While I was attending the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) last week, a certain salesman came in the Press Room with a most unusual product called the BaliYo. The best description that I can give of the BaliYo is that it is a pen that thinks it’s a butterfly knife.

Perhaps you never had a guy like this in your high school, but I remember this one tough guy who would carry a butterfly knife just so he could do fancy tricks of flicking the blade open and close. I guess he wanted to do something cool to pass the time, and a yo-yo was just way too geeky.

The BaliYo is meant to be a similar toy rather than a pen, because it really isn’t the best thing to write with. The two stray ends don’t stay up, so gripping it isn’t really feasible for writing. However, the designers took the time to put a Fisher Space Pen refill, which can “write underwater, in freezing cold, boiling heat, at any angle, even upside down”.

So, the purpose of this pen is to look cool. I can think of a perfect scene for it for a movie. Some of you may remember in Top Gun when Maverick (Tom Cruise) is playing with his pen in a classroom, and flipping it from knuckle to knuckle, and Iceman (Val Kilmer) does the same trick, only faster, in order to show him up. Can you imagine if Tom Cruise took out a BaliYo and starting doing some tricks? Iceman would have been iced!

This pen sure does cost a lot as it has an MSRP of $39.95, but it is on sale at the BaliYo site for $34.95. It comes in a variety of color combinations, and here’s a YouTube video if you want to see it in action.