View From the Bushes

Since high school, I've been fascinated with pen tricks and similar feats of manual dexterity. As with is so often the case (think gorgeous blonde cheerleaders), my high school "fascinations" often meshed very poorly with my talents, and by extension, reality. I'm sure that everyone is hoping to hear about the blonde cheerleaders. Unfortunately, what I've decided to talk about is pen tricks. Despite my decade and a half long fascination, I have only mastered two, and one of them isn't even a pen trick. I can spin a pen through my fingers and I can cascade a coin through my fingers (think Val Kilmer in Top Gun). My lack of proficiency goes back to the aforementioned lack of talents. Basically, I have the manual dexterity of someone in the midst of an epileptic seizure.

Okay, maybe it's not quite that bad, but it did take me an awful long time just to learn to do the two things I can do. Recently I've been trying to pick up the whole snapping spin thing where you rest the pen on the top of your hand and then with a sort of snap like motion you spin it. I've done it a couple of times, but mostly I just drop the pen and have to spend five minutes looking for it. I guess I should stop practicing in deep underbrush...

The reason I choose this topic is because my prayers have been answered. I recently stumbled across a site completely devoted to pen spinning. Of particular use is their learning order chart. Not only does it give you a whole flowchart of tricks (far more than I could have imagined), but it has videos showing how to do the tricks. Just when you start to get a little blase about the web, something like this comes along and reaffirms the idea that the Internet may really be the greatest invention ever.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross