Fountain pen mod

Last week, I bought myself a third Kaweco Sport fountain pen. This one has a blue cap and barrel. I really like these pens. My plan is to buy several, with the colour of each pen matching the colour of the ink it contains. Genius, or what?

However, when I tried to fit an official Kaweco Sport converter to allow me to use bottled ink, the converter wouldn’t fit down the barrel of the pen as there was a solid plastic barrier blocking it half-way down. There is no such barrier in my other two pens. Some online research revealed these converters are new, and some very old Kaweco Sport pens aren’t compatible. It seemed my new pen had come from old stock.

Other than the colour and the plastic barrier, my blue pen seemed exactly the same design as my two other pens. So, yesterday afternoon, I decided to try to hack a solution by drilling out the barrier. Plastic fountain pen versus power-tool: what could possibly go wrong?

Fountain pen mod

…It was then that I discovered the plastic barrier was, in fact, the bottom of the free ink cartridge that I didn’t realise came with the pen.

Kaweco Royal Blue ink everywhere!

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Filed under: Nonsense

Ornamentation

Paying for parking the other day, I had to queue behind a woman who was having problems typing in her car registration on the screen. She eventually let me go in front of her. I experienced no such difficulties.

It turned out she couldn’t press the screen properly due to her long false fingernails, so I had to do the typing for her. Ornamentation taken to such an extreme it becomes a hindrance: the human equivalent of a peacock’s tail.

In a more Darwinian environment, she would no doubt have been eaten by wolves by now.

Fingernails
Image: Kartik Garda, Unsplash
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Filed under: Nonsense

2025 in a nutshell

So that was 2025… The year in which fascism had a really good year; the year in which the orange dickhead carried on being both orange and a dickhead; the year in which the Andrew formerly known as Prince still, as far as we know, was not questioned under caution; the year in which I turned bloody sixty!

On the plus side, Jen and I went on lots of trips, I got a whizz-bang new camera, and I took some more photos. So here’s my fifteenth annual video slide-show review of the year:

Consistent as ever, as in the previous fourteen years, this year’s slide-show contains 97 photos.

Once again, I composed the ambient pap backing track. It is called Havana Brew:

See also: All of my yearly nutshell videos

2024 in a nutshell

So that was 2024… The year in which Dame Maggie Smith died. The year in which so-called ‘A.I.’ continued to infect the internet with specious dreck. The year in which the country that styles itself as the guardian of the free world elected a mentally unstable compulsive liar and convicted criminal as president.

On the plus side, the UK temporarily kicked out its own brand of window-licking fascists, and I took some more photos. So here’s my fourteenth annual video slide-show review of the year:

Consistent as ever, as in the previous thirteen years, this year’s slide-show contains 97 photos.

Once again, I composed the ambient pap backing track. It is called Gui-tardigrade:

See also: All of my yearly nutshell videos

Science FTW!

BBC: Spacecraft attempts closest-ever approach to Sun

Nasa: Parker Solar Probe

A Nasa spacecraft is attempting to make history with the closest-ever approach to the Sun. The Parker Solar Probe is plunging into our star's outer atmosphere, enduring brutal temperatures and extreme radiation.

Genius move on behalf of Nasa to time this rendezvous to happen during mid-winter, when the sun’s at its coolest!

…But it would have been an even more genius move to make it happen at night.

Charles Rex(otropia)

These new-fangled fivers…

Charles III fiver

look more closely…

Charles III fiver detail

…There’s no polite way of saying this: the Charles formerly known as Prince appears to be wall-eyed. His right eye is looking straight at us, while his left eye is glancing over our right shoulders.

(In the good old days, an observation like this would no doubt have earned me a one-way trip to the Tower. Thank goodness we live in a modern, twenty-first-century democracy!)