I just upgraded to the latest version of Movable Type, the software that runs all this. The interface at least is completely different, so I can only assume some stuff will break. If you spot anything funny going on, please . Thanks!
The Col-Pop
Genius!:
Royal Occidental Tuna Fisheries, Ltd.
The basic gimmick as described at the Flickr archive is:
“From 1912-1913 he [grandfather Aloysius “Gorilla” Koford] produced a comic strip which was featured in 17 newspapers, including the Philadephia Star-Democrat, the Tampa Telegraph, and the Santa Fe Good-Newser. The strip was entitled “the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats” and featured the exploits of one Meowlin Q. Kitteh (a sort of cat hobo-raconteur) and his young hapless kitten friend, Pip.”
Roar!
Just got back from a late showing of Cloverfield, which was lots of smash-em-up fun, if perhaps a little vivid for anyone who’s actually experienced a New York crisis or two. It’ll be interesting to see what tonight’s Sustiva dreams bring on.
Assorted Bits of Nerdistry
Bullet time!
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I had a maddening problem with my iMac on Saturday that I was only able to resolve by wiping the drive and restoring it from the backup. Overall I was impressed with how Time Machine came through for me, and luckily someone else wrote a nice wrap-up the the process so I don’t have to bother. (My two cents: I still wish Time Machine could make a bootable backup.)
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I was glad to see that Microsoft Office 2008 was finally making the ClearType fonts available to Mac users. I dropped into the Apple store yesterday to have a look, and saw that even though Word is using Cambria as the default font, it’s wasting a huge chunk of what Cambria can do. Unfortunately, the Mac version isn’t using the spiffy math engine used by the Windows version — it’s still using the clunky old Equation Editor that defaults to Times New Roman. I can’t say that I love Cambria very much, but after all that research I did about what it can do as math font, it’s a shame to see that potential wasted for Mac users.
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I went to go see the Breaking the Rules exhibition at the British Library yesterday, and realized how badly spoiled I’ve gotten after my time at Reading. We get to spend so much time examining books and stuff up close, using our own hands, that it’s incredibly unsatisfying to look at printer material under glass now, no matter how exciting the exhibition may be. Books are especially frustrating to see from the other side of a glass case, since you lose the whole sense of rhythm from page to page, and you can’t inspect the little details of how the ink sits on the page.
This Room Is a Mess!
My favorite thing of the moment is this ridiculously fun song about cleaning your room:
(Performed by GOGO13, as seen on Yo Gabba Gabba!, by way of BoingBoing.)
At any point between 1987 and 1993 or so, this would have been my favorite song in the entire universe. Coincidentally, in 1987 my friend Neil and I published a zine called Kumquat Popsicle, which featured a drawing of a rudeboy by Neil’s pal Alex Désert, who’s doing the voice of the dad in that song. (I would scan that page of the zine, but it’s in my brother’s attic somewhere along with the rest of my old stuff.)
My pal Dave (who directed me to that clip in the first place) prepared an audio extract for your continued listening pleasure: Pick It Up.
Perfection
The perfect simile to explain a thorny issue about type history to people who are familiar with fonts as things they pick from a list:
…there can never be a definitive Bodoni, Garamond, Jenson, or Fleischmann typeface, as their oeuvres consist of a multitude of single, size-specific fonts. It is like mashing up Othello, King Lear, Hamlet and a touch of The Tempest and publishing it as ‘The Shakespeare’.
Kris Sowersby, posting at I Love Typography
Copiers
Like many others, it seems, I’m not wild about the new logo that Interbrand has trotted out for Xerox. I think the typography is pretty nice, but hate hate hate the clunky, overdone, and seemingly pointless and trendy (in the really bad way) ball sitting there on the end. Even worse, it seems as if the whole marble-like thing is just a bad rip-off of the slightly goofy but certainly more dramatic flag of the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan:
Winter in Southern England
(Originally uploaded by pauldhunt.
I was just talking to my mom, who was reminding me to pack warm clothes when I head home next week. I hadn’t yet forgotten what winter in upstate New York would be like, but it’s not a bad reminder when this is what winter looks like here.
(Photo taken by my flatmate Paul, who knows a thing or two about cold winters in New York state.)
Reading’s Glorious Past
Random pop-culture trivia about Reading that I learned today (with audio references):
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Mod band Secret Affair played their first show at the University here in February 1979, opening for The Jam. (I would have loved to see either band.) Ten years later, I had a crush on a cute boy who introduced me to the first single, Time for Action
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In 1981, The Human League‘s producer made them come to Genetic Sound in Reading to get away from the “unhealthy atmosphere” of the studio in Sheffield where they usually worked alongside their former band members who left to form Heaven 17. They recorded The Sound of the Crowd here.