Monty by Jim Meddick for December 28, 2021

What a gINK!

It takes a special touch, and the right ink to make them work correctly.

Be sure to select a script font.

Monty “Charlie Brown” Montahue

In the 50s I ruined a lot of white school uniform shirts with mandated leaky BIC clones. Never had any issues with the previously mandated fountain pens.

I’ve been noticing a trend. Some cards defy you to write anything in them. The paper is coated with something that gums up the roller on ink pens and sharpies either blotch and spread or lie wet on the surface never drying.

My mom always told me that “Thank You” notes need to be handwritten. I write cursive so seldom now that my writing is pretty bad, almost illegible, so I write slow. But, they can figure out it’s a “thank you”, that is what counts.

Heh, how many things like that have I purchased?

Fountain pen? Sounds like your uncle was cleaning out an old desk drawer…

I believe that, in Milwaukee, those are called bubbler pens.

Guess it wasn’t so fancy.

I used a fountain pen at work, by choice, just to be retro, and to be forced to slow down, and discourage others from using it. When others asked, “…can I borrow your pen?”, for quick tasks, I replied, “Sure…but it is a fountain pen, so you have to be attentive and more careful or you’ll smear ink…”; they routinely found someone else’s pen to use / walk off with.

We stopped sending Christmas cards years ago, but my wife still sends thank you notes via mail and birthday cards for the kids and grandkids. Personally, I’m glad the trend is away from cards because writing with a pen is painful for me (arthritis in my thumbs). I can type okay, although I make more typos now since I don’t use my thumbs. Email is no problem and I’m learning to text, although I don’t like that medium.

What? No, that first letter was perfect. Should’ve sent it exactly like that.

The solution these days is to use an X-Y plotter to write your notes in script after you’ve typed them.

Fountain pens are obsolete except as $10000 prestige items for the over-monied Elite.

Hail to the cheap ballpoint pen!

Long ago I had a Fisher “Space Pen”—a ball point, it claimed to be able to write under water, over grease, upside-down, in space, or whatever. (I see that they’re still around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen ). It was awful—it got gummed up, the ink clotted on paper, the end product looked like Dilbert’s. (I’m willing to believe that I had a lemon, or that they’ve greatly improved by now.)

More recently, I got a 12-pack of a popular name brand ball-point at Costco; the leaking ink ruined the pockets of several of my shirts before I caught on and relegated them to “desk-only” status. These days I use the 4-colour ones (with a stylus on top) that I buy by the handful at the dollar store.