<p font="trajan">Thanks are due to Pablo Defendini and neutronjockey for the inspiration they unwittingly provided for the production of this post.</font>

neutronjockey? I hear that dood is (Trajan) Epically Eeevil! (/Trajan)

Does anyone know the name of the tall, skinny, occasionally hard-to-read font used for movie poster credits? The one that looks like it was meant to be read from an unaccustomed angle, like this Holbein painting? The one you get when you ask the studios to print your name in a font of a certain height, but forget to specify width? (It is possible that this contract negotiation was carried out via monkey's paw.)

***

Actually, coming back to this half-written post three minutes later, I think I just answered my own question with a Google search: There's no standard, but it's apparently often Univers Thin Ultra Condensed. Also, I saw at least one page, somewhere, that pegged Holbein-style anamorphosis as the real reason the credits are so skinny, the assumption being that they're not at eye level when the poster is hung. I'm not sure where I heard the contractually-mandated font height explanation.

@ abi,
You're welcome. Bwahahahahaaaaa!

@ Wesley #3,
Yeah, Univers Ultra Thin Condensed is usually the go-to typeface for movie boilerplate. I've also seen it done in Helvetica Neue LT Ultra Light Condensed (my preference over the two, actually).

Noooo! Not Comic Sans!! That font is ... EVIL!!

It's not Comic Sans that's the problem, of course, it's the people who write their work emails in it. And for some reason it's the favorite font of right-wing email forwards.

While we're open-threading: why are there so many right-wing email forwards and comparatively few left-wing ones?

Waiting for Serge to come along with a particularly good font pun now. All the ones I can think of are really lame.

@ Wesley #3,
Sometimes it's a legal thing. I remember when I worked in advertising, no body text in an ad for, say, pharmaceuticals, could be smaller than 8p, and no legal text could be set smaller than 6p, by law.

JKRichard @2:
I hear that dood is (Trajan) Epically Eeevil! (/Trajan)

Really? I heard he had the power to regurgitate live lobsters, but chooses not to.

Dawno @6 -- While you're waiting for Serge....

abi @8 -- Does this mean that the original subject of Chuck Norris jokes was in fact Trajan?

abi @ 8 Shhh. Secret submariner initiation rites should never be revealed in public forums.

I'm waiting for you to get around to "Papyrus." My wife, who has more gigs of fonts on her hard drives than most people have gigs on their hard drives period, can get quite exercised over "Papyrus Abuse." Menus, billboards, business cards--one of these days we're going to walk through a cemetery and there will be a headstone in Papyrus and she's going to start beating the granite with her purse/computer bag.

Trajan struck me as the poor man's Palatino, but I am a huge Zapf fanboy. Do you know how many glyphs there are in Zapfino?

I hear that Russel Crowe has left Trajan, and that, in Nottingham, he plays the serif.

(Dawno, your puns can't be more lame than this.)

re the Font... in this case I'm an anabaptist, and I'm also against capital punishment.

Well, Sony Pictures is trying to buck the trend.

I don't know, Serge, "wow, that Abi sure is a font of wisdom about typefaces" or something like that...puns really aren't my forte.

Bruce @11:

So your wife wasn't too happy with the Serenity posters, then?

I like Papyrus' capitals, and indeed have used them in a particular writing exercise. As you may have noticed, I am prone to overlong sentences. But if I write in a font where I like the capital letters, I find myself writing shorter ones, so I can get to the next initial letter.

If I won't have enough time for rewrites, I drag out Papyrus.

Don't worry, Dawno, no one is too dis-kerning about puns on an open thread. You get points just for trying.

abi: were you leading the witness, just to make an impression?

Terry,

I would have tried platen evidence, but that's bad forme. Besides, it hasn't a brayer of succeeding. So yes, I cut to the chase at that point.

The more, the courier?

Aldus talk about typography is giving me pica...

sburnap @ 15: And thus link the Spider-Man movies to their PlayStation 3 console...

Say, what is the name of that font that was so popular with SF films in the mid-1970s? You can spot a few examples of that in Space:(Party Like It's) 1999.

Serge @ #21, but not so many that you get (h)ives.

JK Richard #10: Secret submariner rites? But I thought those involved pollywogs and shellbacks, not lobsters?

abi: I'm hard pressed to continue banging these out, so perhaps I'll just ink you in for the win, the rest of the dingbats here can fend for themselves.

Fragano: That not submariners, that's sailors, on "Crossing the Line".

Happily I am a shellback and no longer have to worry about such things.

This typography discussion is making me offset.

And after that horrible pun, I must make amends with a poem:

You ask for gifts that last longer than gold
not knowing how the clouds assemble fast
this is the way the story's always told;

we seem so formal, stiff, and even cold,
our hearts are given to the vanished past.
You ask for gifts that last longer than gold.

What you expect are souls ardent and bold
whose urgencies and wishes have to last;
this is the way the story's always told.

But those who have bad cards just have to fold,
the noble outcome cannot be forecast;
you ask for gifts that last longer than gold.

It does no good to scream, rebuke, and scold,
nor nail your tattered colours to the mast,
this is the way the story's always told.

Only the wary live to become old,
those who are foolish cannot take the blast;
you ask for gifts that last longer than gold,
this is the way the story's always told.

Terry,

Your lack of confidence is unjustified. Call it a draw. You be King of typography puns, and I'll be Quoin.

(Fragano can be our Crown Prints.)

Terry Karney #27: Forgive my ignorance, for I am a mere landlubber (and some might say a mere lubber), but are not submariners sailors? I am all at sea.

Fragano @ 25 You speak of Crossing the Line ... a ceremony not for submariners alone. Trajan has also...crossed the line.

abi:

So your wife wasn't too happy with the Serenity posters, then?

I managed to get her into the theater without her having to stand in line and look at them too closely.

I like Papyrus' capitals, and indeed have used them in a particular writing exercise. As you may have noticed, I am prone to overlong sentences.

Not by my standards. You should see the cutting that happens here before I hit "send."

But if I write in a font where I like the capital letters, I find myself writing shorter ones, so I can get to the next initial letter.

If I won't have enough time for rewrites, I drag out Papyrus.

But do you leave the final results in Papyrus or do you put them into a different font if a different font that would be a better choice for the job? Her complaint is usually along the lines of "They think it should look elegant or old--time to drag out Papyrus again."

Mind you, as someone who feels that you can't commit any major sins if you stick to Times-Roman and avoid San Francisco (I can still hear a typographer I know spitting out "Real fonts aren't named after cities." with enough venom to kill a busload of football players when I pointed out that the Federation had apparently contracted with Apple to handle their screen displays) any further discussion tends to go well over my head...

Serge, #23: I googled "Space: 1999" and "font" and found this page.

I was never able to get through more than half an episode of that show, but I'd guess the font you're asking about is Data 70, which looks familiar from every '70s SF show I've ever seen.

A distressing variation on Crab Louis:

"I thought about an almond cake I recently made, the blackberries I picked before breakfast, and my landlord’s chihuahua Louis."

(From a foodblogger who's usually a little more aware of context.)

Those "futuristic" fonts are based on the machine-readable, magnetic-ink printed numbers found on checks.

Some designers figured that, well, since the Computerized Numbers of the Future look like that, then in the future letters will too!

It was always a design conceit. There never were machine-readable fonts that looked like that.

In Computer Lib / Dream Machines, Theodore Nelson called this kind of bogus futurism "cybercrud."

It is the typographic equivalent of people walking around in white jumpsuits with fins on the shoulders.

JKRichard #32: To the Islands of San Serriffe?

Bruce @ 11, my boyfriend (a graphic designer) gets exercised over Papyrus too, but he saves most of his venom for Comic Sans -- like Doctor Science @ 5. He doesn't have much of a religion, but Comic Sans is against it anyway.

I think Trajan is pretty, if somewhat overused these days.

I actually love Trajan (I used it for the title page of my master's thesis, lo these many years ago). The sad thing is that Trajan is a beautiful font that's been hideously overexposed (as opposed to Comic Sans, which is a hideous font, hideously overexposed).

Re 33 -

Abi and Bruce

My spies have alerted me to this thread. I find that I must make my stand clear:

I like Papyrus.
I have even used Papyrus (way back in the 80s on my very own business cards - when I had to buy Letraset sheets to use it.).
I have used Papyrus since then.

What bothers me is Papyrus abuse. Ever since Microsoft included it in some of their software, it has been tortured, racked, shrunk, and thrust into vile company. Poor Papyrus!

It's my belief that much of this abuse is the result of unskilled labor sent to do a designer's work. They want something 'creative', they look in their font list and find - Papyrus! Or Comic Sans.

So for those of you who do not want to contribute to Papyrus' pain and agony, remember Papyrus is not a text font. do not use it in sizes smaller than about 14 pt or so (and larger than that if your paper tends to bleed), and always ask yourself, is this the best font for the purpose?

(And I thought Papyrus looked pretty good on the Serenity posters.)

The "B5 Station Human" font looks like a font I kept seeing all over the place in the 1980's, one that resembled Motter Tektura (but wasn't, because it clearly featured the capital A that B5 Station Human contains). I'd like to know that name of that older font.

[confession time] I'm actually rather fond of Comic Sans, in small doses. I'd never use it for big blocks of text, and never for something I intended to share (since that would out me as someone with no taste), but I do use it for the song titles on my private CD compilations.

#41 - J H

Try www.myfonts.com

Search for Motter Tektura, and then click on the more fonts like this - you may find what you're looking for.

Fragano@ 37

From the halls of New Times Roman,
To the shores of San Serriffe;

We fight our typeset battles,
With Quark X Press misery.

We fight for serif freedom,
To keep our font galleries clean;

Forward your manuscripts to Pablo,
In Trajan font pitch fourteen!

Wesley @ 34... I didn't realize that there were two variants of the font I remembered. Then again, it's been a long time since it was used, during my college years, and about as long since I saw Space: 1999. (The show had its moments, but even my young uncritical mind had problems with one shuttle after another being wrecked without the stranded Moonbase running out of them. But that was the least of their problems.)

The "Village" font...

Serge (#45): They had a magical shuttle replicator in the basement, of course.

As for fonts: sadly, this video omits Trajan; it'd have been a good addition.

Fragano: All submariners are seamen, not all seamen are submariners. All who "Cross the Line" become intiates to the family of Shellbacks.

abi: for each line o' type in which I attempt a pun, I find I've turned out slugs, instead of good coin.

On the subject of typefaces, I liked Present, but I've not got a copy of it at present. It makes a really nice body text for correspondence, though on screen it's so-so.

I don't know if New York counts as a city name, but San Francisco is bad. Chicago is not to my taste, but can be used well; albeit with care.

Serge, #45: The show had its moments, but even my young uncritical mind had problems with one shuttle after another being wrecked without the stranded Moonbase running out of them.

So it was the Star Trek: Voyager of its era?

"Real fonts aren't named after cities."
I remember back in the old days, where my graphic design prof patiently lectured about the difference between display fonts and vector fonts. Some of my classmates still didn't get it until they tried to print stuff out set in San Francisco and had to ask him why it was all jaggy.

Reason being, all the fonts with city names on Macs were bitmapped so they would look good on the screen, and the city name thing was just a nice way to avoid having the font list say "screen font Chicago, screen font New York, etc."

I don't know if this is still the case. I would love to have a vector version of Chicago that didn't look all janky.

Say, does anybody know what font is commonly used on keyboards? Or kinds of fonts? I can't find a google keyword that will turn up anything, but somebody has to be nerdy about that.

Found it. The font is called Stop. It was designed by Aldo Novarese, who is probably more famous for Eurostile. I've always liked Stop because it renders just about anything almost entirely impossible to read without feeling very strange as a result.

I had a boss, whom I appreciated and respected in every way but two. 1) he loved putting commas in places I couldn't see the reason for and 2) he sent his emails out in Comic Sans 14pt.

"Say, does anybody know what font is commonly used on keyboards?"

Weirdly, Wikipedia can tell you what font is used on Apple keyboards. No idea A) what other folks use, or B) whether Wikipedia is correct.

All who "Cross the Line" become intiates to the family of Shellbacks.

Unless they somehow contrive to Delay their inevitable Appearance before King Neptune's Court by some Mortal Trick of Politics (or Worse), in which case they are Damned to remain Abject, Filthy Pollywogs until their Case can be Tried, their Guilt is ultimately Proofed, and their Sentence is Fairly Applied.

I have a publishing/submitting question that's befuddled me for months now, and I've been working up the courage to ask the fine folks here for enlightenment. Please forgive me if I ramble, it's awfully late here and I'm pretty nervous.

Back in 2006 I started a story that amused me, but I thought it wouldn't be anything but trash--fun trash, but trash. I made an experiment out of it, trying to post a chapter per week with minimal editing, as if it were a serial novel a la Dickens. The experiment failed as I missed a number of weeks throughout the year, but I liked the story enough to finish it and it actually made a good story, albeit one that now needs lots of rewriting (awkward writing from 2006 is awkward).

But here's the trouble: It's posted online on my personal web page, so it's already 'published'. I was originally going to edit it and stick it up on Lulu for the handful of people that wanted a physical copy. A web comicking friend of mine wanted to do chapter illustrations for it as well. She offered to contribute an ISBN number for it out of those she had left over from the print volumes of her comic, so it'd be a touch easier for some of my fans to acquire.

However, I later heard that having an ISBN number attached to a POD book that would only sell a few copies would hurt me when agents and editors later look at my history. It may be a moot point; I didn't get the book edited when I planned because of a series of life crises, and my friend recently started a busy animating job and got married, so I doubt she'll ever have the time to do 30-some-odd illustrations for my dinky book.

I know I can make my book tons better than it is now with a solid rewrite, don't know if that much change (it'd be enough to be considered a seperate draft) would be enough for it to be okay to submit anywhere. I really don't want to waste the time of any agents or editors by doing something stupid, nor do I want to hurt my chances at getting further books looked at (as I might if I do something stupid), as the book I'm worried about isn't the only one I'm working on.

I'd appreciate any advice anyone can offer. I've read all of the publishing posts here with great interest since I first wandered by years ago, but I'm still completely at sea with this issue!

I like to look at the different fonts, but since I write for a technical and professional audience, I'm limited to certain fonts. When I create presentations, I choose the fonts that give me the most readable lines at the smallest size, so when the screen is larger, the folks at the back of the hall can still see things.

I learned how to put together presentations when I was a resident in the lab, zoo, and marine mammal program; I still prefer the special fonts we liked to use for our marine cases. It was created for us by the leader of the cetaceans.

Yes, that's correct: I worked with the Prints of Whales.

Terry Karney #48: Isn't 'seamen' a rather dated term, since women serve aboard ship? (Yes, I know submarines are boats.)

Sheesh, Ginger, what's the cetacean equivalent of a shaggy dog story? ;)

Ginger #56: But did you work with the Ducks of Cornwall?

j h woodyatt, 53,

thanks! One step closer to creating my own any key

Trajan is far more dangerous than you think.

[QuickTime needed, and it takes a while to load this video. But it is worth it!]

Fragano: Sailor is the term for a civilian/merchant who plies the sea for fun, or as a trade.

Seaman is the name for the enlisted ranks of the US Navy (just as Airman is for the US Air Force).

The members of both services tend to be both prickly, and defensive, about the proper use of those terms.

I just received a "get published now" unsolicited commercial email from Molli Nickell which included a 1.27MB PDF file.

Which ML thread is it that collects info about this sort of thing?

Oh, and it's been almost two weeks, and I only ever received the one CNN spam email (or similar descendants).

And for an encore, this stunning expose of Cooper Black's seamy past.

Renatus #55 --

I'd say rework your book until it's the best it can be, then send it around. Be upfront about its history if asked.

Don't go the self-publishing route until every suitable paying market has already said, "No thanks."

j h woodyatt, #51: If you say that's it, I'll believe you -- but the font my brain associates with B5 is Serpentine.

If I could wave a magic wand and make one font disappear from the world forever, it would be Letter Gothic. I can't put a finger on exactly why I find it so offensively ugly as to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever, but I do.

The first print issue of Coilhouse magazine just came out and it has a 5 page excerpt from the upcoming Samuel Delany novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. According to Delany: "It's not really a science fiction novel — though I wouldn't mind anyone calling it that. Still much of it takes place in our future." I enjoyed the excerpt and am looking forward to the book. Knowing there are other Delany fans hereabouts I figured I'd give a heads-up.

Lee @66: (now that I'm in the right Open Thread!)
Because it was the "small" font in most non-Apple laser printers for most of a decade?

Mark D @ #61, that's quite a film. I particularly like "Daily Verital," which sounds like a Napa Valley tabloid.

The futuristic font that sticks the most strongly with me is actually Stop, which I believe I first learned from every third-grade poster-maker's best friend, The Lettering Book.

For many years I tried to re-find and couldn't, and assumed I must have misremembered the name. Today I am vindicated! Thanks, Making Light.

glowing testimonial ends

Linkmeister @ 58: How about a Hairy Dolphin story?

Fragano @ 59: No, but I used to hang out at Duxie's in Basseterre. Now you know how low I will go.

"If I could wave a magic wand and make one font disappear from the world forever, it would be Letter Gothic."

Me? I'd like to nuke Courier from space. Yes, and I'd also nuke Courier New just to be sure.

Doctor Science, #5, the problem is that you read emails in html so others get to force their choices on you! I read in .txt so I read all my emails in Comic Sans! Seriously, I don't use it when I print things for other people to read, but it's very easy for me to read.

We had a minor cat terror here last night.

And today's WashPost is discussing graphic novels in two places.

Last week I was at a department meeting at which all of the English teachers were trying to establish certain parameters within which we were all going to require our students to write. When the subject of fonts came up, and we tried to come up with a list of acceptable fonts for student papers, one of my colleagues expressed her affection for Comic Sans. Her argument was that, for middle schoolers with dyslexia, it's one of the more readable fonts. While I could concede that, I suggested, as the English 12 teacher, I wouldn't find Comic Sans acceptable, as writing college papers in Comic Sans was likely to get you mocked. Her reply: "I disagree. I wrote all my graduate school papers in Comic Sans."

Ouch.

People, please tone it down with the puns! If I laugh any harder I might rupture a ligature!

Back on the gripping hand, can anyone recommend a good monospace font which is readable at particularly small font sizes? I have an Eee (laptop with a fairly small screen) and while Ubuntu's default monospace font is okay to read at arm's length, I'd be curious to test out others to see if I can find something better.

Somewhat typographically related: some typo vigilantes corrected a sign they found at the Grand Canyon Watchtower. However, this wasn't a lunchcounter sign for 'Todays "Special"'. It was a historic hand-painted sign by Mary Colter. They used white-out and a black permanent marker to change "womens'" to "women's" and added a comma after "religious crooks and wands". In their blog they complained about "an emense westward view" but didn't try to correct it.

The culprits are banned from National Parks for a year, plus they have to pay the estimated $3,035 to restore the sign.

kouredios @74: That's fascinating. Did she mention/do you have any idea what characteristics of Comic Sans make it more readable for people with dyslexia?

Kevin @ 75

I find that Tahoma and Verdana are pretty legible on-screen in 8-pt, although they aren't monospaced. YMMV, of course.

Kevin Riggle @ 77: I think it's basically the fact that it's sans serif...and that the a and g look like we normally write them. Of course, it's not the only font for which that's true, but the young teen boys that make up a lot of her students tend to like it.

I. Had. No. Idea. Now that you mention it, I'll be looking at all the DVD and movie poster covers with a whole new perspective.

My teenage son and I have an ongoing font battle. He insists on using Lucida Grande for every school essay, while I scream, "Times New Roman" at him.

I know, I know... first it'll be fonts, then he'll move on to the hard stuff, like staples.

I had a Spanish teacher who wrote in almost perfect handwriting-book cursive. The 'almost' is mostly because she had a pretty good blackboard slant going on-- she was creeping up on forty-five degrees a few times.

I couldn't read it. It took me so much longer to read her perfectly neat handwriting than my own scrawl-- or anyone else's scrawl.

It was too regular. I couldn't glance at a word, pick out three letters, and know what it said. I had to read each letter individually; the n and m were nigh-identical, save for the number of bumps. My letters change according to context.

Maybe that's why more handwritingy fonts, like Comic Sans, work better for some dyslexic folks.

In #8, Abi writes of Neutronjockey:

Really? I heard he had the power to regurgitate live lobsters, but chooses not to.

Remember this?

Watch Hadji Ali perform here, if you can stomach it.

Kouredios, #74: I mock my college students who use Comic Sans.

Well, okay, actually I don't - I just encourage all my students to use a nice, readable Roman font.

Even that's changing, though. As I do more and more of my review and editing and grading on-screen (using 'track changes' in Word or annotations on PDF), we're moving from fonts that look good on the printed page to those that are highly readable on a monitor.

Sandra Cormier #80: My teenage son and I have an ongoing font battle. He insists on using Lucida Grande for every school essay, while I scream, "Times New Roman" at him.

That's not too bad; at least he's not using Raslani the Pharaoh for his headlines....

I find Inconsolata a great monospaced font, although I've heard it only really works if you have a Mac (Windows tends not to smooth fonts in smaller sizes, leading to different fonts being readable).

Ah, found where I got it from: the page on fixed-width fonts at the TextMate Wiki.

Sandra, #80: What's the problem with Lucida Grande? It looks like a nice, readable sans-serif to me. Times Roman gets awfully boring after a while! (For a serif font, I have several other first choices -- generally I settle on either Clearface or Centaur, although Pegasus is my favorite for letters and such.)

I just watched Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me tonight for the first time in years, and as usual when I watch it or any of his movies after it, I remembered how much I love the simple, all-caps, italic font his movies use for the opening credits. A little googling didn't reveal what font it was--does anyone know?

j h woodyatt, I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who considers Courier a manifestation of pure evil.

Ginger @ #56

Have you tried Whale Vs. Submarine? or Vanilla Whale?

Real font names, I swear.

Those who live by the typographic pun shall be forever untyped; all their works shall be covered by the Sans of Times.

My current favorite film title "font" is the calligraphy used for Bronowski's The Ascent of Man series (starting at about 0:25). It's simple, distinctive, and gorgeous.

I don't mind Papyrus much, though I agree it's overused. It's the Tekton of the 2K's. (I look back at Tekton and wonder, "How did anyone ever think that looked good?")

I will say that I found one use of the font to be inarguably good: in the "store hours" sign of a card shop called...Papyrus.

My own font bugaboo is Peignot. At work we used to do a magazine of newspaper clippings once a month. It had a title page cum clipping list set entirely in Peignot. Put me off that font forever.

j h woodyatt@53: I have handy a small collection of keyboards, of which one is an Apple. The Apple keyboard appears to match the font on my HP laptop; the Microsoft keyboard collection (a new Natural Elite which is junk, and a pair of the Natural keyboards from a decade ago that are delightful solid devices) approximately match my IBM Model M, and the random early-1990s off-brand keyboard has what looks like an off-brand poor copy of the IBM Model M font. Oh, and the Logitech is yet another completely different font.

A bit of poking on Identifont -- and some very close inspection of the "G" key -- indicates that the old Microsoft keyboards are Helvetica Neue, whereas the new one is the original Helvetica. (I found the fact that they use Helvetica entirely unsurprising in that, "Well, should I have expected anything else?" sort of way, until it occurred to me that this is Microsoft and they're not using Arial. And the reversion from Helvetica Neue to Helvetica is a bit odd.) I am not certain if the IBM keyboard is Helvetica or not; the letters appear to be, but the symbols are different; then again, the symbols don't seem to entirely match the letters. They're probably off of some IBM corporate font, I'd guess.

Mark D @61:

Bless you. I've been looking for that for weeks.

My pleasure, madam.

Terry Karney #62: I see. Doesn't that get confusing for female members of the US Navy and Air Force?

Ginger #71: Not as low as Peyton Place in August Town.

I have to produce large-print versions of all my material, for the benefit of people who can't read the standard versions. We'd do this anyway, but several regular readers have various kinds of visual impairment, and they all tell me that sans-serif fonts are clearer than serif fonts. They're very happy with Arial. Dull? Yes; but effective.

j h woodyatt@53, Brooks Moses @93:

An inspection of the keyboards I have here suggests that most PC keyboards use Helvetica of some form or other. Probably, in fact, this form, although it's hard to be sure as the quality of printing is fairly blurry on most of them.

Keyboards inspected were: a Cherry RS3000 (mid-90s vintage, 102-key), an unbranded "multimedia keyboard" supplied with an eSys PC, and a Tesco Value keyboard (yes, I know, I just needed one in a hurry...). All three seemed to be the same font.

John Stanning @ 98: I have vision issues and it's been my experience too that sans-serif fonts are much easier. I would use Arial if I didn't have an irrational hatred for it, so I'm currently using Tahoma.

Which brings me to my Open Thread question: Tahoma is fine at the various sizes I need -- anywhere from 18pt to 42pt depending on the day -- but it's becoming a bit, well, same-y. Are there other sans-serif fonts that can scale like that and remain readable?

Fragano @ 96, I was never classified as a seaman. I was always called fireman because of my engineering rate.

In the US Navy there are seaman(shipboard non-engineering to include electronics rates, all others not included elsewhere), airman (aviation ratings), and firemen (shipboard engineering and damage control ratings). In the mid-90s there were also constructionmen ratings which included all Navy SeaBee ratings; it was merged with seaman.

No gender distinction is made between men and women and their early ranks (seaman recruit, seaman apprentice, seaman) --- the exception I've seen to this was allowing a female recruit whose last name was Guzzler have her rating designation changed to fireman until she made E-4 (Petty Officer).

Kouredios @ 74... writing college papers in Comic Sans was likely to get you mocked

"They laughed at me at the University!"

Christopher Davis @ 47...

"Nobody uses Microsoft Works!"

Wesley @ 49... So it was the Star Trek: Voyager of its era?

They were totally different. One had a relative of Maximilian Schell who could turn into all kinds of animals. The other had a part-machine woman who was stuck inside a cat suit.

JKRichard #101: Doesn't that get really confusing?

So, when the hundred years of war on terror that McCain has stated it might take to win is over, does that mean we'll get a similar monument that we can call the McCain Column? Of course, will ours feature a robed McCain at the pinnacle with his hands outstretched and lightning bolts emanating from them?

Fragano: Leaving aside the complications of rates in the Navy, no, it doesn't get confusing.

Seaman/Airman is a term of art.I have been, in the course of my career, a Private First Class, a Specialist (which is a rank, not a description; and technically I was a Specialist 4th class, which is the only class the Army has now. There used to be classes up to to 9, but none lower than 4th), a Sergeant, and a Staff Sergeant.

When I was a Private, First Class I was, generally, called Private, even though there are three grades of Private in the Army (and Private First Class is at the top, even though Specialist 4th class is at the bottom.

So, now that I've muddied the waters by way of clarification, all of those ranks are titles, and, pretty much, independent of any meaning apart from where they place one in the pecking order of one's military tribe. The presence of "man" in them is much as that of Chairman used to be.

To change it (to Seawoman, or Yeowoman, or Airwoman), that would be confusing.

What about submariners?

kouredios @74: I'm surprised that you were making a *list* of fonts. My college student informs me that she's never had a paper (high school or college) that *didn't* specify "12 pt Times New Roman".

I, on the other hand, am from the older generation, where you had a choice of Courier or Courier. I don't really understand the animus against it -- it's *supposed* to be boring and monospaced. AFAIK it's still industry-standard for screenplays.

Not so much about fonts, but they'll make an impression... Read a review of a Thorne Smith murder mystery by Susan de Guardiola and you'll wind up linking to sites that sell bullet bras.

Yay, open thread!

Can someone please point me to the entry which was about something to the effect of 'things people say when they flounce away from internet arguments'? The entire comment thread was stuffed with gems of examples. Strangely enough, trying to locate this entry via Google only brought me into direct contact with flame wars.

Jim @ #65 -- Thank you so much. A prod in the right direction from someone who knows what they're talking about is what I needed.

Taking advantage of the Open Thread-ness...

So, the Olympic swimming on the 13th, men's breast-stroke final. Did anyone else find it questionable (and/or amusing) that the announcer, possibly creaming his tweeds in excitement, yelled, "He's done it! Kitajima has done it! Kitajima is the GREATEST BREAST-STROKER of ALL TIME!!!!!"

Greatest breast-stroker, eh? This provoked a conversation among my friends about how this event would be judged, which led to musings on competitive fellatio in 2012.

Tracey S. Rosenberg @ #111:

You mean the Flamer Bingo thread?

(Did you know that you can limit a Google search to a single site by adding, for instance, site:nielsenhayden.com ?)

Avedaggio:

Extempore sports commentary has always been a minefield, although swimming commentary is usually safer than, for instance, any sport involving balls.

Any font size smaller than 12 for Times New Roman is painfully unreadable to someone my age (more accurately, someone at my stage of presbyopia).

I think san-serif fonts are a deliberate attempt to make good readers slow down and poor readers give up. They take much more actual effort and concentration to read, and I (for one) end up with a headache if I read a lot of them.

Monospace fonts were briefly necessary because of the unsophisticated design of typewriters. They are a cheap shortcut in cold typesetting (though come to think of it I'm not sure they were ever used in cold typesetting). They were not used in calligraphy and should not be used for any published (meaning, you want someone to actually read it) material today.

Submission guidelines still require them, which I find odd. It supposedly makes it easier to figure out how much space the printed version will take up, but since the printed version will be set in a proportionally-spaced font, how does that help? I'd think it would be better to specify a particular proportional font, and count based on that; it would make reading submissions less onerous, too. Is it just the weight of tradition?

Suppose you have a major character whose name appears a lot. It's an alien, and its name is Wpmwm'Mwm. Then the author decides to change the name to Ilili'lii. That difference doesn't show up in Courier at all, but could make a pretty big difference to the final typeset version. (This unlikely scenario is to exaggerate the difference, which could cause a problem over the length of a novel...or so it seems to me.)

I know there probably is a good reason for this, because publishing is complex, and in the past there have always been things about it that I didn't know or never thought of, but I don't understand it.

Avedaggio 113: musings on competitive fellatio

Damn, and I thought my Olympic dreams were completely dashed!

debcha @83: Definitely. I've taught high school, college, and occasionally delved into middle school, but in all cases, Comic Sans is not a font I'd consider appropriate. Well, occasionally for middle school poster projects. Definitely not for high school and college, much less graduate school.

Doctor Science @109: It's a fairly progressive charter school, and we like to give the kids choices, within guidelines. Times New Roman was definitely at the top of this list, and then Arial (which I don't love, but it's the default font for Pages), and then we started talking about Comic Sans and ran out of time. I tend to use Garamond a lot, myself.

Paul A @114: thanks!

I did try restricting to this site but I failed at that too. :(

Xopher @ 116: I think san-serif fonts are a deliberate attempt to make good readers slow down and poor readers give up. They take much more actual effort and concentration to read, and I (for one) end up with a headache if I read a lot of them.

I won't dispute your personal experience, but studies have shown no legibility difference between serifed and unserifed fonts. That said, some popular sans-serif fonts have features that make them less than ideal for extended text settings: Helvetica has a very small aperture, Futura has strict geometric proportions, Kabel has a small x-height, etc. But fonts like Syntax and Frutiger are a pleasure to read.

Submission guidelines still require [monospaced fonts], which I find odd.

I've always assumed that it makes manuscripts easier to mark up. It also gives you a better line length, and (to my eye) looks less disgusting paired with double-spacing than proportional fonts do, a plain manuscript rather than a typesetting failure.

Avedaggio, would that be a timed event, or would there be a panel of judges?

Paul A @115

Extempore sports commentary has always been a minefield, although swimming commentary is usually safer than, for instance, any sport involving balls.

Best sports commentary ever -- click on the top 'listen' link on the right hand of the page.

I should point out for those not au-fait with British euphemisms that "leg over" is fairly common slang for sexual intercourse.

fragano:

Consider "chairman". I for one will first be damned before I let anyone call me "chairwoman" or, worse, "chairperson".

Tim 120: I've always assumed that it makes manuscripts easier to mark up.

Um. Er. That is...DUHHHHHH on me.

Thank you. Move along, the guy just had a stupid attack, but his friends are taking care of him, nothing to see here...

For those who followed Miss Teresa's Pirates of the Saskatchewan particle, and were curious about the bridge outside of Moose Jaw that spans the mighty river ... here's a photo.

And for anyone who isn't au-fait with the rules of cricket, here's a primer.

Although I don't have a good source, I believe it may be a quote from Peter Sellers.

There is a special circle of Hell reserved for whoever decided that we have to enter Web forms in a small, proportional sans-serif font. Courier may not be the world's prettiest font, but at least you can tell the difference between "l", "I", and "1", or between " " and "  ".

Jules, people have tried (really tried, not like the primer you link to, which is designed to be as confusing as possible while still being technically correct—I assume) to explain the rules of cricket to me on many occasions. I still find it completely incomprehensible.

lightning @ 128: There is a special circle of Hell reserved for whoever decided that we have to enter Web forms in a small, proportional sans-serif font. Courier may not be the world's prettiest font, but at least you can tell the difference between "l", "I", and "1", or between " " and " ".

I read ML using the default small, proportional sans-serif font, and all of those are easy to distinguish. They're hard to distinguish in Helvetica or Arial, for sure, but proportionality and lack of serifs aren't the reasons.

Rikibeth: Given the variations in response, I think a panel of judges would be incumbent.

Avedaggio @113: It's nice to see that Les Nessman is still getting work.

"Bailey: And it's the breast stroke, Les, not "breast stroking."
Jennifer: That does sound wrong."

lightning (128): I fondly remember my mother's old manual typewriters*, which didn't have a '1' key, instead making the small 'l' do double duty**. For an exclamation point, you typed a single quote ('), then backed up and put a period under it. (Iconoclasts could type the period first, then the single quote.)

*on which I typed all my college papers
**the font would have been Courier, yes?

Expanding on my dislike of Courier: part of it, I'm sure, comes from the fact that it is associated in my mind with nearly-indecipherable mimeograph copies, since that was, indeed, my primary exposure to typescript until the advent of photocopying and later the holy and blessed IBM Selectric.

However, at this point of life monospaced fonts just complicate the problems of reading online, which is, on a normal day, about 80% of my reading time. Even when I reduce the width of the window and increase the size of the text, I find it a struggle to scan and retain meaning in Courier on the computer screen. At times when I have to read for meaning and correctness, I have been known to copy the document into my WP program (I'm back to NeoOffice, and relatively happy with it on the "camel in the tent" principle) and then convert it to, say, 12 point Palatino.

Terry Karney #107: All I can say is ouch! That's a positively Byzantine system.

joann #124: The convention today is to use 'chair' -- in spite of complaints about being part of the furniture.

Doctor Science, #109: Fuzzy memory suggests that the reason Courier is still standard for screenplays is that it allows easy estimation of eventual runtime from script length (X minutes per page). The amount of variation in words per page is much higher with a proportional font than with a monospaced one, and that would affect the runtime estimate.

Avedaggio@113 -

Didn't Phil Foglio's XXXenophile have a story about some, err... changes... to the competitions held in the Olympics?

Oh, so that's what that font is.

I have immense respect for people who can recognize and distinguish fonts on sight. I love playing with fonts, but have never had the level of patience/obsession/time required to train myself to that level.

By the way, according to the guidelines on the closed comment threads this, being the latest Open Thread, is the right place to post about this: I found the Cluttering Bug post again through a link years later, and was following through the links on the post. The first link to the Humane Society towards the end of the entry ("the Humane Society’s two-part article on how to conduct a large-scale intervention") went to a webpage that I would not be visiting at home and should never ever be visiting over the work network. I am not quite sure what happened, maybe a case of URL hijacking in the intervening years, but the esteemed maintainers might want to have a look.

Courier (or other monospaced font) is useful for character art and charts, but those are horrible in anything proportional.

Yours in typographical corrections:

Men banned from national parks for "correcting" antique sign

Anarky For Ever

Xopher #117: Unfortunately, our felatio team just sucks.

Exit, stage left, pursued by angry mob

Perhaps the ugliest typesetting I have ever encountered was a book printed entirely in a monospaced font, with justified paragraph alignment. This left razor sharp left and right margins, but a variable amount of space between each word. Bleargh.

albatross 142: But it's the only time that blowing your lead is a winning strategy!

albatross @ 142... Is the team trained by mad scientist Flexi Jerkov?

Tracey #111:

You might also want to look at the more recent
Time Notices Comments thread. Or this one on Curating Conversations. Both of these have a fair bit of related discussion.

Spiral of time
Where do I find
A point to go tunneling through?

Spiral of time
Revolving signs
As seasons go cycling through--

We're caught on a world
Where gravity reigns
And the light of the stars is behind
The light that we see of the latency
Traveling forward in time--

Spiral of time
Where do I find
A point to go tunneling through?

Return to the last
To change what has passed
And redeem all those things gone untrue.

(written 8/25/2008 16:00 EDT)

Random open thread comment:

This Respectful Insolence post describes a kind of weird cross of astroturf and peer-reviewed medical research. The research being done has some creepy things in common with push-polling.

lightning @ 128: There is a special circle of Hell reserved for whoever decided that we have to enter Web forms in a small, proportional sans-serif font. Courier may not be the world's prettiest font, but at least you can tell the difference between "l", "I", and "1", or between " " and " ".

They could share their circle with the people who make their text-input interfaces have the cursor a single pixel wide, like the text box I'm typing in now. With black on white, it's just on the right side of functional. Any other colour combination and it's useless. I've got the vision of a hawk, but I still sometimes resort to typing random letters to find the bloody cursor.

My issue with Courier is that it's the font students go to when they're trying to make the minimum page requirement without actually writing enough content. Well, that and I find it pretty ugly in 12 point.

Xopher #116 and Tim #120: I won't dispute your personal experience, but studies have shown no legibility difference between serifed and unserifed fonts.

My understanding was that serifed fonts were more readable - that the serifs help your eyes track across lines of text - and that therefore blocks of text should be set in a serifed typeface (this is consistent with what Xopher says).

Of course, that presupposes that you have sufficient resolution that the serifs don't go all fuzzy (which is why screen fonts were invented).

I actually thought that sans-serif fonts were more legible (and accordingly, I use them on slides and for short pieces of text), but I guess that it's more dependent on the font itself, hence the development of Clearview, which I love. I just drove across the US (from Cambridge MA to Seattle WA), and it was pretty apparent which Interstate signs were in Clearview and which were in earlier fonts.

[in passing]

Pagans blogging from the Democratic National Convention.

DebCha @ 151: My understanding was that serifed fonts were more readable - that the serifs help your eyes track across lines of text - and that therefore blocks of text should be set in a serifed typeface (this is consistent with what Xopher says). [...] I actually thought that sans-serif fonts were more legible

You are correct to make this distinction (which I elided), but as the link I embedded shows, neither of these common beliefs is supported by evidence. The former notion turns out to be a legacy of the egregious Cyril Burt.

I've read Type & Layout by Colin Weildon, the other well-known proponent of serif superiority, and his "study" consisted of comparing reading comprehension of one passage set in Times Roman and Helvetica, both at 6 pt. on a 300 dpi laser printer.

In my experience, most supposed sans-serif problems turn out to be Helvetica problems.

So, for those of you who think I should take better care of my family heirlooms, I give you The Gravenstein Apocalypse.

Would somebody please, for the love all that is unholy, make a MONOSPACE variant of Clearview? PLEASE?

Tim Walters, #153: I went back and read the article more carefully. I don't feel like I have a great definition of 'readable' vs 'legible'; I've operationalized 'legible' as text which is clear and easy to read, as from a distance, which leads to the kinds of experiments that were done with Clearview. 'Readable,' on the other hand, is text that is comfortable to read in large quantities. Poole argues that 'readable' is a function of both the font and the overall layout. But it seems like most of the studies he refers to have conflated the two (readability and legibility). That doesn't undermine his central point - that there is no evidence that serif fonts are more readable than sans-serif fonts, and that the font-to-font variation in legibility is much greater than any differences between the two groups - but I'm not sure that he explicitly addresses the legibility issue.

debcha @ 156: but I'm not sure that he explicitly addresses the legibility issue

I was thinking of this:

Books produced for children are often printed with sans serif text as teachers claim that the simplicity of the letter shapes makes them more recognisable ( Coghill, 1980) , Walker, 2001 ). But studies with child participants have found no difference in their ability to read either style of typeface.

But on reflection, you're right--that's not enough to disprove greater sans-serif legibility.

Hmm, a font born of genocide. I'll stick to Computer Modern - as far as I know, Donald Knuth didn't kill anyone ;-)

The late Father Edward Catich deserves credit for correcting Trajan, which was based on a bad plaster cast from the Trajan column. Twombly essentially appropriated his groundbreaking work. (Ask any graduate of Reed College who took Lloyd Reynolds' calligraphy course.)

Font legibility depends on circumstances. My general sense is that for body type in printed books, the classic serif engraver's fonts are still the best--they provide eye-friendly redundancy. For screen-readable body type, usually sans-serif fonts are the best; the low resolution of the medium makes hash of the the serifs. In titles, it doesn't matter so much; just don't use blackletter. That said, while we can argue till the cows come home, we don't even know how to reliably measure the differences in reader response.

I'm poking my lurker head up to ask this question, because while All Knowledge Is Contained On the Internet, more of it is contained in the Fluorosphere than most other places I could look. What's the appropriate term, or an appropriate term, for science fiction that is generally found in the Science Fiction section of the bookstore rather than the Bestseller or Literature shelves? (The statement in question is that while depictions of nanotechnology are common in the former, they show up only rarely in the latter.)

"Genre science fiction," which is what I currently have down, seems redundant. "Science fiction with actual research" is snooty. "Unpopular science fiction" is fallacious, even if Charlie Stross hasn't quite caught up with Michael Chrichton yet. I'm stumped.

A font for proofreading. It's never been pleasant to read, but it sure makes contributing to http://www.pgdp.net/ easier.

@ 159 Theophylact mentions Lloyd Reynolds, and by doing so reminds me that over the years I've managed to have fleeting but enriching contact with some really excellent human beings.

R. Emrys @161

Given that most SF is on the SF shelves, and only a little is on the other shelves, I'd just call the SF shelves SF, and use modifiers to describe the stuff that has migrated elsewhere.

So I'd make the statement be that "nanotechnology is common in science fiction, but is uncommon in the science fiction that is found on the bestseller or literature shelf." Or "nanotechnology is common in science fiction, but science fiction with nanotechnology is rarely found outside the science fiction section, on the bestseller or literature shelves."

Xopher @116: Submission guidelines still require them, which I find odd. It supposedly makes it easier to figure out how much space the printed version will take up, but since the printed version will be set in a proportionally-spaced font, how does that help?

Back in the day (that day being in the mid 1970s) I took a layout and design course. 'Specing type' was an important part of it. For one project, we were given pages of typewritten copy, and given parameters for how many printed pages would be used in the final piece (a multiple of 4 or 8, IIRC).

The first step required finding the character count for the copy. This was most easily done by counting out (for instance) 30 characters on a single line of the page, using a ruler to mark off that column, multiplying the number of lines by 30, and then adjusting the total by adding in the overcounts (extra characters past the marked column) and subtracting undercounts (lines where the count came up short of 30). This gave you a character count for the page; repeat until you've finished all the pages, then sum up the pages. This "efficient" technique could really only work with a monospaced font; typewritten Courier worked well for it.

Then, given the character count, you could start in with tables for different fonts, to determine how much space the copy would take up. You could tweak things a bit by fiddling with the leading and point sizes, to make the total area of type plus the margins fit into the available pages.

For this exercise, we were only filling up pages with one font of body copy; it would have been more complicated to calculate if we added headlines on each page, or used a different font for some paragraphs.

I was happy to see interactive layout come with desktop publishing in the 1980s.

I'm sure the experienced would have a rough estimate of how many characters there are on a typewritten page, and could translate that into their preferred format. In screenplays, I've heard that one page should equal about one minute of screen time.

Four more highly-legible monospaced font possibilities to throw into the mix: Anonymous, Pragmata, ProFont, and Proggy

Also, for really small sizes (but not monospaced), check out Minuscule It looks truly bizarre at larger sizes, but it's readable at 2pt, which is just cool on its own.

Ursula L #164: the stuff that has migrated elsewhere

I was recently peeved to find that the DVD of the movie Jumper had been filed under "Action" at a local chain store instead of "SF". I suppose this is not so much a case of Genre Denial Syndrome as it is that we're living in the future now. heh.

Xopher: When I was doing Journalism (in the dim and distant past) we set our machines to 60 count lines, never broke words, and wrote ragged right.

That meant four-lines of typed text was equal to one column inch (at 10/11). I forget, off the top of my head what it was when we set for editorial (which was 1 1/2 and set 12/13) but there was a standard conversion (I think it was 6 lines = 1 column inch).

What it did mean was every standard variation of text could be measured with a simple line count. Anyone could be trained to do that when drawing up a budget for the page.

And for another take on typography, here's a small sampler of Chinese fonts. Each line of sample text (the font names, I think) starts with the same two words, more or less; some of the fonts are for the traditional characters still used in Taiwan and some are for the simplified ones used in the PRC (汉 is the simplified form of 漢).

I just printed out a MyFonts PDF sample at highest quality on my cheap HP printer, and Miniscule Deux is actually fairly legible at 2pts. No wonder it won an award.

#133 Mary Aileen --

Once Upon A Time, I had to deal with a database of names, addresses, and phone numbers done by a guy who did the "ell" for "one" thing. He also tended to use capital-oh for zero. Complaints led to a rant about how I Am Right And Everybody Else Is Stupid that went on as long as you cared to listen. We probably spent more time fixing it than he did entering it.

Another bit of nastiness from the Typewriter Era was my grandmother's typewriter, which had a typeface that attempted to look like handwriting. Blecch!

#171, lightning -

I once worked at a place where we built ads from (frequently handwritten) copy submitted by the advertisers. (Smalltown newspaper.)

There were two submitters that I noticed every time.

One of them was an individual who handwrote his copy and used a struck-through o to represent the letter and a plain o to represent the numeral. It *infuriated* me, and I was, every time, tempted to represent his copy with a letter O everywhere he used no strike (in his prices) and a numeral 0 every place he used a strike (in his text.) I never succumbed, but I really had to fight it. (They're not *just* wrong on the internet, you know.)

The other notable was an astoundingly good typist. The copy came from an auto dealership, so it was two columns of information - car description and price. Frequently they had enough cars for sale that they made two columns of these two columns, making effectively a four-column text. The alignment was perfect, every time. I never saw any white out or corrections, and the prices were decimal-aligned. I can't recall now why I thought so, but I didn't think it was a fancy electric typewriter, either. Probably because it was a very plain courier font, though now I'm not sure that is an indicator.

#147 ::: Paula Lieberman [poem]

Lovely.

Anecdotal evidence:
I've done the organization, artwork and assembly of a number of booklets to help refugees acclimate to the U.S., with translations of upwards of a dozen languages. The caseworkers insist that serifed text is easier for foreigners to recognize and use. Their theory is that non-English-readers learn the "shape" of common words in the more prevalent serifed fonts.

"Welcome to Your New Home" and "Please Repair..."
here (second and third publications), among others.

Lee @ 66: But I remember the distant days of fanzine publishing in the 1970s when Letter Gothic was upscale... it meant you had a Selectric!

Font-spotting is a new way to annoy my friends and family. (The old way was raptor-spotting; I think Evil Rob got more than a little sick of me saying "TV!" for turkey vultures.) Designers tend to stick to the same two dozen Open Type fonts, which makes it easier.

At work, I have two or three favorites that aren't precisely mainstream but are still clear and pretty. Albertus (Medium and Wide) makes for a really slick sports face. Maiandra is what Comic Sans wants to be. And you can do some awesome things with Matura Script capitals and Scriptina, as long as you realize that they're for pleasing graphic shapes and not for legibility. (I particularly like making snowflakes out of Scriptina.*)

*Photoshop actions are the reason graphic designers should know a little bit about programming, because if you can write an action you can do really cool things with the click of a button.

Maybe I was spoiled by the musical 1776, but I just finished watching the 2nd episode of the John Adams miniseries and it made the writing of the Declaration of Independence a rather ho-hum affair. It may be more historically accurate, but my understanding is that it made stuff up too.

I default to Times Roman for just about everything unless I'm doing some artistic work like the Shelly Allegro & Caslon Open Face for our former florist business advertising.
I would like more high quality fonts but they are overpriced. $165 for a font in 4 variations is an obscene dollar to byte ratio.
I do have a copy of the American Type Founders Cut Book 1900 edition that I will some day scan for the illustrated capitals which are just so gorgeous. Waverly series is my favourite with all the leaf vine filigree.

Serge, #103, :::sniff::: I always knew I was Nobody!

Terry, #131, surely the judges would be recumbent?

MOMA is having a home fabrication exhibit, with five real houses built, and only one is accessible. One of the others is multi-story without elevator and the other three would take ramps covering the yard. Don't they think about this?

Marilee @ 178... You're Odysseus?

Has that lettering which was used for all those psychedelic rock concert posters in the 1960s-1970s got an equivalent font? Like this, for example.

Linkmeister @ 180: Yep. It's called Mojo.

Apropos of nothing except that I think it's funny, some recent colloquy between two of my musical collaborators:

M: It's free jazz, but I've heard way worse free jazz.

B: It's not free jazz. It's jazz with so many mail-in rebates that you receive $25 every time you listen to it.

M: Wow, such a deal. You never get that with free verse.

I dearly hope that Early Cuyler's new tattoo was kerned to his exacting specimacations; otherwise the consequences would be too dire to contemplate....

Edward Johnston (the man who brought broad-pen calligraphy back in the early 1900s) was another person who thought the Trajan inscription was one of the finest examples of Roman capitals.

#29 ::: Fragano Ledgister:

Thank you for the poem.

It reminds me of A Question of Time by Flieger-- a book about Tolkien and time. In particular, Tolkien wasn't all that fond of his Elves. The whole point of Middle Earth is that things change, and the Elves were trying to embalm it.

I've tried to imagine what LOTR would be like if it were clear that the Elves were doing it wrong rather than it being sad that anything so beautiful and magical was going away, and I just can't manage it.

#46 ::: Serge:

I really liked that the Prisoner had the same font in the show and for its credits. It was as though a little bit of the Village was bleeding through to the real world.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 184... It was as though a little bit of the Village was bleeding through to the real world.

Do you remember the very last image from the story?

The one relatively normal font I instantly recognize is Sabon, AKA the Official Font of the 1979 BCP. Essentially everything in the Episcopal Church pew printed since then has used that font, to the point when I see it I have "And also with you" queued up on my lips.

re 180, 181: Other fonts have kerning; that font has inflating.

#182: It reminds me of William Carlos Williams on Arthur shouting "Free verse! Free verse!" (He's in jail at the time for not rhyming.)

#185 ::: Serge:

I haven't seen the last episode. It's ok if you tell me.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 187... Gur Cevfbare znxrf vg onpx gb uvf Ybaqba nccnegzrag, naq gur qbbe pybfrf ol vgfrys, yvxr gur qbbe gb uvf cynpr va gur Ivyyntr qvq.

R. M. Koske, 172,

One of them was an individual who handwrote his copy and used a struck-through o to represent the letter and a plain o to represent the numeral. It *infuriated* me, and I was, every time, tempted to represent his copy with a letter O everywhere he used no strike (in his prices) and a numeral 0 every place he used a strike (in his text.) I never succumbed, but I really had to fight it. (They're not *just* wrong on the internet, you know.)

This might be an artifact of a different convention that they learned. In ham radio, you get the same thing, which is aggravating for the hams who learned BASIC* where you do the opposite. I forget where it originates. Pre WWII military, maybe? Or just those darn Norwegians?

*all of them, now.

#189, don -

That makes it much better, thank you. There were two elements that led to fury for me - not only was he wrong, but he was making a good and useful thing less useful in his wrongness.* If he was using a different and equally useful** system correctly, then my annoyance is more with the existence of two systems, which isn't his fault.

*This is also why I get pretty steamed at those who say that y'all is singular.

**I don't actually care which one gets the strikethrough. All we need in this case is consistency.

Xopher @ #129:

Have you tried David Morgan-Mar's Explanation of Cricket for people who understand Baseball?

(Or are you not part of the target audience?)

What's the appropriate term, or an appropriate term, for science fiction that is generally found in the Science Fiction section of the bookstore rather than the Bestseller or Literature shelves?

I think the phrase you are looking for is "talking squids in space". The other half is "very serious fiction that happens to be set in the future but is really very serious and about very serious human issues".

R. Emrys @161: there are several variations of this, but one of the most popular is "author who hit the best-seller lists and now wants to go mainstream by separating him/herself from those nuts in costumes". Even if they are his fan base and are the ones who drove the book to the best seller lists in the first place.

My two cents on the only sport more ridden with subtleties of interpretation than baseball:
The best way to understand cricket is to read the description of a cricket match in Dorothy Sayers' Murder Must Advertise.

And to B.Durbin @175, greetingas from another Raptor Spotter. My family is all trained; one of the first things my husband told me after returning from his train-trip to Whitefish and back was that there is an Osprey nest right next to the tracks just east of Libby, MT. (We say "Vultch" by the way, and what they do when cruising ridgelines is "vultching").

Paul A. 191: I'm sufficiently familiar with baseball that the link you gave was helpful; thank you very much! (I didn't understand baseball either until I saw Lockwood's Stratificational Linguistics diagram of it.)

I think part of the barrier to understanding cricket was that it seemed impossible for a game that takes that long to be played by people who ever do anything else at any time, so I kept looking for what I was missing that made it go faster...but it sounds like it really can take multiple days to play. And I find it inconceivable that it would be fun to watch (but then I have the same problem with many sports, including baseball and golf, especially golf).

#188 ::: Serge:

What you described is the Village leaking into #6's real world. To my mind, the credits are closer to my real world.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 196... Got it. The real world, as opposed to the 'real' world within the story. I hope the credits are the only thing that's close to your world. ("Hmmm. Why does my manager look like Leo McKern? No, wait. Now my manager looks like Peter Wyngarde. Wait! Now he's back to looking like Leo McKern.")

Did someone ask for a Comic Sans keyboard?

What's that? "No, no, please Gods NO," you say?

Fine, then, see if I help again!

I loved the half-smoke article. I grew up near Washington and we always bought Briggs hotdogs and sausages (that's what we called half-smokes, unimaginative types that we were).

That was also back in the days of Hot Shoppes and Gifford's, both signature DC-area junk food emporia.

Then of course there was National Bohemian Beer (aka "Natty Bo"), which sponsored the Senators.

/yum

Natty Bo and Gifford's still hang on, zombie-like. Glad to hear there are still half-smokes, more-or-less. Hot Shoppes became Marriott (though the last Hot Shoppes closed in 1999, Google links to various purported recipes for the awesome Mighty Mo).

R.M. @#190, I've been known to use the singular y'all on occasion, although I can't really defend the practice. As best I can tell, it's an irregular regional usage variation, and should probably be deprecated (as you say, it makes the word less useful).

Y'all is such a wonderful word though. Particularly in its possessive (y'all's) and plural group (all y'all) usages.

Tim Walters @ #181, Ah, thanks. As a dilettante with no particular need for it, $29 is a little pricey, but it's nice to know it's out there.

Linkmeister...

Is there any reason why your blog keeps rejecting all my posts as questionable contents?
(I heard that.)

Skwid, #200: I'll agree that "y'all" fills a lexical gap, and sometimes I do use it, but I have to consciously think about doing so. My auto-default still goes to the non-gendered "guys" or "you guys" of my Michigan background.

However, the unadorned form "y'all" is NOT singular, period. Seeing or hearing that usage goes "clunk" in my brain every single time.

don delny @189:
I recall slash-o as character from introductory COBOL, which makes me think it is a military convention (especially since it flies in the face of the conventions from other programming languages).

Skwid @198:
My alarm clock's fixed type (both printed and in the LCD) is Comic Sans. (I can't find an image of it online; it's apparently already been discontinued.)

Lee, it's a Controversy, but not one, as I said, to me. Singular y'all should probably not be used.

Skwid, #200 and RM, #194: I was taught by a friend of mine, who grew up in Florida and Mississipi, that "y'all" was singular, and "all y'all" was the plural form. The canonical usage of this latter phrase was, he said, in the sentence, "F*ck all y'all," which I have to admit makes me laugh very hard. (Note that my friend would have been an adolescent male at the point where "y'all" was a regular part of his vocabulary.)

Unfortunately, having grown up not just north of the Mason-Dixon Line but also north of the 49th parallel (well, metaphorically at least), I don't really think that I can say "y'all" without, at the least, being ironic about it.

Ajay @ 192: Tempting, but not quite appropriate, given that my primary example of the non-SF-shelf category is Michael Crichton. The actual and exact discrimination in question is between "items that influence the scientific opinions of large numbers of the general, mostly science-ignorant populace," and "items that influence the scientific opinions of SF fans, unless they're badly done in which case they will be nitpicked to death."

Emma @ 193: Also tempting. I think it's been a while since Crichton was fannish, though. One of my throw-the-book-across-the-room moments in Prey was when a character got punished by the narrative and ridiculed by the other characters... for acting like she was in a science fiction novel instead of a bestselling thriller. (There were a lot of such moments--I was reading the book for academic purposes and had to pick it back up afterwards.)

Ursula L @ 164: I think that's what I'm going to do, even though it will sound a little awkward given that the paper mostly focuses on the latter category.

In the battle of man against sentence, this round may be going to the sentence.

Having acquired y'all from a babysitter from Memphis, it was pluarl; until I joined the Army and it became a more solid part of my lexicon.

Regionally, it varies. I've heard folks from various places in the south vigorously defend both usuages as the one true way.

Nancy @184: Thanks for the pointer to Fleiger's A Question of Time, which appears to be substantially available on Google Books; I hadn't heard it of before, but it looks fascinating.

As a question to all, the one Flieger chapter I've browsed through so far has a cryptic literary/historical reference that I remember puzzling over in Pamela Dean's "The Secret Country" series-- what does the name "Mary Rose" refer to wrt travelling between different times or worlds? All I can pull up from Google are references to the sunken and rediscovered Tudor flagship, but naval archaeology seems a bit more of a stretch in this context compared to (I assume) a traditional ballad a la "Tam Lin"?

DaveL, #199: Then of course there was National Bohemian Beer (aka "Natty Bo"), which sponsored the Senators.

Salon magazine did an excellent round-up of cheap regional beers. The list included National Bohemian, as well as beers from Narragansett to Olympia.

#206, debcha -

It looks to me like your friend's example might be the origin of the whole thing, and in my opinion it's based on a misconception. Just because "all y'all" is plural, that doesn't mean that "y'all" is not. "All y'all" is simply more inclusive. And just because I'm in a room with only one other person, that still doesn't make y'all singular when I use it to them.

English already has a singular and plural that are the same and require extra words to be truly clear about number. Why would I want another one?

Terry - how did the defenders get that "you all" was a singular? Or are they taking the word to be a contraction/corruption of something else? The only defense I can think of for it is "that's the way we do it" - actual logic makes me less irritable about these things (which is what started the conversation in #190.)

Many of the fonts you find on "free font" sites cannot be embedded in PDFs with Acrobat Pro because of licensing restrictions. I gave up using Garnet for this reason.*

Then I found the Open Font Licensed Gentium with its extended character set, which I now use as my default.

* I've since discovered that this problem can be worked around by using third-party PDF creators like Primo PDF and printing (instead of saving) to PDF.

debcha #210: You said Narragansett! Hooray!

Actually, the beer's nothing special, but I drink it anyway, because dammit, it has been local at various times in its history! Despite its name, it comes from Cranston, RI, not Narragansett, RI, and so do I.

I'm with R.M.@#211. It wouldn't surprise me at all if "Fuck all y'all" and similar usages were the back-origin of y'all as singular. As I mentioned, "all y'all" is for plural groups:

"Trey, pick up Jimbo and his cooler, then get some ice and beer; Bubba, you and Jose go get the Crawfish and some buckets, and all y'all meet Boudreaux and me at the lake."

So what happens on Monday when Gustav hits NOLA? A quadrifecta?

In case you're wondering what I'm talking about: http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/tracking/at200807_5day.html#a_topad. (Sorry for anybody reading this in the future; the forecast today shows Gustav barreling through the Gulf this weekend.)

(And in case you think I'm being awfully cavalier about tropical storms: I live in Puerto Rico. Gustav rained on us a little yesterday, and we've got two more possibles lined up in Hurricane Alley coming off the Sahara at us for next week, and it's damned fun watching tropical storms this time of year. Better than basketball any day, and when a Hoosier tells you that, you know he means it.)

All I can say on the "y'all" issue is that I was born in Florida, raised in Florida and Texas, and did my undergraduate work in Arkansas, and I've never in all my born days heard "y'all" used as a singular.

(There are nuances, though . . . if I were to say to one person, "Why don't y'all come over on Saturday night?", the expanded version of that sentence would be something like, "Why don't you and your S.O. and the kids (and Great-aunt Millie, if she's visiting with you this week) come over on Saturday night?" Also, if I were to inquire of a lone sales clerk, "Do y'all have a left-handed frammistat?" I would be asking whether the store of which he/she is a representative had one in stock. If I said, "Do you have a left-handed frammistat?" I'd be asking whether he/she personally owned one.)

I suspect that the reason "y'all", like the coyote, is expanding its range where some other dialect formations are losing theirs is that while it's marked for region, it isn't especially marked for class -- in the parts of the U.S. where it's prevalent, it's prevalent across the board.

Growing up, I didn't use y'all much at all. Since I've learned other languages with both singular and plural second person pronouns, though, I find it a lot more convenient, so I use it now.

Oh my. Wouldja look at this creepy preaching toddler (warning: sound)?

I think he watched grandpa (the pastor) practicing just a little too much. I also think he's saying "you will all perish in flame" in Gozerian.

#211, R. M. Koske: Whoa - I'm not interested in defending either version - as I pointed out, I'm most emphatically from a part of the world that doesn't use "y'all" at all, and most of us either use or are at least exposed to a language that sensibly differentiates between singular and plural second person plural (although it also not-so-sensibly distinguishes between male and female objects).

I'm willing to believe Terry (#208) and accept that there's probably considerable regional variation in usage. The English language has many virtues, but no one has ever accused it of being logical.

And I grew up using a dialect that has no separate second-person plural form. But in that dialect there IS a distinction between 'you' ("you" and "y'all") on the one hand, and 'all of you' ("all y'all") on the other.

I think the confusion arises from the fact that 'all' is used as a plural suffix (and the vowels of the pronoun have been elided) in the case of "y'all" (my evidence: in a Northern rural dialect I have heard, the plural is pronounced as "you all" with the stress on the first word; stressed things are not subject to elision). In the native dialect where I live now, 'you' is singular, 'youse' is plural (a standard English nominal plural applied to a pronoun) but 'all youse' wouldn't confuse anyone, because the plural is formed by another mechanism.

So far I have never heard or seen "y'all" used as a singular by a person who actually spoke the relevant dialect natively. Of course, people like Spider Robinson aren't at all careful about understanding the rudiments of another dialect before using them in a story; he has Fast Eddie use 'youse' as a singular, apparently to make him seem thuggish and ignorant; it is, of course, Spider who is ignorant, whether you pronounce that word as one syllable or two.

Skwid, #205: Sorry, I think our posts crossed and I missed this, but your link sums it up nicely, especially since we are collectively recapitulating it:

There is also a long-standing disagreement about whether y'all can have primarily singular reference. While y'all is generally used in the Southern United States as the plural form of "you" a scant but vocal minority...argue that the term can be used in the singular. An H.L. Mencken quote follows, in which he argues that you can't entirely exclude the singular form.

So yeah, mostly plural, very occasionally singular seems consistent with the posts here.

Oh, and more evidence: in some dialects the 'all' is used productively: "Who-all was there?" "It was all full of spiders and beetles and what-all."* "Where-all does this bus go?"

*This one's different. Not sure it's the same thing exactly. I would predict *"What-all was in that big box," but I haven't actually heard it. Nor have I heard *"how-all" which would complete the set, along with *"when-all," which I'd consider more likely to occur: "at what times" is a more reasonable question than "in what ways."

After their unfortunate experiences with a local "publisher", I hope they haven't decided to go with certain national "traditional publishers."

Horror stories from local [Atlanta] authors trying to get their books published.

Xopher @ 222

Well, actually, I sometimes use what-all. (I think I picked it up from my father, who was born and raised in OK; his father was from northeastern KY.)

R.M. Koske @ 172: [struck-through o to represent the letter and a plain o to represent the numeral]

don delny @ 189: I forget where it originates. Pre WWII military, maybe? Or just those darn Norwegians?

Don't blame us - we abhor the practice. Ø is the 28th letter of the alphabet and shouldn't be confused with O or the number 0. (I misspell my last name because it's an old Usenet habit and I can never be sure how it goes through on the web. Besides, you foreigners can't pronounce Øvrebø anyway.)

Isn't Ø pronounced about the same way as eu in French or ö in German?

#219, debcha -

Oh no, sorry! I don't expect you to defend or deny it. I've never heard your friend's explanation before, and on hearing it, I think that is the thinking that's the source of the disagreement. I'm not arguing with *you* about it, really. Just talking out loud, trying (and failing, apparently) to not say, "But they're WRONG!"

If I met someone in person who used it this way, I'd try to not argue with them, either. As you say, English isn't logical. But I think I'd be unlikely to succeed, because I'm not exactly logical either.

I accept that there are folks out there who use it that way, but most illogical uses of English are logical if you trace them back far enough. I can't trace this one back, and I want to, so I'm hoping Terry can tell me what the defenders say.

The Mencken quote from skwid's link doesn't do it for me, by the way, because he doesn't give any of the arguments, just says that there are lots.

Regarding the distinguishing the gender of objects - my first ever realization of how dreams could make you believe things that weren't true (as opposed to merely hearing or seeing them) was the dream where I understood the nature and purpose of gendered nouns. It was logical, it was beautiful, English was foolish and wrongheaded for not having them.

Dammed if I can remember the logic behind it now. *grins*

ethan @ 226: Isn't Ø pronounced about the same way as eu in French or ö in German?

Yeah. French 'eu' is a schwa, I think, but German (and Swedish and Finnish) ö is the same letter, just written with a different symbol.

RM Koske, #227: I thought that the take-home message from Mencken's quote was not the arguments per se, but rather his observations - that 99 times out of 100, "y'all" is plural, but there is that one time that it's used as the singular, which you can't rule out. That'd be consistent with the general wobbliness of language, especially since (as Debra Doyle points out in #216), sometimes "y'all" is addressed to one person who is standing in for a group. Unfortunately, that is a strictly descriptionist viewpoint, and it sounds like you are hoping for a little bit more of a rationale. But it certainly seems like most people agree with you that "y'all" as plural is just wrong.

I say goodbye to one more worn-out year,
it takes its tired way off the old stage;
there's nothing left my sadness to assuage,
a future comes with more than normal care
to challenge me, and force me yet to dare
accept the perils that confront my age
discreetly as i can, and still engage
with renewed wisdom and not without fear.
So much depends on listening to pain
and knowing just what signals to ignore,
but paying due attention to the sign
that stands out clearly, even through the rain,
reminding us just how close lies the shore
and what the price of every glass of wine.

Xopher @ 218 -- that's amazing. How old is he? He's got the gestures down cold, he's got the intonation and rhythms of that style of preaching down, he's basically got the entire performance nailed if he knew how to talk.

Kids are incredibly quick.

If I understand you correctly, Mencken is saying that in cases like Debra mentioned, if I think someone is using it as plural and they think they're using it as singular, it will be very hard for me to spot the distinction. That I can agree with.

I don't mean to start arguments about this, really I don't, but I seem to keep doing it. I think I'll shut up now.

DaveL @199
Gifford's was NOT junk food; it was some of the best ice cream I have ever had. (I live in Minnesota now, and there is plenty of really good ice cream here.) I was back there last year, and the place that calls itself Giffords is a ghost of its former self. I loved the way they gave you a pitcher of hot fudge sauce for your sundae that you could pour at your own rate.

I mourn the Hot Shoppes as well, since that was were many of my high school dates ended, eating hot fudge cake*. I have never found anywhere that has ones quite like theirs; Ella's Deli in Madison comes the closest. And it was a drive-in. Remember drive-ins?

*A hot fudge cake was a slice of pound cake, a thick layer of vanilla ice cream, another slice of pound cake, with hot fudge sauce poured over it and whipped cream and a cherry on top. Of course, one can buy pound cake, and vanilla ice cream and hot fudge sauce. But it's not the same.

Julie L., #209, Mary Rose was a play by J.M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) about a woman who searches for a lost time period. Ah! I found a descriptive review.

re Y'all: Logic... you want logic? That's how we got the pernicious nonsense about double negatives, prepositions never ending sentences and infinitives remaining unsplit.

As I said, I didn't grow up with it. My use of it comes from the dialect of Enlgish which is Army. Said dialect has a lot of southernisms. One of which is y'all. There are a lot of native users of y'all in the army, and I've some which use it as a singular, and some which don't. None of them defended it, because no one ever said, "Hey, you can't say that, it's not right."

The best I can infer is the singular use is much like the singular use of "their" to gain a neuter use of the second person (which we can find done by no less than Jane Austin, so those who find it an abomination can at least be comforted in that it's not a new one). No, that doesn't work (as I recall the usages, it was always directed to someone, and one doesn't call someone, them/they/their). In practice it seems to be a sort of diminutive.

I recall it being used by waitresses in Tenn, when I was dining alone, "Y'all want some more coffee dear?"

Xopher: I didn't take it as making Fast Eddie thuggish, or ignorant. I took it as an attempt to paint him as local, and colorful.

Fragano: Felicitations on your natal anniversary.

Nancy Lebovitz #184: Thanks.

Tolkien seems to me ambivalent about the elves. He makes them distant, great and grave. Yet he makes them flawed, and he makes it clear that man (pardon the word, it's his, not mine) has something even more noble about us for all of our mortality and our even greater flaws.

Terry Karney #235: Thank you.

Fragano 230: May your solar return bear sweet and nutritious spiritual fruit.

Caroline 231: I don't know. Someone at work sent it to me. Looks like he might be two, but it's hard to know for sure.

#235, Terry -

Well rats. I got the idea somehow that someone had explained it to you. Oh well. Thanks.

Serge @ #202, check your e-mail for a possible answer to that questionable content error.

Xopher: I started that video playing and Gareth started pouting. Then crying.

I didn't understand it, but Gareth apparently did...

I picked up y'all while living in Northern Virginia 10 miles southwest of DC. I never paid much attention to the singular/plural aspects of it, though, possibly because I mostly lost it once I left the region. If I'm talking to someone with a pronounced southern accent it comes back.

I remember Hot Shoppes in Arlington and Alexandria, and I remember National Bo as sponsors of the Senators (and possibly the Redskins too). Our preferred coffee shop after church on Sundays was Three Chefs in Annandale.

Xopher: I would predict *"What-all was in that big box," but I haven't actually heard it.

I have. (Both in North Georgia, where I live now, and in Central Georgia, where I grew up.)

I hear it pretty often in central IL. I've never heard Xopher's construction, actually: "It was all full of spiders and beetles and what-all." Although I have used "It was full of spiders and beetles and I don't know what-all," to indicate a whole bunch of things that I didn't really try to identify.

B. 241: He must understand Gozerian then.

Lila 243: Good! I was sure it must be used.

Jen 244: It was full of spiders and beetles and I don't know what-all

AHA!!! THAT must have been the construction I was misremembering! With the 'I don't know' in there it makes a lot more sense—and matches the general meaning of the other -all constructions better. Thank you!

Fragano: Feliz birthday[1].

Xopher: Didn't Spider Robinson grow up in or around New York? I wonder if that was an error, or if he was just copying a kind of speech he'd actually heard growing up, which is a bit different from your local dialect? (FWIW, I grew up with no second person plural less cumbersome than "you guys." Learning ustedes was like having a blank spot in my language:reality link filled in.

[1] Hablo spanglish muy well.

Fragano @230:

Tomorrow is my 50th birthday, and your poem was a real gift - not the first from the Fluorosphere, and pray God not the last.

Happy Birthday to you, and may the cares prove far less than expected and the attendant wisdom much greater.

'What-all d'ya got in them there boxes?'

albatross 246: He grew up in the Bronx, but clearly didn't listen carefully or associate with people who spoke that way. I'm familiar with this dialect, and he just got it wrong.

Spider has a tin ear for a lot of things.

Joyeux anniversaire, Fragano, even though the day is almost over in your timezone.

I do point out the widespread complaint that y'all is properly only a plural argues for its widespread use in the singular.

Open thread question:
Short of retyping the whole damn thing, how do I get a text list of all fonts installed on my computer? I can get a list of the filenames by dragging the Fonts folder into Firefox or IE, but I want the font names, not just the file names.

Duh, learn to google, me! For anyone else with the same question, search for "list of installed fonts". I'm currently trying out FontList - hopefully it'll be real software and not a virus.

Two things: Alles Gute zum születésnapodot, querido Fragano. And Shakespearean baseball, which y'all here will surely like.

Xopher @ #238, I spent several moments trying to picture a "solar return bear."

I think I should call it a night early tonight.

re 210: I'm amazed at how many of the east-of-St.-Louis beers mentioned are ones I knew of. (And I agree with the person who identified RW&B as a worst ever.) Will have to check out Clipper City's "McHenry", though, as National Premium was my brew-of-choice at one long-gone time.

Terry@#251:I do point out the widespread complaint that y'all is properly only a plural argues for its widespread use in the singular.

Not necessarily . . . I know that in my case, the times I've been moved to vocal complaint about y'all-as-singular have been in response to badly done fake-Southern accents in movies or television.

#236 ::: Fragano Ledgister:
Nancy Lebovitz #184: Thanks.

Tolkien seems to me ambivalent about the elves. He makes them distant, great and grave. Yet he makes them flawed, and he makes it clear that man (pardon the word, it's his, not mine) has something even more noble about us for all of our mortality and our even greater flaws.

Are you just talking about LOTR, or including the Silmarillion?

The latter struck me as ambivalent about Elves. LOTR didn't, though Tolkien is a subtle writer and I may have missed something. It isn't obvious to me that people have greater flaws, though.

#249 ::: Xopher:

Spider has a tin ear for a lot of things.

Including fandom. I've checked, and fans in general don't have their egos tied up with the idea that they can identify time travelers by deduction.

258: well, LOTR makes it quite clear that the Elves are on the wrong side of history... and it's also worth noticing that in the book (not the films, dammit) Legolas achieves the least out of any of the Fellowship, as I think Tolkien himself pointed out somewhere.
But, yes, the Silmarillion is more ambivalent about Elves, simply because it's mainly about them.

Including fandom. I've checked, and fans in general don't have their egos tied up with the idea that they can identify time travelers by deduction.

I dunno, given the circumstances Jnyyl naq Zbven met their time traveller in, I might've gotten excited about it too.

#233 Magenta Griffith: Gifford's was NOT junk food; it was some of the best ice cream I have ever had.

I agree; I used "junk food" in the appreciative sense, not the pejorative. The hot fudge was what kept my family coming back there for decades. My dad used to stop there on his way home from work and bring home a quart and a vat of the sauce. I was in DC not long ago and my brother took me to the current Gifford's (in Bethesda); it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. I think the name has passed through at least two post-origin hands now.

Do you remember "Hot Shoppes, Jr.?" It was in the DC area (Rockville, anyway, across the Pike from the "real" Hot Shoppes) before McDonald's. You could get a fast-food Mighty Mo: not bad at all.

Totally off-topic, but the Marginal Revolution blog just pointed me to a story in Wired about the most often referenced body parts in music.

I think their accounting is flawed, since they've apparently missed a lot of references to, say, certain animal terms and so on, that would change their results. But it's an interesting experiment.

shadowsong:
There's an outfit called MyFonts with some good font utilities, one of which will give you a list (with samples!) of all the fonts on your machine. (I'm happy with their stuff.)

Also, with Windows, there's the command line: something like dir c:/windows/fonts/*.ttf > fontlist.txt should work - check your path first.

Sarah S, #262: but they don't seem to have included hearts!

#264

Good lord, Randolph, you're right! I'm now deeply worried about what it means that I didn't notice that omission.

#259 ::: ajay:
258: well, LOTR makes it quite clear that the Elves are on the wrong side of history... and it's also worth noticing that in the book (not the films, dammit) Legolas achieves the least out of any of the Fellowship, as I think Tolkien himself pointed out somewhere.
But, yes, the Silmarillion is more ambivalent about Elves, simply because it's mainly about them.

"Wrong side of history" doesn't mean there's something wrong with them. The feeling I get from LOTR is that it's very sad that they're leaving-- it's an unambiguous loss.

In general, they're very good guys (if a little snotty) in LOTR.

There's one thing that strikes me as creepy: Galadriel's "All shall love me and despair". The other members of the Fellowship have basically sane desires used as temptation by the Ring-- the wish to defend Gondor, to have a garden, to defend the weak. I'd say that wanting people to despair is just nasty.

Is this courtly love gone wrong? Craziness because (hypothetically) Elves think black hair is more beautiful than blonde?

Perhaps related: Why would Gimli think Galadriel is beautiful? It makes perfect emotional sense to most readers (or at least I'm the only person I know complaining about it, and that only after many readings), but dwarves aren't even sexually dimorphic.

I'm not sure what it might signify that Legolas achieves the least, though I'm sure there were potential plot twists that would have given him more to do.

I don't think it's just that the Elves were more present in the Silmarillion-- Tolkien could have dropped more clues in LOTR that they had a nasty history.

Xopher #222, Jen Roth #244:

"I don't know what all" is how I know/say it; the bare "what-all" never made it into my purview until just now. (Central KY, central TX, some Northern Cal)

There's one thing that strikes me as creepy: Galadriel's "All shall love me and despair".

I reckon it's a punctuation failure. "all shall love me ... and despair"

But that isn't what she's being tempted with. She's being offered the chance to beat Sauron, restore the elven kingdoms, preserve the Three and their effects (thus saving Lothlorien), to turn the long defeat into a final, glorious victory.

And she turns it down. She agrees to diminish, for her people to go into the West (and remember, at this point she still believes herself banished - so she can't go herself) - all because she realises that all would love her as ring-bearer, right until the point where she turned into the White Witch and banished Xmas. Then they would despair.

Of all the temptations, her's is the most potent. She is the most powerful (after Gandalf) to be offered the ring, she could do the most with it. By refusing it she condemns her people to exile, her land to ruin.

And so, this being that sort of story, her reward is greater - her exile is revoked, she can go home again.

I always assumed there were female dwarves, and that Tolkien never bothered writing about them, just like he mostly didn't bother writing about female humans, female elves, or female hobbits.

269: there are definitely female dwarves. IIRC, according to Tolkien there are fewer females than males - two to one - and not all the female dwarves marry, as some prefer metalworking or mining, and others are unable to marry the dwarf they love and (being stubborn) refuse to marry another; for this reason the numbers of the dwarves increase only slowly.

In this respect, the culture of Tolkien's dwarves resembles very closely that of Imperial College, London.

Ah, but there were at least characters of the female human (Eowyn), female elf (Galadriel, Arwen, namecheck Celebrian) and female hobbit (Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, anyone?) varieties. Do we get even a name-check for female dwarves?

All I can remember is that Thorin mentions a father, and nephews, which in the ordinary way of things would suggest that they had mothers.

Skwid 255: A Solar Return Bear would be a chubby bear of very little brain, carrying a hunny pot* with a burst balloon in it.

Randolph 264, Sarah 265: Hearts are seldom referenced as body parts in music. When a songwriter says "my heart," s/he's making an emotional statement, not a cardiac one. Exceptions include Mahler, who not only has a heart, but a heart ATTACK in I-forget-which-one of his symphonies.

Nancy 266: I think that she's aware of what she would become if she had the Ring. The others are shown only the temptation at the top of the slippery slope; she's not talking about that part, but about the end result, which would be her glorying in the despairing love of all beings. It is this vision that lets her turn aside from taking the Ring.

As for Gimli, I don't know; I find really big trees beautiful, and orcas and horses (from a distance). I don't want to mate with any of them (not even the orcas). A character of mine in a roleplaying game met an ice dragon once (appeared to be made of ice, glinting blue in the twilight, with two eyes like bunsen-burner flames) and immediately prostrated himself in awe.

So I think Gimli's love for Galadriel is part courtly love, part goddess-worship. I think he would find the suggestion of mating with her loathsome, if not actually blasphemous.

On the other hand, the (mostly evil) dwarves and dwarfs in folklore lust after human (for which read "Christian" in anti-Semitic propaganda like "Rumplestiltskin") women. Maybe Tolkien was just gentling that down a bit. Hard to know at this remove.

Also...in the Norse and Celtic folk traditions, hideous inhuman giants (and so on) often have beautiful daughters, who give the human heroes who marry them (usually after killing the giants) beautiful human children. So it's all pretty weird and doesn't make any sense from a modern perspective.

______
*For hunny, not morons, but licked clean of any trace of actual hunny.

Found via Animenewsnetwork:

Obama: Would you vote for smeone who still thinks Astro Boy and Speed Racer the latest thing! Or do you want change!

McCain: Hey! I also like Voltron!

Discussion originally concerned this comic strip..

So, in Making Light terms, that's what? Something like this:

Obama: Would you vote for someone who still thinks Trajan and Comic Sans the latest thing? Or do you want change!

McCain: Hey! I also like Helvetica!

Xopher at #272

I don't know. Would "You've got my heart on a string" be any more or less legitimately about a body part than "I only have eyes for you" is?

It's a metonymy, true, but it's still a reference to a body part.

Female dwarves don't come into LOTR except in either the preface or one of the appendices (I haven't got my copy here), where as ajay says, JRRT mentions their fewness and obscurity, and gives the name of one of them as Dis.

One of Terry Pratchett's stories sends up the indistinguishability of male and female dwarves - IIRC the King of the Dwarves turns out to be female.

#272 ::: Xopher:

Good point that Galadriel is much more likely looking at the outcome as well as the temptation.

I bet there's some interesting stuff to be found in comparing the different types and levels of intelligence shown by the characters.

#266 and #272: I would agree with Xopher that Gimli's love of Galadriel is in no way sexual. JRRT came from a period before it was automatically assumed that love meant sex.

Sarah 274: But the real function of physical eyes are for looking at things. That song means that "you" is the only thing the narrator wants to look at.

Love is not the function of the physical heart, and the line you cite makes no reference to that function. Now, when they say "my heart skipped a beat," they're referring to a body part, even though they still don't mean it literally.

Call me a nitpicker if you want. But if it weren't true that 'heart' in a song doesn't usually refer to an actual body part, Tom Lehrer wouldn't have gotten such a big laugh with this line:

My heart is in my hand—yecchh.

Xopher at #272 and Sarah and #274:

I noticed the absence of 'heart' too. My first guess was that the artists had to make a judgment call about words that were primarily used in reference to an actual body part (eyes) and those which normally have a more metaphorical interpretation (heart). But given the number of songs (10 000 or so), it's pretty unlikely that they controlled for semantics - words like 'dick', 'heel,' and even 'head' and 'face' don't have to refer to actual body parts. So I suspect that they just excluded internal organs entirely, which certainly makes for a more unified visual style in the graphic.

Xopher #278:

I can think of a few heart attack references (Olyvia Newton John, Billy Joel) in songs, which involve the real function of the heart. And other songs where you can hear someone's heart beat. Though that old "there's a hole in my heart that can only be filled by you" song always made me think the singer needed the love (or at least the undivided attention) of a skilled cardiac surgeon.

Xopher @#278

For a long time, a lot of people believed that love (and emotion in general) was the function of the heart. It's Aristotle who's the source of this, as he is of a lot of things.

That Aristotle was wrong about the function of the heart doesn't make the popular expression of his ideas about its function less prevalent in music. Nor does it make a reference to that (untrue) function any less a reference to the organ. If I say that my feet flew down the staircase, I'm still referencing my feet, even though flight is not one of their functions. And how about a problem so difficult it makes my brain "sweat"?

I'd suggest that Lehrer's joke is only funny if we know two things:

a) the heart's real function is NOT emotion

b) the heart is often used, metonymically, to stand in for emotion

You have to have both the fact and the fiction to get the joke. If you don't, saying 'my heart is in my hand' is either just icky or just sappy.

#277 ::: John Stanning:

I agree that not all love is sexual, but when you admire a tree, you don't ask it nicely for one of its leaves, and you aren't likely to nearly get into a fight over whether it's the most beautiful tree in the world.

Nancy - sure, but both of those fit with Xopher's reference to courtly love: the request for something belonging to the loved one as a token, and the offer to fight anyone who denies her supremacy.
Gimli's love is to some extent reciprocated: Galadriel apparently obtains permission for him to take ship and follow her the West (unprecedented for a dwarf). "More cannot be said of this matter" - take that how you will, but I still don't see a sexual undertone.

Dis is the sister of Thorin Oakenshield and the mother of Fili and Kili.

The problem with Galadriel is that she's not really comprehensible.

Elrond of Rivendell is about 7,000 years old. There's a sort of parallel to 'this is the brother of the first guy who was a king in Sumeria' only across a greater span of time and a higher degree of cultural attainment. He remembers people and empires and geography and species of creature that no longer exist. One can almost get one's head around this; very old, very learned, "mighty among elves and men". Remembers things -- and elves have nearly perfect memories -- as personal experiences that are vanished from the earth.

Galadriel daughter of Finarfin son of Finwë, High King of the Noldor in the beginning of days; cousin Turgon Lord of Gondolin, sister of Finrod Friend of Men. (That same Finrod who gave Barahir the ring that Aragorn eventually gave Arwen as a betrothal present...) When she was born, the world was flat and lit only by stars and the Two Trees. Student of at least two gods. Luthien Tinuviel is her aunt. She's Erenion Gil-Galad's -- last High King of the Elves in Middle Earth -- aunt. She remembers the first rising of the moon and the smell of the Two Trees in bloom and Morgoth walking around the world in material shape. Thought Feänor was kinda creepy, and told him so. Didn't see why she should stay in Aman when there was all of Middle Earth to wander through and accomplish things in, and had her own distinct rebellion against divine command.

She is one of the things that have vanished from the Earth; the last royal Noldo in Middle Earth. And she's been one of the three most beautiful elf-women who have ever lived for all of that ungraspable span of time; if Elrond is the brother of the first city-king in the land of Sumer, Galadriel remembers the great leap forward and the evolution of fully modern humans.

"All shall love me and despair" is a prediction, not a desire.

Dis is the sister of Thorin Oakenshield and the mother of Fili and Kili.

The problem with Galadriel is that she's not really comprehensible.

Elrond of Rivendell is about 7,000 years old. There's a sort of parallel to 'this is the brother of the first guy who was a king in Sumeria' only across a greater span of time and a higher degree of cultural attainment. He remembers people and empires and geography and species of creature that no longer exist. One can almost get one's head around this; very old, very learned, "mighty among elves and men". Remembers things -- and elves have nearly perfect memories -- as personal experiences that are vanished from the earth.

Galadriel daughter of Finarfin son of Finwë, High King of the Noldor in the beginning of days; cousin Turgon Lord of Gondolin, sister of Finrod Friend of Men. (That same Finrod who gave Barahir the ring that Aragorn eventually gave Arwen as a betrothal present...) When she was born, the world was flat and lit only by stars and the Two Trees. Student of at least two gods. Luthien Tinuviel is her aunt. She's Erenion Gil-Galad's -- last High King of the Elves in Middle Earth -- aunt. She remembers the first rising of the moon and the smell of the Two Trees in bloom and Morgoth walking around the world in material shape. Thought Feänor was kinda creepy, and told him so. Didn't see why she should stay in Aman when there was all of Middle Earth to wander through and accomplish things in, and had her own distinct rebellion against divine command.

She is one of the things that have vanished from the Earth; the last royal Noldo in Middle Earth. And she's been one of the three most beautiful elf-women who have ever lived for all of that ungraspable span of time; if Elrond is the brother of the first city-king in the land of Sumer, Galadriel remembers the great leap forward and the evolution of fully modern humans.

"All shall love me and despair" is a prediction, not a desire.

So, a question that has come up in the group I'm camping with.

The act of asking people if they'd like their third-eye opened, stamping them with a symbol, and then telling them their new name--this is a religious ceremony / act, no? If so, which one?

Kathryn: It sounds a bit like Shiva-worship, particularly if accompanied with a ritual inhalation of cannabis from a particular type of pipe (chilum). Xopher can probably tell you more.

Why does that photo of Garth Nix on the cover of July's Locus make me think of Eureka's Fargo?

#285: That's a really nice run-down. Wasn't Galadriel in the group that made their way across the northern ice cap?

I always took "love me and despair" as a realistic take on how people might react to actually having an immanent, all-powerful, supernaturally beautiful goddess in their lives.

Those people aren't bugs; they have lives and ambitions, and memories and histories of other times. But there's . . . her looming over it all. Maybe forever. Oh, you love her, and worship her, but there's a degree of helplessness about it. Like exhalting a drug that has you in its grip and know is killing you.

Del Martin has just died.

At least she got to marry Phyllis before she went.

The other problem with Galadriel was that Tolkien kept changing his ideas of her role over time. She began as one of Feanor's co-conspirators in his rebellion, but later this was rewritten so that her departure to Middle-earth was independent of theirs, thus keeping her unsullied by the original sin of the Noldor.

Xopher, her obit in the LA Times has a photo from her wedding.

Total change of subject. I just had an epiphany, listening to NPR. Some dork woman was asking a "Democratic strategist" whose name I didn't catch to discuss the "weaknesses" in Barack Obama's "change strategy." I nearly punched out my radio. [I don't watch TV.]

Dear God, the press. The Kool Kidz, as Digby and others call them. They really don't get it. They don't have to get it. None of them are going to lose their jobs to outsourcing; none of them are without health care. None of them are walking away from a mortgage or a home they can no longer afford. When did the press in this country become this incredibly protected class? (That's rhetorical, but feel free to answer...) I loathe them. I do. I am ashamed of how I am feeling at this moment. I am fantasizing mayhem directed at this unknown NPR airhead; I am raging.

Also, if I hear one more word about disaffected Clinton supporters voting for John McCain I will throw the radio out the window (the small one that I've been planning to get rid of anyway...)

Was it Donna Brazile?

Nancy Lebovitz @258 and 266:
I agree with others noting that the Elves in LOTR were quite obviously part of a world that no longer really existed, and fit poorly in the one that did. This was pointed up by the number of times Frodo and company noticed the feel of a bygone era around the Elves — and the same around the Men of Gondor, which was similarly (and explictly) part of the lost world of Numenor. (And reinforced from a different direction by the Sindarin Elves of Mirkwood, who lacked both fitting into the new world of the Third and Fourth Ages and the Quenya air of the First Age, and were therefore doubly out of place.)

And also as others have said, "love me and despair" was clearly a prediction, not a desire. And the point of saying it was to demonstrate that both she and Frodo had passed their mutual tests.

Nancy C. Mittens @269:
JRRT said in one of the appendices that male and female Dwarves were indistinguishable and that in mixed company the females were presented as males. So for all we know all of the Dwarves in LOTR were female (yes, they were rare, but so were Dwarves in Rivendell and Lothlorien). (The aforementiond Pratchett was an acknowledgement of this.)

Terry at 294 -- no, the strategist was a man, and I truly didn't catch his name. Nor do I know who the NPR questioner was: some woman, not a voice I recognized. The strategist, in the few sentences I heard, did a good job of not responding to the utterly stupid questions.

One of the things which a movie is incapable of showing is the beauty of Galadriel.

But, assuming PJ could have hired any actress who has ever appeared in film, as defined by any particular movie (it's a sort of magical casting thread, innit), who?

Ingmar Bergman...though she's not long and lithe enough.

Cate Blanchette so failed for me.

The key to casting Galadriel should have been to choose someone completely unknown. We should have seen Galadriel, not Cate Blanchett. Same for Arwen, IMHO.

Terry, John (#298, 299)

I've just caught up with 1998's Elizabeth for the first time, if only via the DVD played on my laptop. And that Cate Blanchett, in the scenes of Princess Elizabeth dancing on the greensward with her ladies, did have a delicate, lithe grace that was quite Elvish to my eye.

295: JRRT said in one of the appendices that male and female Dwarves were indistinguishable and that in mixed company the females were presented as males. So for all we know all of the Dwarves in LOTR were female

... I probably shouldn't point out that this observation opens up all sorts of new territory for slash. "Legolas, there's something you should know..."

I also can't help picturing the Blackadder episodes involving "Bob".

Terry at 298: Thank you for *that* mental picture. I was under the impression that beards were the sort of thing you only find on dwarven females.

(Yes, I know.)

302: ha. That one passed right by me. And I call myself an editor...

Terry Karney @ 298... Ingmar Bergman would have looked funny in a dress, although no more than Jeff Chandler or J.Edgar Hoover.

Mark D #247: I see we share the same birthday, then (together with Don Bradman and Lyndon Johnson).

My thanks to all for their good wishes.

Nancy Lebovits #258: "Are you just talking about LOTR, or including the Silmarillion?

"The latter struck me as ambivalent about Elves. LOTR didn't, though Tolkien is a subtle writer and I may have missed something. It isn't obvious to me that people have greater flaws, though."

You're right, since LOTR is focused on humans and hobbits above all. I was thinking of both, and of the Lost Tales as well.

He conceives of the elves as tragic, and you have can't have tragedy without inherent flaws. That's also true of his major human and hobbit characters.

The song I can sing is but shreds one remembers
Of golden imaginings fashioned in sleep,
A whispered tale told by the withering embers
Of old things far off that but few hearts keep.

From The Bidding of the Minstrel to the Lay of Eärendil which was written in 1914. The whole thing, the whole Tolkien legendarium is about loss. (Well, loss and fading and diminishment.) It was so in its beginning and never altered in its essentials.

Hel's teeth, Earendel -- Cynwulf's, not JRRT's -- is a figure from a myth we have lost to time. I don't think the name and the resonance was picked by accident.

#285 Graydon: That was excellent, truly excellent.

That scene in both the book and the movie always makes me tear up. As has been written many times before, one of the things LotR is about is "fading," the "long defeat" of magic and the elder days.

Galadriel is the most important representative of those elder days that we see in the book, and as you write, she saw it all, she remembers it the way we remember our childhoods or our college days (probably better). She knows the fate of the elves, and here, out of the north, unbidden, comes the chance to change it all, to become a goddess (and as you point out, she has known some herself). She turns it down.

For me, the only moment that packs as much emotion (and in a very understated way) is in the appendices, where it describes how the tradition is that Sam was allowed to go into the West as the "last of the ring-bearers," and when he left that was the end of fellowship. That's the ultimate fading, the final line between the world of magic, elves, dragons and rings, and our mundane "Fourth Age."

Sexual fetishes vs Gödel
(Yes, it's work-safe.)

Crap. It went past me too, even after several readings.

Yes, I meant Ingrid, not Ingmar.

Terry Karney @ 310...

Ingrid Bergman - Galadriel
Humphrey Bogart - Aragorn
Claude Rains - Legolas
Sidney Greenstreet - Gimli
Peter Lorre - Gollum

I see Elmer Fudd as Gimli, and Bugs in drag as Galadriel.

"Gawaaaaaadwiellllll! You are so wuvvvvvwey!"

Wile E Coyote as Boromir
Marvin the Martian as Gollum...

Xopher, look what you started.

Daffy Duck as Frodo?
Yosemite Sam as Sam?

If I may be more modern, the Warner Brothers (Yakko and Jacko) from the Animaniacs as Merry and Pippin.

Dot? How about Eowyn?

abi @ 315... How about Eowyn?

Tweety's Granny?

No, Serge, Dot Warner as Eowyn.

Tweety's Granny would have to be cast as Sauron. "Bless me, where did I put that ring?..."

hey.. I was being serious.

Partly is was how she was lit, but for sheer numinous beauty onscreen, it's hard to beat Ingrid Bergman.

I think Christopher Lee would make an interesting Gandolf, but I'd love to see Vincent Price in the role.

Terry Karney @ 319... Sorry. I didn't mean to come off like I was making fun of your casting bit. I just felt like being silly. I wonder about a young Katharine Hepburn as Eowyn? Then again I always thought she'd be perfect as Lois Lane.

Kermit as Frodo in The Muppets Take Middle Earth. Miss Piggy, of course, would be Galadriel, and Gonzo would be Gollum.

#321: Piggy would keep the Ring.

I guess if Kermit is Frodo, that makes Fozzie Sam. And the Swedish Chef is Bombadil.

Life, the Universe, and Everything --

I just saw an entry in the "newyorkers" LJ community, titled "Cosmos on the Upper West Side".

And it took me far too long to realize that the poster was inquiring about...the cocktail.

mjfgates @318:
It's been a long time since I've literally ROFLed like that. Thank you.

...but leave it to me to think too hard and kill the moment: it suddenly occurs to me that the days of those cartoons feel as distant and as desirable as the First Age. (Mainly because I was a carefree kid back then; it surely wasn't that different in quality.)

To pop out to a different topic: My upstairs neighbor Luke will be in the convalescent home for at least a month. He can't walk yet, so he's stuck in the bed by the door with another guy in the bed by the window. He's legally blind -- basically, he can see clumps of color -- so he's not reading or watching TV. You can imagine how isolating that is, even with visits. His daughter and I tried to think of something he could work on or play with and couldn't think of anything. Something to take up his time enjoyably. Any of y'all have ideas? We'd appreciate it.

Marilee:

That leaves mostly sound. Audiobooks? Maybe his daughter could buy him an inexpensive MP3 player, and you could give her some pointers (if she's not net-literate) on getting it set up with free podcasts and/or for-pay audiobook downloads.

Marilee @ 326:

Can your neighbor use his hands at the moment? Knitting combination-style, crocheting, those 3D puzzles where you fit all the odd shapes together to make a cube...

Also, if he can hear, a radio with headphones would provide something to entertain him when he gets bored or tired.

If the near-blindness is not new, what does he normally do for recreation?

Marilee #326:

If you have an ipod or MP3 player you can lend him, you can find a fair number of programs, podcasts, etc., according to his interests. You may also be able to find him some music. A small battery powered radio might also give him something to occupy his time.

"What was this book?" question:

A children's book, set in Japan. It is about a fisherman and his wife and child. They have a black and white cat on board ship, although it is established that the cat was the only one of the creatures to reject the Buddha's blessing. They have a tapestry showing the Buddha blessing all creatures, on which the cat is shown disdaining him. Eventually the black and white cat saves a life -- probably the child -- and dies in the process. In the end the tapestry changes, showing the little black and white cat receiving the Buddha's blessing.

Google is failing me, or perhaps I am failing at Google.

Caroline @ 330, that sounds like The Cat Who Went to Heaven, by Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth. I think I may have read it serialized in Cricket magazine many years ago.

A typeface question: a friend of mine is planning a tattoo. It is currently the Lorax, standing on the UNLESS platform*, possibly with a truffula-tree, and the words "UNLESS someone like you/cares a whole awful lot/nothing is going to get better./It's not."
We've been kicking typefaces around. I don't know if UNLESS must be set off in any way.

Anyone know what typeface The Lorax is in?

*not in the book; he stands on a stump.

Jon Meltzer@321:

Piggy *would* keep the Ring, but the Muppet format can deal with that in any number of ways. (Starting with Kermit snatching it back, cutting her spotlit orchestrally-laden claiming speech dead. "Piggy!" he shouts, in that exasperated/aggrieved half-shriek.)

(BTW, I must insist that the title of this endeavor is "The Muppets Take Mordor".)

Also: Bunsen Honeydew as Theoden. Partially because he experiments with devices beyond his control. Mostly because Beaker can be Wormtongue.

("Meep meep *meep*... meep meep.")

Statler and Waldorf - Legolas and Gimli
Sam the Eagle - Boromir
Gonzo - Aragorn or Gandalf? Can't decide.
Sweetums - lead Nazgul (followed by eight other large monsters)
Chickens - adorable hobbit children, adorable orcs
Dr Teeth - Saruman (with his Band of Uruk-Hai!)

Man, I should be packing.

12 Business Logos Gone Horribly Wrong.

The third one down is specifically a font disaster; it would probably work fine in any font in which the L is a real right angle. The last one confuses some people, but it's on the same principle as that "is it a vase or 2 faces?" optical illusion.

It might be wiser to view this one from home -- it's not exactly graphic, but most of the humor is on the bawdy side.

Andrew Plotkin @333:

Also: Bunsen Honeydew as Theoden. Partially because he experiments with devices beyond his control.

JESR way back @194,

My family also uses "vultch" as a verb, but not for birds. Mostly for dogs and kids. Like when my mom's chihuahua was perched on the edge of the highest thing she could jump onto, shoulders hunched, muzzle straight down, to wait for that bowl of dirty rice to die and be placed on the floor.

I'd just never seen anyone else use it before. Neat.

abi@315: Wakko, not Jacko.

Count the errors. Ladies and Gentlemen, these are the competent, qualified media outlets whose employees sometimes see themselves as the only Serious People, and think they're under assault from the barbarian hordes of vulgar, crazy, unqualified bloggers.

The Cookie Monster as the Balrog?

The Cookie Monster as the Balrog?

Oh, sorry, I should have thought of this before- if you're afraid of large spider-like animals, you might want to turn of the graphics before clicking on the link in my last post.

#333: Bunsen Honeydew is Saruman. "Here in Isengard Labs, where the future is made today!"

Should the cast of LoTR be chosen from among this site's people, I think that Kathryn from Sunnyvale and Madeleine F would be perfect as Merry and Pippin.

re 342: Yes!! and Beaker can still be Grima!

Oh, and it's clear that Bert and Ernie are Boromir and Faramir.

I don't know if Wikipedia is entirely right about Camel Spiders, but the report which Raphael @338 links to certainly feels unchecked.

It's a bit like Honeychile Ryder and the crabs.

re 334: A bunch of logos, and you're saying it isn't terribly graphic?

re 336: We also have used "vultch" for our children.

And I suggest Sweetums for the balrog. "Eiee! A sweetums!"

Still looking for a good Elrond. Link Hogthrob is obviously Celeborn.

re 322: "The pig shall love me, and despair!"

Sweetums is Treebeard.

And for Celeborn, Sam the Eagle.

No, on second thought Link does work better.

Sam the Eagle. Hmmm. Maybe he can be Elrond ...

Fragano: re 8/27, don't forget the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, and Michael Jackson, with whom I am an exact contemporary. Kyrie eleison.

#347: "The frog shall love me. And if he despairs ... HIII-YAH!!"

I thought of Sam as Elrond too.

Another inevitable WB version:

The roadrunner is Frodo; Wile E. Coyote is Gollum. At the end of all the inevitable chasing, Wile gets the Ring-- except after his second of triumph, he finds himself standing off the edge of the ledge in the Cracks of Doom. Then he falls into the bowels of Mt. Acme.

BTW: The VeggieTales people have already done it.

And another retraction. Keep Sweetums as the Balrog. The Ent has to be, uh, Big Beard.

And Gonzo. Now, please, what LOTR character can you imagine eating a rubber tire to the tune of "Flight of the Bumblebee"?

That's right. Peregrin Took.

Gonzo's BFF, Rizzo, is Merry.

(I'll stop now.)

#336 on "vultch": We use it my family, too. I think my wife's family originated it. It usually refers scavenging among the leftovers in the fridge, but sometimes to lurking near the proto-leftovers on the table, waiting to snatch them up.

#311 Serge: I'd say that in the movies Gollum, both visually and the way he was played by Andy Serkis, owed a lot to Peter Lorre. Some bits could be almost frame-by-frame from "The Maltese Falcon" or "Arsenic and Old Lace."

DaveL @ 355... I wouldn't be surprised. Speaking of Lorre, did you know that he first got to work for Fritz Lang in 1932's M after actress Celia Lovsky introduced them to each other. Who was Celia Lovsky? This is Celia Lovsky.

Dave L: We use it to refer to the process of lurking watchfully in a place with open seating (like a coffeeshop) or in a parking lot, waiting for an opening.

Serge #356: That's one of my favorite facts.

There seems to have been some doubt as to whether or not this was spam, but it is at least totally irrelevant.

Theoden... Denethor... here's to thirty years now of me mixing them up!

Sorry.

(Anybody play that mid-80s Apple 2 CRPG called "The Wrath of Denethenor"? That was confusing too.)

C. Wingate, #346: PBBBBBBBBBBBBBBTH! You know what I meant! :-)

Well, looks like McCain better not die in office. His running mate is younger than Obama and has no national experience at all.

ethan @ 358... It fits in with my theory that, if you've ever met anyone who worked on Star Trek, you've got it made, when you play Six Degrees of Separation from lots of famous people.

Diatryma @332 -- I don't have Lorax in English*, but just checked my other Dr. Seuss books for typeface. They all look to be set in something Courier/Times New Roman-ish, but unfortunately font information isn't provided on or in any of the books.

*The German version is similarly set. UNLESS** is simply all caps, although on the platform it's hand-lettered.

**The German translation is brilliant and lovely to read aloud, but I wouldn't want it tattooed -- "ES SEI DENN, DASS jemand wie du/ findet einen neuen Anfang dazu --/ einen besseren Weg gibt es nicht,/ wirklich nicht." Too long.

re 347: Arrrrggggggghhhh!

I meant, of course, "The frog shall love me, and despair!" But I do like the HIII-YAH!

And how about Thog for the balrog?

Xopher, the more Palin described her husband, the more I thought "This sounds like a failed 1965 TV sitcom pilot."

(Second response: "I know Laura Roslin. I served with Laura Roslin. Governor Palin, you're no Laura Roslin."

And then the Monty Python part of my brain kicked in, and it's all chaos after that.

Mary Aileen @359:

The spam done gone. Thanks for pointing it out!

The fact that she's governor of Alaska says more about Alaska than about her, I'm afraid. I mean, Brooklyn has almost four times the population of Alaska. Being Mayor of New York City is a bigger job than being governor of Alaska.

Well, except for the problems with grizzly bears wandering into city parks and wolves eating suburban dogs...

369, by the way, is not meant to be a slam at Alaska, just a way of saying that on many levels experience in Alaska does not transfer to anywhere except maybe the Yukon.

This feels like the political equivalent of casting Michael Phelps in a Broadway revival of The Crucible.

Xopher @362, while I don't want to wish death on anyone, on the whole I guess someone who's a bit inexperienced with her finger on the button might well be the lesser evil compared to someone who's got a temper and may be senile with his finger on the button.

(Generally, I agree with Amanda Marcotte on the decision.)

Wait, she's only been in the governor's office a few months and she's already being investigated for corruption? Damn, those Republicans are fast movers.

Raphael 371: Fortunately that choice isn't given to us to make. We're only stuck with that choice if we don't get Obama elected.

I agree with Marcotte as far as she goes, but I think there's much more to it than that.

Interestingly, when I went to Pandagon to look at what Marcotte had to say, the following Google ads were side by side below her post:

158 Abortions An Hour
Help stop it. Sign our petition supporting life today.

Planned Parenthood Center
Learn About Women's Health Care And How To Get The Services You Need.

re camel spiders: They are strange. They are scary. They are not capable of killing a dog. They can't run that fast. They can kill small rodents (e.g. young mice). They are not insects.

The strangest bug I saw in Iraq was the cricket which preys on camel spiders.

Just after the announcement, NPR asked Ralph Reed for some commentary. Reed responded by mouthing platitudes about how much of an antidote this represented to the disrespect that'd been shown to Hillary Clinton by the Obama campaign.

*coughsplutter*

I suspect that Reed himself hasn't been hitherto terribly complimentary to Hillary Clinton, but I'm too disgusted to even check Google.

Lee #334:

My immediate reaction to the "Computer Doctors" one was to say "Is that a mouse in your pocket?"

Correcting myself: ah, so it's been two years, not months. Not quite as impressive.

re 368: I'm not sure that being mayor of New York qualifies you to be governor of Alaska. Actually, I don't think it qualifies you to be governor of any state, of itself. I'm not sure it even qualifies you to be mayor of Des Moines. Anyway, I could argue that being governor of any state is better experience for being president than being a senator is, because being governor is a chief executive position, and being a senator is not.

This feels like the political equivalent of casting Michael Phelps in a Broadway revival of The Crucible.

Yes, but in which role?

Xopher, you probably don't need this now after the DM-M site, but the way I start to explain cricket to baseball-savvy people is:

You get one strike only.
There's no such thing as a foul ball.
You don't have to run if you hit the ball.
The bowler can (should) bounce the ball during delivery.
11 players, you get 10 outs per inning, but you only get two innings.

The rest of the information (bowl vs pitch, all the terminology, fielding positions (oi, fielding positions), ways of getting out (in particular, LBW), 4s vs 6s vs leg-byes vs overthrows vs...) can wait.

The tension in a cricket match is different from anything in American TV sports, because the game is so slow. Watching a one-day team attempting to defend a 220 total can be nerve-wracking as they spend two hours and 25 overs alternatively way over, and way under the required run-rate. One of the best cricket experiences I have had was watching the end of a test match where England were butchering the West Indies; but there was a tail-end struggle, after five days of cricket, to see if they could hang on to the metaphorical whistle and salvage a draw (down 650-335 or so), or whether the English bowlers could push through for the win. They did, IIRC, with 8 balls remaining in the day.

One thing I like about baseball is the pace (cue Carlin); things Take Time, but when things are happening, boy are they Happening. Cricket is the same, only more so. Note that below the Big Leagues, things go faster (because the batsmen have less of an advantage over the bowling as experience goes down), so the "5-day game" at Test level is 4-day at second-class games (where Canada and the U.S. play), and can go down to 3 days for School or lower county level. Normally now, the local cricket leagues are limited-over events, but in the past, they were just one-innings matches that could complete on a Sunday after church and before dark (cue Murder Must Advertise, and note that "Bredon" plans on playing out the draw, not to win, at least at first).

The new Twenty20 game might just catch on in North America - it plays in the 3-hour "sweet spot" for TV sports, and it's not like there isn't *lots* of action. Unfortunately, there just isn't the elegance...

C.Wingate #378: I could argue that being governor of any state is better experience for being president than being a senator is, because being governor is a chief executive position, and being a senator is not.

As the number one counter-example, I give you George Bush, formerly governor of Texas. (Take him, *please*.) Didn't seem to do him any good at all. OTOH, there were several senators (LBJ way up among them) who made excellent Presidents.

Mycroft 380: I have a somewhat different perspective. I think BREVITY is a virtue in any sporting competition.

I was able to share the outrage of the traditionalists when Major League Baseball went from "win the Pennant, go to the World (sic) Series" to "win the Pennant, so what" and the ridiculous (but apparently quite lucrative for the owners) playoff system they have now, but I didn't tell them I was annoyed by it primarily because it made the baseball season longer, and I have to wait longer into the fall to be able to have a conversation with more than one of my friends without it degenerating (yes, degenerating!) into baseball talk.

So the idea of a game that's like baseball (the second-most boring sport after golf IMO) only more so sends a shudder through me. And it takes FIVE DAYS? For ONE GAME? Jesusmaria christosa gospoda. Keep it far and far from me. I'm afraid your description reads, to me, like "Cricket is like baseball...only even worse!"

Thank you for clarifying it, though, and may I add that the above is not in any way a denunciation of the noble game of Cricket, but just an expression of how extremely it is not to my personal taste.

joann, #381: Someone is bound to point out that the Governorship of Texas is not like that of most states; it's primarily a figurehead position, and the governor doesn't wield much actual power, or do much of anything really. That someone might as well be me.

It was quite a jolt, moving here from a state where Governor is a real leadership position.

Ajay @270 In this respect, the culture of Tolkien's dwarves resembles very closely that of Imperial College, London.

Curiously enough I'm the child of two IC alumni and a graduate of that establishment. I feel that the culture became less dwarfish with the merger with St Mary's medical school.

Also I'm six and a half feet tall.

--
And as for cricket, traditionally one should have half an ear listening to it on the radio while working or pottering about the house. If you turn up for a day it's as much about meeting friends, getting sunburnt and reading the paper between overs. (Other people may have their own ideas about how to enjoy cricket)

re 381: The wrinkle, unfortunately, is that "experience for" translates heavily into "can get done what you want to get done". That is, it teaches you how to run the machine; it doesn't teach you to formulate acceptable policies.

Clifton, Rozasharn, albatross, #327-9, I realized after I went to bed that I should have said he doesn't want to listen to books. But I wonder if he'd like music. I don't think he can crochet or knit -- most people have to look at that and I think teaching might be too much. Maybe a puzzle, that might be interesting. I'm going to see him tomorrow, I'll ask him about music. Rozasharn, usually he watches sports on a special TV that has descriptive commentary. Just listening to the regular commentators doesn't tell him much. Thanks!

Dr. Seuss font: http://web-design.lovetoknow.com/Free_Dr._Seuss_Font

(Google is the Final Encyclopedia.)

Fragano,

Happy Birthday, and many happy returns. And may the wine always be worth the price.

Now that a bigger chunk of my amateur fiction has been published, I'm feeling a little embarrassed. I'm thinking about all thes people seeing it, and seeing the mistakes.

Still, if you like a bit of 1930s air-racing, and evil Nazis getting what they deserve, with added furries, you could do worse than The Spontoon Islands Speed Week

It's more fun than the politics.

Neill Willcox @ 384... the culture became less dwarfish with the merger with St Mary's medical school. Also I'm six and a half feet tall.

Been hanging with Ents?

Marilee 386: How about podcasts of, say, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me or other fun radio shows?

The review of Babylon A.D. by Kim Newman at The Guardian starts with "In a grim future, Diesel is hired by a Mafia boss (Gérard Depardieu) to escort the angelic Thierry and the martial arts nun Yeoh from Mongolia to a cult in New York, headed by Charlotte Rampling. Between fights, betrayals, stunts and explosions, the action man shows his inner softie and worries what will become of his super-powered package."

Can someone who's seen this one tell me if we have an Inigo Montoya moment ("...that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.") on the part of the reviewer? Because I don't need the mental picture of Vin Diesel having a super-powered package, let alone Vin Diesel worrying about his package. Frankly, I'd prefer not to have any thoughts of Vin Diesel's packsge in my head at all, but tastes differ...

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 392... A cult headed by Charlotte Rampling? That sounds good to me.

[in passing]

Here we have an early defense of the study of the language of primitives--the Welsh.

Serge: I once heard an interview where Rampling described telling her incredibly conservative parents that she'd gotten her first starring film role while trying to make sure they didn't figure out what The Night Porter was about or what she did in it. Incidentally, I found the review quote above while looking for another Newman review (can't seem to track it down) which apparently goes into Rampling's "CGI Botox" in A.D.

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 395... You mean that the movie did to Rampling what was done to Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in the 3rd X-men movie? We do live in a science-fictional world.

Marilee (386): There is such a thing as "described videos"* for the visually impaired. Maybe he'd enjoy those? Your local library may have them; mine does. He'd need a player but just a regular one, nothing fancy.

*I don't know if they come on DVD or just tape.

Happy birthday, dear Fragano!

Love, C.

Neil @384
Other people may have their own ideas about how to enjoy cricket

Pimm's and lemonade. 'Nuff said.

Cricket? Time to watch Lagaan again.

Saw "Babylon A.D." yesterday.

The ending, specifically the last three scenes, is incredibly weak. Very little payoff.

But the rest of it is a quite passable action movie. I didn't find it as incoherent as some of the reviews suggest. There are some interesting settings (nuked-up Russia, just hanging on) and colorful characters.

But the ending . . . really weak. There's talk that the director is complaining about cuts. Maybe that's what went wrong.

Today's improbable news story:

Sea turtles explore new, urban frontier

Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Dr. Lance Adams, staff veterinarian at the Aquarium of the Pacific peers into a holding tank at an endangered green sea turtle that was caught earlier today in a Long Beach canal. Federal officials tried for days to capture the creature, fearing vandals would succeed first and kill the animal.

The massive endangered animals normally spend their lives at sea. Scientists are closely studying the progress of two breakaway colonies that have settled in the San Gabriel River and San Diego Bay.

The San Diego group has at least 100 turtles, according to the story, and the largest weighs nearly 600 pounds. The scientists seem to be having fun with research they never expected to show up at their doorsteps.

Serge @ #400, I watched Lagaan. It didn't help.

Lila @ 403... Oh, I couldn't understand the rules of cricket, but still I enjoyed Lagaan. It's like the card game in Casino Royale - I didn't know what this or that meant, but the reactions of the characters cued me in as to whether or not this was good or bad.

C Wingate @ 346

I like Zoot for Elrond. He has the otherness the part requires.

Bruce Cohen, StM:

It may be too late, but the Microsoft website has a training section for Excel (indeed, all the office suite), with self paced lessons, video sessions and tests to see if you got it all. They go into quite a bit of depth, I thought, and certainly if you went through them all you could legitimately say you were familiar with Excel.

re cricket: Apart from not getting the terms (for lack of watching it much), I understand it.

I understand it because of this site.

Juli @ 406:

I'm the Bruce who brought up the subject of needing to learn Excel. Thanks for the info; I've already seen the site and dipped into the first few lessons.

Update: I started training for that mall security guard job earlier this week. There are a LOT of codes, and forms, and procedures, and guidelines to learn. A LOT. So these guys are not always the dummies that a lot of people assume security personnel are. (Some of the people in this company do speak contemptuously of other companies, those who hire warm bodies to plunk down in a spot for eight hours. But this particular company seems to take its responsibilities, and its employees, seriously.)

Bruce Arthur

Just want you to know that Excel is straight forward and user friendly. It's also a very useful program. As anyone who once had to create and TYPE spreadsheets on a typewriter at the dawning of my adult-professional life, Excel is a boon and a half and dearly beloved. Indeed, in my humble opinion, it is the best program that MS ever came up with (yes, yes, yes, the competition is not so much).

Unlike Acess, for instance, which I kinda hate. But it is so x-accessible, for instance.

Xopher, #391, he loves jazz and has lots of CDs. So when I got home I googled for easy to use MP3 players and only one was easy enough to expect him to use. I called his daughter and told her I'd pay for the player and rip the CDs (it comes with software that works with Windows Media Player) if she paid for the batteries -- the only bad thing, it doesn't recharge. Then again, he'd probably need help with that. She agreed, so I ordered the blue 1G from Office Depot for only $20.95. It won't come for a week, but he'll have plenty of time in non-home places to enjoy it. Thanks, folks, for the suggestion!

Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher are in the Twin Cities for the Repub convention, and they're following a series of preemptive police raids (in full-on SWAT mode) against so-called "hippie homes" full of people that might possibly protest during the convention. They've been seizing laptops, journals and other "political" papers and detaining anyone who protests. At least one lawyer has been detained as well, for asking what was going on.

More here, with links.

Welcome to the United Police States of America.

I forwarded an email I got about that to Dave Neiwert, Lindsay Beyerstein, and Glenn Greenwald.

Seems I was late in letting him know.

For anyone who cares to read the email I got I ginmar has posted it here

I watched "Hamlet 2" today.

Very funny, in a uniquely sacrilegious and obscene fashion, with some very catchy music.

Rock me sexy Jesus!

The engineer of America's educational decline is dead.

I'm sure that's not what she thought she was doing -- but it's the result, so the shoe fits.

Lee @ 414...

"Was Robin Hood a hero, as the text claimed, or a dangerous advocate of income redistribution?"

Robin Hood, Robin Hood
Riding through the glen.
Robin Hood, Robin Hood
With his band of men.
Feared by the bad, loved by the good.
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.

Serge, a lot of the people involved with writing that British TV series, and the earlier Ivanhoe which also had liberty v. tyranny as a regular plot issue, had fled Hollywood and its blacklists.

The sneaky thing about the modern Robin Hood is that the Good King returns, and the proper old order is restored. It's not a revolution, after all. But you can deal with all the issues that revolutionaries want to deal with.

Not necessarily:

Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore
Riding through the land
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore
Without a merry band
He steals from the poor
And gives to the rich
Stupid bitch

Dave Bell @ 416... I didn't know that about Robin Hood or Ivanhoe (starring Roger Moore, right?). As for the Good King returning, and the proper old order being restored, that's true, unless the King is played by Richard harris or John Rhys-Davies.

Tykewriter @ 417... "Blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought."

Heresiarch #411/Terry #412:

Jesus. What the f--k happened to my country? You're allowed to protest, we'll just arrest you if we think you're planning to do so, or if you do it anywhere where anyone can see you. Asking unwelcome questions of leaders or candidates during public appearances can get you arrested and maybe jailed. Although the president claims the authority to have you disappeared and tortured indefinitely, don't worry--that's mostly not happened to protesters. Of course, quite a few have ended up on no-fly lists. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though.

Anyone with serious computer security chops want to sample the machines of protest organizers, to see what fraction of them have keyloggers installed? Anyone want to try some experiments with swapping around cellphones to see whether you can get wrong or empty houses raided by putting a known troublemaker's cellphone in the house and calling it from other troublemakers' numbers a few times?

How long till the same thing happens for people who start discussing/planning protests on the net?

Do you ever feel like you're in a house with a small kitchen fire going on, and everyone else is staring contentedly at the TV, refusing to notice the smoke and flames? We could put it out if we decided to now; in a few minutes, evacuation will be the only option. But putting it out would involve moving a bunch of flabby asses off the couch and ignoring the idiot box for a few minutes, so it's not really doable.

I think I may have confused Ivanhoe with the several other swashbucler/freedom-fighter TV series which, like The Adventures of Robin Hood, were produced by Sapphire Films.

Yes, Roger Moore played Wilfred of Ivanhoe. Useful sneaky quiz question there.

albatros: I don't know. I am appalled that, for Denver, the Dems set up areas for protest. bad enough the sequestered them.

But the name.... The Freedom Cage.

What

The

Fuck?

#411 ::: heresiarch

You read the accounts of these Minneapolis events in small town newspapers, like in Pennsylvania, the accounts are taken verbatum, with no tip, from reThug talking points memos. The accounts are filled with terrible threats and weapons and plots discovered and foiled. Buckets of urine!

That's what those small town newspapers are now. They've been bought up, as have the radio stations, by reThug/newCON groups, and they are a constant feed of hate and bigotry into these communities.

I see it with my hometown paper, whose publisher is such an out-and-out racist (owned, incidentally by a very secretive consortium in AZ; he trained in South Carolina) -- he was one of those who proliferates the Obama is a Muslim meme -- and even really born in the U.S.A., and our people are so much than those people down there in New Orleans, who did nothing for themselves and then just sat around with their hands out (while looting, of course) to be helped.

NOT LIKE US good white midwesterners who never get a public dollar in our lives, by golly, and won't take those dollars when offered. And if you believe it, we have bridges for sale.

But they actually believe that garbage about themselves, even while filling out flood disaster relief papers, medicare and medicaid papers, cashing their social security chex, etc.

Love, C.

Dave Bell @ 421... I remember some other British swachbuckler series of the era. Was Sapphire involved? There was one about a Viking leader's three sons, one about a buccaneer, one about Lancelot (the knight, not the chimp) and one about a Florence artist who was as handy with the sword as he was with the brush and in which Leonardo da Vinci appeared every once in a while. I think. It was quite a few decades ago.

Re the sidebar item on pre-convention raids on protesters, may I suggest a new word:

preactionary

heresiarch @411: Not just protest groups. They're targeting groups like I-Witness that monitor protests. I-Witness tapes have forced local governments to drop charges by documenting false testimony by the police - in at least one case, false testimony contradicted by a videotape in police possession.

Terry Karney @422: "Freedom Cage" is the snarky term. They're still officially "free speech zones", which is bad enough.

Fungi: Oh. Since I never saw them called anything but that (and that in feature, and hard news, stories in the, "legitimate press."

As for free speech zones, I refuse. There is no public place in which I don't have the right to speak my political mind.

Serge @415, argh.

I had just managed to rid myself of that earworm, which I got by deminstrating to my son that I can still sing that theme song however many decades down the road.

Of course, the radio replaced it with "Dancing Queen" so maybe I'm better off to have Robin Hood back.

JESR @ 428... the radio replaced it with "Dancing Queen" so maybe I'm better off to have Robin Hood back

You asked for it.

Apparently the first season of The Adventures of Robin Hood has been released on DVD.

I have just found that my poor husband has never seen that version of Robin Hood; it may be necessary to get him the DVD.

Zeynep @139:

Thanks for the heads-up; I have tracked down the correct links and replaced them.

(If you're interested, they're Interventions that Work and Managing a Large-Scale Rescue Operation.)

An observation on the nature of the internet:

1. There really is a site called howtoopenacoconut.com.
2. It doesn't actually show the best way to open a coconut.

oops. I had too many threads open, and mis-posted this.

A cool thing. Detroit Rivercam

JESR @ 431... What have I wrought?

Serge, a change for the better, I hope; since RetroTV has come on our digital cable menu, he's been binging on Dragnet and Adam 12.

JESR @ 436... RetroTV? I've never heard of it, but it sounds like something I'd like, and it reminds me of the early days of TVland. Ah, the days of Dobie Gillis reruns...

Yesterday, I finished reading the August/September issue of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (available in newstands) and found my wife quoted in Nancy Holder's column about paranormal romance. Neato!

That illustration shows how to open a store-bought coconut, in which case by far the easiest part of opening a coconut has already been done for you. The hard part is husking the coconut to get it into that state. This means prying off a couple inches of thick fibrous stuff which (when green) has similar consistency to a radial tire.

The recommended approach is to use a iron stake pounded into the ground with the sharpened side up:
Jam the coconut husk onto the stake as hard as you can, and then twist it and tug on it until the stake pries off a big chunk of the husk.
Repeat until you get down to the core nut.
Then you can punch holes in it with a nail as shown, or just whack off the top with a machete, drain out the juice and then crack it in to pieces.

When the coconut is still green the shell is a bit softer, the juice is much more plentiful and delicious, and the meat has a delicious jello-like consistency. (BTW, the meat is only copra after it's separated and dried.)

abi @ 433...

King Arthur: I am, and this is my trusty servant Patsy. We have ridden the length and breadth of the land in search of knights who will join me in my court at Camelot. I must speak with your lord and master.
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: What? Ridden on a horse?
King Arthur: Yes!
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: You're using coconuts!
King Arthur: What?
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're bangin' 'em together.
King Arthur: So? We have ridden since the snows of winter covered this land, through the kingdom of Mercia, through...
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: Where'd you get the coconuts?
King Arthur: We found them.
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: Found them? In Mercia? The coconut's tropical!
King Arthur: What do you mean?
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: Well, this is a temperate zone
King Arthur: The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land?
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
King Arthur: Not at all. They could be carried.
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: What? A swallow carrying a coconut?
King Arthur: It could grip it by the husk!
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut.

Serge: He said "house martin or plover"? Wow, for however many years it's been since the movie came out, I always thought he said that a plumber may seek warmer climes in winter. Which makes pretty good sense for Monty Python too.

Serge #311:
Were you thinking of this B&W version which I first saw here?

Serge, #437, you have to receive digital signals and have a digital display to see RetroTV. It's a sub-channel of ABC, 7.3 here, where 7 is the main ABC channel.

Clifton Royston @ #439:
For the green coconut, I rather liked this video. (Of course, I don't have either of those pieces of equipment, so the one time I opened one it was a lot slower & messier...)

I haven't been keeping up with open threads (or much of anything lately), so my apologies if this has already been posted, but I'd feel even worse if you hadn't seen it: Animator vs. Animation.

According to my calendar September 1 is Serge's birthday. I can't think of a good or bad pun, so here's a haiku

Another orbit?
Joyeux Anniversaire!
Please have many more

Joyeux Anniversaire, mon ami!

A birthday had by Serge
Arrived in time for a surge;
As Gustav drew close
And ML grew morose -
Nobody liked NOLA re-submerge (d)

Terry #427:

Freedom cages explain
what those bumper stickers meant:
"freedom" isn't free

Drat. I messed up the syllable count by making it plural.

Freedom cage explains
what those bumper stickers meant:
"freedom" isn't free

Soon Lee @ 442... And there also was John Huston's adaptation of "LoTR" in the early 1970s, with Sean Connery as Frodo, and Michael Caine as Sam, but that fell thru in mid-shooting so he recycled the existing footage as "The Man Who Would Be King".

Tania @ 446 and Ginger @ 447... The Day really is next week, but, hey, I'm vey happy that you thought of it. Thanks!

John A @ #445: *snork*!

Thank you for putting in a sidebar link to the Minneapolis raids. Let me put in a kind word for Food Not Bombs, I have seen them doing their thing in Cambridge, and they keep up the good work in the face of it all.

Dratted calendar. Now I will go and fix it.
Oh well, it means I have an entire week to come up with a pun laden tribute to Serge's natality.

Happy birthday, Serge!

Tania @ 454... Huh oh. By the way, on my birthday, I will be exactly one year younger than actor Jeffrey Combs. I know. Same as the year before. And the year before. And the year before the year before.

does anyone know this:
(all knowledge is included in Making Light)

I recently saw a movie asserting that one of the crown jewels of the Roman empire is a sword forged from a meteorite. Is there any truth in this or did a screenwriter just think it sounded cool?

I'd just like to thank the Fluorosphere for talking me into celebrating my birthday despite its negative associations. I've just passed your wisdom on to a young person (I know him only through the web, and I think he may be in Pakistan) with the same birthday, who was TWELVE when it happened and hasn't "had a happy birthday since."

It's one thing to stop celebrating your birthday when you're 42. It's quite another when you're 12. I believe that, like me, he will celebrate his birthday this year. He said this:

Thanks for this amazing message. I will put your sayings to work, I sure will. And I wont let my birthday be robbed by anybody.

Erik, 457: If you're talking about that soi-disant "King Arthur" movie, everything in it is utter hooey. Go read The King's Peace and The King's Name instead.

Erik Nelson and TexAnne... I think that the movie in question is The Last Legion, with Colin Firth as a long-suffering general, long-suffering because he has to carry across Europe the many outfits that the warrior woman of his group sports throughout the film. King Arthur was indeed hooey, but it was pleasant hooey. Besides, it starred Clive Owen and Keira Knightley. And Stellan Skarsgaard as a smelly Saxon.

Erik @ 457 and TexAnne @459: while the movie may in fact be utter hooey from opening title to closing credits, it wasn't the only source propagating that particular detail -- Mists of Avalon also described Excalibur as forged from meteorite iron. Not that this makes it any more factual. And of course in Mists, Excalibur was a "Druid" rather than a Roman artifact.

I am not enough of a scholar to know if there's any genuinely historical bit to fuel that detail.

Sajia @ 455... Thanks. Of course I already know the gift my wife will be surprising me with next week - because I told her what I wanted: the Modesty Blaise novels I had been unable to find on my own.

XopherXopher @ 458... Sometimes, what goes around does come around, and sometimes it's good things that do.

Serge @460, glvalentine did one of her Questionable Taste Theatre segments on The Last Legion and it was hysterical! You might get a kick out of it.

Rikibeth @ 464... I definitely got a kick out of that.

"Romulus “Kiddo” Caesar finds Excalibur in one of the Lara Croft reject scenarios where you push on some mosaic’s eyelids and drop three stories through some wooden beams and remain utterly unhurt."

"I played that one when I was thirteen!"

"I’ll bet you did."

Novelist Jack Whyte's Excalibur is also forged by this engineering Round Table from meteorite steel.

Love, c.

Serge #462: the Modesty Blaise novels I had been unable to find on my own.

If one of them is I, Lucifer, I'd very much like to know where the hell Sue managed to find it.

I haven't seen The Last Legion but I read the book and I'm pretty sure that it was in the novel. So it may well have been made up, but by an Italian novelist and archeology professor.

Serge @450- You mean the little known collaboration between Kipling and Tolkien The Man who would be Lord of the Rings trilogy - The Contrack of the Ring, The Two Chancers and The Return of the King*.

Ethan @467 - I found a copy on my Dad's bookshelf. I doubt this is of any use to you though.

* In this case, the king being Alexander the Great

Neil #468: I found a copy on my Dad's bookshelf.

I found copies of six Modesty Blaise books on my dad's bookshelf, and six others at the library, but I, Lucifer is nowhere to be found--not in any library system in the state of Rhode Island (public, private, university), and not online for anything under $50 that I've seen. It's infuriating, since I'm trying to read them in order and it's only the third one. I've stalled so early!

ethan (459): Have you tried interlibrary loan outside of Rhode Island? It's not as fast as in-system, but it usually works. According to WorldCat, there are 176 copies in libraries around the country, so you ought to be able to get one. (Often free, or there may be a smallish processing fee.) Check with your local library.

ethan... Yes, I, Lucifer was among those, and she found it and the other novels on bamm.com. I discovered one at the worldcon, at the table of a dealer who had the comic-strips, but this was the only novel in his inventory.

Neil Willcox @ 468... With Anjelica Huston as Eowyn?

Ethan @ 469: They're out there if you know where to look:

I, Lucifer via ABE

A slightly more useful version of the previous link which restricts the search to I, Lucifer by O'Donnell, thus eliminating a myriad hits on the book by Glen Duncan with the same title.

If you haven't already, check out the 'Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War' sidelight. I find it heartening to see there was internal resistance to that war.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now was arrested

She's been released. (She'll be filing a suit, I think.)

They don't have a good excuse for arresting her, or the two producers she was trying to get them to release.
(WTF were they doing, arresting newspeople, and also people trying to get to - or go home from - the SEIU concert?)

There are reports of possible agents provocateurs, too.

Mary Aileen #470: I actually didn't try ILL, because I'm a moron. I will try that.

Paul #473 & 474: OK, but I swear I did try abebooks.com. Maybe I'm just stupid? Or maybe part of my brain is lying to another? Weird. Anyway, thanks!

Google Chrome, the browser of the future? Architectural overview in comic book form by Scott McCloud. Some really good ideas there, folks.

I was trying to post a long comment on the RNC thread, and ran into an XSS block. How specific is this?

Randolph #479:

I assume this has to do with MS Explorer's announcement of privacy features that would interfere with some of Google's advertising techniques.

I was just looking something up on Preditors and Editors (http://anotherealm.com/prededitors/), and noticed the alarming notice on their home page:

"Help Defend P&E

Unfortunately, there are those who do not like P&E or its editor because we give out information that they would prefer remain hidden from writers. Usually, they slink away, but not this time. P&E is being sued and we are asking for donations to mount a legal defense in court. Please click on the link below and give if you can to help protect P&E so it can continue to defend writers as it has for the past eleven years."

Yikes! Anyone know what's going on?

Randolph: I'm pretty excited about it. They're applying current state-of-the-art in OS design and implementation to browser design.

By the sound of it, Google has been very thoroughly doing what Netscape was only talking about grandiosely 12 years ago, when Microsoft decided Netscape was so much a threat they needed to "cut off their air supply." This is a threat to any company trying to keep their OS a monopoly, because it's in a position to make the OS much less relevant to the typical user.

Sure, there are desktop apps like I develop, which will probably never run on the browser, but by this point the average user already does most of their day-to-day computing either via their browser or in apps that could be done in the browser.

Gonzales under the tires now?

I heard on the radio that Alberto Gonzales took highly classified documents home to read, a major no-no.

Strange, that it comes out out and not back when he was in office, and how did anyone find out about it, anyway?!

What's going on, an orgy of scapegoat and red herring collection, promotion, and sacrifice?!

Meanwhile, the latest economic news is that the top executives are getting fat bonuses and raises, and the rest of the legal-to-work-citizen-by-birth workforce in the USA is lucky to stay employed without a paycut, let alone stay employed or get a raise....

(And a strange job market it is.. I had work with health benefits for three weeks or so between late 1989 and late 1998, and from early April 2002 to fall 2006... today I got contacted by TWO headhunters, despite not having updated any online resumes in close to two years! Labor = disposable commodity these days.... the demand is for specific things, at specific times... and evaporation at other times...)

Hamster sudoku lets you play sudoku with pictures instead of digits.

Paul Duncanson (474): Holy frickin' cow! I just followed your link and was astonished to discover that Peter O'Donnell and Madeleine Brent are the same person. I may have to go dig up some Modesty Blaise books now. I *adore* "Madeleine Brent's" books but had no idea that was a pseudonym, let alone for whom. Thanks!

Joel, hamster sudoku is hard! I can't tell which ones I have already used, unlike numbers.

I'm not much for sudoku myself. But I think the picture version would be similar in difficulty level to the regular version if one had a set of simple and easily-distinguishable pictures. On the other hand, some people may be wired such that solving problems of this kind goes better with number-pattern stuff than with picture-pattern stuff.

You could always find or create images of digits to use in the puzzle. Any font you like. :-) (I've just created a set of digits with the tag "sudoku digits". There is a catch: the generator only works if it can find at least 10 images, so with that tag, you'll get some combination of nine of the digits 0 through 9, instead of the traditional 1 through 9.)

Greg, #482, I assume this is still the Barbara woman who is also suing P&T, which is why we're not talking about it.

Paula, if you know of good places to look for work for someone who isn't a programmer but is a power computer user plus very good at organizing and problem solving please let me know. I'm in my ninth month of being unemployed and our budget is crap. Thanks in advance for any guidance.

Constance @409:
Microsoft didn't develop Excel; they bought it. IIRC the same was true of their previous spreadsheet, Multiplan (which I still miss).

Marilee @443:
Not all network affiliates have the same programming; the Pittsburgh affiliate WTAE only has a 480p live weather/traffic subchannel.

Bruce Arthurs @408:

Sorry! I should have gone back and checked to make sure I had my Bruces straight. However, I'm glad you have started to use the online system a little bit.

Also, one of my co-workers told me that she checked a guide to Excel out of the library. You might try that if you want a little more depth.

Marilee #489 Ah! OK. Thanks.

Greg, #482 - if you email me, I can point you to a fund that supports all the defendants, not just P&E.