Every once in a while, a comedian comes along who isn’t quite completely joking. John Hodgman is one of them — his trilogy of COMPLETE WORLD KNOWLEDGE ephemera has real facts mixed in with complete bullshit. But interesting bullshit.
I’m delighted to say that this book is in the same vein. Continue reading
A Facebook friend shared this music video with me. From the description on the video’s Vimeo page:
The new music video for ‘Against The Grain’ from emerging Melbourne indie-folk artist Hudson sees him collaborate with film maker/animator/VJ Dropbear (aka Jonathan Chong), producing a vibrant and colourful clip based around a mainstay from our humble artistic efforts throughout childhood – coloured pencils.
Beautiful! Make sure to hit the full-screen HD version, if your internet can handle it. It really looks amazing! Here’s the band’s Facebook page.
Usually this is something that Sean would post over at The Blackwing Pages, but this time I thought I’d scoop him, respectfully. My friend Stephanie at Rhodia Drive, a blog about one of my favorite paper products, sent me this screen capture from the 1954 movie The Glenn Miller Story.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but Jimmy Stewart is perhaps my favorite mid-century actor, and I was that wierd kid who used to listen to swing music as a teenager, so I’m quite familiar with this movie.
I don’t quite remember him using a Blackwing to compose, but I wasn’t hyper-sensitive to on-screen pencil choices at the time. I’ll have to re-watch it and find it again.
Sean is much more knowledgeable about the classic Blackwing than I am — perhaps he can perform some forensics and figure out which version of the Blackwing that is.
Thanks, Stephanie!
UPDATE: Sean at Blackwing Pages found another screencap with Jimmy Stewart’s face and the unique Blackwing ferrule. I want to make that my Facebook picture.
Colombian pencils offered by Rad & Hungry
One of the great things about running a specialty blog like this is that if someone is interested enough in something to Google it, chances are they’ll see your site. Big, venerable pencil blogs like Pencil Revolution, Pencil Talk, and others are certainly going to come up before a young upstart like mine, but if a Googler really wants to read about pencils, chances are, they’ll see me (hi, guys!). There just aren’t that many of us out there, compared to, say, Apple blogs or life-hacking blogs.
That’s why I was super excited when I got an email from Hen Chung the other day. She is a traveler, a scribomechanist (lover of writing/office supplies), and entrepreneur. And she has a new business called Rad & Hungry. Continue reading
On other blogs that I’ve been part of, we’ve occasionally set aside a post every once in a while for discussion. I would love to get a dialog going between all of the online pencil bloggers, users, and collectors, because I think we can all benefit from sharing advice, tips, specific interests, etc.
So here goes: I’ll post a topic to get us started, and feel free to keep us on my topic, or start your own. No real guidelines, just keep it clean (as I know you will).
TOPIC: Do you have a lot of pencils? If so, how do you display them? Right now, I am storing all of mine in labeled cigar boxes on my shelf. I’m looking for a portable, attractive, space efficient way to display my pencils. Any ideas?
Woodclinched 