Friday Typewriter Doodles

Messing around with the Android "Kids Paint" app this morning. I deny any and all artistic ability, and the resemblance to any real-life machines is purely unintentional and coincidental. Richard Polt has nothing to fear!









My wife originally found this app and installed it on her phone a while back as a kid-entertainer for my youngest. As you can probably tell, it randomly changes the color of your "pen" for each stroke, which gives the artwork a very pop-art sensibility. This hopefully compensates for lack of perspective, realism or (in the case of the upstrike) screen space.

BABAROP: Look Out, Baby!

The missus ordered a roll of butcher paper to cover our dining room table when it's school time for my daughters. It's 30 inches wide by 900 feet long. It's a BABAROP*

I'm not sure how many NaNoWriMo drafts that works out to be. Included in the photo above is a Hermes Baby, for scale. I'm genuinely scared for the Baby's future. A piano suspended overhead would be less menacing.

This might be just the thing for anyone with one of those super-long-carriaged accounting machines. How many lines per day would meet your quota? "I typed two and a half yards today."

More to the point: do you think I can convince her to order another?

* Big-Ass Big-Ass Roll Of Paper

Disposable Pen Thunderdome

The usual apologies apply for my rambling, twisty handwriting. This was as much about testing the new pad of paper as the pens, but not, tragically, legibility.

My camera has all but given up the ghost now, so you'll have to satisfy yourself with canned product photos from the web sites of the stores where I bought the pens.

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I do think it's good marketing to have these pens work right out of the package: no shaking, no refills, just pop the cap off and write. For a steel-nibbed pen, this is surprisingly smooth to use, and at least in my tiny sample size of two pens, both are quite nice. (Confidential to Bic: please send a dozen and I'll give them a proper try.) The ink dries quickly, and there is very slight shading.

I opted not to test some of the other plastic pens I have around, since they are mainly calligraphy pens like the Sheaffers or the Pilot Plumix. In contrast, these three are very much meant to be your everyday-use type writing instruments, with presumably a touch more élan than your standard ballpoint.

Image from Staples.com


It's silly, but I really like the clip on this pen: it makes me think of Jules Verne's Nautilus. As the photo shows, it's all one piece of molded plastic, attached to the end of the cap. The eye-shaped opening in the side is presumably the ink window, and the clear area above the feed also shows the ink sloshing around.

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In writing up this page, I realized that there's really more negatives than positives... and I think that pretty much sums up the pen. Doing a little more investigation shows that the refill is not, in fact, a standard type, so when I use up the ink, this pen may just get used for parts. Here's a review with far better photos that sums up the experience. Scratchy, and nothing to write home about (ha!)

Image from Walgreens.com

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I'll backtrack on my recommendation comment a bit, given the non-standard nature of the Zebra refills. The Varsity has taken on all challengers, and emerged victorious. That red ink is especially fitful in my regular pens, so it's impressive to me that the pen writes after several weeks -- months? -- of disuse. The caps fit snugly and are airtight. The model shown in the photo below is the original style. I've seen a new barrel design since, and I hope it doesn't change the hackability of these pens.

Image from Staples.com

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Conclusions: the Bic is a nice addition to the mix. I'll have to use it up and see how refilling goes, or if it's even possible without destroying the pen. Given the amount of ink visible, that may take a while unless there's some sneaky trick like a tube in the middle giving the illusion of more ink. I hope not.

The Varsity is an easy recommendation: it's usually available in multi-packs of assorted colors, including unusual ones like pink and turquoise, as well as staid business colors, and they really are quite easy to get into, albeit with a little mess if you're impatient for the ink to run out and try to refill early. Or so I've heard. Ahem.

Bonus tip: looking for a way to keep your cheap pens out and available for use? Haunt your local thrift shop/flea market for a glass "flower frog" with wide holes. They're generally inexpensive, and heavy enough to take a full load of pens without hassle. I wouldn't do this with a rare or fragile pen since it could damage the pen or even crack the end of the barrel, but for disposables it's perfect. Here's a crappy cell phone picture of the one on my desk, holding the pens used for this entry, along with one of my new pads of sugarcane/bamboo paper, and a ribbon tin because typewriters.

The Most Dangerous Time of the Year

I share Little Flower Petals' weakness towards office supply stores, and now, as schools are starting back up, it's an even more dangerous place to walk into. Not only are the usual school-related items marked down, but in the preparation for what's the largest sales days of the year -- judging from the length of the checkout lines -- the staff have been required to find space for all the wares, meaning a stem-to-stern clearout of the shelves.

Don't get me wrong: I would be thrilled if we had a decent independent stationery shop here in the suburbs, and not the outpost of a major corporate entity. "Suburbs" and "independent business" do not typically overlap, though, so one must make do. The up side is that the larger stores tend to carry stock much broader and generally weirder than a small shop. I've been using this store to ship out typers from the great clear-out project (still going!) so I've of course found myself wandering back to the "Clearance" tables hiding in the back of the store, heaped with the residue of past stocking mishaps. I was in again yesterday, for a project I'll discuss in a moment.

During the shipments, the store had found -- somewhere -- boxes of old pin-feed computer paper. You know the sort, maybe, if you're of a certain age. This is the kind of paper with tear-off strips running down both sides, and perforations between the pages. It dawned on me too late that this would be a suitable BAROP substitute, being both in its own container and pre-cut for easy pagination after typing. The store had a couple of boxes of paper for a while at what I assume was a good price, but they appear to have been snatched up at last, no doubt by some local business still keeping their dot-matrix printers alive. I suspect the DMV.

Fresh trinkets made it out to the tables, though, including a heavy-duty pencil pouch with a large pocket in the front -- for a calculator, maybe? Always handy to have around, I decided, and chucked it into my basket. I also found some nice embossed note cards which will get added to the family collection of potential thank-you letters, and a pair of rectangular Moleskine-brand pencils that formerly carried a Moleskine-brand price. And then, high on the fumes of savings, I went wandering the regular aisles.

Theoretically I was in the store to have a ream of sugarcane-based paper cut and bound into notebooks to keep by my phone and keyboard at work, and at home, and anywhere else I need a stack of fountain-pen-friendly paper out and available. While waiting for the binding, though, I got into trouble in the clearance table, and then wound back through the pen aisle to discover that Bic has hopped aboard the Disposable Fountain Pen Bandwagon with Pilot. They're now selling their own plastic-barreled pens. I usually see these as a challenge -- they say they can't be refilled, but is that true? The Pilot Varsity makes a very respectable eyedropper pen, for example, once you learn the magic spell: pull out the nib and feed, rinse, refill, and re-use. It's a very cheap way to get into nicer pens and inks without a lot of fiscal outlay. One of these days, I'd like to treat myself with a vanishing-point pen, but I'm afraid I'd always be fussing over it. It's hard to fuss over pens that cost $5 for two.

So, in the days to come, I'll do a disposable pen compare-and-contrast blog entry, testing out the new sugarcane paper pad as well. And maybe that will keep me away from the office supply store for a while... or until the next typer gets adopted.

Makes me laugh

Of course there's no actual physical piece of paper bearing Jeff Bezos' autograph, the royalty having been deposited electronically into that dedicated account. I feel like I should frame the bank statement or something. Just in case I get big-headed about this tiny achievement, my wife has offered to send me regular updates on the products that come before the book in question on a general Amazon search. Today's choicest hits:

• Pink case for a smartphone
• High-end audio cables
• Men's hair color
• Headlight kit for a Nissan

That's funny in a whole other way.

Vive la poste!

Assuming Google translate and my own hazy recollection of high school French has that correct, I'm excited about what came in the mail today.



The Quo Vadis blog has giveaways now and then, and I entered their Bastille Day giveaway last month. ExaClair is the U.S. portion of a group of French companies that make fantastic papers, notebooks, inks... all the little necessaries for the pen-and-ink addicted. Now I just have to think of something worthwhile to put in these little guys. The 1951 book is like a composition book (Sorry LFP, it has floppy covers) and the Habana is a fountain-pen friendly version of that other mole-ish brand of hardcover, pocket-in-the-back notebooks. In my experience, those tend to be heavy on the hype, but light on the paper quality. I've heard nothing but good things about the Habanas, though, and I can't wait to try them out.