Word: pencilers
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...think I'm alone. Harvard students can be classified into distinct categories according to their instrument of choice: there are ball-point gnawers, the roller-ball elite and, somewhat rarer, the pencil people. These types are not mutually exclusive, but they certainly divide the campus into a class structure of note-taking. The felt-tip bullies, a rare exception, force their way onto a sheet with the power of fat letters. As for the multi-colored clicker pen owners, well, they are just confused pre-meds...
...count in my last week's English 178x section yielded the following results: four ball-pointers, seven roller-ball-users and a lone pencil person. Hmmm. Is the roller-ball phenomenon a throwback from days of fountain pen prevalence? Perhaps proud owners cherish their Pilot Precises and their UniBall Deluxes for their decisive, permanent ink or for the little windows through which they can watch the ink go down and think, "boy, I sure write a lot!" The Harvard humanities notetaker comes to adore the flowing pages upon pages of intellectual-looking lecture notes...
What about pencils? Who still uses them? They can't write in blue, or black. They can't look decisive or bold. They remind us of high school math class. Ahh, but here's the one, obvious beauty of a pencil: graphite disappears with a little help from that wonder of physics, friction. Pencils at Harvard are reserved for either those who aren't vain enough to care about permanence or for taking exams, where we would rather not have our confused hieroglyphics remembered. Pencil use has its hierarchy, though: note the dichotomy between integral-calculators, who use mechanical pencils...
...they should have to pay taxes for the schools after their kids have graduated. Anger is a primal force in politics, and if you get the good folks riled over the pointy-heads in power, you can get yourself elected, even if your own head resembles a No. 2 pencil. But then you take office and are expected to legislate anger. How do you do that? This is the Republicans' dilemma: how to breathe fire and chew up the scenery, but gently, so as not to alarm the moderate voters...
...hook. ``I just came from your accounting firm,'' I say. ``I told them I had discovered an error in my calculations -- that my set-top box had a faulty chip. I supplied them with 27 new numbers, which I worked out by hand, with pencil and paper, in a conference room in their offices, far from the prying eye of the cable company. I personally sealed them in an envelope and placed them in their vault...