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
It's going in the knife vault/sock drawer for six months...well, maybe three months, to begin with. That would bring us to Decemeber, which is not only gift-giving season, but is also kind of a desert for knives: the sales are over, the stock is low, the new models haven't come out, and there's probably nothing exciting out there worth buying. Early December I'll post a local add in the online classifieds to see if I can get any action at $300. If not, I'll give it another three months, and if the desperate collectors still wont bite, into long-term storage it will go. The owner of my local knife shop just bought a beat-to-hell Spyderco super blue from 2006, or maybe '07...around then. I think it was a full sized Calypso, but even that I'm not entirely sure of. What I remember was the price: he paid $475 for a beat up knife with plastic handles (but no rust nor serious blade chips). I dont want to wait a decade+ to make a profit from this one, but that's why it the only time it's ever been out of the box was for the photo shoot.
That said, if I can find a little non-locking higonokami that actually looks like it had a legitimately aogami blade, I'll scoop that up in a second, and will never come near the sock drawer. I'll use that thing daily.