...with whoever the crazy motherfucker who designed the Olympia SG3 is.

<sup>Okay, so this calls for some backstory. I've had one desktop typewriter for a while, a Royal KMM which I absolutely hate. It's tall, the touch adjustment is terrible (IMO) and I could just go on and on about how much I loathe it for being so goddamned huge. That aside, I've always liked the idea of having an absolutely huge desktop machine... mostly because they're badass, but it's also true that they have some pretty cool functions you just can't get on a portable.

Additionally, I'm an Olympia fan to the max, and everybody seems to love the SM1 and SM3 (Schreibmaschine Grosse, or Big Typewriter in English - hahaha), so when I saw one come up on Craigslist for $20 I jumped on it. Seemed like a pittance. I did the Blues Brothers thing and drove down to Joliet, picked it up, and took it home.</sup>

THE THING IS BLOODY HUGE. And that part didn't really shock me too much, though it's actually a thing of majesty to look at - it's bigger in every dimension than the KMM, which I thought was pretty impractically huge. That said, it's really an excellent machine. Since it's so huge, it's easy to clean, easy to work on, and the only thing that could really stop it would be a nuclear war... and that's only because it would kill off the humans that use them.

The surreal thing is that it bears a striking similarity to the SM9 - in fact, you could say it's just an SM9... but three times as big. Sure, there's no chrome on the carriage, but the coloration is the same, the hood is the same... it's just huge. It's surreal, though, when you look at the SG3 next to the SM9. The SG looks sort of comical, like the token fat kid or something.

^{Maybe, the better thing to say would be that it's just a caricature of the SM9. Was there supposed to be an element of postmodern humor in this?}

But I worked on it a bit last night after I took it home, with the usual brushes and compressed air and sewing machine oil on a few keys that had started to slow, and it's really very nice. Most interesting, perhaps, is the "paper injector", this big lever... you just sit the paper in the carriage, give it a yank, and it rolls it right up to the right place. I think this is incredibly cool, though I don't know why.

But yeah, having a geekasm here. I'll put up some comparison photos this weekend. Right now I'm busy writing... I'd offer some more details, but that'd be time that I'm not writing anything of consequence... y'know?