Earlier this year, I read Terkel's Hard Times,. When the market tanked, I plugged the book on both my sites; it's an excellent collection of recollections of The Great Depression.
Two striking things about Hard Times: The vividness of the memories of those who went through that time period. I was born 30 years after the market crash, so "the Depression" has always been there, but been remote to me. No more. Now it's immediate and visceral.
Second, the variety of people he interviewed. Terkel didn't set out to interview a subset of people to support a narrow thesis about what that decade meant. He went wide, in order to say, "here's what happened." Contradictions abound: investors who lost it all in the crash, investors who managed to sell off before the crash, the destitute who were grateful for government assistance, destitute who refused government assistance, the creators of the government assistance programs, well-off people who despised government assistance, farmers who helped one another in the farming mortgage protests, and a guy at the Public Works Administration who saw the photos of Dorothea Lange and recognized the negatives had to be protected from political whims and preserved for posterity. Yes, and more (sorry, it sounds like marketese bullet points, but the vastness of the collection of voices really is "...and more!")
Hope Dies Last is a collection of interviews with politically active people; it's from reading that work that I made my first acquaintance with community organizers, before the current election brought the job title to the fore.
Oh, my. I see I've discovered this thread a couple of days after it was begun.
I found a catalogue listing for some letters that my great grandmother wrote 100 years ago when she and her husband moved from the Boston area to Billings, Montana. (I've got later letters she wrote to her daughter.)
Her name? Misspelled. Am now corresponding w/ the librarian who fixed the listing (at my request); librarian did some research and told me the date of her death.
After quickly posting my score, I have been reading the thread. Calligrapher? Yep. Graphic designer? yep.
In fact, when I saw Palatino and Optima, I thought of Hermann Zapf, who designed them both.
I never think of Mormons and Optima; I think of really crappy
tightly kerned mid-1970s everything newslettery with Optima. Then I
read Friedrich Neugebauer's The Mystic Art of Written Forms
and saw how beautiful Optima could be as a text font. The not-quite
sans serif boot-leg cut of the strokes makes it easier to read that
uniformly sans serif. If you set your letter tracking a little wider
than standard (but not by much), Optima is drop-dead gorgeous.
I just went to the web site for The Vietnam War Memorial Wall, and yes, the names are all set in Optima. capitals. Just found, at the bottom of this page, the last question in the FAQ confirms that it's Optima.
. . . .
Not that long ago, I spent a goodly amount of time trying to match a
font. San serif. Bold. It wasn't Helvetica. It was not Frutiger. It was
not Univers. I went to Identifont -- or some other site I'm too lazy to
look up at the moment -- where I answered a series of questions about
parts of letters, and in the end it announced that it was Arial / Arial
Black, and I gnashed and growled. So. obvious. in. retrospect.
What a lovely thread. This kind of arcane typographic knowledge is a light I usually put under a bushel. It's fun to bring it out from time to time.
Woo hoo! I made it into the hall of fame, with a score of 28 points. (and, like Glenn @ 110, w/o using a reference)
I threw a party in 1996. On a Tuesday night, I believe. February 29, 1996. A Leap Day party, because it was the last leap day of the 20th century. Or of the 1900s, depending where you draw those centurial/millennial lines. Someone said, "But it's a Tuesday night. Can't you move the party to the weekend?" Alas, no. It's on leap day or not at all.
Can we talk about notebooks with the single-spiral binding? Your basic 1-subject wide rule notebook?
It all comes down to the feel -- or tooth -- of the paper. Mead (which I find at Office Depot) is a little rougher than Stockwell (it was once available at Staples. Then Staples put its own brand on the notebooks). I buy 'em in the shrink-wrapped 5 or 6 notebooks to a package set. Stockwell-turned-Staples paper is smoother, and the hand flows across it faster. These are the notebooks I use for "keep your hand moving on the page" writing, so tooth and drag DO make a difference.
More recently, tho, Staples made a slight change to the notebooks. (I don't know how recent, since I buy the notebooks in bulk.) Some accursed Staples/Stockwell product manager got the bright idea to increase the diameter of the spiral coil oh-so-slightly. I swear at that product manager when my hand reaches two-thirds the way across on the back side of pages and crashes against the spiral spine. Now the Stockwell-turned-Staples notebook has been ruined.
And once you get a little whiff of the academic deconstructionist stuff (don't know if it goes in AAR circles; I think I hovered at a convention once 'cause a friend was presenting), but I can see it now... if FSM takes on, there'll be Derrida-ites who'll talk concept shop countering the prevailing pastarchial constructs, and employ many other words ending in -ist.
Scalzi referred to this snippet...
[begin quote] “I would pick 5 top-100 blogs that I felt worked well with my target market, then I would read each of their articles and spend time coming up with interesting and constructive comments†[end quote]
which led me to this startling revelation: Mr. William Collins (Pride and Prejudice) is a starfucker who shows us how it's done!
From P&P, Ch. 14, where Mr. Bennet entertains his guest (and cousin) Mr. Collins, and the topic turns to his benefactress, Lady Catherine:
Mr. Collins continued, [begin quote] "I have more than once observed to Lady Catherine that her charming daughter seemed born to be a duchess, and that the most elevated rank, instead of giving her consequence, would be adorned by her. These are the little kind of things that which please her ladyship, and it is a sort of attention which I conceive myself peculiarly bound to pay."
"You judge very properly," said Mr. Bennet, "and it is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they result of previous study?"
"They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time, and though I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such little elegant compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions, I always wish to give them as unstudied an air as possible."
Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the time the most resolute composure of countenance, and except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure.[end quote]
I see an opportunity for an artist with a crane and a large mechanical digger to bury a number of shipping containers in the ground of some desolate spot in the west. Bury 'em halfway up, end-up, at an angle, slanted, similar to the Cadillac Stonehenge.
Slightly off topic but worthy of Particles sidebar link (then again, it may be ON topic, in a twist on, well, weird science):
Unicorn Museum
What is ROT-13? And thanks for the word on that particular comment. I just posted something re: VT and got an incoming comment right away... far milder than "wht sprmc" (lo, I disemvowel myself)... but I don't want a link to a VT student's video about what happened at his school to kick off a "let's ignore the immediate response and instead begin a discussion about firearms and control and amendments." I came back here to double-check this post and compare it with the (what I believe to be) drive-by comment on my own site.
Hoax News
We distort. You deride.
Paula @ 57:
someone pointed out that all the other presidents by this time in their term (or more often within three years of their term) look like they've aged 20 years in that time. Or more. Bush looks just as crisp and unlined and unburdened as he did when elected.
Hmmm. It must be the light. Because I see earlier campaign-era photos (that's 2000) and think, well, he may be doing a crappy job, but the White House is aging him.
Hair much grayer. Blotchy face, and generally stressed/peeved/fatigued expression.
Though if you want to make it an actual wrinkle-count, well, I dunno. I'm not looking at high rez fotos.
Then again, the wrinkles I see are an attempt at appearing to be thoughtful, you know, as in capable of rational thought. Oh dear, there I go. I've misunderestimated him again.
I created a 20K gif image (George Bush's American Flag) and have it posted on my site (click the link for my name in order to view the post with the image)
Feel free to download it and then upload it to wherever you wish. Please do not hotlink from my site, tho.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2008 | 4 |
| 2007 | 10 |
| 2006 | 1 |
Total: 16 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Susan Kitchens:
Show all comments by Susan Kitchens.