Mouse Farts in a Wind Tunnel

May 16, 2003

Commentaries on Cheap Pens

I love Phil Agre. I have been reading his mailing list, Red Rock Eater, since 1994 or 1995. The list is not nearly as busy as it once was, which is a shame. Phil had the sort of sensibility that drives some bloggers but long before blogs were invented. He also has an ability to write clearly and a wide-ranging set of interests that few bloggers can hope to duplicate. To read through the archives of the list is to follow a panoply of social concerns that arose with the growth of the internet. Privacy, human-machine interface, and the economics of internet access are only a few of the subjects addressed over the years.

Have blogs made Red Rock Eater obsolete? No way! More than anything, we need Phil Agre's unique voice and viewpoint, much more so than an occasional list of pointers that trickles out of California at infrequent intervals. Come back, Phil, we need you!

An exciting development in the area of cheap pens... Stephan Somogyi has sent me a 1.2mm Pilot Super-GP ballpoint pen from a place that I am now dying to visit: the Kinokuniya store inside the Japan Center in San Francisco. (It's across from the Kinokuniya bookstore.) Stephan tells me that they have almost every disposable pen imaginable, and all their pens are imported from Japan. The Super-GP ballpoint pen that he sent me must be tried to be believed. It's a ballpoint, but it feels completely different. The ink flow is both hypersmooth and somehow rubbery in a good way -- similar to the gel pens but better in my opinion. It has a rubber grip for your fingers, the cap clicks shut persuasively, and it has some cool Japanese writing on it. It does demand to be oriented almost vertical to the paper; it becomes scratchy at a steeper angle than most pens. (Stephan points out that this is inevitable given the 1.2mm ball size.) But that's alright for most purposes when you're sitting with good posture and writing on a horizontal surface. If anybody else gets a chance to pass through the Kinokuniya store, do tell me about anything else you find there. (RRE, 11/15/98)

The cheap pen thing is Phil at his sweetest... "Look, I'm a compulsive geek, and isn't it fun! Pens!! Pens!!" Writing instruments are at the root of many obsessions, at least in a world where soul exists. The thing that fascinates me so much about Phil's love of them is that he obviously uses them to write and write and write. He needs to communicate and is fascinated by modes of communication -- discursiveness at its most elemental.

Having been directed by several knowlegeable RRE subscribers, I just got back from an expedition to the Kinokuniya stores in LA's Little Tokyo. Both of them -- a small stationery store on the second floor of the Yaohan supermarket at 4th and Alameda and the stationery department of the Kinokuniya bookstore on the second floor of the Weller Court shopping mall at 2nd and San Pedro -- have perhaps a couple dozen models of Japanese pens that I haven't seen elsewhere. I dropped thirty clams and got two Sakura Ballsign gel pens (including one in the series that writes on black paper -- look for the sparkly cap), a couple of Uni-Ball Signos, a couple of Uni Lakubos, a Pentel Hybrid "milky" pen (prominently advertised as the thing for teens), a Tombo Coat highlighter/fax marker, a Super-GP 0.7 (to compare with the 1.2 that Stephan Somogyi sent me from the Kinokuniya store in San Francisco), a Pilot Hi-Tec-C, a large mysterious gold-colored Pilot with a spring-action tip that I haven't gotten working yet, a Pilot V-corn, and a Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V5C. Only the last two are liquid-ink pens, both seemingly variants on pens that I've gotten elsewhere. I'll let you know more about these pens (and a couple of pens with marbly multi-colored ink that I've left in my car) once I've had a chance to road-test them. (RRE, 12/15/1998)

I have a thing for pens, too, but it's of a different species. I love to have pens and pencils and all manner or markers, but I don't use them that much. I've never been compelled to write. Having pens (et. al.) may be part of my "having stuff" compulsion. I can date its inception to sometime in sixth grade grade, when Chris F. came to school with a whole passel of pens and markers that he had shoplifted from Cochran's Drugstore. He started a brief craze in penlifting among my classmates. I have a block in that I can't remember if I ever took any pens or just considered it. Those fat magic markers called to me.

This is one intuition behind the frivolous aspects of the list, like my reviews of cheap pens. It's fun to review these pens, and to have people send me pens, and to imagine that someone out there is thinking about the list every time they list their groceries, and such reasons would probably be reason enough to keep me typing my reviews. But the pen reviews and other small rituals also serve a bigger purpose of helping to confer a personality on the list, so that everyone can feel as though the individual messages all hang together, in a sense, as one big message. (RRE, 1/19/1999)

One big message Right there, the soul of humankind.

More on cheap pens. (People keep calling them "disposable", which isn't very nice at all.) I have been impressed lately with the endless profusion of new pen models from Pilot. I presume that they are engaged in a characteristic Japanese competitive strategy called "product churning" -- blanketing the market with different designs (see John Heskett, The growth of industrial design in Japan, in John Zukowsky, ed, Japan 2000: Architecture and Design for the Japanese Public, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1998). In any case, let us consider some of the models that I've come across most recently.

Start with the Hi-Techpoint V5C. You may recall my recommendation of the Precise Rolling Ball V7, a new generation of Pilot's pioneering liquid-ink pen, the secret of whose smooth handling (in contrast to the scratchy V5) is that it delivers a great deal of ink. Well, that now seems like eons ago. The Hi-Techpoint V5C is so advanced that it provides even smoother handling without even having to disgorge vast quantities of ink. In fact, it took me a couple of days to accustom myself to it: it writes so smoothly that my hand wasn't getting the feedback that normally enables it to determine whether the pen is in contact with the page.

Another liquid-ink Pilot, the equally remarkable P-700 fine, produces a different effect: it is somehow both firmly in contact with the page and frictionlessly walking across it. One doesn't feel the tip of the pen dragging across the page, just a sense of the page itself. This is the first of the new breed of liquid-ink pens that doesn't come with a window showing the ink inside the pen, although its faux-marble design and serrated grip will probably seem old after a while.

The Pilot V-corn, which also uses liquid ink, looks like an improved version of the V-ball. It provides a more solid sense than the others that the tip of the pen is writing a line on the paper. Although it doesn't write as smoothly as the Precise Rolling Ball V7, the solid feeling is reassuring: the tip doesn't feel fragile. It won't break.

You may also recall my pleasure with the ultra-wide-tip Super- GP 1.2 traditional viscous-ink pen that Stephan Somogyi sent me from the Kinokuniya in San Francisco. When I finally went to the Los Angeles branches of Kinokuniya (two of them), I picked up a Super-GP 0.7. It is, as Stephan had warned me, not the same relevation as the 1.2 mm model. But it's a good pen, with one of the better rubber grips. I was surprised that, like the 1.2, the 0.7 wants to be held more vertically than some of the others in order to avoid a scratching sensation.

An RRE reader aimed her Web browser at the Levenger Web site and ordered me a set of Pilot G-2 07 spring-loaded retractables. These are particularly high-quality traditional-ink (or maybe gel) pens in red, blue, and black, with refills.

Finally there's the strange Pilot Hi-Tec-C. It doesn't carry a tip size measurement, but it looks and feels like it's 0.5 mm or perhaps even smaller, maybe even 0.3 mm. It works remarkably well for the very fine line it creates. (It also makes a mockery of the often much wider pens that boast of being "fine" or "extra fine" or "micro".) Even though it is made of transparent plastic, I can't tell what kind of ink it uses. The ink isn't visibly sloshing around, but it feels like liquid ink to write with. I suspect that some of these new pens employ compressed air to keep the ink flowing, in preference to the highly fallible baffle system that regularly causes liquid-ink pens to barf all over your fingers, but I have no way to substantiate this.

At Kinokuniya I also got some non-Pilot pens. You may recall that I listed them all in my notes from December 15th. I won't go into the ones whose novelty is more the packaging or the funny colored ink. That leaves the truly inferior Uni Lakubo, a conventional-ink pen that seems incapable of writing a solid line on the page, and the Uni-Ball Signo, which despite looking similar to the Super-GP is in reality just a relatively good example of the traditional, high-friction style of pen, not worth going out of your way for.

And that's it -- my latest haul of cheap pens. (RRE, 3/15/1999)

The Levenger website, like the Levenger catalog, is a collection of "tools for serious readers." Pens are included there, in some metonymic relationship to reading, being cultured, the culture of elegance and wealth. By and large, these are not cheap pens. There are, however, pre-inked pens -- "the inkly equivalent of pre-owned cars with hardly any mileage." In other words, the Filene's Basement of the literary crowd.

Let us turn now to the world of cheap pens. The "middle column" article on the front page of the 6/15/99 issue of the Wall Street Journal concerned the fashion for gel pens (aka "gelly pens"), especially of the "milky" variety, among American schoolgirls, who have discovered that they are good for writing on one's skin. (The ink wipes off easily.) The pen companies, however, strenuously insist that they do not recommend using their products for this purpose, because to do so they would need approval from the FDA. This is all important cultural news.

I bought a couple batches of pens on a recent trip to Europe. I bought the first batch at the Terminal 1 shopping mall at Heathrow. Maybe this got past you: Heathrow is no longer an airport in any recognizable sense of the word but rather a set of shopping malls that airplanes fly in and out of. They provide only enough seats for the hard-core disabled and the food court eaters, and they don't announce the gates until the last minute to maximize shopping time. The men's stores carry shirts in the most dreadful, chemical-looking colors. It is not a happy place.

Nonetheless, stranded like everyone else in my three-hour layover, I stopped at the Terminal 1 W.H. Smith store to check out the pens. I am positively inclined to W.H. Smith because when I lived in England ten years ago, I used the W.H. Smith A4 sketchpads with the spiral binding on the top and found them very nice. For purposes of writing, a sketchpad should ideally be rather thin, so that one's wrist can rest on the table while writing down toward the bottom half of the page. The W.H. Smith sketchpad was particularly good in that regard, and the spiral binding at the top meant that one's hand isn't always bumping against the spiral binding at the left or right edges of the page. In any case, this experience may have made me unduly credulous about the pens at the Terminal 1 W.H. Smith, for they turned out to be major turkeys.

Take this Pentel Superball BL36. Please. On the right kind of paper it's actually somewhat nice; it produces an usually robust-looking line, and the pen itself is a tiny bit thicker than most others, which is better for my clumsy hands. The problem is that it is exceedingly sensitive about what kind of paper it is used on, and on the wrong kind of paper it is incapable of producing a steady line. I have a semi-serious theory. You know those little pads of paper that stationery stores provide so you can try out the pens? I'm thinking that the W.H. Smith people, or perhaps the Pentel people, provided the Pentel pen display with a pad of test paper that was slightly slicker than your usual writing paper, in order to show the Pentel Superball in the best light. That's my theory. In any case, I must have been in an optimum buying environment, because I also bought a Ball Pentel Fine Point R50, a vinyl-tipped pen whose point is anything but fine. It too works well on particular kinds of paper, but it's really more like a marking pen, useless for writing legible words and sentences. Finally, I bought a Hybrid Gel Grip, which is as you might expect a fair-to-middling gel pen with a rubber grip, nothing terribly special.

My luck changed for the better, however, once I got to Vienna. In the city center I found a couple of shops with very interesting pens. I found a Rotring Xonox Rollerball F. This is the pen whose existence I theorized about in my very first message about pens in November 1997. It resembles the superlative Reynolds Ink Ball, and while it doesn't provide the same sense of gliding precision as the Reynolds it is still quite worthwhile. (I've just realized that I accidentally referred to it way back when as the "Liquid Ball". Oh well. You can see this outstanding pen, by the way, at the Reynolds Web site: . No word yet on whether it is possible to order the pens online.) Far more remarkable, however, is the Super-GP pen that I found with a 1.6mm tip. You will recall my discussion of the 0.7mm and 1.2mm versions that can be found at Kinokuniya stories. 1.2mm is already pretty darn wide for the tip of a pen, at least one meant for writing. Well, this is a 1.6mm, and writing with it is like steering a supertanker into port, except in a good way. Last but not least, I found an Edding Control 77 pen, which resembles the look-and-feel of the Reynolds Ink Ball even more closely than the Xonox, and in fact is very close to it in quality. Much better.

I've had some other, more dubious adventures in pen shopping. At a "design" store recently I bought an Eversharp Astronaut Pressurized Pen. ("Eversharp"? Like maybe you're worried your pen will get dull?) You may recall my speculation that the ink cartridge in the strange Pilot Hi-Tec-C contained pressurized air. Well, that's the Eversharp Astronaut's claim to fame. "Originally designed in the 1960s for use by the astronauts in space, ... [t]he [pen's] design uses pressure, not gravity to push the ink through the barrel ...". (The rest of the sentence wasn't real grammatical so I left it out.) You know how the only reason why any sane person would drink Tang is because the astronauts do? Well, likewise with this crummy pen. Its solid-metal construction, very small size, and ovoid shape seem space-age retro cool just long enough for you to shell out the money to buy it, but then you confront a few earth-bound facts: that the ink gums up on the tip like any old Bic ballpoint, the ovoid shape means that the cap is always shifting around on the back of the pen when you're trying to write with it, and it's too bloody small for any real astronaut to actually use -- unless you happen to be one of those chimpanzees they sent up in the Mercury. Foo. On the other hand, the same design store also sold me a very nice Pinetta spiral-bound sketch pad whose covers are made of wood -- excellent for carrying around in a backpack. It's very Italian, with nicely textured cream-colored A4 pages.

Finally, I've been embarrassed lately by my fervent recommendation of the Pilot P-700 pen. I know several people who went right out and bought them, and they're just not working out. Although one person said he found his P-700 to be scratchy, the real problem I've had is that it doesn't maintain an even line for long periods. It worked fine for the short period that I tested it before reporting on it, but its flaws became evident when I wrote a whole speech in my notebook with it. It is still an interesting kinaesthetic experience to write with one of them, but I'm afraid it's not the last word in cheap pens. (RRE, 6/16/1999)

I love office supplies. I will go to Office Depot to wander around the aisles. It has an immediately calming effect on my nerves. I don't like pens so much for writing with as for being organized and as symbols of order. Orderly aisles full of orderly pens and pencils, three ring binders, and the stuff for the top drawer (staples, rubber bands, paper clips, bottles of white-out, you know -- the top drawer of the desk). Even though I find offices to be deadly and stultifying, I like the stuff that is in offices. It's just so orderly. I think this fascination dates back to when I was even younger, maybe five or six, and I went with my Dad to his office one day. The secretary had lots of cool stuff in her desk to play with. Years later, having been a secretary, I can say that office supplies are often the only redeeming feature of the job. And now we have Post-Its, which were undreamt of in my childhood.

What a privilege it is to live in these times of rapid improvements in technology! The technology we take for granted today is incomparably better than the stuff that seemed so wildly impressive even two years ago. I refer, of course, to cheap pens. The two main lines of evolution in cheap pen technology are, as you know, liquid-ink and gel pens, and lately I have come across especially evolved examples of each. I bought a Zebra Zeb-Roller DX7 in Ireland -- actually I bought the only two I could find and then lost one. It's a liquid ink pen with a cylindrical tip that is similar in philosophy to the Pilot Precise V7 but works a lot better. It is downright therapeutic to write with, totally unscratchy, like gliding on a lubricated surface, without the uneven lines that the V7 often produced. Because its 0.7mm tip produces so much ink, it can bleed when writing on absorbent surfaces. It's not especially precise. Its cheesy brown plastic is not fashionable, though it does have some cool translucent blue near the tip. And like all such pens it runs out of ink fairly quickly. But despite these liabilities, when judged strictly by writeability it's clearly one of the best ever. If I manage to get it into a write-off with one of my Reynolds Ink Balls (which I deliberately left home because they tend to puke on the road) then I'll let you know.

My other discovery is the Paper-Mate Gel-Writer. I don't think of Paper-Mate as a maker of quality cheap pens, and I certainly don't recommend any of the other Paper-Mate pens I've tried. But this one is different. It is a gel pen, somehow like writing with liquidized plastic more than any feeling one would associate with ink. So you have to like that feeling in order to appreciate it. That said, though, the Gel-Writer is the most effortless (or, as we would have said at MIT, least effortful) gel pen I've tried. Its faux- marble barrel is not as cool as it would have been last year, but it's okay. What's really special is what happens as the pen starts running out of ink. I don't understand this technology and wish I did. As best I can understand, the ink is chased down toward the tip by a wad of clear plasticky stuff, which may or may not have compressed air behind it. I wanted to saw the pen open to find out, but I'm traveling and it's not normal behavior to ask the hotel manager if you can borrow a saw. So that particular experiment will have to wait until I get home. Maybe you can try it yourself. Remember your safety goggles.

I've tried several other cheap pens lately that are worth writing about, but they will have wait for another time. (RRE, 10/19/1999)

When I was a kid, we were not allowed to use pens in school until we had been taught how to use them properly. It was deemed that we were sufficiently mature in fourth grade. And we did not use ballpoint pens, we used cartridge pens with nibs. This has to be a holdover from early twentieth century educational traditions, even though it was 1969. I still love the look of writing with these types of pens, but I remember that when I used them it was hopelessly messy and time-wasting. Nevertheless, learning to write with a pen was one step closer to being a grownup. Do schoolchildren still learn how to use pens or have they just become one of a number of writing utensils, with no loving rite of passage?

The world consists of two kinds of people: people who understand the point of writing about cheap pens, and people who do not. The people in the latter category are strange, but they're allowed on the list anyway. Be nice to them.

Speaking of cheap pens, I want to thank Mark Warschauer for sending me some pleasantly wide-bodied gift-shop pens from Cairo -- they're covered with Egyptian tomb inscriptions and prominently marked "Micro Ceramic Pen Ares 0.5 Korea", a cultural combination that will raise no eyebrows in Los Angeles -- and Frank Ritter for sending me a Papermate Gel-Writer (which had already been in the mail when I found it on my own) and a Penn State pen that was unusually good for a "stick" ballpoint. Thanks also to Henry Lieberman for reminding me about the Micron Pigma, a plastic-tip pen that comes in sizes from .05mm to .7mm. I used Pigmas for a while when I was first experimenting with cheap pens several years ago, but they're not for me. You have to write very gently with them or you'll mash the point. I do find them useful, however, as a reminder that people can be different from me.

In Sofia the other day I paid a street vendor a couple of new levs for a (take a deep breath) Beifa Free Ink Roller 0.5 Be-A3, which declares that it is made of "Materials from Germany.Swiss", whatever that means. Boy is this pen a loser. It's a cylindrical-tip liquid-ink pen of more or less the standard design, except that writing with it is like trying to write with an X-Acto knife. You know how the X-Acto knife keeps deciding that it wants to go off and cut a nice straight line in some different direction from the one you had in mind? That's what the Beifa is like. I find myself going back to redraw at least one letter in every other word, but then the pen is delivering so much ink that the newly redrawn letter gets swollen and the whole thing looks like a mess, yet a somehow a very precisely drawn mess. I bought this thing about a block from the old Communist Party headquarters, a truly strange building that looks like an aircraft carrier cutting down the middle of a city street. I gotta say I feel for the people in Sofia.

In case you're wondering, when I end up with a loser of a pen, I don't throw it out. Sometimes I give it to someone who is not a cheap pen connoisseur, but usually I keep writing with it until it's done, which with a lot of these pens isn't such a long time.

We're still looking for a source for the recommended Zebra Zeb-Roller DX7. We've had a sighting at Staples, but I haven't been able to confirm it. If you locate a source of Zeb-Rollers, do let me know.

Finally, the mystery of the advanced gel pen technology is starting to affect productivity. Despite what you may have heard, the technology probably does not come from extraterrestrials. Can someone please do a patent search? It makes sense to start with Pilot, whose G-1 is an excellent example of whatever this technology is. The main question, indeed the central design question for all of these cheap pens, is how the ink gets chased down toward the point as you write with it. Does it involve a vacuum, or what? (RRE, 11/9/1999)

I have had pen pretentiousness in my life. What educated person hasn't? My pretentions were goofy, though, and did nothing to help establish me as having any culture. In college, I went through a phase where I only used green ink. I decided that that was going to be my signature -- green ink. As a metonymic strategy, it was right up there with the decision to wear white shoes only, as a fashion signature -- essentially empty because incomprehensible. Now I wear red shoes when I can, because I love the idea of red shoes. However, more important is wearing shoes that fit my oddly-shaped feet, so the footwear these days, by necessity, is clogs. The ones I have happen to be black.

I gave up the green ink pretention when I finally admitted to myself that my green writing was extraordinarily hard to read. Then I switched to purple ink, and that was much better. I stopped doing that when I couln't find a second purple pen.

RRE's splendid readers have sent me so many interesting cheap pens that I'll never use them all. Accordingly, I will send an interesting cheap pen at my own expense to everyone who sends me a check for US$20 (or equivalent in other currencies) made out to Amnesty International. Please make sure your name and addressed are on the check. I'll pass the checks along to Amnesty. If you don't want them putting you on their mailing list, you might want to attach a note to that effect. (RRE, 7/27/2000)

On the subject of cheap pens, I received a message from a real, live cheap pen magnate. He tells me that his company imports ten million pens a year to the US, mostly brass pens from Taiwan but also plastic pens from China and Germany. He wrote me to share the information that the Beifa pen that I bought in Sofia was actually made in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China, where (he tells me) they actually have a sizeable assortment of small and medium factories. (RRE, 7/31/2000)

That is a picture of my current favorite cheap pen up there. It's a Lisa Frank design, so you know it's stuff girls love! I bought a stationery set years ago, for reasons I can't remember. The pen has gotten the most use of any of it, even though the purple heart clip-on clip has an annoying tendency to come loose whenever I pick it up. For some reason, the cheap hard plastic feels perfect in my hand, and the pen is the perfect size -- slightly fatter than the Bic Biro norm. It's got a fine tip ball point, which I normallly hate and wierd blue-black ink. I love this pen.

Cheap pens!! I've gotten the latest models from Europe, and some pens that had been in storage. And let me tell you, I can't believe what cool pens I have! Too many cool pens. What's why I'm extending my offer: send me a check for US$20 or the equivalent made out to Amnesty International and I will send you a cool cheap pen. In fact I've been sending everyone two pens, one in black or blue and another in color. Such a deal! Here are some of the cool pen models that I have in stock, sorted in decreasing order of how hard they are to get in the United States. All are highly recommended. If you want to specify a particular model then I will *try* to comply, but I can't guarantee anything.

Pilot Hi-Tec-C. Highly sought-after and impossible to get (so far as I know) outside a few Japanese import shops, it's best for people who are gifted with the precise handwriting of an architect.

Zebra Antique Hyperjell. This is a new gel pen that's just terrific. It fits my own preferred style: big sloppy pens that deliver a great deal of ink and flow very comfortably across the page. Slightly odd colors.

Zebra Zeb-Roller DX7. Another terrific Zebra model, this is a liquid ink pen with a rather precise point that glides in a marvelously liquid way.

BPS-GP Extra Broad. This is a traditional-looking pen whose extremely wide tip, 1.6mm as opposed to the usual 0.5mm or 0.7mm, makes it an interesting experience.

Pilot V-Corn C. A stubby-looking liquid-ink pen that's much better than the already very good but more fragile Pilot Precise V7 Rolling Ball. The Precise is widely available, but not the V-Corn.

Staedtler Liquid Point. This is the bumble-bee pen, a robust needle-tipped liquid-ink pen with excellent ink flow.

Sakura Gelly Roll. An entertaining, cost-effective gel pen that mostly comes in colors.

Uni-Ball Eye (aka Vision). A very good liquid-ink pen.

Let me also mention two excellent pens that I can't offer to send you because I've used them up:

Micro TANK-Pen. This very rare Korean liquid-ink pen is outstanding. I haven't done a write-off, but it may be the best yet. The company has a Web site at but it hasn't responded to my entreaties. If anybody happens to be in Lisbon I can explain how to find the stationer where I bought it.

Finally, gel pen fans will be enthusiastic about a wide-bodied gel pen that's only available from the gift shop of the new Tate Modern museum in London. This pen gets only an A- for its line quality, but being wider than the average pen it can't be beat for people with clumsy hands. (RRE, 10/10/2000)

Here is an interesting Lisa Frank bit, especially in light of the fact that you probably never heard of Lisa Frank before, unless there are pre-adolescent girls in your home.

Lisa Frank, Inc., manufacturer of popular girls’ toys and school supplies, and operator of a Web site featuring those products, will pay $30,000 in civil penalties to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) and the FTC Act. The settlement also bars the company from certain future violations of the law. This is the fourth law enforcement action the FTC has taken to enforce the COPPA Rule since it became effective in April, 2000.

Who knew that cheap pens could lead to a federal crime?

Stop the presses!! I have just received this bulletin from a reader:

I read your cheap pens piece. I thought you'd like to know that there's a store on the corner of Embarcadero Road & El Camino Real in Palo Alto in the Town and Country Shopping Center (this is like 2 long blocks from Stanford U) called MAI-DO. It has an amazing number of Japanese Pilot pens for sale including more flavors of the Pilot Hi-Tec-C than one could imagine. They're about $2 a piece. I like the 0.3 mm the best, in blue black. They also have lots of notebooks and Japanese organizers and B5 and A4 paper and notebooks. The store is across the street from Palo Alto high school, if you're familiar with PA.

It is a privilege to be able to share this with you.

Speaking of which, if you want to get one of my remaining excellent cheap pens, this is your last and final chance. Just send a check for US$20, made out to Amnesty International, to me at this address:
Dept of Information Studies; UCLA; Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520; USA.
The list of probably-available pens can be found at:

http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/pens.html#available

For more on Amnesty International's new campaign against torture:

http://www.amnesty.org/ (RRE, 10/17/2000)

Office Max. Office Depot

Office Depot has a search function for pens, but "price" is not one of the searchable attributes.

A Google search for "cheap pens" brings up a fairly boring list, with a number of links to Phil's articles and to purveyors of cheap pens.

People have been sending me pens. Lemme tell you, you have not lived until you have written with a Stabilo 's move elastic writer. It's impossible to describe, but on this Web page it's the one that looks like a concave basketball:

http://www.stabilo.com/stabilo.com/english/html/products/writing/write0.htm

Aside from being really weird-looking, it is the slipperiest pen ever made. It produces so little friction against the page that I still can't write neatly with it. Just get one. I'm told that the 's move powerball is also a trippy experience, but I haven't tried it yet.

The same reader (in Norway) sent me a Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V-2000 Extra Fine (0.5mm) liquid-ink needle-point pen. It's a bigger, more robust version of the much-sought Pilot Hi-Tec-C. Like the Hi-Tec-C it's for people who write with a light touch. The line is a little thin for my taste, but probably not for precision freaks. It has the best rubber grip I've ever seen.

You know what's a darn good pen? The "Colors" liquid-ink rolling ball pens that they sell at Kinko's photocopy shops. They're ugly as heck with the Kinko's logo on them, but they're similar in philosophy to the Reynolds Ink Ball, the Rotring Xonox Rollerball F, and the Micro TANK-Pen.

A reader in Japan sent me a bunch of pens, including two copies of that ultimate expression of contemporary Japanese culture, the Hello Kitty gel pen. They're not what you'd expect. They're about seven inches long, quite heavy, clear plastic, slightly textured grip, with half-inch statues of Hello Kitty on the cap. One of them actually has a problem delivering ink consistently, but the other one works great. You could never take these things to work. Even the ink is not what you'd expect, a kind of metallic off-greyish-blue that looks stranger on the page than it does in the pen. They each have decals with lots of cool Japanese script that I can't read, plus (on one of them) the English text "FOR SALE IN JAPAN ONLY". Yeah. (RRE, 12/22/2000)

Have you had either the patience or obsessive nature to at least skim through this? Man, you've got the soul of a RRE reader! Rock on!

The most recent cheap pen post, over three years later. RRE, 5/5/2003

posted by el goose on 5/16/2003 01:32:06 PM | link

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May 13, 2003

Reported by E! Online:

SKIN DEEP: The Style network launching a new makeover series targeting troubled, addicted and homeless people. A Second Look, debuting May 25, will provide internal and external makeovers to those in need.

The Style network seems to be a subsidiary of E! Entertainment Television. It's the same people who brought us Anna Nicole Smith as a reality show. Now it all makes sense...

posted by el goose on 5/13/2003 09:32:37 PM | link

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May 12, 2003

I seem to be chopping up my hands when preparing food these days... it adds that personal touch, I guess, when I bleed into the ingredients.

I julienned my hands several times the other day when preparing this jicama slaw, which is better than you can imagine:

Niki's Jicama Slaw

1 large jicama (about the size of a large baked potato), peeled and julienned, then squirted with fresh lime juice to keep it from turning brown

1 package of cole slaw mix from the produce section (cabbage and carrots) (I also used some red cabbage)

2 medium jalapenos, seeded, deveined, and matchsticked

Mix all veggies together, then make lime-ginger-garlic dressing.

1/4 cup black rice wine vinegar (it's slightly sweet, could use balsamic) (I used balsamic)

4 large cloves garlic, finely minced (I used more like six)

1/4 cup fresh squeezed lime juice

2 inch piece of fresh ginger, finely minced or grated (I used more to finish off what I had)

1/2 teaspoon honey

Whisk all of the dressing ingredients together, then slowly whisk in 1/2 cup of canola oil (I used Loriva sesame oil). Add salt and pepper to taste. Pour over veggies and mix well. For best results, let sit for an hour prior to serving to allow dressing to permeate.

My whole apartment smelled of garlic and ginger for several hours afterward. This slaw was a great counterpoint to a slightly spicy barbecue sauce on pork.

Another chop to the thumb just now when I was making this soup from AllRecipes.com:

Cream of Mango soup

2 mango - peeled, seeded and cubed

1/4 cup white sugar

1 lemon, zested and juiced

1 1/2 cups half-and-half (I used sour cream instead, and it ends up more like a mousse)

Place the mango, sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest and half-and-half into a blender or food processor. Cover, and process until smooth and creamy. Serve chilled.

Mighty tasty. Next time, I might try with part half-and-half and part fat-free sour cream, just so it gets more soupish. I also need to find out a better way to peel and deseed a mango than the make-it-up-as-I go method.

I've been making more food than I can eat recently, so it's almost time for a huge lunch.

posted by el goose on 5/12/2003 02:33:11 PM | link

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