Princess Doesn't Live Here Anymore (A Bummer Typecast)

 My wife and I were out for a walk around the neighborhood and encountered a sorry sight by the curb.  This would fall in the "abandoned" category.

Typed on the Hermes Media 3

I felt sorry for this stuffed animal.

This little bear is the saddest thing I've seen in a long time.  She was face down in the gutter, but I thought she deserved to see the sun before her long journey to the landfill.  Our neighborhood is prowled by Jawas, so there is always a slim chance that someone picked up Anabelle and took her home. 

Analog Record Keeping and Kansas City History

I'm plucking out cards from cancelled sales for typing use.  This is the back of a card like the one below.

The story of one customer and his watch.

Each drawer held hundreds, if not thousands, of customer records.  The earliest were from the 1920s and the latest from the 1960s.  The entries from the '50s on weren't as interesting since they added small appliance repairs.

I have a certain nerdy fascination with forgotten history gleaned from esoterica.  Out of all the antiquities I looked at during the October First Fridays' sale at Good JuJu, this was my only purchase other than a 1960s vintage Girl Scout Handbook for my wife.

There are many uninteresting stories in this collection, but that is made up for by the really interesting customer stories.  I settled on this one because it contained a record of a house call to repair the dashboard clock on a "Ladies Red Buick".  In looking at the customer addresses, I've come to the conclusion that this jeweler generally served the upper middle class and above in Kansas City proper.  There are many monied addresses along Ward Parkway in the file.

The drawer full of record cards was one of many.  In talking to the seller, I found out that the whole lot of drawers came from a single huge estate sale cabinet that was in very poor condition.  So out came the drawers for sale to crafters, creative types and nerds.

I guess since I am using backs for typing, that makes me semi-creative.  The fact that I am blogging about it places me squarely in the nerd category.  At any rate, I have lots of fun reading material to pick through.

Typecast Courtesy of the Royal Futura 800 (Borg Edition)

Dead Blogs Are No Fun

This sheet was cut from a blank book for documenting awesome dinner parties.

We've all been through it:   the Eureka moment when we have chosen to blog, know what we want to blog about and have an awesome name in mind.

Excited, we jump on Google and look up Blogspot names.  Perhaps we already have a blog and just want to add another to fit a different theme.

Then we find out that all the good names are taken.  That's not so bad unless they are taken by name squatters.

That is precisely what happened to me.  I wanted a place to put my odd stuff that did not match the vintage technology theme.  I started looking up names and found roughly 8 in 10 of the good ones (even obscure second choices) being squatted on and filled with blank page, one post, no posts or even a couple of months worth of posts many years ago - as in 2002 or 2004 in a couple I looked at.

And then I had a Eureka moment and discovered that deadblogsarenofun.blogspot.com had not been claimed.

It is now and I would love to have some help in identifying blogger names that are being used to no good end.  Send them to me and visit the new blog and let's have some fun!

http://deadblogsarenofun.blogspot.com/

As  side note, I have to say that I had a really good run up until looking for photo related blog names.  I've been surprised at snaring good names in the last few months for me and the family including:  nerdtopics (Claire), thoughtsatfullspeed (Hannah), housefullofnerds (my Spousal Unit) and my new junk pile called digitalmemoryhole.

The latter is currently an empty shell, but I promise to populate it, really.

HERMES Media 3 in Cursive - Typecast

The last comment is from my 11-year-old.  So glad my kids know how to build sentences.

OK, I'm going to get this over with.  I may be a heretic, but the sage-ish green of Hermes typewriters is just kind of OK in my book.  Color, however, is a very personal thing.  The freakishly smooth operation of this machine is in another class.  The downside is that there is no chance whatsoever to even think about changing your mind in mid key stroke.  The type has already hit the page.

The cursive script on this machine is dainty and delicate.  I haven't done a thing to align typebars, yet everything links together nicely

Lovely curves.  I wonder how it would look in a deep metallic green?  Just kidding!

Unexpected bonus:  an official Hermes brand ribbon spool!

The money shot.

It was pretty clean to start with.  I was kind of lazy and focused on cleaning up old lube and getting the segment slots and type cleaned out with mineral spirits.

If I'm reading the Internet Typewriter Database right, this machine was made in 1962.

Bad light in the garage during cleaning.  This is the underside of the basket with the ball bearing equipped shift rails.