I like flashlights.
I mean, who doesn’t really, especially when the power goes out, or when you’re trying to find something you’ve dropped inside your car at night, etc.
Portable light has been a fantastic idea since the first time a pre-human picked up a burning stick from his fire and realized that would enable him to see better for making cave drawings, or something like that. You get the idea.
Of course, to make a really good torch you need something slow-yet-intensely burning wrapped around the end of the stick. Early man likely figured out how to do that way better than I ever have, because every torch I’ve ever attempted has sort of quickly become a non-torch. Perhaps I should invite Bear Grylls and/or Les Stroud over for dinner sometime and they can work with me on that; I would not allow Bear to bring the “food,” however, or we’d be dining on a combination of frogs, slugs, grubs and deer feces,washed down of course by our own urine, drunk from a snakeskin bota bag.
Luckily, should my torch ever fail, I can just fish in my pocket and pull out a little LED flashlight that puts out illumination like there’s no tomorrow (the British Empire, btw, in an ultimate bit of throwback vernacular, uses the word torch for its flashlights).
LEDs — light-emitting diodes, for all of you who dozed through physics class or never read Popular Mechanics — have revolutionized the flashlight game for sure. They are just so much better than an incandescent bulb.
I’m somewhat addicted to the pocket-sized lights. I keep one in my truck, one on my headboard and one in my motorcycle tank bag; they just flat come in handy.
Coming in less handy are:
I should have included, say, a baseball for scale, but what you are looking at are two old-school Maglites, each about 16 inches long and quite hefty, that I’ve had for years. Not sure why, but they both ended up atop our entertainment center the other day.
Each has a single bulb, meaning the light they give out is better than total darkness, but not a lot better. Basically they are clubs that happened to be equipped with a tiny bit of light-producing capabilities; if you were going to truncheon a night-time burglar with something, one of these would put out enough light to enable you to see the bad guy you were subduing.
I’ve always thought the big Maglites were pretty cool in a tough, rugged-looking sort of way. Nowadays, of course, the Maglite has gone LED as well. Maybe one of these days I’ll update to the modern variety, but for now, I’ll rely on my little flashlights for, well, light and these for weaponry purposes.
