Pens and Cool Speedometers

I'm a big fan of the UK Top Gear show. It's an awesome hour of television. Great hosts, sweet cars, interesting interviews and the sights and sounds of a Lamborghini Aventador.

While these guys were testing out three cars (that I'll never be able to get close to driving) I noticed that all of them had really nice speedometers. This seems like a pretty minor feature, but it's a part of the car that you will probably spend the most time looking at. The design of most speedometers is pretty pedestrian. Sure, some of them will have a white background or something like that, but they're just not very exciting. The picture at the left there is the Aventador's instrument panel. How exciting is that thing?  It's awesome, and not really because it's digital.

 Compare that with the picture of the Nissan Sentra's instrumentation.  I drive a Sentra. It's a fine small car. The background is black, the text is orange. It's not black and white, but it doesn't have much in the way of style or design. Car makers spend a lot of time making the exterior and interior of a car look nice. They add angles and sweeping curves (check out any of the new Hyundai models) to the exteriors and different sorts of textures and colors to the dashboards and seats. I say: save the obviously fake leather and carbon fiber fill-ins and spend some time making the instrumentation look rad.

In other news, I'm a big fan of fountain pens and ink. I've gotten my wife interested in them as well, and we ordered two more today. I got a Noodler's Ahab for Christmas, and we liked it well enough that Audrey wanted a Pink Tiger, and I ordered a black one. Both of these are brand new models, and we've been waiting for them to come in. One of these days I'll be posting reviews and whatnot, but I haven't had the time yet.