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Dolores, Our Lady of Sorrows – a Make-over

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“Our Lady of Organic Cheerfulness”


“Our Lady of Perpetual Disco”


“Our Lady of the Lost Barroom Fight”


Just Dolores, bless her heart. Ugly as she is, my photography only makes things worse. She deserves better. (And a special shout-out to the techno-magicians at Photobucket for making this reveal possible. Such as it is.)

Typewriter Glamour or How I’m Staying Off of Ebay This Morning

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Oh, I’ve been rummaging around a bit and find all sorts of glamorous oddities. Some gorgeous, some just plain entertaining. The first of the goodies is this Medieval Helpdesk video, and although it’s subtitled, it’s a scream.

The glamour comes from Elizabeth O’Neil Photography and her old typewriter photos. She’s asking readers to choose a favorite. Couldn’t do it. I just wanted the typewriter.

Typewriter: Relic of Wisdom is a little must-read. It just steels our resolve to, well, spend entirely too much money on old manual typewriters. Sometimes we have to give the whole collecting thing an elegant spin to make it all worthwhile. Tactile nirvana.

Finally, a little thing I almost missed. It’s a vintage childhood typecast and I wish I could get my hands on all the crazy business I typed as a little girl. I doubt ANYTHING I could find would be as plot driven as this little rabbit’s daily schedule.

There. It’s Saturday and I’m in Complete Goof-off Mode. No telling what I’ll find next.

Hitchhiker Typewriter and My New Rationalization

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Got any spare change? This bad-boy wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and can be yours for the bargain price of $25, 577.95, plus shipping. You also get a first edition of the book, but that’s just thrown in as a bonus, Steampunk says.

If Hitchhiker had been written on a Macbook or an HP laptop, would anyone care? Probably not enough to throw down that kind of cash, even if the screen was autographed in blood.

This somehow makes me feel better about all those typewriter cases under my bed. They’re not flea market junk – they’re unsigned literary artifacts.

Alabama Girls Do All Right

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Occasionally, I get a little Ebay-happy and bid on a typewriter I’m completely unsure of. The machine usually has a bad picture or a lackluster description. Sometimes I email the seller and get back either useless information or no email at all. This has happened to me three times and every single time I’ve lucked into a prize.

This one is prize number three. I’m always a fraidy-cat when it comes to opening The Box on the Porch when a new typewriter arrives. It’s the moment of truth, especially when the machine inside is a gamble. I paid almost nothing for this Royal Futura 800 – even less than the low shipping cost. Sometimes, though, you’ve got to put it in perspective: I’ve spent more on a dinner out at a mediocre restaurant. I’ve bought earrings more expensive than this. Just cruising past the Estee Lauder counter sets me back twice the cost of the shipping alone.

In the end, it was sent to the wrong address, poorly packed, and the case…well. I spent the better part of an hour just trying to get the rusted latch to open, when it might have been easier just to start ripping the leather away by hand.

But look what was inside. Aside from Tallulah’s obvious beauty, all I had to do was put in a fresh ribbon and start typing. Just like that. I took her to my office the very next day and kept her on my desk as an everyday typer. The color is interesting – something between blush and band-aid, but it has an angelic, effortless touch. Ed at Acme Business Machines said that of all the typewriters I’ve ever brought him, this was his favorite. She’s such a coquette. Just look at her up there, posing in the gardenias.

She’s also a sassy Alabama girl with (literally) untapped ambition. Possibly a graduation gift to a young girl who’d rather marry her high school sweetheart than go to college, and so the gift languished, unused, and stored carefully away. Then uncarefully away as the kids and her life began to fill out. It’s possible this typewriter represented a regrettable decision and finally went to live with the shed spiders. Who knows.

So I named her Tallulah Bankhead, because sometimes good Alabama girls didn’t marry the sweetheart, sometimes they left home and became famous bad girls.

The Bottom Line

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Photobucket

This little ditty from Modern Mechanix is confusing. I’m trying to remember EVER seeing a mirror taped to anyone’s desk and I get nothing.
I’m not making light of the real issue, however, which is quite serious. How DO you keep from running out of paper? How did we write all of those foot-noted papers in college without running out of room every single time?
I don’t remember. That was too long ago and I paid my roommate to type up my papers at $2 a page anyway. I was young. Typing papers was about layout perfection and margins and no white-out. Even though I bask in the glory of strikethroughs and fictional hyphenation strategies now, I remember when the whole world was ready to pound and pronounce upon the smallest mistake. Especially marginal mistakes. I didn’t type much back then.
I had an old boyfriend who, for a semester or two, channelled or copied or posed as Jack Kerouac. Or Sal Paradise. Or both. This was a common malady among my English major/poet boyfriends back then, but this one in particular liked to tape all of his pages together, one after the other, a la Kerouac, until he had a mountainous pile of over-inflated ego drivel. That’s how he solved The Problem of the Bottom Margin – no margins at all.
Later, Bob earned a Phd in Medieval Lit, then changed his name and became a rodeo announcer. Just thought I’d throw that in.
I handle the paper problem by cheating a bit with this fabulous lined and numbered legal paper. I just roll it in behind a sheet of perfect 9 lb. onionskin, peer through it, and voila – stop typing when the number “32” rolls up. Easy.
What’s your trick?