Tuesday 20 October 2009

Pens! Pens! Pens? Pens!


As long as there are Post-It notes, there’ll be pens. The reason for this is that Post-It notes won’t go through a printer; instead, they’ll stick to the rollers and clog it up in a mass of yellow semi-adhesive inconvenience forcing office workers everywhere to snarl and curse and cry and hate their lives that little bit more. So as long as people need to pop an easily-removed note on top of a pile of documents that says “Greg, check the Montalban a/c and sign off, thanks! Debs”, there’ll be pens with which to do so.

Ian’s Marvellous Pen Company have released a brand new line of pens, and I checked out their blue pen. What a pen this is! With overtones of velvet, canard and frangipane, and a rating of approximately 18 kiloblots per square inch, this pen is quite simply a joy to use. It’s especially good when drawing circles, and by example I mean Venn diagrams, balloons or cowpats.

Don’t look now, but there’s a new ballpoint pen on the block, and it looks mean! Penny Pennington of Pennsylvania’s Pens (both the Writing Kind and the Animal Holding Kind), Inc are building a name for themselves with their take-no-prisoners writing implements. The red pen I tested was very good when it came to marking essays (performing extremely well on margin utility and spelling error underlining), but was quite deficient in marking multiple choice quizzes. The ticks and crosses were both very poorly defined, with abysmal conviction vectors; they also had a worrying taste of limpet.

A word of warning: Watney Heckbulb are advertising some new pens at excellent rates for mail-order purchasers, but don’t be taken in. Customers are actually being sent chalk, and when they receive telephone complaints, customer service representatives just repeat what you said but in a high voice, which is really annoying.

On paper, the new Dervish QV7 is a terrible pen. However, on other surfaces, it’s excellent. It draws exceedingly well on orange peel, bricks, sponge (both kitchen and bobsquarepants), chips (US and English), fannies (US) and bums (UK). Granted, if you ever attempt to write on a piece of paper with the QV7, it will fall apart, but as long as you remember this it should serve you well. I highly recommend it for scribbling an insult onto a potato and throwing it at a nearby Jesuit.

Finally, Shugborough-Tweedle have created a single-use disposable pen for suicidal people. Each carries enough ink for one letter, and it writes wonderfully. Sadly, though, I found that it does tend to run out quickly if you ramble on about how you thought your life would get better once you’d had the patio refitted and nobody noticed your new hairstyle even after they told you to make more of an effort if you wanted to make Janice jealous after she ran off with Marcus, although she shouldn’t blame herself because before you met her your life was a barrel of rotten pigs’ trotters and she’ll always be close to your heart.

Pens come from the shops. Other things that come from the shops include newspapers, sausages and plants. Things that you won’t find in the shops include graddical flumes, twingmar delobets and corporeal nattttttttttttttttttwhips.

10 comments:

tennysoneehemingway said...

Oh, I'm all for anything that'll get me 18 kiloblots to the square inch.

Clippy Mat said...

funny! as always.
good 'un.
:-)

Hunter said...

I almost fell for the Watney Heckbulb ruse. Thanks for the warning.

mo.stoneskin said...

Kiloblots. What a great measurement.

And the perfect pen for drawing cowpats which is fantastic, my cowpats have for years appeared pathetic.

Sara said...

I was just looking on e-bay for second-hand fountain pens...so your guide will come in very handy indeed.

:) Loved it.

The Imaginary Reviewer said...

Tennyson: Yes, that's a pretty impressive stat. I hear there's Pierre Cardin pens that get up to 21, but that does require some tweaking.

Clippy: Thankings!

Hunter: Yeah, they colour the chalk to make it look like pens, but then you can't write on a white piece of paper with them. Very sneaky.

Mo: It's a common complaint. To get the maximum effect, I recommend drawing stink lines.

Emma: Thanks! I hope this was useful.

Soda and Candy said...

Hahahahahhaha! Perfection.

"scribbling an insult onto a potato and throwing it at a nearby Jesuit."

Damn, I could have used this advice SO MANY TIMES!!!

Some Guy said...

As soon as you find a source for those delobets, could you fill me in? I'm in the market for some.

Genius as usual, TIR!

Daltana said...

One just needs to be careful when browsing the catalog of PPoPP, Inc. The item numbers for the different types of pens are very similar. It would be easy to intend on ordering a case of red ballpoints and receiving an acre of red bull pens.

Unknown said...

Although we use pens sparingly at IGNN (most notably when nasal nuggets become impacted in that annoying "I'll be damned if I live another second with this obstruction up my snout" sort of way, we do enjoy a good Gaspard's Clipper Red for leaving rude Post-It notes to the cleaning staff concerning their imaginary nightly revels.