Month: September 2008

And people think I’m fussy?

I giggled at this passage that I just encountered in The Joe Orton Diaries:

Peter Willes rang up. ‘What do you mean by sending me such an atrocious script?’ he said. ‘What?’ I said. ‘All the “O’s” are out of line. I can’t read a script like that. Haven’t you another copy? ‘No,’ I said. “I’ll have to get it retyped,’ he said. ‘I can’t let the actors see a script in that state.’ ‘Did you read the script?’ I said. “A little.’ ‘What did you think of it?’ ‘I thought it rather dated,’ he said, ‘though that may have been the effect of the “O’s”.’

See? Good typography makes a difference.

ΩÖØ

Do you like the idea of using crazy characters in your blog posts or online profile headlines, but just can’t remember all those nutty character entities? Fret no more! This website is a tiny little thing that lets you copy and paste to your heart’s content. Of course, after all the time I’ve spent dealing with Unicode charts, I actually think they could have been a little more ambitious. How useful is it to include the interrobang (‽) but not mu/micro (μ) or the eth (ð)? We love the eth!

One more thing about Orton

You know, there are lots of other things that have been happening that might be better to write about (Travel and work abroad! Fetishwear spending sprees! The waxing and waning of various flirtations!) but all that stuff always takes so much time and effort that I ought to be devoting to things that actually help pay my bills. But since I’ve just started reading The Orton Diaries on today’s bus/tube/plane/train trip, I’m thinking again about a certain ex and all the similarities between him and Orton’s carefully constructed public persona that just seem too perfect to be a coincidence. And the intro of the book also reminded me that Orton’s diaries and letters are held at my old university, in the library where a certain someone also used to work.

Also, Orton is still really sexy and smart and funny. But kind of a jerk, just like a certain someone always was.