There are thousands of different pens available to buy, made by numerous pen manufacturers and this can be very confusing. When buying a new pen how do you decide which one when they all look very similar?

Do you know what type of pen that you are currently using? Is it a gel pen, ballpoint pen, biro, liquid ink pen or something else?

Pens are categorised by the type of tip that they have and this usually determines what type of ink it contains. There are always exceptions but as a general rule pens fall into one of the following five categories:

Fountain Pens

Fountain pens have a nib with a thin slit which allows the ink to be applied to the paper. They use a water based liquid ink that is stored in a reservoir within the pen. They are usually refilled by either a mechanism within the pen that is used to draw ink up through the nib, or by replacing an ink cartridge. A good fountain pen should write smoothly using only its own weight to apply the pressure.

Ballpoint Pens

Ballpoint pens have a ball bearing which rotates applying ink to the paper as you write. They use an oil based ink that dries almost immediately after contact with paper. A ballpoint pen requires pushing to start the ink flow. They are generally reasonably priced, reliable and the ink lasts a long time. The diameter of the ball bearing determines the line width produced.

Rollerball Pens

Rollerball pens use a ball point writing mechanism and were initially designed to combine the convenience of a ballpoint pen with the smooth “wet ink” effect of a fountain pen. They use either water-based liquid or gel ink, as opposed to the oil-based viscous inks found in a ballpoint pen. Rollerball pens tend to saturate deeply and widely into paper, giving their distinctive writing qualities.

Marker Pens

Marker pens have a porous tip that is usually made from either felt or synthetic fibre. The shape of the tip can either be a bullet tip usually found on smaller markers or a chisel tip for the larger markers. Non permanent markers use water based ink but permanent markers and highlighters use a variety of different special ink types.

Brush Pens

As the name implies Brush pens have a hard wearing synthetic brush to apply the ink to the paper. The ink is usually from cartridges of fade-resistant and waterproof pigment ink. Artist favour brush pens as a variety of lines from fine detail to broad sweeping strokes can be produced. They are ideal for oriental artwork, cartoons & calligraphy.

Hopefully reading this will have helped to clarify the different types of pens and inks available. I appreciate that some of our readers already have an in depth knowledge on this subject.

This was written more as a general guide, if you can think of anything that I have missed as always we really appreciate your comments.

• So, the U.S. Postal Service is considering eliminating Saturday mail delivery – and chose to make the announcement via email rather than good ol’ hand-delivered mail.

According to the Washington Post, the postmaster general is required to submit his plans in electronic format to the Postal Regulatory Commission, which will make a recommendation as to whether Saturday service should end.

Submitting via e-mail “does not go against the grain,” insisted a PRC spokesman.

Submitting the plans online provides for transparency and accountability and sending hard copies would require the extra work of scanning documents and posting them online, he said.

So the explanation appears to prove a point: Paper mail is increasingly obsolete and inconvenient.

Kind of hard to encourage people to send more letters when even the postal service prefers push-button delivery.

• At least one senior person in the U.S. government still believes in handwritten letters. The Post reports that President Barack Obama makes it a point to read 10 letters a day from the public.

The president receives 20,000 letters and emails every day. His staff weeds through them to find the ones that give him an idea what life is like outside “the presidential bubble,” according to the paper. And:

He prefers handwritten letters to e-mails, believing them to be more thoughtful, with better stories.

Obama responds by hand to five to 15 of the letters each week, writing notes with a black fountain pen on thick white card stock bearing the presidential seal.

• Ramin Setoodeh makes the case in Newsweek that Hollywood is still nursing a strong affection for written correspondence, especially love letters.

In Dear John, a soldier overseas has a gushing, epistolary romance with his girlfriend back home. Letters to God is about an 8-year-old boy with cancer who sends dispatches to You Know Who and the mail carrier who befriends him. That’s not to be confused with the upcoming Letters to Juliet, about an aspiring journalist (another dying breed!) who discovers a lost “Dear Abby”–like note on a trip to Italy and responds with her own advice on love.

Some of this paper fetish has to do with screenwriters showing their age, but most of it has to do with nostalgia. You can’t pack the same narrative punch with e-mails, because we don’t associate technology with voice (unless that digitized voice-recognition-speak does something for you).

And here you thought most Hollywood types were barely literate.

• Bad handwriting is the source of a lot of humour, but not so much for Bob Shryock, a columnist at the Gloucester County Times. He has Parkinson’s, which has made his never-that-great handwriting become all but unreadable.

As awful as my handwriting has always been, it worsened in the early part of the century when left-side tremors became my first pronounced Parkinson’s symptom.

On the operating room table for DBS (Deep Brain Stimulation surgery) seven years ago, surgeons had me write my name on a tablet. The result was typically ugly. But four or five hours later, with DBS successfully complete, they had me try again. And, like magic, the writing had dramatically improved. Of course, my improvements are measured in very small doses.

For seven years now, the tremors have stayed away. But while successful DBS eradicates tremors and some other symptoms, it doesn’t derail Parkinson’s progress.

And so my wretched handwriting, a near life-long curse, remains an apparent irreversible stigma.

We feel for him. Become unable to enjoy the simple pleasure of writing a note must be a tremendous loss.

• From Edward Iannuccilli, the author of “Growing Up Italian,” comes a brilliant little essay on why people should still take the time to sit down with pen and paper to write letters.

As the years went by, I stopped writing until one evening when I was watching a great old English movie. There was a scene of someone writing a letter. It was beautiful. The only things in the scene were gleaming white paper, a quill pen, blue-black ink and two hands; fingers steadying the paper in the upper left, and the writing hand caressing the pen as if it were a baby bird. Miss Casey would have given this writer an “A” for the thick, tall, looping letters, smooth strokes. And the beauty of the ink. It brought me back to the days of penmanship, paper, ink and my love of fountain pens. My thought was, “This is what we should be doing rather than e-mail. We should be writing to people on paper with fountain pen and ink. Even broken penmanship can be as smooth as soft summer waves. And the waves can carry the thought.”

Since rediscovering writing, he’s made it a habit to send frequent handwritten notes and letters, crafted with a Parker fountain pen filled with blue-black ink. And clearly enjoys every moment of it.

• As if we needed more reasons to prefer handwritten letters to email, here’s another: A recent study found that participants lied 50% more via email than they did in letters, according to PsyBlog.

In addition:

In some ways a more damning indictment of email from (the) study was that people reported feeling more justified in lying over email than they did when writing with pen and paper.

Across a further two experiments people consistently lied more over email and felt more justified in doing so, even when they were lying to someone they knew and when that person would find out. Participants seemed relatively unconcerned about the damage to their reputation caused by lying over email.

Part of the reason for this seemed to be the impermanence of email and the less personal connections people make online.

With Earth Day coming up April 22, this seems like a good time to hand out some eco-friendly pens to one lucky blog reader.

Regular visitors may remember last week we talked about the underrated RexGrip ballpoint. Well, now you have a chance to get a set of 5 RexGrip pens and markers for yourself. RexGrip is part of Pilot’s BeGreen range of pens, pencils and markers made from recycled plastics.

From the Pilot BeGreen website:

BeGreen is a complete range of recycled products covering all writing instrument categories.

• The BeGreen range follows the ISO 14021 international environmental standard, concerning usage of recycled material.
• All BeGreen products contain at least 70% recycled content.
• 100% of the Ballpoint pens are refillable.

With BeGreen, Pilot proves that it can produce writing instruments that are respectful of the environment, whilst providing consumers with the best levels of comfort, quality and a high level of design technology.

OK, OK, so what do you get?

1) Pilot RexGrip retractable ballpoint pen, blue ink, medium tip.

2) Pilot RexGrip retractable ballpoint pen, black ink, medium tip.

3) Pilot Green Tecpoint liquid ink rollerball pen, blue ink, extra fine tip.

4) Pilot RexGrip mechanical pencil, refillable, 0.5mm leads.

5) Pilot Spotlighter Twin Hi-Lighter, chisel and bullet tip.

All you have to do to enter is add your name to the comments below (along with a way to contact you, of course). Then, on April 22, we’ll randomly select one person to receive the set of pens. It’s as easy as that. Deadline for entries will be midnight April 21 (London time).

Open to readers anywhere and everywhere.

• Would you believe that the best way to improve children’s handwriting is to have them do it lying on their stomachs? That’s what Channel 5 in Bismarck, North Dakota claims.

“When we lay on our tummies and do writing we`re getting some weight through our elbows and through our shoulders,” said occupational therapist Wendy Graff. “It`s building some of that stability that helps carry over to when you are writing at a table. If you`re standing at a board you are using different muscles to write and more stability is required at your shoulder and your elbow.”

If it works for watching TV and playing video games, maybe it’s the right position for composing perfect letters. Who knows?

• Susan Hanley at NetworkWorld says she’s a prodigious note-taker, which is why she was so excited to try out the Capturx digital pen. But, after trying it, she gave a thumbs-down to taking notes digitally.

The upside:

I am addicted to the Levenger Circa notebooks so I love the idea that I can print my own digital paper and use my special Levenger hole punch to create pages that integrate seamlessly into my existing notebooks. I can take my regular binder to a meeting and take notes the way I’m used to doing, but with the digital pen.

When I connect the pen to my laptop, I can seamlessly download my notes to OneNote.  I now have two versions of my meeting notes – one that can stay in the physical notebook and that I can bring with me to all meetings and one on my computer that can be searched electronically and easily shared with my client or members of my team.

The downside:

The pen is much too fat!  My hands are small and the pen is about the size of a white board marker.  The first time I used the pen for two one-hour meetings, my hand was sore for 24 hours.  The second time, I stopped after an hour and switched to a regular pen to give my hand a break!

I just wish it were more comfortable as a writing implement because it has the potential to become as important to me as my iPod!  After my 4 month adventure with digital note taking, I find that I have mostly reverted back to my $2.00 Pentel EnerGel pen.

She also wasn’t impressed with the plain ballpoint ink used in the pen, instead of a smoother gel ink. Still, the fact that there is now a digital pen that doesn’t require special (and expensive) paper is definitely a step in the right direction.

• An elderly Connecticut woman has been writing letters every week to military service members overseas since the late ’60s, according to the Danbury News-Times.

She picks people from her hometown, located in the Northeastern U.S., and begins a correspondence with them wherever they are, even if they don’t write her back.

She told the newspaper:

Ventres, an 82-year-old eighth-generation Ridgefielder, spends one week a month, from Monday through Friday, six hours a day, sending news from home, pictures, and words of encouragement to military men and women from her hometown.

“Right now there are 52 on my list, the most I’ve ever had, ” she said.

She uses a pen and stationery she buys on sale. “I won’t switch to the computer. Handwritten letters are more personal,” she said.

Thirty hours a week of letter writing! That’s a lot of commitment to the supposed “lost art.”

• You just might be violating the rules of letter-writing etiquette if you don’t have a collection of assorted stationery to fit each writing occasion, according to etiquette expert Lisa Mirza Grotts at the Huffington Post.

A stationery wardrobe is important for both the seasoned executive, newcomers to the world of business, and social correspondence. Like clothing, a stationery wardrobe should reflect your personality and include foundation pieces appropriate for all occasions.

Among the pieces of your “stationery wardrobe,” she recommends correspondence cards and sheets, fold-over notes and calling cards for social letters and separate correspondence cards and sheets and business cards for professional letters. What exactly would go on something like a calling card? Your Facebook address, of course.

She doesn’t address which pens should be used for which occasions.

• Finding an old letter from her late grandfather prompted columnist Renee Moilanen to share her feelings about the timelessness and emotional weight carried by handwritten letters from the past.

The ink on my grandfather’s letter is fading, and the edges have yellowed. But I know I’ll save the letter forever, until the paper crumbles to dust, because it reminds me of my grandfather more than any photograph or memorial ever could.

The handwritten words speak off the page, and when I read the last line – “I love you Renee” – it’s like hearing his voice. The ink might fade, but the words never will.

The whole column, while melancholy, is worth reading.

• The practice of Chinese calligraphy, or at least the pursuit of better handwriting, could be the path to tranquility, as Harry Eyres advances some thoughts on the subject in the Financial Times.

Everything about the way I write bears the marks of an occidental (rather than oriental) approach and education. There is a strange combination of instrumentality and hyper-individualism. Handwriting in the west is regarded as a means to an end, not an end in itself; it’s what you write that’s important, not how you write it. Any way that reaches the goal of intelligibility will do. This allows a freedom that might seem attractive (to many in the east as well as the west), but I am beginning to wonder whether it could be a short cut to expression that ends up impoverishing expression itself.

Having recently returned from Taiwan, where he learned a little about calligraphy, he reckons that striving to return grace and beauty to written words could possibly help us tap into our wells of concentration and meditation.

Calligraphy, or just writing better, might help us find more peace and joy in our lives, which seems a good argument for including it in the syllabus. Sadly it is not one which would ever persuade the utilitarian commissars who control our education systems.

Perhaps he’s got a point. After all, putting a really good pen to paper can sometimes feel like a semi-religious experience, right?

Actually, not quite so random this week.

• Lock up your good pens; there are thieves about. The Herald is reporting that burglars in Plymouth have stolen a collection of jewellery and high-end pens, including a Montblanc Greta Garbo special edition ballpoint.

(Greta Garbo was a classic Hollywood movie star in the ’20s and ’30s. The Montblanc series pens carry her signature and have a pearl in the cap.)

The other items were:

A Delta Dolce Vita chunky-sized fountain pen. The pen is bright orange with a black cap.

An Elysee slim silver-coloured fine-fibre tipped or ballpoint pen. It probably has blue ink and twist mechanism to bring the nib out. The base and lid are covered in an ornate filigree textured design.

A black Parker (possibly ballpoint) pen.

According to the paper, the take for the heist was about £10,000. The thieves, who broke in during the day, also made a mess in the home, even spilling ink on the carpet.

• The above is interesting because Bonhams & Butterfields just held an all-Montblanc auction in Los Angeles during the LA Pen Show – and, coincidentally, a Greta Garbo pen was among the items auctioned. However, the one sold at the auction was a solid gold fountain pen that fetched a whopping Us$21,350.

All together, the auction brought in US$715,000 for fountain pens that included a Black Widow, a Fortune Number 88 and a George Washington, all limited editions, according to Art Daily. The auction reportedly broke a few world records, with at least 10 of the pens going for more than $20,000 each.

They weren’t all that expensive, though. The auction house’s fountain pen catalogue shows one Alexandre Dumas limited edition from the Writers Series brought less than $900.

• Speaking of Montblanc, do you remember the company’s decision to honour Gandhi with an 18K gold fountain pen that cost roughly 50 times the average annual income in India?

Now, sales of the Gandhi Montblanc have been halted while an Indian court decides whether it’s even legal. The Centre for Consumer Education had sued over the pen, arguing that the Emblems and Names Act of 1950 prohibits the use of Gandhi’s name and image for commercial purposes.

From the BBC:

“We have agreed to stop selling the pen until the court decides on the matter,” Pankaj Shah, director of International Trading Private Limited, which distributes Montblanc pens in India, told the BBC.

Just 241 of the handmade pens will be sold, reflecting the number of miles Gandhi walked in his famous march against salt taxes in 1930.

Each pen comes with an eight-metre golden thread that can be wound around the pen, representing the spindle and cotton Gandhi used to weave simple cloth.

Mr Shah said 42 of the 70 pens “allotted” for India had already been sold since they were launched in early October.

By the way, the pen goes for about £16,000.

As part of the deal, Montblanc donated £100,000 to a charity run by Gandhi’s grandson, Tushar, who told The Times that he did not agree with the opposition to the pens in India.

“People are being deprived of the right to commemorate Gandhi and that’s a very un-Gandhian thing to do,” he said.

Asked what his great-grandfather would have thought of a £16,000 pen, he said: “Everything that has been said is conjecture. Who are we to decide what he would have thought?

• The Chief Officers’ Network painted a bleak picture of the economic future in a recent report and part of the forecast was based on ink pens, of all things.

The so-called “luxury goods” sector found the same thing: if you can write with a two dollar gel pen; why buy a Mont Blanc? For us, an indicator was the number of people in meetings who used pens bearing hotel logos: these are people who were thinking twice not just about the capital cost of the pen, but even about its running costs – refills for an expensive rollerball cost a lot more than taking a promotional pen from the bedside table. Their expensive, expired, pens stayed at home.

Of course, they could just buy inexpensive, good-quality rollerballs instead of the pricey ones with the refills that cost a fortune – but alas, what’s a chief executive to do?

Lots of good stuff for you this week:

• No wonder people in the Victorian era seemed to write so many letters. The New York Times has a very interesting article about how mail was delivered 12 times a day in London back then. You could receive a letter and respond to it the same day.

“In London, people complained if a letter didn’t arrive in a couple of hours,” said Catherine J. Golden, a professor of English at Skidmore College and author of “Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing” (2009).

And, not unlike us, most Victorian letter writers seemed more concerned about getting a rapid response than a long one. “Return of post” was an often-used phrase, requesting an immediate response, in time for the next scheduled delivery that day.

Part of the reason everyone wrote so much was that England had introduced an inexpensive flat postal rate, according to the Times. Before that, the person receiving the letter had to pay the postage, and the rate was determined by the length of the letter and the distance traveled to deliver it. Getting a letter apparently cost a day’s pay in some cases…which seems like it would have been a great way to punish a frenemy.

• The Independent’s Simon Usborne tried a nifty little experiment recently to discover the fastest way to communicate a message. He timed himself as he wrote a 100-word block of random sentences using eight different devices, from smartphone to ordinary pen and notepad.

…clock ticking, I’ll take each device and enter the text three times, dividing the number on the watch by three to get an average time. I will also divide the total number of mistakes by three, and add that number to the average time to adjust it for accuracy. Finally (stick with me) I’ll convert that time into words per minute to establish the speed I can achieve using each method.

For the pen and paper, he used a plain Bic Cristal and a Niceday notebook.

I am quite fast and in my first attempt finish the passage in two minutes and 48 seconds. But, when I give it to my editor to read, she fails to make out 15 words. Slowing down improves things and I end up with a tired hand and a speed of 33 wpm…about average, I’m told. But surely I can do better.

The winner was his Dell PC keyboard, on which he was able to type 91 words per minute. But that’s probably not a fair comparison since all the other methods, including the pen, involved mobile methods of messaging. Of those, he was fastest with his iPhone, hitting 43 wpm.

His Bic held a respectable fourth place, or right about the middle of the field.

• A touching profile in the Denver Post introduces us to an elderly Colorado woman named Texana Striggles who has spent the last 10 years struggling to learn to read and write again after suffering a stroke.

She married while in the 10th grade and dropped out of high school. Writing, like reading, brought serenity.

“When I was upset about something, I’d sit down and write about it,” she said. “When I was done, I’d feel great. I’d get up, get my gun and my dogs, and take off for the hills.”

She started trying to teach herself in 2000, but now has a grant and works with a professional reading and writing tutor, using flashcards and practicing her writing on a white board, according to the paper.

The 85-year-old now is fighting a malignant neoplasm in her lungs that could take her life this year.

But she refuses to give up on the simple pleasures she once enjoyed — like sitting down to read the newspaper or expressing emotions in handwritten letters.

We wish her the best and hope that she gets to enjoy at least a little more of what she loves.

• Columnist Laura Porter shared a story with her Worcester Telegram readers about how her godmother recently sent her a package of letters written years ago by her now-deceased mother.

…when I finally had time to open it, a sheaf full of letters fell out instead, some in my mother’s handwriting and some she had typed on our old Underwood. There was no accompanying note from Aunt Polly, as though she knew that these letters she had saved for decades would speak for themselves.

And so they did.

Those letters were a powerful gift for her.

My mother has been gone since 1984, 26 years last month and fully half my own lifetime.

But on a chilly winter’s afternoon in 2010, I sat down in a quiet house, the dog sleeping beside me, and spent two hours with her.

…Written words. They last forever.

• The Suburban Journals of St. Louis, Missouri ran a loving ode to fountain pens and handwriting from one of its readers, a therapist named Mike Williams. He says he’s not afraid of technology and uses his smartphone regularly, but still feels passionate about the art of pen and paper.

I use e-mail for unofficial correspondence and to cut down on paper waste. But for really important documents, a printed-out letter with correct formatting and spacing and an original signature is still the workplace standard. When I sign a letter or memo with my fountain pen, it feels good. My original signature is who I am, and it is my testament that I wrote and approved the content of the letter.

…As I sign my name to documents, my name flows; the loops and swirls that the letters make are artistic and definitive. When I make a particular turn with my pen, it sends a fine spray of dots that accentuate my work, little orbiting satellite moons that are attracted to the gravity of my flowing name. Ballpoint pen and e-mail signatures are thin, anemic signatures that make a person look timid and unsure of themselves, and let’s face it, they’re just plain wimpy.

It’s always nice to read something like that from a person who clearly loves the look and feel of ink put down on paper with a good pen.

• A handwriting textbook in a Christian region of northern India has lots of people angry about the letter “I.” Or more specifically, the word and image used to represent the letter, according to Agence France-Presse.

…a picture showing Jesus Christ holding a beer can and a cigarette…used to illustrate the letter “I” for the word “Idol”.

So far, no answer on how it happened. What made it worse was that the textbook was for primary-children attending schools run by the Catholic church. Apparently, the government is considering pursuing charges against the company that published the book.

• While we think everyone should write more letters, it’s probably a good idea to be careful to whom you write and what exactly you put down on paper. It could come back to bite you in the bum years later.

A Swedish woman who had a brief affair with U.S. President John F. Kennedy and carried on a correspondence with him for several years is auctioning off his love letters, according to The Times.

The letters are being sold in the US by Ms von Post, 87, who has kept them in a safe deposit box for more than half a century. The two-week online auction, which began yesterday and is being handled by Legendary Auctions, has a starting price of $25,000 (£16,000) “People have read about Kennedy’s family life, and the type of person he was as a political figure,” said Doug Allen, the president of the auction house. “These letters are very romantic. They show a different side of Kennedy. It’s not an appropriate relationship. But it is part of history.” The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston declined to comment.

(As of Tuesday night, bidding on the eight JFK letters was up to $US45,000, with eight days left in the auction.)

So, just remember, anything you write down could be read by someone else…and not necessarily the person you intended to do the reading.

By the way, if you would like to read some brilliant letters, cards and notes that have made their way into the public by accident, we recommend you take a look at Found magazine.

We all have to take notes, whether for work, school or just daily life, so Lifehacker poses an excellent question to readers on that topic: Do you prefer to take notes with pen and paper or on a computer?

For those of us who love using pens, the idea of relying on a keyboard to record all of our thoughts and information might seem a little alien, but there apparently are plenty of people who choose to do it that way. At least 23 percent of the respondents in Lifehacker’s poll said they go with typed over handwritten notes.

The website of the popular For Dummies series even has a page dedicated to, yes, “Notetaking on the Computer.”

From the site:

Writing notes by hand can be such a pain that more and more people are taking notes on the computer.

We say (only half-seriously) shame on them for making such outrageous – and patently untrue – claims! Sure, it can be a little difficult to keep up with a fast speaker when trying to scribble down everything by hand, and your fingers can start to cramp during a long session of furious notetaking, but it isn’t a chore, by any means.

Nifty at Notebook Stories pointed the way to another person arguing against the use of pen and paper in favour of a smartphone, of all things, for note-taking. Writer David Pierce says he uses his phone exclusively, entering random ideas into applications like Evernote or Simplenote.

I’m a writer, and I don’t carry a notebook around with me. Heck, I don’t even carry a pen. Do people even use those anymore? Pens. So old school.

To which Nifty says, “SACRILEGE!!!” And we add: Can you really even call yourself a writer if you don’t carry around even one writing instrument? C’mon, everybody needs a pen…can your smartphone take notes in the rain, like the Power Tank can?

Fortunately, a more balanced approach prevailed among the nurses at AllNurses.com. Responding to a poster who asked whether she should take notes in nursing classes by hand or by laptop, the general consensus seemed to be that the best way is to take notes by hand, then later transcribe and organize them on a computer.

In the Lifehacker poll, 38 percent (as of Tuesday night) said they preferred handwritten, and 38 percent said a combination of handwritten and typed notes.

Your Tiger Pens blogger takes a lot of notes. It generally breaks down like this: Any note-taking done while out and about is with my G2 or B2P on a little reporter’s pad. At home, there’s a little cheapie pad from Staples by the phone with a stick pen for quickie notes like phone numbers or appointments, and on my desk is usually a legal pad with a rotating assortment of pens, currently a Signo 207, for taking notes while online.

If I’m on the phone taking notes, I open up Notepad in Windows because I can type much faster than I scan scribble, making it easier to keep up with what the other person is saying. After seeing something recently about Microsoft OneNote, I opened up my copy, which I’d never done in the couple of years that I’ve had it. It was just a brief glance, but it looked useful, with different tabs for different types of notes and drag-and-drop capability. (Now, though, there’s a OneNote icon in my system tray every time I boot and it won’t stop appearing.)

If you really want to learn how to take notes, Gordon at One Man Writes has a simple and effective note-taking system that he uses for business. He breaks notes down into action items, questions and information, with little shorthand symbols for each that help him scan his notes and decide what items to transcribe and which ones to add to his Remember the Milk account.

So, which is it for you…pen, keyboard, or both?

It’s movie awards season in the U.S. (look for Oscar nominations to be announced tomorrow), so here at Tiger Pens, we decided to put together a movie/TV list of our own: Great fight scenes involving a pen or pencil.

You might be surprised at how many there are. Some are fairly recent, and a few go back several years, but all feature highly choreographed use of writing instruments in violent ways probably not recommended by the makers.

We’ve ranked them using a scientific process that assigns weighted values to….oh, who’re we kidding, they just go from “cool” to “coolest.” Here they are:

#7 Red Eye – Lisa Escapes the Plane

Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) needs to get away from terrorist Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), seated next to her, as their Dallas-to-Miami flight lands.  In a scene that adds a flash of excitement to a so-so thriller, she stealthily thumbs the cap off a rollerball and waits for the seatbelt light to go off before whipping the pen around and into Rippner’s throat.

#6 Battlestar Galactica – Gaeta Snaps

(Video won’t play outside the US…sorry, it’s the only version I could find of this scene, although you can see a still and photos of the pen here.)

Lt. Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani) is trying to learn how much Gaius Baltar (James Callis) has told the Cylons about the fleet’s search for Earth in this intense sci-fi series that ran for four seasons. Baltar whispers something into Gaeta’s ear, infuriating him. Before Baltar realizes his mistake, the lieutenant snatches up a pen and slams it into Baltar’s neck.

#5 RocknRolla – Johnny Quid vs. the Bouncer

Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell) and a friend are trying to get into a club in Guy Ritchie’s brilliant crime movie, but end up taking a bit of abuse (and a punch) from the bouncer. After the bouncer threatens to “grind your bones to make my bread,” Johnny starts jabbing him with a pencil, presumably the pointy end, but it’s hard to tell. He finishes the bouncer off with a trashcan lid.

#4 The Dark Knight – Joker Kills the Henchman

The Joker (Heath Ledger) shows up at a meeting of Gotham’s underworld leaders and offers to kill Batman in exchange for half of the crooks’ money. To show them how serious he is, the delightfully demented villain offers to demonstrate a magic trick. He plants a pencil on a table, then makes it “disappear” by slamming one of Gambol’s henchmen headfirst onto it.

#3 Casino – Is This Your Pen?

In Martin Scorsese’s crime classic, Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) is having drinks with his mob guardian, Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci). When he finds a nice pen laying on the bar, he casually turns to the man next to him and asks if the pen belongs to him. The clueless drinker responds rudely, and Nicky, grabbing the pen, stabs the man over and over in the neck until he falls to floor whimpering. Pesci was the king of the psycho mafia characters in the ’90s, and this was one of the scenes that cemented his reputation.

#2 The Bourne Identity – Bourne vs. Castel

Amnesiac spy Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is searching his own Paris apartment for clues to his identity when assassin Castel (Nicky Naude) bursts through a window, setting off one of the most exciting movie fight scenes in the last 10 years. Castel attacks with a knife and Bourne, unarmed, manages to grab a Bic from his desk. He puts several holes in the assassin before the pen lodges in Castel’s hand. Bourne then kills him with a little movie-fu.

#1 Grosse Pointe Blank – High School Reunion Death Match

Hitman Martin Blank (John Cusack) is attending his 10^th high school reunion, not realizing that a competing killer has followed him to the event. When a drunk former classmate hands him a promotional pen, he slips it into a pocket and goes upstairs to see his old locker. That’s where Felix La PuBelle (former kickboxing champ Benny “the Jet” Urquidez) catches him. The two go at it fists, feet and knees until Blank reaches in his pocket for the pen, flips off the cap and buries it in La PuBelle’s neck.

That’s our list, although we thought we’d give honourable mention to two pen deaths that occurred offscreen in a couple of U.S. television shows. In “American Gothic,” a short-lived supernatural series from the ’90s, Sheriff Lucas Buck (Gary Cole), who may or may not have been devil, murdered a man by forcing him to stab himself to death with a Platignum fountain pen. And, in the “CSI: NY” Season 3 episode “Some Buried Bones,” a college student apparently is stabbed to death with a Montblanc.

(You may be wondering at this point whether anyone has ever actually killed or seriously hurt someone using a pen…or maybe that’s just a little morbid curiosity on our part. Either way, the answer is, “Yes.”

In 2007, a student at the University of Hull attacked his girlfriend in a fit of jealousy and stabbed her to death with a pen. And, in 2008, a 13-year-old California boy was stabbed several times with a ballpoint pen in a fight with a classmate and later died.

BTW: Pens can also be used for self-defense, if you’re into that sort of thing, as our post on tactical pens explains.)

Let us know what you think of our list, or if you know of any other great pen fight scenes we should know about. Extra points if you can identify any of the pens/pencils used in the movies above.

Yeah, it’s probably a long, long shot, but a website run by a Parker Pen collector is putting together a petition in hopes of convincing the company to create an archives/museum when it closes its British factory later this year.

In case you didn’t know, a portion of Parker Pens are manufactured in a facility in Newhaven, in East Sussex. They’ve been made there since 1921, according to The Argus.

The storied pen maker, which is now owned by Newell Rubbermaid, announced last year that it was planning to close the factory and consolidate its pen operations in France.

Swedish collector Tony Fischier is afraid that a piece of pen history may be lost when the Newhaven factory is shuttered. He’s posted a petition on his Parker pens collector site asking that Newell Rubbermaid:

investigate the possibility of opening a museum where selected pens and other products made by The Parker pen company would be on public display.

Newhaven is traditional Parker soil and the residents in Newhaven would be able to add many memories, things and stories to such a museum.

We weren’t able to reach Fischier through his website, but he emailed the Gazette in Parker’s original hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin that he knew the petition might lead nowhere.

“…hopefully, if there are a lot of us letting the company know that we care, maybe that could give the Newhaven people some leverage in their discussions with the mother company. There is a fantastic treasure out there; the Parker brand has an incredible power among most people over 40.

“It’s a petition, but it’s mostly a declaration and a reminder that the Parker brand still equals an emotional value for millions of people. If we can’t have the pens we love, at least we want a museum with the old relics.”

A company spokesman told the newspaper that no decision had been made yet on what would happen to the archives when the factory closes and production moved to France.

Wondering what all the fuss is about? Read Fischier’s description of his visit to the Parker Pen Archives last June, where he saw thousands of vintage Parker Pens, including rare Snakes and Azteks. It’s a bit long, but well worth the read. He also has photos of many of the pens that he saw.

Here’s to Fischier and his petition. We wish him luck in keeping a small part of pen history in Newhaven.

Update: Here’s the link to sign up for the Parker Pens petition and the accompanying newsletter from Fischier.

A promotional pen company has just launched a new product for people who fear their writing instruments might be out to get them. The Antibac antibacterial pen is a “certified superbug killer” that supposedly wipes out the nasty germs that are crawling around on your pen, trying to infect you.

According to Senator Pens, the makers of the Antibac, the secret formula baked into the pen’s surface “kills 99.9% of harmful bacteria and viruses” within 24 hours. The company also says it’s the only antibacterial pen that meets British Standards for bug killing.

Among the germs the pen is supposed to kill:

• MRSA
• Salmonella (stomach flu)
• and, tests pending, H1N1 (swine flu)

The company’s website does not explain what exactly in the pen kills the germs, but a spec sheet says it starves them of nutrients so they die, and the surface of the pen, where bacteria normally would “flourish” and be easily transferred, stays clean.

The retractable ballpoint pens apparently are sold as customized promotional pens for, among others, the food safety industry.

The Antibac is not the first, or only, antibacterial pen on the market.

For example, Staedtler makes the iRemedy pen, which has a “special additive” in the barrel and grip to kill germs (although protection does not extend to the skin, however, so if you already have germs on your hand, you’re out of luck.) Liqui-Mark also offers a range of antimicrobial products, including rollerball pens. And Paper Mate sells the Flexgrip Elite Stick as antimicrobial.

(Most of these antibacterial pens seem to use some variation of silver to kill the bugs.)

But here’s the thing: Antibacterial pens don’t really do all that much for you.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, antibacterial products are not “demonstrably useful in the healthy household.” In fact, they may make matters worse by helping to breed more resilient germs and by stifling the immune systems of children, leading to more allergy problems later.

In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency limits the public health claims that antibacterial products can make because “no scientific evidence exists that these products prevent the spread of germs and harmful microorganisms in humans.”

The bottom line is, antibacterial pens may kill the germs on their own surfaces, but you’re still going to pick up germs from every other thing you touch during the day, including your keyboard, telephone, keys and doorknobs. To deal with the germs that get on your hands, Consumer Reports suggests the old-fashioned way – washing with plain soap and water.

But what do you think, readers? Are you haunted by the thought of all those nasty little bugs on your pens?