Alas, hotels don't tend to have a marquis like that anymore, and if the do, they don't blink on and off. Then again, who uses a manual typewriter? Who uses a typewriter of any kind? That's the trouble with being born around mid-century is that you remember one world but live in another.

And mine.

That's well said. I'm only 35, but I'm starting to get it. Watching the world that formed you fade away is somewhat disconcerting. Unchecked, I can see how it might lead to nostalgia, or worse, statements that begin "When I was your age".

Ha! Yeah I learned on a manual typewriter in junior high. I'm still pretty heavy handed on a computer because of that.

Being a geek, I was always able to adapt quite well.

But then... smartphones. I don't get the appeal of such restricted design at all. NOW I feel like an old fart.

About once a year, the folks at the Tai-Pan Project here in Seattle get together for a bout of Round-Robins. And for the occasion, we break out the typewriters. One of our members has a collection of them. Sharpens a lot of the group when they pause to realize there's no 'enter' key, that they can't 'cut and paste', and that some punctuation keys are non-existent altogether.

Tai-Pan has also hosted a Round-Robin event at the past several Foolscap conventions, to which we dragged along several of the typewriters. Most of the folks who have participated suffer the same hesitations and unfamiliarities, but some of the pros can really bang those keys. Joe Haldeman participated in our last one just a couple of months ago.

If you can use one keyboard, you can use any keyboard... except maybe some of the really tiny ones that they used to sell as novelty calculators, that you could only work with a pencil tip. There are no giant keyboards that I know about, but archy the cockroach, Don Marquis's 1920s poet, reincarnated as a roach, used to use a typewriter in the office of a newspaper editor. He'd crawl to the top of the machine, jump off the carriage and knock his head against the keys, one at a time. Of course, cockroaches are pretty tough... if anyone ever builds a keyboard half a city block long, I don't recomment following archie's example. (By the way, he couldn't manage the shift lever, so his name and other capitalizations were always in small letters.)

Oddly enough one of the holiday catalogs I was flipping though actually had typewriters in it!

An old joke that never gets old.

Yeah, I miss this little dude, and not just because "Hyper Al Goes Latin!" is the story of my life.

yep, I remember this one

As a writer for comics, I can't say whether the time would be better spent working on short stories, or light fiction...

Coming soon to # "The Mystery of the Missing Super" by Hyper Al.

I can hardly wait.

Oh, grand.

Did anyone catch the gag in "Hoodwinked 2" where the Grand Hotel had so many buzzing neon signs on it that almost everyone staying there could be treated to a view with a sign just outside their windows?