It's no secret that I love pens and paper. Of course, you'd never know it by looking at my handwriting, but that doesn't stop me from pursuing my quest to find the "right" pen for me.

Over the last few months, I've settled on what I think is the perfect pen. It's affordable ($2 each), works beautifully, is light and trim and durable. It is the Zebra F-301. It's a great compromise and has become "J's official pen".

Technically, it takes refills, but I have a much bigger issue misplacing pens than running out of ink. In fact, I can't remember actualy running out of ink before losing a pen, so the fact that these things aren't $30 or $300 pens is a much better setup for me. If you can manage to hold on to a single pen for 10 years, one of the nicer pens that takes inexpensive refills might work for you.

If that ever happens to me, I'll maybe reconsider, but any replacement has a tough battle given how much I like these dang things.

"If I put 6 suitcases in front of you and told you that 5 contained cobras, ready to strike, would you open one?" - J Wynia on how poorly people make decisions.

Photo: Michael Rhys

The above quote is from me on a new episode of Garrick Van Buren's "First Crack" podcast. We sat down on Saturday morning for about 3 hours and had a great conversation. We talked, among other things, about attention. It's that topic that Garrick extracted from the conversation into a 33 minute podcast.

That conversation was actually round 2 of discussing the topic as the first round's audio was eaten by Garrick's installation of Audacity. This one was redundantly recorded to avoid that problem. There was some good stuff in the first, but I think that most of the important points came up the second time around. I *do* know that this contains better explanations of some of the points than I've been able to do in the past.

If you're interested in this whole "attention" thing, you should probably give my interview a listen.

Later that afternoon was the first MN meeting of the Uplifter group, which I was only able to stay for about an hour of. However, in that time, we managed to set up a guy from the library with a Wordpress site and help him put notes together to show others at the library how to do it for themselves. I think the group has some potential to do some great things and it will be interesting to see how it goes from here.

It's starting to look like a good year for me and new music. I'm finding lots of new music via podcast and David Gilmour, Gov't Mule and now Tom Petty are going end up with new albums this year. All of them are on that list I've mentioned before of artists that I'll pay full price for any album they put out.

Billboard has an interview with Tom Petty about the 30th anniversary of he and the Heartbreakers. It's a pretty good read and interesting to read his perspective on putting out quality music for my entire life. I agree with one of the other artists they talked to about him. I consider his discography to be a soundtrack to my life.

He isn't the kind of artist who the modern "American Idol" poll-taking approach to choosing our musicians would make famous, so I'm glad he started 30 years ago. Of course, it doesn't hurt that, given my nasal voice, I can sing along and not sound nearly as bad as I do with others.

I rarely agree 100% with anyone on anything. However, on occasion, a manifesto resonates with me on a deeply spiritual level. I join with Brother Cederholm in his call for the removal of raisins from oatmeal cookies. For too long, the tyranny of the raisin has been forced upon us, disguised as a chocolate chip, hidden from external view only to ruin the cinnamon sweetness on the first bite.

Photo: weezie pie

I've got a new analogy that I latched on to. It replaces the phrases I've been using when someone has a solution in search of a problem. Usually, I go with something from the "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" camp. However, that is so overused as to be ignored by lots of the people I'm talking to.

However, this morning, I read a posting that carried the idea of a silver bullet a bit further than just the phrase and left me with the idea of "Searching for Werewolves" with a silver bullet in hand as my new analogy of choice in these situations.

It's vivid, just obscure enough to delight those who get it, but accessible enough to those who don't that they won't feel dumb for not having gotten it immediately. I like it.

So, if you come to me with a really great solution that doesn't solve a problem, you're going to get asked about your werewolf hunt. You've been warned.