Yes, brass balls. An easy-to-assemble kit, created by Paul Spinrad, MAKE editor and author of such timeless tomes as the RE/Search Guide To Bodily Fluids and The VJ Book. These balls are $18 in the Boing Boing Bazaar and would make a wonderful gift. For someone. Paul says:
You don't need a semiotician to know that these bad boys are full of meaning. As a token of esteem, they have a purity that makes other gift attempts look weak. Gleaming atop your desk at work, these totems of potency dare people to acknowledge their presence with a calibrated test-blend of serious appreciation and ironic distance– and woe be to anyone who calibrates incorrectly. Everyone will want to touch the brass balls, feel their impressive weight, their uncompromising hardness. They are the family jewels.These brass balls are sold in legal, kit form, and it is your responsibility not to assemble and use them as the deadly weapon or that they are. The balls are not toys; they weigh over one pound, and they will smash fingers, eyes, teeth, and skulls if swung in a fit of unbridled rage. Think of brass knuckles whipping around on a string, but without the soft, velocity-limiting hand inside…
Cinema buffs may associate the brass balls with the opening scene of Glengarry Glen Ross. Cable television viewers may recall similar "Big Brass Balls" from episodes of The Colbert Report. Lawyers may note, then, that this product is not solely derivative of any one intellectual work. Rather, it taps into the broader culture, expressing a common folk idiom that no single motion picture studio or playwright (to take some hypothetical examples) can plausibly claim exclusive rights to.
