Cartoonist David Rees is responsible for one of the most brilliant things ever: The web comic Get Your War On, brilliantly satirizing the gung-ho warmongering culture of the Bush years.
His My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable was likewise brilliant – using clip art graphics, bone-dry wit and absurdity to hilarify officeness.
He’s now turned to something completely different – the “age-old art of manual pencil sharpening.” It’s elegantly simple: send David Rees a pencil, and in his workshop in upstate New York, he will sharpen it and send it back to you. All for just $12.50. Or send him $15.00 and he’ll send you a brand-new hand-sharpened pencil.
Read that last line again: “Each pencil will get my closest attention.” He’s deadly serious about that. As he says in his Details interview: “The point is that I’m going to have an authentic, honest-to-God encounter with your pencil. I’m not going to be absentminded. I want to get these things fucking sharp as shit.”
Oddly, some people think this might be a joke. Wrong. Every pencil Rees sharpens is shipped in a protective tube “with a signed and dated certificate authenticating that it is now a dangerous object.” The package also includes the shavings because “the shavings are part of the pencil – and it’s YOUR pencil.”
I’m not sure I can afford that kind of pencil sharpening, but if you can, get on it, because this is the kind of offer that doesn’t come along every day.
