexter-Russell 8″ Chinese chef knife. It’s a mix of carbon and stainless steel, not entirely stainless, so you should wipe it dry after cleaning it, but it can hold a great edge. It’s cheap, too, and great for just about anything except paring and maybe filleting. A Chinese chef knife takes a bit of getting used to but I find myself leaving my other knives alone and just using this one most often.

If you’ve got a Chinatown near you you can pick them up quite cheaply, otherwise Amazon carries it via a vendor.

Reader John Richardson emails:

Here is a knife brand that won’t be on the radar screen for most of the gourmets – Cold Steel.

When I went back to grad school in the mid-90s, I worked as the bookkeeper part-time for a knife wholesaler. As such, I got to play with a lot of knives of all sorts from custom Bowies to collector pocketknives to switchblades (pardon me, automatics). I picked up one of the 7-inch Cold Steel K-7 kitchen knives. It does the job right and it doesn’t slip when your hand is wet. It does a very good job of
thin slicing.

The other thing I might suggest is to get in the car and go down to Sevierville and visit Smoky Mtn Knife Works. They have a lot of kitchen knives. It would give you a chance to try out a lot of different knives and see what fits your needs.

I didn’t realize Cold Steel made kitchen knives. I used to own one of their Tanto utility knives and it was good. And the Smoky Mountain Knife Works suggestion is a good one, except for the ungodly Sevierville traffic. Maybe post-Labor Day. . . .

Reader Chad Wayne emails: “Anolon has ventured into knives. They’re less expensive than the
designer brands and just as good. I bought the 5″ and 7″ Santoku knives from Amazon and it is all we use now. No other knives we own can compare.”

Reader Jim Evangeliou emails: “Get a magnetic knife bar. Do you know how to clean out a knife block? Neither do I.” Several readers noted that knife blocks get dirty with age.

And several readers asked what I know about ceramic knives. Not much. Anybody out there got advice?

UPDATE: Several readers recommend the Kapoosh universal knife block. It’s washable, and takes anything.

AN AMATEUR JOURNALIST offers the pros some help.

UPDATE: Perhaps professional journalists should look in the mirror.

“I FEEL VERY GOOD ABOUT WHERE I AM.”

THE SUPREME COURT SEEMS TO BE VERY MUCH IN STEP WITH PUBLIC OPINION on questions of race.

TOM SMITH DEMONSTRATES WHY HE’S A LAW PROFESSOR, instead of a headline writer for the NYT or WaPo.

MORE ON POLITICAL CAMPAIGN DONATIONS FROM ACADEMICS, at John Wixted’s place. “Nowadays, almost no one seriously disputes the idea that academia and the media both lean far to the left. Even so, the evidence concerning how far left they lean never ceases to surprise me.”

HMM:

After being virtually tied with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for several months, Republican contender Rudy Giuliani now leads Clinton up 47% to 40% in the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

In the match-up of the frontrunners, this result marks a significant shift. For the last three months the two frontrunners have never been further apart than three percentage points. Last month, Giuliani and Clinton were separated by just a single point.

These polls don’t mean much at this point, but this can’t make the Clinton camp happy. My guess is that she’s dropped because of attacks from Barack Obama and John Edwards. But if those rather mild attacks make this much of a difference, how will she do in a real campaign?

BOOING BUSH in the MSNBC newsroom.

UNIDIRECTIONAL multiculturalism.

COOL IF TRUE: “A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light – an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.”

I’d await confirmation, though. And does quantum tunneling really violate special relativity? It’s been a while since I studied such things, but I didn’t think so.

JOSE PADILLA: Guilty on all counts.

SCOTT BEAUCHAMP: Tip of the Iceberg. “These offenses have been going on for years, long before the internet. But there does seems to be a rise in the number of reported offenses in recent years. Did the number of offenses go up, or did the fraction of discovered offenses go up?”

LARRY KUDLOW: “The power outage in banking and credit markets continues to deepen as the sub-prime mortgage infection spreads throughout the U.S. and the global financial system.”

I told somebody the other day that if Kudlow ever started sounding gloomy I was going to liquidate my portfolio and turn it into canned goods and shotgun shells. He’s not sounding gloomy yet — but he is sounding kind of worried.

UPDATE: John Coumarianos emails: “All Wall Streeters are screaming bloody murder to induce Bernanke to drop rates. That’s the kind of relationship they had with Greenspan, and they’re testing Bernanke now to see what they can get from him.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader George Zachar emails:

I’m the Park Ave/Hedge fund guy who’s corresponded with you in the past.

It’s true that some Street crybabies are testing Bernanke to see if he’ll blink and elevate the level of moral hazard in the financial markets. But it’s not true that “all Wall Streeters” are doing so. Some of us, amazingly, want a robust self-regulating system that can operate with minimal government intervention. But there are no headlines in silence and maturity.

I’ve noticed that myself.

A LOOK AT WHO’S KILLING MUSLIMS in carload lots. Shockingly, it’s not the United States or Israel.

WOW: I just noticed that yesterday’s traffic broke 275,000 pageviews. Not a record or anything, but a lot for a slow news day in the summer. Must be the cookware blogging!

AND THAT’S NOT COUNTING how Wile E. Coyote can walk on air until he happens to look down:

Movies such as Spiderman 2 and Speed generate excitement among audiences with their cool special effects. But they also defy the laws of physics, contributing to students’ ignorance about science.

Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed. And, if that were realistic, a ramp would be needed to adjust the direction of motion to even try to make the leap, said UCF professor Costas J. Efthimiou, who co-authored the article.

“Students come here, and they don’t have any basic understanding of science,” he said. “Sure, people say everyone knows the movies are not real, but my experience is many of the students believe what they see on the screen.”

Well, they’re better and better at making it look plausible.

EARTHQUAKE IN PERU: Gateway Pundit has a roundup of the latest reports.

IN THE MAIL: Mike O’ Connor’s Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe: A Memoir of Life on the Run.

AN UPTICK IN ARMY SUICIDES: James Joyner thinks it’s random variation, and notes the small numbers involved: “We had a spike of more than 11 percent from 2005 to 2006. That’s huge. But it represents 11 individual soldiers. The preliminary numbers indicate that the rate will likely decline for 2007. That’s despite a surge in the number of soldiers deployed to Iraq and an increase in the combat tempo. If that holds, it almost surely means that the 2006 spike is largely random variation in a complex phenomenon.” Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Tam notes something rather crucial:

In 2006, the overall suicide rate for the United States was 13.4 per 100,000 people. It was 21.1 per 100,000 people for all men aged 17 to 45, compared to a rate of 17.8 for men in the Army.

This leads her to comment: “Y’know, I don’t mind being jerked around a little bit, Mr. Reporter, but if you want your propaganda headline to work better, you really shouldn’t include the raw numbers. It makes me feel like you think I’m dumb.”

A LOOK AT the new John Edwards.

WELL, YEAH: Law schools recruiting bloggers to boost rankings?

MEDIA HUBRIS: Victor Davis Hanson says enough with anonymity.

IT’S NOT “FOUL-MOUTHED” when we’re using those words!