Tony Bridges 
Zebra is a company that likes to have fun with its pens, especially the versatile and reliable Z-Grip ballpoint.
Over the years, we’ve seen Z-Grips come in a range of colors, from fuchsia to orange, and in wild animal prints, including cheetah spots and bright tiger stripes. Always with the same sturdy barrel, comfortable grip and smooth writing we’ve come to expect from Zebra pens, even the low-priced ballpoints.
Not being one to give up easily & having difficulty getting to grips with the art of writing with a fountain pen, I decided to give the Pilot V-Pen a go.
My first impression was that it was comfortable to hold, as I started to write I didn’t get the feeling it was any different to anything else in my collection. This is a first, I usually get negative vibes before the ink has dried on my first couple of words.
For the last several months, an unidentified street artist has been pasting up drawings of pigeons – and hummingbirds and shopping carts and other objects, too – around downtown Bangor.
Years ago, when I was just starting out as a newspaper reporter, I worked at a paper run by publisher Dave Lawrence. Although he was in charge of a large, busy daily metro newspaper, he often took to the time to send out handwritten notes when someone’s work particularly pleased him.
They arrived in stiff, yellow inter-office memo envelopes, closed by a string, and were known around the newsroom as ‘Dave Raves.’
I’d been at the paper for a few months, working the night desk, and was pretty sure he had no idea who I was. A couple of my stories had made the front page, but mostly I wrote minor briefs and obituaries that got tucked away in the back sections.
And then one day, I came in to work and found, in my mailbox, one of those little envelopes from the publisher’s office. It was a handwritten ‘Dave Rave’ praising an obit I’d recently written about a local cartoonist.
The Pilot FriXion erasable pen is a nifty little erasable ink pen that has gotten lots of love since it was launched a few years ago. It’s popular with editors, artists, quilters, and almost every kind of writer, and has consistently received decent reviews.
Except for one common complaint – the positioning of the eraser. The FriXion, until now, has been a capped stick pen with the friction eraser on the end of the pen. If you write with the cap posted, you have to stop and remove it any time you want to erase it.