"Typerbolic"? What an absurd name, eh? Allow me to elucidate... I enjoy travel, so I like carrying cases, bags, luggage, et cetera. I thought that I might keep a couple of words in just such a fashion, hence the 'portmanteau' I have used to entitle this blog.
I like to write, and I have lately reignited my interest in typewriters (an interest that gripped me ever since I was young, and my mother allowed me to type on her old, wrinkle-black Olivetti), by first indulging an old love of anachronistic telephones - oddly enough.
My cordless phone finally died the last death and slipped into the cold beyond of battery-failure a few months ago. Who knew that the beeps of admonition I kept hearing when calling family and yattering on were from my own device? I searched high and low for a simple corded phone to replace the thrice-accursed cordless thing, but to no productive avail. Eventually, I located two things that gripped my attention: etsy.com and old rotary-dial telephones! (The latter being located with assistance from the former). I plumped for a nice 500-series office phone from the 1970's. It looked so fine on my desk that I had to make sure to have the right kind of phone cord for it. Enter stage left: oldphoneworks.com! There I found a throwback style of handset cord: fabric-wrapped. "Oh, but why stop there?" thought I, mischievously. One 25-foot fabric-wrapped wall-cable later, I was hooked on old tech once more.
My next buy was an Olympia SG1 to match my new office feel, then a partial-SG1, then another partial-SG1, and so on. I finally stopped for a breather after my SM4 cried out for a new platen. I am rather excited about Olympias, I have to admit - and therein lies the second aspect of my blog title: the hyperbolic way in which I evangelise to my friends (or anyone who'll listen, really) about the joys of using old typewriters as well as the endless fun to be had tinkering with them.
So, typing and hyperbole. That's me! You may also have detected a wry wink at my other interest: mathematics. Of course,it's just not maths unless you can do it with the simplest of tools. My collection of weird and wondersome geekiness is further enhanced by my collection of old measuring and calculating devices: slide rules (5 and, ahem... counting BWAHAHAHA), a micrometer, a rather nifty E6-B pilot's flight computer, vernier calipers, protractors, depth gauges, an architect's scale, geometry tools, technical drawing pens (I'm migrating, here - digressing indeed), inking tips, a really spiffy fountain pen, mechanical pencils, antique books on navigation, trigonometric and logarithmic tables (oh, come on - you KNOW you want to memorize pi and e to 30 decimal places each), and that's just what I can think of off the top of my head.
And what do I do with all this rubbish? Well, apart from just 'enjoy it', I'll tell you in the next post.
ND
(Short for NerrrrD)
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