Help with Pilot, Sailor, and Platinum vintage pens

[mke]

On 1/11/2022 at 2:09 AM, Chi said:

I love your picture of the cat. It has a bad-ass attitude

Thanks. It is only looks not character. Felix was one year at the time of the picture, now he is nearly 16 - nothing has changed.

[Chi]

6 hours ago, mke said:

Thanks. It is only looks not character. Felix was one year at the time of the picture, now he is nearly 16 - nothing has changed.

 

HA HA HA HA, awesome! 

[OldTravelingShoe]

7 hours ago, mke said:

2. As I live in Japan, I don't need it. But look on FPN, there were a few threads about such forwarding/buying-for-you services

Very nice, @mke! Visited Japan twice in the 2000s-2010s, iirc, mostly the big cities. Loved it enough to bring my better half over. Did not have even a single fountain pen in mind at the time, so I think I should repair this some day.

 

I took the message about FPN and will do my due diligence, likely the upcoming weekend because things are already super busy at work. 

Edited January 12, 2022 by OldTravelingShoe
Edited for clarity.

[AmandaW]

I find this FPN post from 2008 to be very helpful:

 

 

[IlikeInksandIcannotlie]

Deepl does have some inaccuracies though.... so do be careful. Try translating いいえ。 via deepl. You might get a laugh out of it.

[A Smug Dill]

5 minutes ago, IlikeInksandIcannotlie said:

Deepl does have some inaccuracies though.... so do be careful. Try translating いいえ。 via deepl. You might get a laugh out of it.

 

 

OK, I'll bite. What's wrong with that?

 

Edit: Ah, OK. I didn't put in the punctuation you specified.

 

Edited May 29, 2022 by A Smug Dill

[IlikeInksandIcannotlie]

Huh.  (Edit: you missed a little symbol at the end there. It also only works with Eng (US). )

[A Smug Dill]

32 minutes ago, IlikeInksandIcannotlie said:

Huh.  (Edit: you missed a little symbol at the end there.)

 

I mentioned that in my ‘edit’. In any case, what you showed isn't what I got from DeepL.

 

 

(Yes, I'm aware I'm using “English (UK)”, not “English (US)” which is not a reasonable default in the target language setting.)

 

[mke]

4 hours ago, AmandaW said:

I find this FPN post from 2008 to be very helpful:

You don't need that, you only need this: https://www.deepl.com/translator

 

example:

これ1つですぐに始められる！
オリジナルデザインの万年筆と、オリジナルカラーのコンバーター・少量で試せるオリジナルラベルのボトルインク（10ml）のセットです。
初めての方も安心のイラスト入り説明書付き。
第2弾の今回は、「原っぱにあらわれるいきもの」がモチーフの harappa がテーマとなっております。

→製品紹介ページへ

※数量限定発売品のため、すでに販売を終了させていただいている場合がございます。

 

translates into

One of these gets you started right away!
This set includes a fountain pen with an original design, a converter in the original color, and an original labeled bottle ink (10 ml) that you can try out in small quantities.
Includes an illustrated instruction manual for first-time users.
The theme of the second set is "harappa," which means "creatures that appear in a field.

→Product page

Please note that this product is sold in limited quantities and may no longer be available.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

 

This translator is WAY better than Google or Bing Translate.

Even from English to Japanese, it is nearly perfect.

 

[mke]

2 minutes ago, mke said:

you only need this: https://www.deepl.com/translator

I just saw that after the post I commented on, some people were mentioning deepl.com

I wonder why people now expect a flawless translation. It is better than the competition and that is what counts.

 

[OldTravelingShoe]

Many thanks for the excellent resources, @AmandaW, @IlikeInksandIcannotlie!

 

No worries about the wrong translation. This reminds me somehow of a day I spent in... Must have been Xi'an or nearby, in China... I entered a place which did not appear to cater to foreigners (because I like to do this kind of thing). I used fingers to point inexactly at some menu written on the wall... And received the largest portion of pig feet and huge Chinese lettuce I ever saw, swimming in sauce. And chopsticks. It took me the best of two hours to get a decent meal. Meanwhile, people were stairing and commenting. Took a few good laughs to get through all this; the whole shop and I got involved. So I assume I could get through with understanding what the pens are about, and maybe go through some more laughs. Cheers! 😄

[inkstainedruth]

On 1/10/2022 at 9:19 PM, A Smug Dill said:

 

 Advisory / Apology: Entirely off-topic content 

 

 

In the past several years, my wife's family usually does this thing around Christmas, where everyone puts entries into a shared spreadsheet ‘in the cloud’ as to what they want to be given — and usually that means allowing for one present for each family member to give oneself. That's just O(n²) rigmarole, if you ask me; I can and do buy my own stuff as required (or whimsically) from a variety of retail channels throughout the year, thank you very much, and for that I have the reputation of being difficult to buy presents for, so in part that is supposed to make the gift-exchanging exercise easier for them; yet some of them wouldn't have a bar of just not exchanging Christmas presents.

 

Anyway… her brother was often tardy about filling the spreadsheet, and when he did, it was often not very specific. This past Christmas, long after everyone's (online) Christmas shopping was done — by the start of December, what with the well-publicised failures of Australia Post to just do its job, let's blame it on Round 17 of pandemic outbreaks and lockdowns — he deigned to add the rest of his entries, after the initial one that he put on the spreadsheet weeks ago (which we ‘claimed’ immediately at the time).

 

“Anything from [a particular clothing brand] (size XS)”, ”Anything from [a different clothing brand] (size S)”, “Any book from the 20 most recent additions to my ‘want to read’ list on Goodreads”, etc. Erm, OK. I guess he thought that was being easygoing and easy-to-please, two weeks before the family's Christmas get-together.

 

Black Friday sales were long over; ordering online may not get things delivered in time; and the number of daily new COVID cases was starting to go through the roof, so we didn't really want to be battling the hordes who felt compelled to enjoy their freedom from mask-wearing and vaccination requirements by retail therapy involving lots of in-store browsing.

 

My wife started looking into what (else) to get him and how, and was getting frustrated. I asked her which twenty book titles were on his list, and she read them out to me. I then went and pulled three New-Old-Stock books off different bookcases here at home, and dusted them off. “There. Pick the one that you think is most presentable, with the least signs of yellowing along the edges and such.”

 

He ended up getting a copy of the 40th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene I must have bought from Book Depository or Amazon(?) back in 2018.

 

A few years ago my brother-in-law's wife suggested that everyone in the family put their name in a hat and then draw someone's name and buy one splurge present for that one person.  I thought it was a GREAT idea (I'm always scrambling to figure out what to get people) but my mother-in-law nixed the idea.  

There have been years where we bought everyone the same thing: one year it was a set of fairly nice spatulas; one year several people got knife blocks which instead of having slots, have thin rods so you can stick the knives in anywhere (we had bought one for ourselves and found it to be a GREAT idea); one year my in-laws (as sets) got nice trivets from the Wendell August Forge Outlet store.  I often would buy nice wall calendars (mostly for the artwork) but those are getting harder and harder to find anymore -- and admittedly, the last one I bought for myself for the living room has been on the same month for about two years now....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[inkstainedruth]

On 1/12/2022 at 7:19 AM, mke said:

Thanks. It is only looks not character. Felix was one year at the time of the picture, now he is nearly 16 - nothing has changed.

Is Felix auditioning to be the replacement for "Grumpy Cat"?  I saw the. people who owned her on Anderson Cooper's old talk show a few years ago, and she was actually really placid and not fazed by lights and cameras -- she just had, well, unusual markings -- and her owners made a FORTUNE off of her.  

As opposed to one of our cats who would make a beeline for elsewhere every time she saw me pick up the camera or the cellphone....  For some reason she HATED having her picture taken.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[inkstainedruth]

On 5/31/2022 at 8:32 AM, OldTravelingShoe said:

Many thanks for the excellent resources, @AmandaW, @IlikeInksandIcannotlie!

 

No worries about the wrong translation. This reminds me somehow of a day I spent in... Must have been Xi'an or nearby, in China... I entered a place which did not appear to cater to foreigners (because I like to do this kind of thing). I used fingers to point inexactly at some menu written on the wall... And received the largest portion of pig feet and huge Chinese lettuce I ever saw, swimming in sauce. And chopsticks. It took me the best of two hours to get a decent meal. Meanwhile, people were stairing and commenting. Took a few good laughs to get through all this; the whole shop and I got involved. So I assume I could get through with understanding what the pens are about, and maybe go through some more laughs. Cheers! 😄

Ha!  Sounds like my mom's story about when my parents took a bus trip around which included going to someplace in Germany or Austria.  A couple of guys in their tour group ate dinner at some local restaurant and had seen the remains of what they thought was chicken bones on a platter being taken away.  So they looked on the menu and ordered "Schenken" (thinking that was a close translation from English).  And my mom said they were STUNNED by getting served HAM!  (My mom suspected that what they saw being carted away MIGHT have been rabbit bones....)

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[OldTravelingShoe]

Hehe, @inkstainedruth, this is part of the pleasure of traveling. As an old traveling shoe myself, I think it is an important part. Being surprised, discovering new things! 

[inkstainedruth]

Yeah, when my parents went to China in 1980, the first part of the trip was a couple of days in Manilla in the Phillipines, and the last night there, their tour group got taken to some "for tourists" dinner which made my mom sick (apparently my dad as well).  My mom said she was lying on the floor of the plane, sick as a dog, and TERRIFIED that they wouldn't let her into China.  The next morning, they were taken to a "typical" Chinese breakfast in their hotel in Beijing.  The first thing served was something pickled and my mom said she was going "OMG...."  But then EVERYTHING ELSE was absolutely the right thing for someone having tummy troubles (aka "tourista") -- toast, tea, and rice soup!

My mom said pretty much everywhere they ate in mainland China the food was AMAZING (and she learned to eat with chopsticks -- and I then figured that if SHE could learn to eat with chopsticks, so could I.... ).

Of course it helped that a really good Szechuan restaurant opened the next town over from where I grew up.  We had our wedding rehearsal dinner there (I figured everyone in the wedding party would eat Chinese food, and we knew that they didn't add MSG to stuff -- my husband has a bad sensitivity to it: it's not technically an allergy but if you SAY that to people in restaurants they're better at telling you what to avoid ordering) and it was also where my dad's retirement dinner was (for that, a Chinese co-worker of his arranged it all and they just brought out platter after platter -- my mom had to ask what the soup was so she'd know to order it again!).  

Up till that point, for my mom "Chinese food" meant Americanized frozen Chinese dinners and cartons of La Choy....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth