I did not buy anything this Black Friday,(*) not because of any particular moral stand or distaste toward capitalism, but mostly because nothing really crossed my radar that I wanted to buy. I did check lego.com this morning to see if there were any deals I was interested in; there were not.

I did manage to talk myself out of buying something; my wife and I have been talking about how we don’t want to get each other any Useless Crap this Christmas, and we mostly want to avoid getting the boy any Useless Crap as well. I have had my eyes on the odachi in the image above for a couple of weeks now, and I believe that I’ve successfully convinced myself not to buy it, and for the most ridiculous reason imaginable: an odachi is the kind of sword you use if you need to cut a horse in half. They are so big that there is apparently a school of Japanese historians that believe the swords were never actually used in combat at all. This particular one is 78″ long– six and a half feet.

My house has eight foot ceilings. My wingspan, fingertip to fingertip, and yes, I just went and measured, is right about 70″. There is, in other words, virtually nowhere in my house where I could unsheathe this giant bastard without worrying abut breaking things, and resheathing it afterward under any circumstances would be a challenge. Now, none of my little goofy-ass pile of weapons is ever going to see combat, fake or otherwise, so it’s not like I’m going to be doing sword practice in my living room or something like that, but if I’m gonna buy a sword that’s eight inches longer than my actual height, I’d like to be able to take it out of its sheath and swing the fucker around once in a while, and that would be absolutely impossible to do inside my house.

Which would require me to go outside carrying a six and a half foot long sword, and swing it around like a dork in my back yard, and while my lawn is fairly private, that’s not something I’m going to allow even a chance of someone else seeing. So, as sad as it makes me, no odachi for me.

(Given the price point, the sword in question is likely junk anyway, but again: I’m not buying these things for combat.)

Fun fact: the largest odachi ever forged is the fifteen foot long, 165-pound Great Evil-Crushing Blade, probably forged in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

I suspect I can’t afford that one.

(*) Upon reflection, not quite true– I impulse-bought my son an inexpensive Christmas present from what I believe is a small business. So I guess I spent, like, $15 on Black Friday, without leaving the house. Or did I do that yesterday? Hell, I don’t remember.