Pack Rat Magazine is too legit, too legit to quit.

Hello my darlings. I have missed you. I try not to hamper you all with my personal life very much because really, this blog is about cool finds not a whole lot of navel gazing, but I did want to let you know that I apologize profusely if I am a bit remiss in getting blogs out over the next couple of months. I am doing my best but as some of you know, I’m in grad school right now and frankly this semester has been the most time consuming so far. I just wanted you to know.

Anyway, now on to the interesting stuff.  As I sit here clicking away at my keyboard, I find myself taking for granted such amazing developments in modern technology, such as the backspace key or the delete key.  I was born just as a generation of typewriters  were being retired, so I never knew the frustration of the whited out type-o. But, likewise I never knew the satisfaction of perfect, error free typing, or the gratifying deep clacking of the keys, the ding of the bell at the end of a line, the whir of the carriage release lever.  I do, however, have a great love and respect of all things typey.  I was actually just mentioning to my co-workers the other day how much I like typing, how when I was first learning in school I would go home and copy pages from my library books onto my Tandy 5000 word processing program (my dream was to type out a whole copy of my favorite book at the time, Sorcery and Cecelia.  I wasn’t hip to copyright infringement laws at the time).  Even now, my favorite online time waster is a game called Typer Shark where you have to type words as fast as possible or sharks will eat you.  All of this is lead up to explain why I am completely enamored with the Boston Typewriter Orchestra. A group of dedicated typewriting enthusiasts refused to let a classic, refined piece of history simply drift away to the realm of nostalgia.  Instead they’ve banded together in every sense of the word and have created a percussive symphony (can you have a percussive symphony? Whatever.) of typewriting.  Like the Japanese Kodo drummers, the Boston Typewriter Orchestra layers percussive rhythms of typing keys to create a rich, hypnotic sound that is fully addictive.  Visit their website to hear their full, layered sound and see video of their lively performance.