been thinking about knife kid a lot lately

i love that guy

I don’t remember exactly why I started thinking about Knife Kid this week. There’s a pretty good chance there wasn’t a reason. Maybe you guys have that too, the thing where you’ll just be sitting there minding your own business and suddenly a thought comes swooping into your brain like a hawk. Maybe it’s just me. A few months ago I was sitting at my laptop allegedly writing a column for work and out of nowhere I was like “I wonder who invented the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” I went to Wikipedia and clicked around a bunch of the footnotes and learned a lady named Julia put the recipe in an article in Boston Cooking School Magazine in 1901. She just woke up one morning and wrote “For variety, some day try making little sandwiches, or bread fingers, of three very thin layers of bread and two of filling, one of peanut paste, whatever brand you prefer, and currant or crabapple jelly for the other” and went and changed the whole world. Shoutout to Julia. And, uh, apologies to my editor.

The point here is that this kind of thing happens sometimes and this week it was Knife Kid. We all remember Knife Kid, yes? The little rascal who went viral back in 2017 for tearing around the corner of an above-ground pool with a knife in his hand and sending a number of beer-pong-playing adults into a state of panic? God, I loved that video. I still do. I watched the YouTube link up there maybe 50 times in a row on Tuesday night. I’m trying not to click play right now because I’ll probably watch it another 50 times if I do. Reasonable arguments can be made that it is the funniest five or six seconds ever committed to video. 

“Lemme see what you have”

“A KNIFE”

“NO”

Beautiful.

So, yes, I did some more Googling. And in addition to an Amazon link to something called “Knives For Kids,” which sounds like the name of an album by some D+ rap-rock band that played a side stage at a concert in 1996 that ended with some suburban teens blowing up a car in the parking lot, I found this article about the video from the Washington Post. I learned a bunch of stuff I didn’t know about it all, like, for example, the fact that it wasn’t his mom who yelled “NO” at the end. It was one of their friends. 

“I saw Jonathan running around the pool,” Holsapple said via a Twitter DM. “I’ve always had a big mom instinct with people. … So I asked what he had. When he screamed he had a knife I just panicked and went worst case scenario that he was gonna hurt himself or do something bad.”

And I also learned that it started with a knife heist by the kid. 

The 5-year-old really was running around the yard with an actual knife, Ryan said. It was a closed pocket knife. How’d he get it? “He went into my uncle’s pocket and pick-pocketed it out of there,” Ryan said.

And I also learned that this tiny little demon is even more of a rascal than I thought he was when I first saw him running around with a stolen pocketknife. 

Jonathan’s parents have reminded him that things like stealing a knife and running around with it are wrong and dangerous, although Ryan said Jonathan definitely knew he was doing something he shouldn’t as he ran around the pool with A knife!

“He knew it was wrong,” she said. “We talked to him again the other night when I was Facetiming him. We said, ‘Jonathan, you know this is not okay.’ But he just laughed.”

I was kind of worried when I started poking around that I would ruin this perfect little video with more information. That happens sometimes. Not here, though. It somehow made it even better.

“But he just laughed.”

Classic Knife Kid right there. Like an adorable little supervillain.

So, yeah. That’s what I’ve been up to this week. Watching and reading about Knife Kid. There’s no big conclusion coming here about What This Says About The Way We Use The Internet Today or anything like that. I hope you weren’t expecting that. I’m not the person you want that from anyway. I’ve just been thinking about Knife Kid a lot. 

I hope he’s doing great. 

STUFF I TYPED

— my yearly recap of the Super Bowl commercials, which were once again marred by my lifelong nemesis, the E*Trade Baby

— my simple, four-step plan — with barely any kidnapping — to get a new Nice Guys movie made by Christmas

— my weekly Rundown column, which opens with a bit about the fracas surrounding the new Road House movie and closes with a story about a lonely donkey looking for a friend 

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— I adore my colleague Bill DiFilippo but I am currently furious with him for leaving Vince Carter’s honey dip dunk from 2000 off this list of the best 50-point dunks in the history of the Slam Dunk Contest

— speaking of the Vince Carter 2000 dunk contest, my colleague Robby Kalland interviewed Kenny Smith and asked him about the legendary “IT’S OVAH” call

— screw it let’s just watch all the Vince dunks again, including the honey dip, which happens just before the two-minute mark and is followed by a string of reaction shots — MICHAEL KEATON — that should be put in a museum

— I did not read either of the very viral first-person essays that people online were so excited about this week but I DID read about the tallest water slide in America

— I have always wondered how actors make themselves cry and I am happy Rachel Handler did the research in this super fun deep dive

— “A single pregnant stingray hasn't been around a male ray in 8 years” is a great way to start a headline but “Now many wonder if a shark is the father” takes it to the damn stratosphere

— Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese talking about movies is always worth some time

— honeybee thieves stole over 100 hives from an orchard in California, which I bring to your attention for two reasons: one, Jason Statham etc etc; two, I tried to post that link with this screencap from The Beekeeper on Threads (I’m trying!) and it flagged and removed my post for “inciting violence” (lol) so… yeah, don’t look for me on Threads too much

— Zoomers want to bring back landlines because, among other reasons, they love to twirl the cord, which I’ve seen some people mocking on social media but is actually kind of a fun thing to do with your hands while you talk

— “I’m over coats and the drama of zipping them up”

— people are already returning their Vision Pro headsets, which were probably doomed to fail — as all the headsets before it did — because they remain impossible to use without looking like the biggest dork alive

— a good interview with FX head honcho John Landraf about the struggle of making cool new shows that audiences want to watch in big enough numbers to keep them on the air

— Go Birds

— Freddy Got Fingered is now on the Criterion Channel, for real, which is as good an excuse as any to watch this again

Okay, that’s it. Please subscribe and eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.