Tag pens

Gifts For Him

Yes, Steak And A Blowjob Day was last month, and Father’s Day is TWO months away, but it’s never a bad time to be thinking about that special XY in your life.

Amazon UK offers this lovely and tasteful Gentleman’s Willy Care Kit, featuring everything the discerning gentilhomme needs to keep his meat and two veg well-coiffed, all for only £7.62 (about $12.45). Just don’t forget to remind your fella he shouldn’t put aftershave on his testicles after he shaves them.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…but sometimes it’s also a pen. The famed Cohiba cigar from Cuba is recognized as one of the finest in the entire world. Sadly, “real” Cohibas, the kind that Fidel Castro enjoys, remain technically legally unavailable in the United States, although it’s possible to buy them online and in other countries. But you can buy this real-looking handmade enamel ballpoint pen that looks just like a Cohiba cigar and even has an authentic Cohiba band on it. Just don’t forget it’s a pen and try to light it up, mm’kay?

Okay, it’s not exactly Batman’s utility belt, but if your man is the type who can’t be without his tools, maybe he’d like a belt with a set of built-in screwdrivers. You might even be able to sneak this past the TSA if you play it cool when they give you the Freedom Grope.

As an Old School Geek, I have to say that I would seriously love to have this retro Commodore 64 PC. You might remember that a couple of years ago somebody bought the rights to the Commodore 64 name and their original plan was to slap the logo on a standard desktop tower. That plan fizzled, though, and instead they opted to squeeze the guts of a contemporary PC (1.8Ghz Intel Atom processor, 2-4GB RAM, NVIDIA graphics, etc.) into the classic latte-colored Golden Age Commodore case. The product was announced a year ago, but is finally available for reals. The fully-loaded model is $895, but you can downgrade some elements and save a few bucks if you want.

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But Bapu, You Must Write SOMETHING

gandhi pen

Reporter: What do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a very good idea.

From the Department of “U R Doin’ It Rong”, Mumbai Branch:

Luxury pen maker Mont Blanc has designed a limited-edition pen featuring the likeness of Mohandas K. Gandhi in rhodium on the nib, a saffron-colored opal on the clip, and an engraving of Gandhi’s signature on the barrel, all for the low, low price of $25,000. Mont Blanc has made a donation to the Gandhi Foundation, but is otherwise not donating proceeds from sales to any charity. Realizing that the $25,000 price tag puts this pen out of the reach of all but the richest collectors, Mont Blanc has issued a much more reasonably-priced ballpoint pen that will only set you back about $3500

Sidebar: Here is a piece by George Orwell about Gandhi written around the time of the Partition, shortly before Gandhi’s death, in 1949. During his lifetime, Gandhi was not as globally revered and publicly sanctified as he would become after his assassination, especially in Britain. That air of British suspicion that Gandhi was just another scheming wog pervades the essay, even as Orwell tries to distance himself from such suspicions (without much success, I’d say).

Western adoption of Gandhi as a saint-like personage came in steps, especially as 1960s counterculture looked for non-Western role models to shake up centuries of Great White Men, culminating in the 1980 film by Richard Attenborough that gave American audiences the boiled-down idiot version they needed to grasp his significance (provided they could sit through the whole movie). Reading a piece written by a contemporary, especially someone who would come to earn his own political significance after his own death, is a good way to strip away some of the perhaps-unearned deification. Buying a $25,000 pen is not.

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The Pen And The Sword

A pair of articles about a dying generation of Japanese craftsmen and their art:

This is master sushi knife maker Keijiro Doi, who has been making these razor-sharp knives by hand in the city of Sakai for sixty years. Sakai is world-famous for its knives. Food writer and blogger Harris Salat wrote this piece in Salon a couple of weeks ago explaining the process, his visit with Doi at his knifeworks, and a little bit about Japanese knives in general. As it so happens, the Discovery Channel series “Some Assembly Required” also visited Doi in a segment for that series, which I saw on TV only a couple of days before reading this article. If you’re interested in seeing the master at work, check the Discovery Channel schedule to see when this segment is being re-run.

The MAKEzine blog recently had a link to this article at sister magazine PingMag MAKE about a man known as “The God Of Fountain Pens”. Nobuyoshi Nagahara has worked for the Sailor Pen company in Hiroshima for more than 50 years, making, designing and repairing fountain pens and pen nibs. Technically, he’s retired, but he continues to spend his days fixing pens and nibs at his workbench.

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Dick Cheney’s Favorite Pen

Dick Cheney's Pen

I have it on good faith that this pen, which uses blood fed via a loaded syringe, was actually used by the Dark Lord himself to sign all those no-bid contracts with Halliburton. There was also that little-known bit of paperwork with a fellow who signed the guest book as B. Elzebub, but he may have brought his own pen to the signing. (via)

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Like An Artist’s Brush

pens

I may not collect fountain pens anymore, but I still love to look at them. Because people don’t use them as everyday writing instruments anymore, modern fountain pens tend to be elaborate and highly decorative, but there were certainly many fountain pens in the past that were beautifully designed as well as practical. This collector not only collects old fountain pens (among other things), he also photographs them. Nice work.

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Scribo, ergo sum

Yoropen

I used to enjoy collecting pens a few years back, but I gave up on it after a while. I’ve had a problem with a pinched nerve in my left shoulder for the last 10 years or so, and it reached the point at one time that trying to write by hand was too painful to sustain for any length of time. These days the pinched nerve isn’t quite as painful as it used to be, but I rarely write anything more than my signature or to jot down a quick note, so if you’re not going to write with a pen, what’s the sense of buying more of them, eh?

This morning, Joe at bookofjoe had a post about this ergonomic pen called the “Yoropen”. It’s designed for the most comfortable writing position, while also making it possible to see what you’re writing at the same time (which many ergonomic pens do not do). If you can bear to dig through the terrible Flash-based website at that link, you can find out a lot more about the pens, and you can even order them online directly, however Joe also has this link to an online retailer who sells the basic pen for a lot less than they do. For less than $20 for the pen and some refills, I will probably order one and see if it lets me do a little more handwriting than I’ve been able to manage for the last few years.

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