Update! Modern Manhood ACHIEVED!

As a result of this post https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/10/02/fisking-the-new-york-times-modern-man/ where I fisked the New York Times’ article on being a Modern Man, I realized that my life has been empty. Despite the fact that I don’t eat melons, don’t really like to eat melons, and have never given a single thought to the shaping of melon balls, I would be unable to achieve MODERN MANHOOD.

But no more! BEHOLD!

melon baller

 

Yes! That is a melon baller! Despite my never buying shoes for her, my wife purchased this for me when she saw it in a store. Because Modern Manhood ACHIEVED!

Now all I need is some Kenneth Cole oxfords and a crying pillow, and I’m set.

The Tactical Melon Baller. For all your tactical melon balling needs.
The Tactical Melon Baller. For all your tactical melon balling needs.
BOOK BOMB! Pack Dynamics by Julie Frost
Book Bomb this Thursday, the 8th

180 thoughts on “Update! Modern Manhood ACHIEVED!”

  1. needs the matte black finish and the little skull decal to be fully tactical. And a pickatinny mount. 😀

          1. Great minds, etc. See the link I just posted. There are a bunch of other places selling them.

          1. “What? The Slagwaw beast can only be killed by a melon baller? What the hell? Who carries a melon baller? What do we look like, New York Times columnists?”

    1. It does have a lanyard loop, which is even better. Retro-tactical — coordinates perfectly with a Browning Hi-Power (which, of course, Larry appreciated long before you or I knew what one was).

  2. You need a new reward level in your next Kickstarter: Modern Man – for $X your zombified corpse can be slain by a melon baller wielded by Ed.

    1. Huh. Once ordered French fries at the restaurant in the Novotel in Eindhoven, Holland and got these. Asked what they were and the waitress claimed they were German fries.

  3. Maybe you could use it as a tiny ice cream scoop instead. Bite-sized scoops of ice cream, dipped in chocolate which then hardens to make them even more convenient and yummy.

    That would be totally manly.

    Seriously, I’ve never understood why anyone would need round balls of melon. Isn’t that basically just mushing the melon up to shape it? Why would anyone want mushed melon?

    1. No, Shawna, a good melon baller doesn’t mush the melon up, it cuts it smoothly and effortlessly into uniformly bite-sized balls (well, mostly balls — unless you are willing to waste a lot of melon, each ball will have at least one flat side where the previous ball was cut out.) The whole point is that it’s proof that you’ve got time to faff around balling melon, rather than simply chunking it, and that you can afford to throw out perfectly edible melon . Conspicuous consumption on a micro-
      scale.

      1. Oh, I see. I thought mellon ballers made round balls, but the flat side explains it. There’s even less point to that! Who wants non-round balls?

        I still say it would be put to better use on ice cream.

    2. As shem noted above, it’s original use was to make various small pastry / mash balls for cooking and icecream balls to decorate over desserts in a sensible fashion, without drowning the whole thing under a glacier…

    3. I think it’s a leftover from failed experiment times. Some guy really enjoyed playing marbles. Then he thought, “Hey! Marbles made from melons, cantaloupes, and honey dews would be awesome!”. And hence, the melon baller.

  4. I wonder if they make a tactical mellon baller. Can’t put it in my bug out bag unless it’s tactical…

  5. Please tell me the tactical melon baller will appear in a MHI book in the near future.

    To quote Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves “Why a spoon cousin? Why not an axe…” “Because it’s dull you twit. It will hurt more.”

  6. I imagine that when Arthur first pulled Excalibur out of the stone, he was holding it in approximately the same position you’re holding the melon baller in that first picture.

    Perhaps this means that you’re really the Rightful King of the NYT Hipster Boys.

    [I think there’s a Monty Python joke hiding in here, but I’m too lazy to make it. Someone else, please feel free.]

    1. Wot? So, just because some watery tart gave you a melon baller you’re now King of England?

      That’s racist, you bloody peasant!!!!

      Help! Help! I’m being repressed!

  7. @Sabrina Chase, you beet me to it, needs rails.
    @Shawna, I haven’t used one since childhood, but I recall it being more of a cutting action (with the narrow edge on the circumference of the baller) than a mushing action. Some people find it more appealing to have their food spherically shaped. I am guessing it comes from the French, but this is an completely unsubstantiated accusation.

  8. That thing looks more like an eyeball removal tool when you lay it next to your tactical gear. See? Everything looks better with firepower.

  9. You do realize that a melon baller is a patriarchal tool of macro-aggression, especially towards melons who self-identify as ball-less. It’s shape is also clearly heteronormative and phallic. And why was there no warnings before posting that picture? Just seeing it is enough to trigger any ball-less melons, and all members of the ball-less community in general, but most particularly melons of color, which, if I may add, don’t seem to be represented in your writings. Melons of the world, unite! All you have to lose is your balls!

    1. Are you denying the lived experience of people who have melons but wish they had balls instead? Get your TERF off our turf!

    2. Right. Where are the melon umm…ovaryers? Kept off the shelf by the patriarchy, that’s where.

      Even worse, a melon is a fruit, and therefore an embodiment of the female principle. Reshaping it into testicle simulacra is textbook misogyny.

      1. And it gets worse. This melon-normative dialog is marginalizing lemons. Where are the lemon-ballers? What about trans-lemons that identify as melons? By ignoring them, the shitlord patriarchs are trying to disappear lemons, not to mention limes, and other fruits of color, and fruits of trans-flavor, like cantaloupes. And…

        (After a while it gets hard to mock something that is itself a mockery of reality).

        1. And what about all the beautiful entities that transgress or outright reject the conventional fruit/vegetable dichotomy altogether? Will no one speak for the avocados? The pumpkins? The lovely squash creatures that are equally at home in a sweet pie or baked with a savory coating of parmesan?

          Down with default binary vegetation categories, say I!

          1. Don’t even get me started on tomatoes. And when will apples and oranges be able to stand together? Why do people keep segregating them?

  10. As someone who is not that familiar with melon ballers, are they really that small, or is your hand just that big?

    1. They probably come in different sizes depending on how big you want the balls in your mouth to be.

      Balls of melon, that is.

    2. I have a double barrel melon baller. In case you can’t decide if you want little balls or littler balls. It’d be totally badass if it weren’t pink.

        1. Well, your ancestors beat up conquistadors with rattan sticks. Obscure weapons are in your blood. *g*

      1. My wife will not buy one of the pink ladies’ guns the manufacturers offer these days. To be fair, she never drove a pink deuce and a half either.

  11. I will cut out your heart with a melon baller!

    Umm, why not a knife?

    Because a melon baller would hurt more. And because of the shame.

  12. Your display of the melon baller is….uhh……..triggering. It gives a delicate, sensitive, intellectually and morally enlightened person like me a feeling of pain and oppression. That’s because you have a melon baller with a large black handle, which is very macho and thus….patriarchal. Yeah. And….you are grasping that black handle in a large whyte hand, which is symbolic for your whyte male patriarchal oppression of minorities and protected classes. The melon baller – both by shape and name – also subliminally suggests to me that you are hostile to women, so you are a misogynist, like all patriarchists.
    So, in summary, your attempt to be a more modern male with greater empathy and sensitivity is actually racist, women hating and oppressive.
    I’m going to go see my therapist now before I pass out from all the hate you’ve directed at me and my consequent psychic and spiritual wounding; in the meantime, your penance is that you should put on a pink sweater, plant an ecologically appropriate tree nearby your home, and publicly apologize to every woman and non-white person you have ever known for permitting yourself to be born with whyte skin and a penis. Oh – and learn to be a proper Progressive by voting for Hillary and supporting your local chapter of Code Pink.
    (Note: the scary thing about the above is that there really are people in Berkeley, San Francisco, NYC and on the staff of liberal arts departments in colleges across the country, as well as more than a few Europeans and Canadians, who will see ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with the above uber-neurotic verbal miasma.)

    😉

  13. A melon baller with a MHI symbol on the handle would be amazing. I bet Batman has a Bat-melon baller in his utility belt, so why not the MHI team?

  14. Didn’t mention this before, but I can’t help but wonder what’s so manly about a guy who’s concerned about the condition of another guy’s balls… 😛

  15. The F….?
    You yanks and your passion to relabel everything with new names… Yes you can carve a melon with it but you can also carve better with a shallower spoon…

    1. And yes, I just discovered what you language bandits mean with “Melon Carver”… Bloody Americanglish users…

      1. Melon baller is perfectly good ‘Merican. Melon carver is only cromulent in the British dialect of ‘Merican.

  16. I think I might be intimidated by a size 15 boot wearing Correia-sized person coming at me wielding a melon-baller while foregoing all of that other gear.

    / why with a spoon?
    // Because it will HURT MORE, idiot!

      1. I have visions of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’s broom instead. Do you have any idea how many BOOKS would get written?!

        As a bonus, how many SJWs would get TRIIIIIGERRRRED?

        It’s a win/win!

    1. Phil Foglio’s character Buck Godot the Hoffmanite is a massive fellow who carries throwing forks and spoons. At one point while being pursued by armed assailants of some kind he muses that he really needs to find a cheese grater.

  17. Use your imagination!
    1) Insert a firesteel through the hole in the bottom of the cup, pack the cup with tinder, and draw the steel out briskly. A windproof fire starter!
    2) Hone the edges and use it to retrieve bullets, buckshot, or slugs from a carcass. Recycling lead is good for the environment!
    3) It’s the perfect size to portion out lock-breaching quantities of C4. Knock knock!

    Dad always said you don’t really know how to use a tool until you know three ways to abuse it.

    P.S. What kind of knife is that on that rig?

    1. Gerber. Can’t remember the name, but it is one solid chunk of metal. It is kind of like a sharpened crowbar.

    2. Say, now….
      Take a melon baller, put in a bit of dryer lint, melt some candle wax on top of the lint – that would make a handy little fire-starter for when you’re hiking in the back country.
      And, ‘lock-breaching quantities of C4?’
      Good reason for carrying a melon baller in your tactical gear!
      Cheers, Dave!
      P.S. Anyone else got any other suggestions?

  18. Wouldst thou know the secret of that arcane object? All you need is a high society great aunt married to a Shriner, with cocktail parties inflicted on her regularly! Once the afore mentioned melon (At least three types of melon) has been properly balled, you skewer it with a toothpick and place it on a serving tray covered with leafy green lettuce. You add cubes of a variety of cheeses and chunks of cold meats and sausages. Then hand it to a servant to walk around the living room, making sure that those cocktails, that your poor husband is desperately mixing and passing out, are being properly accompanied by some degree of norishment and dodging the need to cook a real meal for the pundits (It’s ALWAYS pundits, when you are as high a level Shriner as Uncle Athel was) You, in the meantime, remain in the kitchen, safely away from your guests, and desperately making more of everything! Since this was in the Midwest, no one was shy about filling their gut on these morsels and generally left the hostess blessedly alone.

  19. I wonder if Ron Popeil could be persuaded to come out of retirement to design a full auto melon baller. The Ball-O-Matic.

  20. ConantheCimmerian https://conancimmerian.wordpress.com/ says:

    Despite the fact that I don’t eat melons, don’t really like to eat melons, and have never given a single thought to the shaping of melon

    Larry you need to work on that. Mrs. Cimmerian demands that I eat her melons no matter the shape they are in… She says she wouldn’t trust a man that did not eat his wife’s own melons. She says there is something just not American about a man that does not eat his wife’s melons.

    The really crazy thing is she keeps on asking me kiss her female feline, “Come on and kiss the little pu$$y”

  21. I like how it has a tiedown point at the end so you won’t lose it going through the brush. A little shiny on the one end -but hey- that means it doubles as a signaling device. I will get one myself and sharpen the edge so I won’t have to carry my Gerber Tac II anymore.

  22. Obviously the hole in the middle is for trickle charging rounds in the field. How many grains of Win 748 does that hold?

  23. The perspective seemed wrong, then I remembered those catcher’s mitts you call hands…

    No offense.

    Please don’t hit me with your catcher’s mitts..

      1. That’s why I laugh when normal people talk about how awful it is when their pinky falls under the bottom on a mini-Glock. For me that’s most things. 🙂

  24. Someone in New York or San Francisco needs to design a Modern Man multi-tool so the metrosexuals will always feel equipped. It would come complete with a shoehorn, crying towel, paper bag dispenser (for those awkward popcorn/movie moments or when the intruder comes in so you can cover your head), lotion dispenser, and water pistol. It seems though there would be a huge marketing challenge because the word “tool” is to the Modern Man what someone who shows up to fix something uses. The word “tool” implies there might be some dirt or grunge involved and that might contaminate his manicured hands so it would need to be called something besides a “tool”. Maybe we could get Jane Fonda and Sean Penn on the HSN sharing their favorite Wu-Tang concert selfies. “If you order now we’ll include a large White Flag with instructions on how to properly display it when the next riot happens”. In fact, I’m surprised it wasn’t 28 ways and the last one should have been: #28 The modern man [is such a pussy he] must have a hijab on hand for Islamafacist day so he can properly cover his wife’s head and face so as not to offend any school district board members or college professors.

  25. Hmm, anybody got any ideas for a “Melon Baller” drink recipe? I’m thinking cranberry juice, liberal tears, and 2 very small balls of goya (bitter melon). Completely undrinkable, but that’s Modern Drinks for you. (Yes, I did leave out all alcohol, but why waste it?)

    1. The straight version:
      -pour vodka over melon balls
      -refrigerate for a day or so
      -eat!

      The Dave version:
      -Insert melon balller into melon
      -throw melon for distance
      -make a Martini instead (4:1,Tanqueray Rangpur and dry vermouth, shaken with cracked ice and served with a lime twist).

    1. Hey! Stop the hatin’ on shoehorns. Have you ever looked closely at one of the metal ones? Death in your hand, man.

  26. YOU ARE ALL WRONG! We need to put our massive cranial head type things together and create a belt feed, full auto, melon baller machine gun. Which when used will create such a cavern of woundy deathlyness, that the SJW’s will rise up and with one voice ban melon ballers forever. “OH, the humanity!” they will weep. College professors will faint, the UN will declare sanctions, Putin will…wait, does Putin have one? Christmas is coming.

      1. The modern man shuffles out his driveway to fetch the paper the local boy throws from afar out of fear. He scans the neighborhood with his bulging eyes and gaping mouth then looks at the headlines. Happy day! The minor league local baseball team the Dagon Justice Warriors thrashed the visiting team 9-0 in a forfeit due to the visiting team not showing up. Elsewhere, an entire bus full of baseball players mysteriously plunges into the sea due to a bridge collapse. Shares of fish stock are up!

        1. “Multiethnic indigenous aquaAmericans, of differing faith and vulnerable to lookism, deserve social justice for the naziesque ethnic cleansing visited upon them by the United States military in 1927-28!”

  27. I never wanted this “modern man” thing in the first place! I wanted to become… A LUMBERJACK!!!

  28. I’m really looking forward to learning how a melon baller can be used to make perfectly shaped little balls of plastic explosives, or as a field expedient explosive-eyeball removal device.

  29. The sidearm is for fighting to get to your rifle. And the rifle is for fighting to get to your mellon baller.

  30. Brings to mind the seen from Riddick with the can opener. Unconventional weapon kills can be demoralizing and also awesome. You might be on to something here.

    Unrelated: sufficient melon ballers duct taped to C4 = modern man’s claymore mine.

  31. “I’d be following my mark ever since he stepped out the club. Dude in Kenneth Cole Oxfords, I’d figured he’s easy. Then he walks down this dark alley and I know he’s easy. I make my move; figure on leaving with his watch, wallet and maybe those fancy shoes. Then what does he do? Dude pulls out a freakin’ melon baller! A gun or knife you know what you’re dealin’ with, but a melon-baller? Aint no way I’m messing with a crazy mo-fo like that! Man, I’m outta there!”

  32. What!? No serrated edge? Remember, when your life depends on having a melon baller, you don’t want to find yourself holding one with a smooth edge.

    FYI – This ‘assault’ version is banned in New York and California.

    1. Instructions in previous thread on this topic. Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it, melonophobe…

  33. Your tactical Mellon baller needs some stippling on the grip. How do you expect to be able to maintain your grasp when you have mellon blood pouring down your hands?

  34. Anyone else hear Also Sprach Zarathustra ringing out when he saw that picture? The handle does need a skull…

  35. But do you have a double ended assymetrical melon baller? Because apparently I do. And now know what a melon baller is. Still don’t know how I got it.

  36. You and see the scene inthe next MHI… our heroes catch up to Owen’s latest mess, and start walking down into a destroyed Bed Bath and Beyond.

    0. First couple just shot.
    1. Impaled with Shower Rod
    2. Bludgeoned to death with high end frying pan, broken handle rammed up nose.
    3. A couple of corpses with a variety of fine kitchen knives etc,, most of which broke
    4. one Strangled with decorative curtain pulls
    5. Hammed by bare hands into the floor
    6. Cell phone crammed 3/4 into eye socket.
    7. Entire rack of appliances fallen on another

    etc…

    they find Owen & a friend, a little worse for wear, sitting on something bloody:

    Looking at it.

    “Geez, Owen whadya kill that one with? That’s medieval”

    “Melon Baller.”

    ‘!?”

    “It came to hand. Got a cigar? I need a smoke.”

  37. I just noticed the little hole in the middle of the business end of the melon baller. Is that for sticking a toothpick through, into the melon ball/eyeball/testicle? Does the modern man stick toothpicks into his melon balls, I wonder. The article didn’t mention it.

    1. Quite possibly to keep the melon ball from being stuck in the melon baller. Otherwise the fluids might help seal them together.

  38. Larry,

    My sympathies on your mental illness regarding the melon baller thingy.

    Please get well soon and write some more Monster Hunter books with lots of guns an no melon ballers.

    Brian.

  39. Dude you HAVE to put a melon baller in one of your characters tactical kit just to mess with a noobie.
    Noobie: “What the heck is THAT for”
    Old Pro: “Use your imagination kid… I just hope I’ll never need it.”

  40. Imagine now Z, Milo, Sam, and a good majority of the good people of MHI reading a certain article, then whispering abounds in speculation about whether their good boss Earl Harbinger, the man who lacks for nothing, might relent to the company’s sudden emergency lack of melon ballers.
    Try not to judge, as I so miserably have failed to do and must now search out the perfect hardwood floor to beg my father to update our sadly ancient marble tile as penance for not keeping him better updated.

  41. Every time I read this I imagine Milo, Sam, and Z gathered around in a huddle sweating about approaching Earl with their newest emergency company budget that requires mass orders to whatever company makes tactical, field use acceptable melon ballers .
    I spend the rest of the day smiling thus.

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