Second Childhood

A little change today– no movie, just me letting some associations run wild and free.

You could, if you wished, view this as a far-too-late-to-be-useful gift suggestion for the person on your Christmas list who is very hard to get a gift for. And it’s not even a pen.

My birthday has just passed, and as often happens to people of my culture, I got some gifts connected to the event. One of them fulfilled an ambition I’ve had since I was about 17, although it has only lately slipped out of the realm of utter fantasy. Check this out.

I promise that at no point during my drive to work did I shout “Fox 2! Weapon away!”

Yes, I have a heads-up display in my minivan. Whole unlapped Venn circles of humanity are now shaking their heads in despair.

And that’s fine. Let ’em. I’m a big boy, the boss of me, and doing no one any harm with it. In fact, quite the opposite on the last point, as I now appreciate how much contact with the traffic around me I was losing every time I darted a glance at my speed. I honestly don’t know why this sort of thing isn’t a government-enforced standard equipment in all new vehicles. It can’t be cost (yes, I know how much a birthday gift cost– big boy, me).

I can’t quite justify the altimeter display on the left in the same breath, but I swapped it for a heading indicator since the picture was taken.

Anyway, that’s me done showing off my new toy. This weekend should be merry– we’re putting up the the festive green object covered in lights tonight, and on Saturday I’m getting a late start on this year’s batch of Eggnog. Late? As you’ll see in the recipe, for it to be safe to drink on Christmas morn, I should have got it done a couple of weeks ago.

Oh, well. We may not be going around to the grandparentseses this year, but that’s no reason to not flirt with a food-borne disease!

Today’s pen: Parker 51
Today’s ink: Montblanc Racing Green

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Backward Compatible?

Exciting news! The Playstation 5 will allow use of Playstation 4 controllers! Apparently! For older games!

While this is all true, according to an article I saw the headline of through someone’s tweet, it’s not really the point of today’s uncommon foray into the olden-style content on this site. On Sunday, I was rattling around in my Pit of Solitute, deciding what was going to step in for dear old Duofold that exhausted its ink last week. The conclusion was Parker 45, as it’s been an age since I had one out for a run.

Choosing a 45 means deciding on what sort of point it’s going to have fitted, and that led to me poking around in the box I keep various loose point-units in. Esterbrooks, Osmiroids, and others, all rolling around together and never a hint of ill-feeling between them. I found the bead-tube I was after, the one with the little 0.8mm stub I ground… and it lay between a couple of TWSBI points, a situation which made me frown.

STASIS POD ACTIVE!

I knew I had one, because I had a clear memory of this picture on the page for the TWSBI Diamond– I updated it very recently, after all, and even if I had not, the mention of “TWSBI point” brings a clear reproduction of the above image into my mind, for I am not saddled with aphantasia. The frown came because I had absolutely no memory of having two.

Another reason the memory of one sticks is that it represents… well, not a failure, but a failure to attempt. I was intending to experiment with re-profiling the shoulders of the point to make it more flexible, but ambition never (yet) transformed into action. I had a reason to have one. I had less reason to have a second.

There’s also not a lot of pressing reasons to have more fountain pens than fingers, either, so I can’t say no reason.

It turns out that at some point in the past, I ordered a stub for a TWSBI Diamond. I then promptly slung it into storage and forgot its very existence.

In the time since, I got a TWSBI Classic with a stub, and discovered that it’s a really nice point. I was therefore less vexed with my lapse than excited with my discovery, especially since I had a Diamond in battery at the moment.

But… the Diamond in current rotation is a 580 ALR. The newest of the breed. The point, assuming I got it with the never-touched experimental item, may be contemporary with the release of the 540 in 2011. It could be older. Can they possibly swap around, across such a yawning chasm of time?

Evidently, yes.

I should probably say “Yes, but with qualifications” because you’ll notice the textured shell of the ALR is attached to the stasis pod’s platform, and the transparent old-style shell is on the pen. There are some differences in the two sections construction that make me unwilling to try switching the point/feed units around in the shells, especially given the older Diamond’s reputation for cracking.

I’m still very pleased with the arrangement, because this stub is just as pleasant as the one on my Classic. I had it in mind that TWSBI changed the source of their points more recently than this one would have been made, but if they did it wasn’t the writing properties of the stub that prompted the switch.

I’m still a little worried about the utter blank in my memory regarding the purchase of the section, but I guess I’ll have to accept that I’m as fallibly human as the next goldfish. HEY THERE’S A CASTLE OVER THERE NEAT!

Today’s pen: A somewhat hybridized TWSBI Diamond 580 ALR
Today’s ink: Pelikan HEY THERE’S A CASTLE OVER THERE NEAT! Violet

 

Oh, Damn It.

The question frequently comes up on forums– “Will the security people at the airport get bent out of shape about the fountain pens I carry?”  The answer has, hitherto, been a resounding no, because (a) no one who doesn’t use them ever notices a fountain pen, and (b) they are less suited to poking a hole in a person than a ballpoint, with the pokey bit being also very bendy.

And then this nonsense happens:

Shown in picture: Absolutely no fountain pens. Not one. Because they’re boringly innocuous.

Now, if you read the whole story, you’ll find that nobody was hurt, and that one could as probably make the headline read YET ANOTHER ENTITLED GUY IN AIRLINE FIRST CLASS FALLS TO STRESS, but then we lose the exoticism of pointing to a fountain pen as a deadly weapon (which did not actually do anyone any harm).  Why couldn’t he have used a plastic airline fork, or his tie?  At least it didn’t happen with a US carrier or in US airspace, so it may not enter the script of modern security theatre.

Of course… I probably shouldn’t be making noise about it, should I?

Today’s entirely harmless pen: Pelikan M600
Today’s non-toxic ink: Diamine Oxford Blue

Broken

Anyone trying to look at my site right now will be seeing a pretty blank sheet.

Here’s what led to this.  First, I went to log into the dashboard, after spending a week furiously ignoring the internet.  I do so, and get this:

Well, OK.  Unusual, but let’s do.  That gets us this:

…and on and on and on.

Which eventually leads back to the first thing.  Which is frustrating.  I eventually find this helpful entry:

Yes, I find it becomes impenetrably technical, too. AND THERE’S MORE!

Which would have been helpful if there had been any way to NOT trigger that update pop-up in the first place.  So… until I can, in my non-technical, blundering, blind and thumbless manner, figure out how to fix this without getting into the “Administration Panel” which at the moment is hiding behind the first image in this post, the site is down.  There are instructions, but I have become a cave fish in this modern age, and will be a while developing my understanding.  Heck, I stopped being a competent computer user about the time 3.25″ floppies vanished from the world.

Basic Maintenance

I came to discover recently that I have been letting my site slide into squalor.  Of course, with a vast media empire such as mine, it’s not surprising that some elements suffer occasional neglect from the not only the owner, but even the managers and frontline staff.

…all of whom is me.

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from someone seeking a thoroughly incomplete but slightly helpful set of data which resides on my page for Swan pens.  Or rather, it should reside there.  The sender of the note had been disappointed to find instead a sullen note from Dropbox that they’d stopped letting all and sundry wander into the castle, tracking up the carpets and pointing in an ill-bred manner.

Oh, dear.

I thanked this confidential informant and set to work on fixing the problem.  Once I had it sorted on that page, it struck me that I was using Dropbox for several useful little tidbits, mainly scans of instruction booklets from ages past that I wanted to share with the world.  The problem had become a hydra.  Then, as I landed on another page that needed attention, I found a deeply unlovely image where there should have been a picture:

Do NOT go to that URL

On the older incarnation of my site, I had trouble uploading images, so I relied on… the service named above.  At the time, that service was fairly benign.  When I committed the overhaul of the site, the uploading of images was not longer a challenge and I had taken fresh pictures in which one could make out little details like “Which end is the front?”  What I forgot was that there were several images over on that service which I deemed at the time sufficiently adequate in illustrating a point to bring over.  Thus, as word that this service I decline to name (to keep from helping their search engine score) had ceased to be benign and was in fact a heaving mass of pop-up ads and annoyance filtered into my consciousness, it never occurred to me that I should react.  It is also likely that the lazy element in my subconscious glanced at the news, decided it would be too much work to do anything about, and concealed it from the more active parts of my make-up.

“As ye sow, so shall ye reap” is not quite apt here; the usual crop of laziness is loads of extra work, and I don’t see the equivalence.  In any event, when I realized what a dog’s breakfast some of my pages had become, I grasped the nettle and did what I could to put it right.  If you flip through the site, or indeed the back issues of this little enterprise, you will find no other reproductions of that nasty extortionist of an image, and so far as I can discover no disappointing billets doux from Dropbox.

However… I know that the real solution is to host my own images, and this I have not done.  My brother and I both have lamentably image-intensive sites, and neither of them brings in vast heaps of money (his more than mine), so I’m loath to suggest that we pay for more storage, and even more loath to suggest that I take over more of what’s there.  Thus, I’ve made a problem for another day by stuffing all these things on what are currently benign third party storage.

I just hope Google and WordPress don’t get all grabby about their monetization, the way… that other service… did.

Today’s pen: Hero 100
Today’s ink: Herbin Poussière de Lune

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Pelikan 25 OMAS Arte Italiana Pilot Vanishing Point Waterman Carène	Pelikan Royal Blue Diamine Amazing Amethyst Pelikan Violet Quink washable blue (vintage)	17 manuscript pages

The paucity of output this week is down to Monday being too taken up with agony to be creative. You may remember a really dumb thing I reported doing to my leg about four months ago.  Well, I managed to do almost the same thing without the assistance of ice on Sunday evening, simply through inattention; I stepped too long for the last step in a flight, and then down I went.  The damage isn’t as bad this time (although I really should have a medical professional opine upon how things stand with my inner rigging), but it was sore enough on Monday to make creativity in anything other than self-directed terms of abuse fly right out the window.

And to avoid leaving people up in the air about important things: the pen I had in my pocket at the time is completely unscathed.

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Parker Senior Duofold Sheaffer Snorkel Valiant Sailor 102 Pelikan M30	Diamine Marine Diamine Denim Herbin Bleu Nuit Diamine Evergreen	20 manuscript pages.

A minor disaster has occurred for me on the mechanical side of the writing. I managed to jostle my book at the end at yesterday’s writing session, causing a Rube Goldberg cascade which threw my fiction pen to the floor.  This was not the Sailor, but my well-loved Touchdown Valiant, and it now has a small crack opened up at the rear of the barrel which defeats filling.  I’ll take it away for repairs, but I think I’ll rotate something else in so I don’t feel like I have to rush the repaired pen back into service before the solvent-weld has a chance to knit properly.  Probably a slightly older Sovereign II, which has very similar writing properties.  I am somewhat low in my spirits about this accident, though– I love my pens nearly like children, and to have injured one through my own clumsiness stings.

Oh, let me tell you about some fun I had on the weekend. Through my own negligence as a householder, I slipped on some ice.  The main injury was not, as my initial vector would have had it, through taking the edge of a concrete stair to the parietal lobe, but resulted from my quick “thinking” to avoid such a blow; the non-slipping leg suddenly took the weight, slipped sideways on an entirely different but smaller patch of ice until it found traction… at which point everything below the knee stopped moving, while everything above the knee carried on for another three or four centimeters.

This hurt rather a lot.

The silver lining in this was twofold.  I discovered that my son does not panic when a parent collapses in a howling heap, but waits for a break in the screaming to ask if he should go inside and call 911 (not this time).  Also, I was presented with an unusual opportunity to amend the lyrics of a Sesame Street song to run “One of These Knees is Not Like The Other” for the amusement of my family.

The reason I mention all this is that my page output is a bit low this week.  For some reason, I was having trouble focussing on Monday.  Things are rather better now– I may even put aside the cane before the weekend is done!

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Sheaffer Balance Defender Parker 50 Sheaffer Snorkel Valiant Pelikan M600	Waterman vintage blue Jentle blue-black Diamine Denim Diamine Bilberry	24 manuscript pages, plus 11 pages of “Free Balloons for All Good Children”.†

† This is one of those stories that you either vent off by writing or go nuts from it presenting new and ever more upsetting details on the screen of imagination.  I’m cracked enough already, so I’m dividing my attention until the short story is safely pinned onto paper; lunch for the novel, idle minutes in the last half-hour of the work-day and through the evenings for the this horror.

Ventriloquism!

That’s what it’s called when a dummy speaks, right?

I thought, in lieu of the usual Friday Film Feature, I’d recount a tale by way of making up some of the entertainment-of-visitors deficit I’ve run up on this blog.  A tale of a lost pen.

A humorous tale of a lost pen, I should say; let the smelling salts stand where they are.

I had intended to use today’s pen on Tuesday, but it was not where I expected to find it.  This was slightly distressing, because one of the few habits I have that is reliable is returning a pen to the in-battery facility; a small correspondence box with a drawer for a half-dozen pens in its base, which itself rests in a profoundly rustic Welsh dresser which came to me through my parents’ protracted move.  Since this pen doesn’t sit comfortably in the drawer, it gets to sit on top of the inks which take up the space one is meant to stick letters in the box.

I didn’t even have to open the glass doors on the top of the dresser to establish that the pen wasn’t where it should have been.  But of course, one does, and roots around.  Did it get in behind? No.  Down the side?  Nope.  And that was it for the easy possibilities.  We then start the unhappy game of I put it down somewhere foolish.

Our house is… cluttered.  My son builds railways on all horizontal surfaces.  We haven’t yet finished the integration of crap from the parents’ house with our pre-existing crap.  We have to use plastic containers full of Lego, roughly shoe-box size, to keep the insane diabetic cat off items of furniture we don’t want her to mistake for a litter box (if we’re not sitting on it, then it’s a litter box).  Setting down a pen without attending to where one sets it, even a relatively large pen, makes for problems.

So, when not attending The Regular Job and not otherwise engaged in cooking, washing, or cleaning up after the flippin’ cat, I was peering under things and into corners, all to no avail.  I was becoming resigned to the idea that the pen would not be found until the slow campaign of making the house a place for living in (insane diabetic cats already with 14 birthdays on the clock can’t last forever…) removed whatever it was hidden by.  This wasn’t a devastating blow by any means, as (i) I’ve got plenty of other pens to fall back on and (ii) this one cost less than burger at McKing&W.  I wasn’t happy, as I’d hardly had any use out of the thing since its recent arrival, but I could cope.

Coping only had to struggle on until this morning, as it turned out.  It turns out that it was in the pocket of a shirt worn on Sunday.  Not much worn* either, which is why it got hung up rather that chucked in the laundry… unlike the shirt from Saturday, which I had roused out of the hamper and given a pat down, because my search was wide-ranging if unscientific.  Hooray!

Some minutes of pointless self-castigation then followed.

There was something to learn from this incident.  Not that I have all too human failings in the areas of retention and looking after my stuff– that has, alas, been well-known for a long time.  It is the simple and happy discovery that the cap seap on this pen is very good indeed; almost a week standing point-up, but not a moment of hesitation when I opened it up to start writing this morning.  Not bad for a pen that costs the same as a ride on a city bus.

Today’s inexpensive, elusive pen: Jinhao 159
Today’s ink: Herbin Éclat de Saphir

*”Not much worn” meaning duration of contact with me since last washing.  It is, in all honesty, profoundly worn and is a “Weekend when I don’t expect to interact with others” item of clothing.

Summer Heat and Warm Thoughts

I’m about to embark on my summer vacation, which takes me away from the Regular Job entirely and the internet to as great a degree as I can manage (because it turns from a welcome distraction into a vexatious distraction).  I’ll be using the time in the following ways:

1. Throwing out stuff I should have thrown out when clearing out the parents’ house instead of letting Nostalgia shove me around;
2. Throwing out stuff so my son won’t have to do item (1) in 35 years;
3. Committing small acts of home repair as a proof of good intention to the house;
4. Small acts of sympathetic magic in hopes of convincing wealth to shower upon my household (already begun, as you may note from the roster of “Rich Man’s Pens” that are showing up in my rotation);
5. Getting my son as much locomotive time as possible in celebration of his birthday– there’s a steam engine and an archaic diesel within reach;
6. Submitting more stories to more markets;
7. Please, please, please some writing, because the boy’s at school still for almost the whole period that I’m not and I should have time even with the previous chores standing in my way.

I may also, if something particularly interesting lurches up in front of me, stick my head in here, but don’t count on any more than a large and oddly formatted progress report in early July.

And now, because it’s Friday, let’s have some films.  First, something sizzling hot pen action!

Seriously, folks– don’t get your old pens near an ignition source.

To balance all that horror, here’s something I’d actually like to be present for:

…and may one day, should my efforts at conjuring bear fruit.  Have a nice solstice, everyone, and I’ll see you next month.

Today’s pen: Parker 75

Today’s ink: Lamy Black (more old cartridge tidying underway, see point (2) above as well as last week’s complaint)