Prickly City by Scott Stantis for May 29, 2022

I just restored a Continental Wanderer typewriter that came with me from Germany in 1983. I have since figured out that it was built in 1937, the year before WW II.

I was a GI at the time, living in a small village in southwest Germany, taking German lessons. I purchased said typewriter from a fellow GI and used it to type my German lessons.

I’m about to write my first letter on it. But first, I have to put a ribbon in it.

What’s a ribbon?

Goes in a typewriter.

What’s a typewriter?

Prints letters and words on paper.

Why would you want to do that?

Oh, well. It’s a print thing.

Nobody understands.

We don’t use that stuff any more.

We just flush the evidence down the toilet.

♫There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.♫

I have extensive bookshelves, but my Kindle is great, and my brothers use their Kindles almost exclusively, because they can make the text bigger.

Newspapers and book publishers are in denial. People are going to digital for pragmatic reasons.

Not exactly Abbott and Costello, but cute.Hey with a paper clip, a rubber band, and two pencil erasers, MacGyver could stop an nuclear reactor in meltdown.

A takeoff on the comedy classic Who’s on first by Abbott and Costello?

“What’s a paperclip?…” an object you bend open to use for poking into the tiny “reset” holes on electronic devices.

If you need a paper clip, you have to buy 100, which will magically have disappeared, in a year or so, when you need another one.(Always get extra large, they can also clip snack bags and such.)

I own books that are well over a hundred years old. I wonder if any electronic device will exist in a hundred years, or the servers that store their information. I have many autographed books, not one autographed Kindle. Real books can make a real personal connection, electronic devices connect to their batteries.