For those who don’t read Swans on Tea (and if you like fun physics-y blogs, you really should), I have to link to this post concerning product reviews on Amazon.co.uk. People have taken to heart the absurdity of being able to review anything you buy there, including pens. A sample:
Writes well – but it’s unmusical
If all you wish to do is write on paper this product is ideal, but unlike its brother the Bic Stic, which has a softer, opague, plastic barrel, it is not possible to turn it into a whistle in less than a minute using only a penknife and a short length of softwood pencil. For some obscure reason Amazon does not sell the Stic so you’ll have to steal one from a Holiday Inn if you want to make yourself a whistle: having stolen a Bic Stic cut a flat about 1 mm deep and over 6 mm long along the side of the unsharpened end of a pencil. Remove all the pen components from the Bic Stic and make a cut about 3mm deep about 6 mm from the end of the barrel. Now cut a notch as shown in the diagram at www.jbryant.eu/whistle.jpg, cut 6 mm of flattened pencil and put it in that end of the barrel with the flat aligned with the notch. Now cut 6 mm of unflattened pencil and use it to close the other end of the barrel. You have a whistle. Blow at the end with the air hole.
There are some amazingly funny reviews there.
Wow… Amazon.uk is spectacular! I guess that’s what you get when an entire nation grows up listening to Douglass Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide radio broadcasts.