Tuesday Tunes: Ink me up!
Did the quick brown fox write that sentence?
Oh, are you asking more questions about my time at the SF Pen Show and about pen/stationary collecting as a hobby? WELL THANK YOU FOR YOUR QUESTION.
Here's a fun and random thing: So in the course of testing pens, ink, and paper – we're always in search of a truly magnificent combo where each brings out the best in the other – we test a lot of pens, ink, and paper. The SF Pen Show had a very fun idea, which is to put stations of 50 individually inked up pens at different spots around the convention center, where you could test and log all the inks in your journal.
To do that, we tend to write out a sentence. The obvious go-to is the classic: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," which uses every letter in the English alphabet. But there comes a point where that becomes super boring. Also, I will stand for the slander of this dog. Let him be!
So what I've taken to over the last few years is writing out some of my favorite lyrics as my testing sentence. Here are a few in my rotation:
"sometimes i think that i'm bigger than the sound"
"wait, they don't love you like i love you."
"give me a lake that i can dive into, bury my head in the shit at the bottom. fuck today. fuck oakland. fuck california."
"standing on the corner of 6th and where do i go"
"you are a splendid butterfly. it is your wings that make you beautiful. i could make you fly away, but i could never make you stay."
What would be your pen-testing sentence?
Bonus track: I totally missed this – The Magnetic Fields being absolutely wonderful on NPR Tiny Desk Concert late last year:
