Author Archives: DELively

Close But Not Closed

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Today was a mishmash of regular work and side projects and some sifting but not much was actually accomplished.

I was at home all day because I was babysitting and although I managed to finish my “work” for the day, it took a while as I attempted to organize and sort pens and ink.

I have customer with a large order and a hefty stack of ink to put up for sale. I also have a bunch of pens that are in the “no, really, use it one more time” phase of sales.

Somewhere in there I cooked lunch for our youngest.

Tomorrow (today actually) we will go to a candy street where I will pretend that I’m not going to buy the cinnamon candy and ginger candy, but in the end I will walk about with both. I will also be “working” by taking pictures of the area to use for “work” next week.

It is all as silly as it sounds, and it left me feeling annoyed and off-kilter enough that I didn’t actually finish much.

My follow-through was shot and except as a topic, I didn’t care much. Just one of those days.

Farewell Parties

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They were generous with the booze, but not with the food, which is not usually how I like school parties.

Tonight was a farewell party for two English teachers at the school where I work. One is moving to Tibet (long story) and the other has found a full time job and will, within a few months, wish he was in Tibet.

The event started with booze, which was unusual because they usually start with random appetizers of questionable content and origin. After a while we got salad, tuna, tofu, and raw vegetables. After that was more booze.

After enough booze I found myself looking around for a menu. Food hadn’t arrived in a long time and I thought we were expected to order it. During a school party, food is usually a form of self-defense. It provides something to do other than drink and it helps slow down the impact of the booze.

It turned out I was wrong, though. We didn’t have to order because after a while more food arrived.

The trouble is, by the end of the evening, a lot more booze than food had arrived, which magnified the power of the booze. (In defense of the restaurant, they served bourbon neat, even though it wasn’t on the menu and were generous with the amount.)

On the other hand, they were generous with the amount, which means I’ll soon have regrets. Especially as there wasn’t much food.

 

Bad Holiday Habits

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I’m in the middle of a holiday, which means I’m pretty much back in university.

My schedule has started to reverse from normal working man daylight hours to vampire hours. I stay up later than I could and get up later than I could and do less writing than I could. That said, it’s mostly relaxing.

I manage to do the work that’s not work that the company I work for requires. I do that even though today’s “work” required lots of disc searches until I realized that I’d probably lost the text I was searching for in a memory stick crash a few years ago. I’d managed to recover the photos after the crash (which involved Linux and lots of swearing) but I’d lost all the other documents.

This means I’ll actually have to write some stuff–or more accurately, write it again–but I get to count trips downtown, even if I’m only shopping, as research.

I’ll do some of that tomorrow (more accurately, later today) when I take some pictures before having lunch.

Bond, James Bond and On and On and On

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Because I believe in setting a bad example for my kids, I always have some sort of television show or movie on in the background while I mark exams. In theory it provides a mild distraction, but in reality it’s just that it’s usually more interesting than actually marking exams.

(Note: this does not prevent me from telling the girls to turn off the television when they study. Yes, I am THAT kind of dad.)

For last term’s marking season, as it was rather stretched out, I decided to watch all the James Bond films (Eon Productions only) starting with Doctor No and ending with Spectre.

It was an interesting trip.

First, I should acknowledge “My” Bond. Everyone has a Bond who is “their” bond. He’s the first Bond they remember seeing and everyone else is “Who the HELL is that?” when you see reruns or the next Bond is announced. (There is a similar phenomenon with Doctor Who: there is Tom Baker, David Tennant, and “Who the HELL is that?”.) In my case “My” Bond is Roger Moore and that effects the way I view all the other Bonds.

I also find with Bond movies it’s necessary to rephrase a line from My Favorite Year: “With Bond, you forgive a lot, you know?”

The Sean Connery movies started out strong then got crappy as he became more detached from the part and less and less cool. George Lazenby’s movie was excellent but it’s probably best he only did one.

Roger Moore’s movies start out average then get better and, with a couple exceptions, are less campy than I remembered. Moonraker was better than I remembered, although I’ll never forgive them for ruining Jaws: “His name’s Jaws, he kills people; unless he sees impressive cleavage and then he’s just a horny, heterosexual male incapable of maintaining focus on the task at hand.”

In other words, they turned Jaws into James Bond.

Timothy Dalton’s movies are also better than I remembered, although I always remember liking him in the part. Pierce Brosnan’s movies are much more campy–and him a lot more lifeless–than I remembered (and I’ll never forgive the switch to BMW). Daniel Craig is awesome, but only has 2.5 good movies. (Skyfall was good but its plot relied on the London train system running precisely on time which is the most unbelievable thing done in any of the movies; even less believable than Sean Connery passing as Japanese in You Only Live Twice.)

I also came away having a hard time picking a favorite, although if you stick a golden gun to my head I’ll have to say Goldfinger, which may be the quintessential Bond as it’s full of gadgets, funny lines, a henchman with a killer hat, the Aston Martin DB5, and Honor Blackman. After that is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Casino Royale (the Daniel Craig version). I also have a soft spot for For Your Eyes Only, which has one of my favorite movie car moments.

The worst movies are You Only Live Twice, A View to a Kill, Quantam of Solace, which also wins the award for worst title (yes, it even beats out grab her by the Octopussy. Um, too soon?), Tomorrow Never Dies, and The Man With the Golden Gun, which even Saruman couldn’t save.

It’s harder to rank the Bond Girls, although I tend to favor the ones who show some sort of capability or competence. Honor Blackman is a favorite despite having the worst character name (Pussy Galore); Barbara Bach as Anya Amasova aka Agent Triple X in The Spy Who Loved Me; Michelle Yeoh as the best part of Tomorrow Never Dies; Lois Chiles as Holly Goodhead (yeah, well, okay) in Moonraker;  Carole Bouquet in For Your Eyes Only; Sophie Marceau, who serves as both Bond Girl and villain in The World is Not Enough (which may be my favorite Brosnan Bond film); and Eva Green as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale.

Grace Jones was a good villain, but was mostly wasted in A View to a Kill. 

I also kind of like Mie Hama as Kissy Suzuki in You Only Live Twice as she’s one of the first Bond Girls to remind Bond that “this is business” and that business comes before “honeymoon”. (Other than that, she was mostly useless in the movie except as a bikini model who looks beautiful in the sunset.)

I also have to give credit to Dame Judi Dench for playing two different versions of M. The M in the Brosnan movies is different in many ways than the M in the Daniel Craig movies.

(The treatment of women in the movies is another post entirely, but as historical moments it is interesting to see how the treatment changes over the years. With Bond, you forgive a lot, you know?)

The stunts also change a lot from the days when they actually dropped stunt men down cliffs in For Your Eyes Only to crappy CGI surfing in later movies.

One does tire of gun battles on ski slopes. However, that seems to be as much a right of passage as boat chases and saying the line “Bond. James Bond.” The ski slope battles, though, are more interesting than the endless underwater battles in Thunderball and For Your Eyes Only.  (During the former, I spent part of the time looking up what type of knife the divers were using just to have something interesting to do. Yes, I was still, technically, supposed to be marking exams.)

The first obvious product placement is Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize ) taking a bottle of Tabasco sauce to Scaramanga on a silver platter in The Man With the Golden Gun.

As for the future, I’ll be interested to see where they take the movies once Daniel Craig leaves. I like his anti-hero portrayal of 007, and the realistic style of his movies and think he will be hard to follow. As much as I’d like to see Idris Elba in the part, he may be approaching his expiration date (I feel his pain). Tom Hiddleston would also be good, but there’s that Marvel Extended Universe thing to contend with. Tom Hardy would also be an interesting choice as he keeps the Daniel Craig physicality.

I just hope they don’t do another reboot. I’d happily adopt the “James Bond is a codename, not a person” theory so long as they make new movies and not just remake old ones.

That said, even if they do another reboot, I’ll still watch the next Bond movie. With Bond, you forgive a lot. You know?

I know.

Here Goes That Again

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Tomorrow I’ll go back to work without ever leaving the house and that has me kind of cranky today.

I’ve written before about the period of “house arrest” the company I work for subjects me to, but this year there have been some changes that might make it more interesting.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the powers what are want to develop a database of information about the different areas we live, because, well, because they can and they need something for us to do to justify paying us when we have nothing to do just to show us they can make us do things.

That means that taking the girls sightseeing will count as “research” toward the project (How to Enjoy My Town with the Family, etc). Granted, I’ll have to eventually produce some kind of writing, but since I’ve already written something like that for the company the first time they tried something like this, I’ll just revise what I’ve written (after doing “further research” of course).

Some where in there I’ll actually have to do some actual work related to the school where I work and there will be a “training session” of some sort that will count as a “work” day.

That will end with the actual job starting. (There are other complicating factors, but more on those in a future post.)

Fear of Missing Out on Cash

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I’ve heard it argued, from many sources, that one of the reasons people become pen addicts is the inability to resist the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).

A new product comes available, probably via Kickstarter, and you rush to get it. Then another one comes out and you rush to get that, too. You’re afraid you won’t have something that people you’ve never met have and are talking about on podcasts. If it’s a fountain pen, you need ink, so you rush to get the newest ink. (If it’s Kingdom Note ink, then you’ve probably acquired that from me, their unofficial global distributor.)

Suddenly you find you’ve got more pens and ink than you can use and you’ve also figured out which ones you don’t like and they’ve ended up in pen cases and boxes while you acquire new pens that you actually use, at least for a short time.

Eventually, though, you have to get rid of stuff and that’s when things get complicated. You know, for example, you don’t like the clear Kaweco Classic Sport you bought and used a couple times, but you suddenly can’t part with it because you’re not sure how much you should charge for it.

You’re not only afraid that no one will want it if you put it up for sale, which is kind of embarrassing, you’re also afraid you’ll miss out on one or two dollars if you charge less than it’s worth which will make  you feel foolish.

Intellectually you understand that any loss you take between what you paid and what you sell for counts as a kind of “rental fee” for the time you used the pen, but the emotional part of you is afraid of missing out. You want your money back and you’d rather have nothing for the pen than miss out on getting what the pen is worth.

In my case, I’ve got fifteen pens to sell, including an OMAS Ogiva, a couple Pilot vanishing points (including one from 1964 and a couple “faceted” versions) and a few others, but now I’m stuck on figuring out what to charge. Or, more accurately, I’m stuck on not actually wanting to get rid of them even if I don’t use them and I’m using price as an excuse.

That is part of addiction: knowing the right thing to do and then not doing it.  And then acquiring another pen because of the fear of missing out, even though it’s the wrong thing to do.

The 18th Mitsukoshi Fountain Pen Festival

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It was the food that made me mad and that probably jaded my reaction to today. Well, that and the long wait.

To understand what’s wrong with the Mitsukoshi Fountain Pen Festival (and the Maruzen version, for that matter) you have to imagine the oldest, most prestigious department store in your town or city holding an annual festival featuring socks.

The store invites a few makers who demonstrate different techniques for making socks, and who will fix your worn out socks if you’re lucky enough to get an appointment, they may even offer a Sock Festival exclusive pair of socks, but mostly what’s being sold is stock from the store and it’s being sold by the clerks who sell it every day. They can recite materials and manufacturing techniques and statistics and even let you handle some of the material but they do so without passion. They have a product, they sell it, but it’s no more important to the store than the food being sold nearby or the fine China on the other side of the festival space.

Today, to get to the Fountain Pen Festival, I had to walk through a large food event that brought dozens and dozens of noisy people. The food displays ended right across the walking path from the fountain pen festival but the noise traveled quite far. During a special fountain pen art display, and short speech by the head of Pelikan Japan, the speakers had to use microphones to speak to the dozen or so people gathered to participate or listen whilst behind the audience food salesman hawked their wares.

And, of course, pictures were not allowed.

Despite this, I set out to have a good time, and tried to crash the Sailor pen experts repair line to get my Nagasawa Profit’s nib straightened. He sent me to a different counter to get an appointment. Although it was noon, my appointment was for 3:15. This wouldn’t have bothered me except I was pretty sure that in the time it took me to fill out my name on the card he could have straightened the nib and been done with me. I was annoyed enough that I went to Maruzen for lunch (yes, I had lunch at at bookstore. So what? I had ice cream too.)

One thing I like about the Mitsukoshi pen festival–and it is my favorite of the two–is that many of the manufacturers, especially Pilot, Platinum, Nakaya, Eboya and Pelikan have sample pens for  you to try. In the past, though, they’ve also had two tables of samples, complete with lots of notepads. This year, though, the tables were gone and it took me an hour to realize that they’d been moved to a single table mixed in with the counters. I’d thought it was a pen manufacturer and had passed it a couple times.

Eventually, I sat down and started testing different pens, but the table also featured a woman whose job, it seemed, was talk incessantly to the man sitting next to me. I’m still not certain if I crashed an appointment or not, but at that point I was in “don’t understand if it’s not convenient” mode.

(Note: this mode is a variation on “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission” but in this case it’s easier to pretend you don’t understand what’s being said and just keep doing what you’re doing.)

Whilst checking out the Aurora table and the Optima’s and 88s, I saw a bottle of Aurora Blue-Black ink. It quickly became mine. (Later I came back and actually tried the pens.)

The only thing I bought:

Pilot had a special event where a handwriting expert (at least I assume that’s what he was) asked you to write with a pen that was wired to the board on which you were writing and that was connected to a computer. This action produced a computer read out of how you write, including the writing angle, which helped him choose a Pilot nib for you.

Finally, at 3:00, a Sailor counter person took pity on me and sent me to the Sailor repair man. As I predicted, he took less than five minutes to pull the feed and straighten the nib. I could have done all this myself, but as I hope to sell the pen, I thought it best to let an expert handle it.

After my pen was fixed, I exited as quickly as I could. If it hadn’t been for the noise, I’d have probably enjoyed it more. Well, except for the three hour wait. I doubt I could have handled that better.

The Missing Ink

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Last Sunday I failed miserably, but not in the usual way.

The 18th Mitsukoshi World Fountain Pen Festival started this week after years of forgetting I finally remembered to call and try to schedule an appointment with the Sailor pens ink blender.

The call-in, drop-in time was 10:30 last Sunday and I had the number entered in my phone and right as it clicked 10:30 I pressed call. I got a busy signal.

Oddly, She Who Must Be Obeyed also helped by calling on our landline. After 20 minutes of attempts, all we got was a busy signal. I suspect this means that there was a line of people at the store  and they stole all the appointments. Because, let’s face it, if I didn’t get what I wanted it was because of theft. Something like that.

(Note: There were only about 40 appointments available over the two days.)

This won’t stop me from attending the pen festival, but it probably means I won’t buy anything. I will try to sneak into line at the Sailor booth to see if I can get a pen fixed. I’ll also play with as many pens as I can. Then I’ll run away before temptation sets in. Probably.

 

A Little of That and Less of This

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First it had to go, then I remembered a use for it, now it needs a place.

This means that Purge and Clean Day got off to a bad start.

I’ve written before about the process involved in culling pens, but there’s also an odd situation involved when culling the piles of random scraps of paper, half filled notebooks, full notebooks, empty notebooks, notes from old classes, assignments from old classes, roll sheets from old classes.

The latter three are the easiest to deal with: remove from folders, pull out staples, put everything in book bag, carry to shredder.

If I could do that with everything else, the process would be a lot easier.

Instead, the empty notebook pile gets reorganized and set aside. The full notebooks get set aside for later review as, by colossal coincidence, has been the case for the past several Purge and Clean Days.

The half-filled notebooks get the filled parts pulled out simultaneously creating more random scraps of paper and more empty notebooks.

The random scraps of paper then get reviewed. The trouble is that because so much paper was eliminated because of the old student related folders, it feels as if there’s plenty of room for the random scraps and therefore sorting them is not that much of a priority.

Today I looked at the pile of 10 Ideas from the past few years and threw them away. Then a couple minutes later I reconsidered and started copying a few of the more interesting ideas–see The Economic Reasons from the pen culling post.

This means I temporarily acted on the idea I had planned a year or so ago. I guess that counts as progress. At least it will once I figure out a place to store it. Of course this was a problem the last time I wrote about the ideas so the Purge and Clean Day needs some rethinking.

 

 

Spiral Bound Bits of Hell

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After using them for a large portion of my education, I finally reached the conclusion that I hate spiral bound notebooks in all their various forms.

I only bring this up because at last year’s ISOT I was given a spiral notebook as a free sample from a Korean notebook manufacturer. I frowned inside at it, and since I have no poker face whatsoever that means I frowned outside at it too, but I accepted it because it was free and I was interested in the smartphone app that accompanied it. (As used notebooks pile up around me in the variety room/office, digitizing my scrawls and scraps has become increasingly important to me.) I put off testing it but feel that since it was given for evaluation it’s only fair that I evaluate it.

I’ll get to that review in another post. Today, though, I want to trash the binding. As I’ve used the notebook, I’ve begun to remember the reasons I stopped using spiral bound notebooks. (Note: I count anything bound with continuous metal rings as “spiral bound”.)

–The binding is thicker than the notebook which means the binding inevitably gets mashed and mangled if it’s carried in a bag.

–The binding is thicker than the notebook making them impossible to stack.

–If you do stack them, they wire binding gets stuck together.

–They only work well on one side but your hand rests on the binding when you’re using the other side which makes them uncomfortable to use.

Since I’m right handed, this is the only side of the spiral bound notebook that works for me.

This side sucks and leaves marks.

–When you tear pages out you get the fuzzy bits that seem to get all over everything.

–When you tear pages out there’s always a piece of fuzzy bit that gets stuck in the binding.

I remember professors insisting that we cut off the fuzzy bits before we turned in assignments. The fuzzy bits were only slightly less hated than the dreaded slippery plastic cover.

I’m more forgiving of top-bound notebooks like the Nock Co. DotDash Spiral Pad or the Field Notes Byline, especially as the Byline attempts to protect the binding, but they are still problematic.

I dug through some old writing journals and found an old spiral notebook I saved for some reason, probably the contents (more on those in a future post). The spiral is getting grungy and probably about to rust.

It may be time to digitize the contents and rid myself of the last remnants of spiral bound in the house. Well, at least once I finish the review of the one I got from Korea.