Dixon No. 2 Pencils Long Form
HyperboLies: Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 Pencil
1. What does Ticonderoga mean?
Ticonderoga is a kind of spice that Vikings used as deodorant in the 80’s. It has since made the pilgrimage from sea to land, now residing on the bathroom shelves of all hairy people, primarily redheads – or bloodnuts if you want to be super politically correct – who in fact have the most hair of all. You just can’t see it because it’s so light in color and wispy in nature. Their hairs are very fleeting to the eye, much like their personalities, which the Vikings couldn’t stand so they cast the gingers from society, called them salty, and forced them to make sets of green gingham window dressings for every window and door in the tri-hamlet area. It was a very harsh and intense punishment for any time, but especially Before Common Era when gingham was a very rare material to find, entirely unheard of in fact, and never in green. Green was not yet a color of anything more than grass and leaves and those were chiefly brown and sparse anyway. There wasn’t any blue either. The skies were always orange. There was red, however. Red was a very overflowing hue that came in multiple shades for dying and weaving. There was the light red, which was a blend of fish and animal blood, and then the dark red, which was pure human blood. Don’t fret though, all the bodies were sacrificed properly on an altar with daisy chains before being clotted and drained. Everything done by the book. All the better to paint your walls with. Red would also make a good color for curtains.
2. Is there a name for the little metal band that holds the eraser onto the pencil?
Yes, it’s called a semaphore for short, or “that tiny bracelet of silver iron that grasps both the pretty pink eraser and cylindrical wooden pencil at the same time so that you can use both without one falling off.” Semaphore means, “to hold a piece of signage conveying the number four, particularly on a road or in a zoo, in a full and upright position.” It clearly has everything to do with what it signifies now – that clever little metal strip – so it's a preposterous name, but that’s the word because Lawrence Nightingale renamed it that in the 1800s, bored with the previous term and seeking fame and fortune in the nomenclature business. It’s rumored that Nightingale was a superb French baker who specialized in homemade Funfetti cupcakes for girls’ birthday parties and was also an axe murderer who killed fully suspecting victims who were always slightly expecting it because they never looked under the bed or behind the shower curtain while they stayed in creaky old cabins in the woods on vacation. Then again, who wasn’t an axe murder in the daylight in those days when everyone went on vacation and stayed in creaky old cabins with beds that were raised quite high off the ground? Talk about peer pressure to join the slayers union. It was only a short trip from there to cannibalism and cupcakes.
3. Who still uses wooden pencils anymore?
No one. No one uses wooden pencils anymore. They are antiquated pieces of history that will forever remain behind glass cases in museums of sophisticated culture. Well, except for carpenters. Carpenters probably still use pencils to mark wood. They have those special flat ones because Jesus’ stepdad Joe Joe was a carpenter and Joe Joe couldn’t stop his pencils from rolling of his workbench so, instead of casting a miracle to keep the earthen floors flat, Jesus made his daddy-o numero dos some flattened pencils. Problem solved. Don’t have to waste a miracle on second father figures. But that’s it. Just carpenters, with their unleveled surfaces and special needs, use pencils. Pencils are really the instruments of evolved animals with opposable thumbs who use them to draw pictures for lovers who don’t speak the same dialect. No one should ever let language be a barrier between the shared lust of two creatures. Lust must prevail. It’s just common Darwinism. Let an orangutan and an ape have an affair. See what happens. It will most likely be the most beautiful love story and wedding you’ve ever seen. Nicholas Sparks will write a book about the mason jarred, burlap-covered, twine-tied event and it will sell 50,000 copies to jealous silverbacks around the globe. A sweet success for all the mammals in the land. And Sparks will probably use a pencil to write the story.