Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday

I don't think he was joking. The liquid ink fountain pen, and even the hi-tech versions used by engineering draftsmen have been on the endangered species list for decades already. Kohinoor of Germany made a series of excellent pens designed to use India Ink, a very black drafting ink, and unlike popular fountain pens of the day, these didn't rely on a collapsible rubber bladder to hold the ink. Instead, they employ a piston and cylinder system which lasts indefinitely as long as you keep them clean, and they can be easily washed out with warm water. I have a set of four of these pens dating from the mid 1960s, and they are all still in good working order. I have a different sized nib in each, for drawing different widths of lines. But as I said, this kind of pen has been on the endangered species list for decades, ever since the first ball-points came along in the 1940s.

Advances in technology, like the hand-helds and calculators of today might easily contribute to us regressing to babbling idiots, totally dependent on our gadgets to do our thinking for us. When's the last time you used mental arithmetic to add up the grocery bill, or balance your budget, or calculate your income taxes? And now, we can't hardly function without some gadget doing most of our mental tasks for us. Ever wondered where that's taking us? And where do we turn for help? To a TV, where we're being brainwashed by the advertisers for one-third of every hour. Are we smart, or what?