When I’m in a hurry, I abandon cursive. Goodbye loops, goodbye shading, goodbye thick and thin lines that swoop and scroll into descenders, ascenders and pretenders in between. My G looks like a 6, my R can’t be bothered to close its loop like a lady. Slow writing isn’t necessarily slow thinking. Sometimes the words …
Month: September 2008
If a haiku were reincarnated as a pen, it would be the Nakaya Piccolo. The seminal Nakaya pen has to be the Piccolo in the kuro-tamenuri (blackish red) finish. It is a triumph of aesthetic restraint. It was the first Nakaya I liked, but the one I never bought, until last weekend. The shape, size …
Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago” is the kind of album that enters your temples and seeps down your arteries and spreads down your spine and slices through and out with bloodied wings. I have been a fan of the Takeaway Shows since last year. Bon Iver in a Montmartre apartment doing Flume – what …
My first thought was oh, so that’s what A2DP is for. The BH-503 version I have is black with red accents. It matches my N82, but I didn’t think of that when I bought it. I wanted a Bluetooth stereo headset primarily for music, secondarily for calls. The majority of headsets in the market have …
Near the end of a particularly vicious week, I received a message from Jenny. She said her daughter was dropping off a surprise for me at the office, and it had an “outside and an inside.” What a surprise it was. I had to leave for a meeting, and opened the box when I returned …
In all the fuss about Google Chrome, and IE 8 the Advertiser Freakout, I almost missed the Flock 2.0 beta release. The tabs look more more raised, text rendering is looser, there’s still no way to refresh the People sidebar (whose top bar now sports an underwhelming beige background). If you’re a feeder, you’ll like …
In the fountain pen community, they’re called frankenpens. Pieced from pens that otherwise would have rested in peace, frankenpens are the inevitable creations of mad people who wince at the thought of handling a ballpen. My first (and only) frankenpen is a Parker 61 put together from three Parker 61s. It has a turquoise section, …
It washes over me, and keeps me warm at night. Hello there, Bob Mould. Good to listen to you again, after all this time. Even better to see the red lights streaking past, almost in time with the curl and wail of Sugar guitar, as if this city were nothing but streaming video to your …
I forgot my settings. Let’s try this one more time, baby.
Were it not for The Week That Was, I wouldn’t have made it through the week that was. The Week That Was is part of what happened to Field Music, whose Tones of Town was on my heavy rotation playlist last year. (The video for In Context even inspired a storyboard – that wasn’t approved, …