Robert Leone is an unnervingly close to "40-something" male. He's beyond overweight and into the "pudgy," despite his love of bicycling. He last passed another cyclist in 1998. He works in inventory control (and makes the coffee) at a private computer school. Despite his workplace, he usually has at least four fountain pens in his shirt pocket (black regular, black italic, color of the day regular, color of the day italic) along with a ball point just in case someone needs to "borrow" a pen. The main exception is those "casual Fridays" when he forgets to wear a shirt with a pocket.
His introduction to fountain pens, aside from the usual youthful dissassmbly of whatever he found in the bottom of his father's desk drawer, came when he was 12. His parents, disparing of his ever developing legible printing, much less a cursive hand, enrolled him in a night calligraphy course. It was only in college that he attempted cursive handwriting again, and found to his astonishment that it was almost as readable as his italic hand. He still has a deep, abiding, nearly inconprehensible worship of the Platignum "Silverline" fountain pen with lots of interchangable stainless steel nibs that was his first "real" pen. For some reason he doesn't seem to realize that having to remove the section from the barrel in order to squeeze fill this aerometric-type fountain pen is a flaw, especially to those who like piston fillers and lever fillers.
His hobbies and interests include bicycling, chess (although he hasn't played in a tournament for about a decade, and mixes up Ruy Lopez, the Spanish bishop and opening innovator, with El Greco, the Crete-born painter), science fiction, mysteries, the history of science and pen palling. He spends entirely too much of his free time writing for the pen pal 'zine "Cool World" and "The Espresso: San Diego's Coffeehouse and Cafe Newspaper." To his credit, he does deposit the occasional check from "The Espresso" in a timely manner. He also likes to make his own holiday cards, but that is in part because he's such a cheapskate.
Robert Leone is a graduate of the University of California at San Diego, Revelle College. His majors were Anthropology and Literature (Concentration in Writing), with a minor in Mathematics (at which he's not particularly good, but does enjoy). He's literate in English and thinks he's literate in Spanish (his favorite poem in Spanish is Pablo Neruda's "Oda al Tomate," which should be enough of a warning to anyone who IS literate in Spanish). He has lived in San Diego, California, USA for the past nineteen years. He was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. He sometimes reads his e-mail at rleone@hotmail.com.
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