It's about damn time!

Andy Dehnart, in reality blurred/the reality TV weblog, that the next season of MTV's venerable pseudo-reality show The Real World may be set in Austin.

The Jetty

Bill Chance's Daily Epiphany is a reliable pleasure. Here he covers familiar ground: I spent a lot of time on the south jetty when I was a kid.

My mom has read extensively about the 1900 storm, which her dad lived through, but I'm sure she hasn't read Isaac's Storm. I'll have to get it for her for Christmas.

Fellowship of the Ring: Customized Cell Tones

From washingtonpost.com:

In a short time, in a public way -- while on Metro, or in line at Starbucks, or inside a movie theater -- ring tones signal who you are. Or who you want people to think you are. It's a special stamp, a personal touch. Are you a Maroon 5 kind of guy? Are you a Shakira kind of gal?

I'm puzzled by this. I'd be hard pressed to think of any piece of music I'd care to hear every time my phone rings. I try to stick to simple tones that sound more or less like a ringing telephone. Unfortunately, I don't really like any of the tones available for my current phone. Doesn't anyone else just want the damned thing to ring? The fanciest I'd want to get is the tone the hotline makes in "Our Man Flint." Now there's a cool ringtone.

Residents of historic district on alert after robberies

The Arizona Republic reports:

Two recent armed robberies in one of central Phoenix's oldest neighborhoods have put its residents on alert.

Willo Historic District residents are being told to walk in groups at night and to be more aware of their surroundings in the aftermath of two muggings that targeted three residents.

Holy crap. I lived in that neighborhood until 5 months ago. I know two of the people quoted in the story.

The house we used to own there is on the market again. Some improvements have been made, notably with the flooring, but essentially the house is pretty much the same as it was when we owned it. Ron and I installed the kitchen/dining area light fixture ourselves, and it was that experience which led me to install the sconces in the hall in our current house by myself.

Marriage needs a lot more explainin' than just saying it's 'man and wife'

John Kelso, in the Austin American-Statesman, gives the first persuasive argument I've seen against same-sex marriage:

I can sort of see where these people are coming from because, well, you know how guys are when they get together and the problems that can lead to, when you don't have a woman around to lay down the law. Two guys get married and instead of yard work, being guys, they just want to go out to the lake and drown some worms. And pretty soon the front yard looks like hell's half acre.

I can state without equivocation, based on my own experience, that he's right. This is why we have a yard guy.

Hey, if two-guy couples tend to hire yard guys and cleaning ladies, does that imply that same-sex marriage leads to higher employment? And if there were such a trend, would lesbian couples offset it or reinforce it?

Gee, I wonder what box How to Lie with Statistics is in. I think I've hit a fit topic for it.

Ashcroft the Optimist

From the text ofJohn Ashcroft's resignation letter, as reported by CNN: "I take great personal satisfaction in the record which has been developed. The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved."

Now there's a sweeping generalization for you. I guess that means they'll be taking down the barriers along the back driveway to the VA hospital here, and letting people meet arriving air passengers at the gate...

On the other hand, it appears that the widely reported rumor that Ashcroft thinks calico cats are a sign of the devil is false. Snopes.com is a wonderful thing.

Now there's one for the law of unintended consequences...

...except I'm kinda sorta semi sure that this isn't an unintended consequence. The Washington Post (registration required) reports that it's the highest achievers who are most likely to leave underperforming schools under the "No Child Left Behind" law:

Eight-year-old Umaid Qureshi does math problems for fun and reads most nights before bed. His mother thinks her son might become a doctor, like her. Or maybe he will follow his father's lead and become a software consultant.


So when Fairfax County sent Shafaq Qureshi a letter in August explaining that Umaid's school -- McNair Elementary in Herndon -- fell short on standardized test scores and that any McNair student could transfer to a better-performing school, she decided there was no reason for him to stay.

Bigger, better, faster, more....

Several months ago when we moved into this house, RoadRunner said something to us about faster cable internet access being right around the corner.

Well, Ron called them up earlier this afternoon, and while they're not advertising or documenting this access in any easy-to-find way, they will sell it to you if you qualify. I dunno what that means, but evidently we did, because we have the new service up, as of about 10 minutes ago. And it's noticeably faster.

This doesn't do me much actual good, because I don't need a lot of speed in my day-to-day work, but Ron spends a lot of time in a web-based database application and he's very happy. So, good.

Life's simple pleasures, yuppie homeowner division

The yard guy, who's supposed to mow every 2 weeks this time of year, decided to take the week off last week. This means that it's been 3 weeks since my lawn was mowed. The shrubbery is also long overdue for trimming.

So he's finally here right now. It's surprising how happy I am about this.

Kinky Friedman for Governor--2006

From the Kinky Friedman Official Site:: "The professionals gave us the Titanic, amateurs gave us the Ark."

Kinky Friedman is running for governor of Texas in 2006.

He won't win, of course: as far as I know, he's never held office before; he's an independent; and he's not an evangelical Christian (as his campaign logo implies, he's not any other kind, either).
I think it's a mistake to write Friedman off as a joke, though; campaign slogans like "How hard could it be?" and "Why the hell not?" are perfectly reasonable questions, considering the records of some previous governors, and I don't just mean the two most recent.

Kerr County Early Voting Statistics

To follow-up on my item yesterday on early voting,here's a report from the Kerrville Daily Times:

According to the voter registrar’s office, 13,028 citizens participated in early voting last week, which ended Friday. That number reflects only the appearance votes and does not include mail-in ballots. These numbers indicate that more than 39 percent of the 33,124 registered voters in Kerr County took advantage of early voting opportunities.

It's interesting that the Democratic party worker quoted in the story says Democrats are hoping that Republicans will split their tickets and vote for Kerry. I've heard little that suggests this is a reasonable possibility.

Texas Early Voting Statistics

Early Voting stats from the Texas Secretary of State show that in the 15 most populous counties in Texas the cumulative percentage of registered voters who have voted early as of last Friday (including absentee voting) is 29.66.

I hope this means a large turnout tomorrow.

Early voting in Kerr County

I've seen a number of news reports and blog entries from around the country to the effect that early voting, where available, has proved to be so popular that lines are several hours long.

It's not quite like that here, although I should point out that most of the reports I've heard are from large metropolitan areas and the population of the county I live in is about 40,000.

Last Monday, Ron and I went out about 4 pm to vote and waited in line for about 20 minutes. Thursday, about 9 am, I took my parents to vote. They vote in the same precinct I do, and there was no line at all.

Harmony in my head, part 2

Today the song running through my head is "Cabin-Essence," from Brian Wilson's Smile. That's a vast improvement over the song I was thinking about when I woke up: "Hair," by the Cowsills.

Yesterday's song was "Museum," a Donovan Leitch song recorded by Herman's Hermits, which tied in with a peculiar dream I had about a strange Herman's Hermits best-of which contained no familiar titles at all.

Clear times on the editing scene

A sentence from an otherwise admirably clear and straightforward marketing document:

This helps reduce the risk of a successful and profitable project for all our clients.

Gee, I'd hate our clients to run the risk of having successful projects. Actually, that's the best one of those since Moses Hadas wrote of a book he didn't care for that it filled a much-needed gap in the literature.

Harmony in my head

A week or so ago I had the misfortune of hearing the song "Today" by the New Christy Minstrels in passing, and since then it's stuck obstinately in my head despite liberal applications of everything from Prokofiev to Brian Wilson.

It's bad enough to have one sappy ersatz folk song in my head, but something about the lyrics (starting off "Today while the blossoms still cling to the vine/I'll taste your strawberries, I'll drink your sweet wine" and going downhill from there) reminded me of that other phony anthem to hedonism, "We'll Sing in the Sunshine." and now I've got both songs fighting for airtime in my head. Sheesh.

Lord help us...

One more reason people outside Texas might (and maybe ought to) think Texans are hicks, from the Austin American-Statesman(registration required):

AUSTIN — Republican Gov. Rick Perry refused to honor United Nations Day, even as President Bush signed a U.N. proclamation, because doing so would be inconsistent with the governor's views, his spokeswoman said.

Sad days for rock fans

Word comes that the influential BBC DJ John Peel has died at 65, and American rock fan, publisher, and record label owner Greg Shaw has died at 55. Both were early champions of innovators in rock, and both will be missed.

Self discovery through somebody else

From Into the Cove, by Randy, whoever he is: "I don't wake up quickly and well. I tend to choose only one."

Uhh, me too.

Ashlee Simpson and That Lip-Syncing Feeling

Lisa de Moraes in the Washington Post (registration required):

Oh, and here's one of those little ironies that make covering TV such an interesting and rewarding career choice: The director of that 'SNL' telecast from hell, Beth McCarthy Miller, was director of the infamous Super Bowl halftime show in which Janet Jackson's costume 'reveal' turned into a 'wardrobe malfunction,' thereby revealing her breast and leading to the moral decay of the children of America. Live television is a very rough racket.

You mean it's not part of some kind of media conspiracy?

Terror suspect Hicks Harry Potter fan

From The Advertiser, via Heidi McDonald's The Beat:

Investigators thought a series of numbers next to [Australian terror suspect David] Hicks' name on a cellblock roster were part of a secret coded message between Mr Al Halabi [a translator and librarian at the Guantanamo Bay prison] and Hicks.

The 'code', however, was the reference numbers for Harry Potter books in the library.

Aw, crap

From the Houston Chronicle: No World Series for Astros as season ends with loss to Cards

V.O.T.E.

Two of my very favorite artists, Chris Stamey and Yo La Tengo, have collaborated on this timely message. Don't miss the three alternate versions of the PSA, especially the Old AM Radio Version--it channels the spirit and sound of the Cyrkle better than anyone but Fountains of Wayne.

There's an associated CD, also called V.O.T.E, a mix of covers (including the Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things," Television's "Venus," and Les McCann's "Compared to What") and originals. The CD won't be in stores until after the new year but you can download it now from iTunes.

Uh-huh, yeah, right...

From The Cincinnati Post:

Some absentee ballots distributed to Hamilton County voters do not include the name of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, local election officials confirmed today.

A bit further down:

"It's a screw-up," said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Board of Elections. "This just feeds the paranoia that's out there. The tragic thing is that even though I think we will have a very fair and accurate count here, this will cause people to question the accuracy of our operation."

Oh, thank god I'm not the only one...

Michael Bierut on ITC Garamond in Design Observer:

The most distinctive element of the typeface is its enormous lower-case x-height. In theory this improves its legibilty, but only in the same way that dog poop's creamy consistency in theory should make it more edible.

Hey, I've been busy...

So I haven't had much time or inclination to write. Not like I ever do. Anyway, here are some mini-squibs on topics of recent interest to me.

Brian Wilson's Smile: overhyped but great.
Presidential debate #1: I thought Kerry came out better, though not as well as his more enthusiastic proponents (I'm not one) would have you believe. I'm not swayed by Bush's "stay on message" rhetoric, but I can imagine how some might be, though.
Sky Captain: Enormous fun--I'm sure everybody caught the Wizard of Oz and Metropolis references, but someone more learned than I will have to comment on the film noir elements and the taxi chase rendered as an aerial battle. I loved the Space Angel and Nick Fury references, though.

I knew it, I just knew it...

CNN.com covers the Ig Nobel Prizes:

"The medicine prize went to Steven Stack of Wayne State University and James Gundlach of Auburn University, for their 1992 report, 'The Effect of Country Music on Suicide.' The research of 49 metropolitan areas concluded 'that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate.'"

Aha!

I've been reading Bill Chance's Daily Epiphany for a good many years now. Right now he's in the process of getting rid of junk so he won't have to pack and move it.

Our Real Estate agent said something interesting about clutter, about why people don't throw stuff away.
She said, 'People keep things because they are afraid they will lose the memory that goes along with it.'"

Makes sense.

You wouldn't believe the crap we packed and took with us when we moved here. We made an effort to get rid of stuff, but there's still way too much crap around. I all but had to kick and scream and hold my breath to get Ron to let me throw away a bunch of old too-tight T-shirts.

Thomas Phinney on those damned forged Air National Guard memos

Interview with Adobe's Thomas Phinney, by Sandee Cohen, from creativepro.com.

The discussion of these memos that's filtered down to me has been extremely incomplete. Phinney's a genuine expert in the field of digital typography, and he covers his topic like a horse blanket. He explains how he concludes that the font in the forged memos is Times Roman, in terms a normal person can understand, while at the same time making the incredibly bad reproduction a non-issue. He identifies the two typewriter-like devices available in 1972 that had proportional spacing and (to my satisfaction, anyway) eliminates either of them as a source for the memos. Excellent illustrations in pdf format are included.

Phinney also discusses the unevenness of the baselines in the forgeries which have led some to believe that they must have been typed on a typewriter. Phinney points out what's known to everybody who's ever had to recreate artwork from a faxed original: that the low resolution of the fax process tends to introduce irregularities in letter forms which may be made worse if the fax is a bit crooked on the page, which isn't unusual.

There's also discussion of how Word treats ordinals and superscripts and how in spots it looks as if the forger took steps to defeat Word's automatic superscripting.

Now what I want to know is how such obvious forgeries got through CBS's fact-checking apparatus.

Recent Rebrandings

Speak Up on new doings in the world of corporate identity and branding.

Gosh, what a bunch of mediocre solutions. MBNA's new logo is probably the best of the lot, and that's not saying much. The negative space under the tree branches on the left just begs for the initials to be tucked into it.

Sure is an improvement on its predecessor, though.

Chansons

Three very familiar songs usually sung in French have been called to my attention in the last couple of days:

1. During a peculiar movie caught on cable the other day, schoolchildren sing "Dominique." (The particular scene takes place during the mid-60s in Paris, so that would still have been a fairly current song.)

2. U.S News and World Report describes Karl Rove at a dinner party singing "Alouette" by way of illustrating his lighter side. "Lighter side" is their term, but I can't read it without thinking of the late Dave Berg's regular strips in Mad. (I won't link to the story because a fee is required.)

3. A kid I saw in a drug store today, probably 7 or 8, was trying to sing "Frere Jacques." He sang:

Para yaka, para yaka
Deja vu, deja vu
I am glad to meet you
I am glad to meet you
A-a-men
A-a-men

Weird. Little kids know the phrase "deja vu"?

Desperate, desperate, desperate...

From SFGate.com:

In his Cincinnati speech, Cheney said indicators that measure the nation's unemployment rate, consumer spending and other milestones miss the hundreds of thousands who make money selling online on eBay.

"That's a source that didn't even exist 10 years ago," Cheney said. "Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay."

Granted there are people who do make a living selling stuff on eBay--are there really any more of them, relatively, than there were 20 years ago selling out of the back pages of Goldmine and the Comic Book Buyer's Guide and the like? Are they making more and better money?

Gee, who'd a thunk it?

From the AP, via CNN.com: "Floppy disk nears obsolescence"

APESGRAPES - Midget Clown

As certain persons of my acquaintance would say, this is just wrong. Especially the special offer for funerals and wakes.

[By way of Jen Segrest's Very Big Blog.]

What I hate about Word, part 2

What I typed:
GAGEtrak lets you create IDs for users.

Word automatically corrected my capitalization, so the sentence read:
GAGEtrak lets you create Ids for users.

This changes the meaning somewhat.

What I hate about Word, part 1

It's exasperatingly slow: I can type ahead of it easily, and I don't type any more than 50 words a minute. Hit the delete key and it's even slower, as if it's thinking real hard about whether it really wants to do it.

I'm officially fried

Ron woke me up at 5 this morning because he wanted to start work early so he could finish work early, and after about half an hour I gave in and started work myself.

Good thing, actually. I've plowed through about half of the feature list for one product brochure after struggling for three days with it and now, at just before 2 pm, I feel justified in stopping here and now, dead in the middle of some statistical information I find very confusing. I'll handle it much better when I'm rested.

The other product brochure will be much easier.

Sir George Martin's coat of arms

From the College of Arms, via Anton Sherwood:

Among many other achievements, Sir George Martin was producer to the Beatles. The shield, crest and badge make various more or less explicit references to the group as well as to music and the recording industry in general.

Some references are less obviously explicit in America than in England. As a native speaker of American, I didn't immediately recall that the type of crosswalk the Beatles are seen in on the cover of Abbey Road is known as a zebra crossing in English. Inobservant as usual, I also didn't realize that the musical instrument under the bird's wing isn't a clarinet (as I first supposed) but a recorder.

The spam just keeps on comin'

I, or one of my e-mail avatars, just got an "Urgent Message" from someone who styles himself "platitudinous Jefferey."

Holy disappearing act, Batman!

From Ron S. Bell's evocatively named Bear Left On Unnamed Road: "The Invisibility Cloak"

Too Much Tech?

John Edison Betts, Jr., on how equipment proliferates:

I have an over-abundance of electronics in my office. No, not my work office… my home office. Compared to my home, my workplace is technologically barren.

Huh. Ron and I have no other workplace than our home office, and together we have less stuff than John has individually.

Of course, that could change. Possibly on the horizon: a laptop so I could surf the web in the living room while Ron watches TV, and some sort of Windows box for testing web sites and creating screen shots.

My Mom packs for moving

When we moved into my folks’ house in Kerrville, we found all kinds of items my mom left behind when my parents downsized and moved into a retirement community. Mom didn’t just leave us the odd item here and there, or even the odd sofa; there are many, many boxes, some of which were packed in 1984 when they moved out of the house in Houston that I grew up in. And my mom really knows how to pack.

Mom’s of the thrifty Depression generation, so everything’s worth saving and preserving: bags, foil, boxes, plastic bags, jars, old rags—everything. This is doubled, in spades, for anything durable and potentially useful. You name it: if my mom didn’t take it with her, chances are that it’s in the garage somewhere, as likely as not in its original box. I can go out there right now and grab headphones from 1972, an answering machine from 1990, a screwdriver or two from 1960, and my dad’s foot locker from his postwar stint in the Merchant Marine.

Much of it, as I say, is wrapped up as only my mom can wrap things. Usually, boxes are double-taped; once inside, the unpacker is confronted with vast amounts of old newspaper protecting the actual contents, which are themselves labeled and individually wrapped. At a bare minimum, unwrapping an item involves cutting through heavy box tape to take the newspaper off; however, if the item is remotely breakable, it’s usually wrapped in paper, taped, then wrapped in a plastic bag and taped again.

Naturally, the more breakable an item is, the better wrapped. To get to an 18” glass table top, we had to take off the outer plastic bag, then the inner paper bag. Below that was a layer of bubble wrap, which protected a layer of newspaper, under which we found aluminum foil, then an old ragged towel, another paper bag, and another layer of newspaper. Each layer was individually and thoroughly taped, all the way around, crosswise.

Mom also has a mania for documentation. I opened a box the other day. The outside was labeled in Mom’s graceful handwriting:

BILL
Household Items
VERY FRAGILE

A note on the inside flap of the box provides an inventory: “Clara’s bowl; Aunt Willie’s plate; Mama’s silverware; NSD costume jewelry; knickknacks; bric-a-brac.” Weirdly, this isn’t complete enough. Not that I don’t know a bowl from a plate or silverware from costume jewelry, but damn if I can tell knickknacks from bric-a-brac.

Defending Our Skies Against the Elderly

Diane Dimond, from MSNBC:

The last I saw of him, a burly airport screener was forcing my frail and faltering 78-year-old father to stand at attention—arms spread—for a wand search. As I watched from the other side of the security gate I saw the man in the uniform point to my father to sit down and take off his shoes.

I'm as shocked and appalled as anybody else that this kind of thing happens, but in truth I'm not surprised. (A couple of years ago in Albuquerque I saw security folks hand-search the bags of an elderly Mexican nun not once but twice.) My mom (who'll be 86 in October) was lucky to have been treated respectfully and courteously by everyone she dealt with in the two airports she went through last week. I'm glad I was there to escort her, and that I was allowed to do so.

More on QuarkXPress

Pariah Burke holds forth on QuarkXPress again:

Kamar Aulakh has taken charge and pointed Quark in a very different direction from that long travelled by Fred Ebrahimi. Pretty much since day one, Aulakh has recognized that Quark is no longer the dominant layout application in many of it’s former key markets.

Interesting. The prevailing sentiment I've seen recently about Quark--understandably so--is that Ebrahimi will never let Aulakh do anything substantive to reverse Quark's long-brewing decline among the individual designer and small business markets. This feeling is based on the fact that several years ago that very thing happened: Ebrahimi relinquished control, changes were announced, and then Ebrahimi fired the new managers and reverted to status quo antebellum before any real progress could be made.

Aulakh's done well so far, reducing upgrade prices, restoring the user forums, seeking user input, and improving customer service. If Aulakh's Quark can deliver a usable product with features comparable to InDesign's, that may slow the bleeding enough to keep Quark viable outside its strongholds while giving printers and other service providers a reason to upgrade.

But don't expect me to buy a copy unless I absolutely have to.

It's good to be back. Or here. Or something.

We've been busy with the relocation from Phoenix to Kerrville, resulting in a prolonged hiatus since my last post. We're almost done now: the furniture is (mostly) in place, we're (generally) unpacked, the cats are happy in their new home, and we are too.

None of it was as smooth or as easy as we would have liked, but we came through okay. Warning: U-Haul will not rent any kind of towing equipment for use with a Ford Explorer. (Mercury Mountaineers, for some reason, are okay, even though--to paraphrase Monty Python--a Mountaineer's an Explorer with the word "Explorer" crossed off and "Mountaineer" written in in crayon.) My name was misspelled on some of the closing documents, and the resulting delays sorely tested our patience and particularly my dad's endurance.

RP's mom and sister were here Thursday and Friday and were able to meet my folks on Saturday before they left. Everybody got along well--not that I was in any way surprised about that. We're very pleased with how the house is turning out and everybody else who's seen it so far has said the same.

GOP-led House takes a new shot at gay marriage

Hmm. Interesting.

From MSNBC:

WASHINGTON - The Republican-led House voted Thursday to prevent federal courts from ordering states to recognize gay marriages sanctioned by other states.

Congress wants to strip jurisdiction from the courts? Have they ever done that before? Can they do that? My uneducated guess is that it's not meant as serious legislation, just a way of getting on the record.

Tempest in a teapot

Amplification on the very strange Linda Ronstadt story of recent days, from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (registration required):

Some concertgoers took issue with the Aladdin's accounts of angry patrons tearing down posters and throwing drink cups.

'I was so stunned to read in the newspaper that anyone had a negative reaction,' said KLAS-TV, Channel 8, news anchor Paula Francis. 'Everyone who was leaving when I was leaving was just thrilled. They thought it was a good concert.'

Of course, it's good that they have a quote from someone who attended the concert, but why would they quote a presumably prominent employee of a competing news gathering organization?

Nonetheless, I guess all is not as the extremely cursory reports that made it into the national media would have you believe. From this story, it seems clear that Ronstadt has no love for the Aladdin historically. I also gather from the story that Ronstadt's been dedicating "Desperado" to Michael Moore during the whole tour, and the reporter seemed to take her comment "I keep hoping that if I'm annoying enough to them, they won't hire me back," as a joke (though maybe with some serious intent).

And nobody asked me, but to expel Ronstadt from the hotel without even allowing her to return to her suite seems needlessly petty–if that's not a tautology–or worse.

Box turtles?

Senator John Cornyn of Texas on gay marriage, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation:

"It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife."

[Note: Cornyn's office says that this remark appeared in the written text of the speech but wasn't included in the speech as delivered.]

Golly, what is this thing some people have about animals? It's a persistent theme in the rhetoric of gay-marriage opponents, and it's just a teeny bit unnerving. And of course, there's a fallacy inherent in comparing relationships between legal persons and relationships between a legal person and something else.

At least Cornyn isn't quite claiming that gay marriage necessarily leads to box-turtle marriage.

Somebody else has crappy documentation, too.

From JohnEklund.com, verbiage from a foosball table assembly guide: "'Happily insert slot A into screw B using socket in toe.'"

Several entries later, Eklund coins the word "underexaggerate." Which is one of those terms like "unscented deodorant" that kinda makes my head hurt to think about.

Ooh, right, that is so going to work...

From CNN.com: UN takes aim at spam epidemic. "The United Nations is aiming to bring a 'modern day epidemic' of junk e-mail under control within the next two years by standardizing legislation around the world to make it easier to prosecute, a leading expert said Tuesday."

Just what we need, another font format

DTP Types Limited:

Fonts for QuarkXPress� in Mac OS/X
If you are a QuarkXPress user on a Mac and have just upgraded to OS/X, you are probably having some font problems, especially with custom made or language fonts like CE, Cyrillic or Greek. Well we have a solution!
Our hfont format will overcome all those nasty problems of characters misplaced or not printing. Download a free trial font from here to see just how well they will work for you.

Not that Quark's problems with font handling don't need to be solved, you understand. I just think it would be, uh, less complicated if Quark solved them by fixing the dang application.

The Tyranny of the Tagline

Michael Bierut in Design Observer: "This is a bit of a prelude to a remarkable new corporate identity that was unveiled last month for the YWCA. It is not remarkable because of the way the identity relates to the tagline. It is remarkable because, as far as I can tell, the tagline is itself the identity. "

He's referring to this, which I think is just about the most gawdawful logo I've ever seen. It's cluttered, the elements fight, and it obscures the name of the organization. What's it going to look like on a sign?

I've created a few logos in my day, and it's hard for me to see how this identity got through the approval process. Design by committee, maybe.

Aw, what the heck

It's cruel to laugh at the afflicted, and this has already propagated widely through the blogosphere, or at least the portion I attend to, but what the heck--it's a name worthy of John Train.

Euphemism of the day

From CNN.com: "There was a frank exchange of views."

Now what's supposed to have happened is that VP Cheney used some form of profanity in response to criticism from Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. But, hey, I guess "frank exchange of views" is one way of putting it.

Silly folksongs

From Dan Goodman's Life and Observations blog: "Wednesday June 23, 2004. Today began as Silly Folksong Day. Beginning with 'And the name they called that ship was the Golden Monotreme.' "

Some folks hum; RP sings "Well I don't know/But I've been told/A green grasshopper's/got a green asshole," in styles ranging from operatic to hip-hop. Never drill-sergeant style, though.

Like a Vietnamese racehorse?

I've grown used to the Sizemores and Johnsons trying to convince me I'm somehow inadequate; today I heard from Hung Darby.

I also heard from Liechtenstein Letisha. Like Tokyo Rose but less so, I guess.

The best dating site for horse singles, equestrian single, USA equestrian, horse lovers, cowboys, cowgirls, horse riders.

I'm speechless.

Brian Wilson Tour info

Austin on October 24! : And it's a Sunday, too! Woo-hoo!

My motto, from now on

Client Quotes: 33/521: "less creativity, bigger pictures"

Egad. Again.

The company we've engaged to help us optimize our web pages for search engines has some room for improvement in just about every area, but most particularly in proofreading .

I've had to correct this phrase in the comments of several pages: "All information herein is copywrited by the [IncorrectlySpeled] Corportation."

Corportation? Copywrited??

And I already have a copyright notice in human-readable form on every page, so I sorely doubt I need it in the comments too. But if I do, shouldn't it just say "Copyright (c) 2004 [CorrectlySpelled] Corporation"?

Lots of big news.

Events both good and bad are propelling us headlong back to Texas.

The bad first: I mentioned in this post RP's daddy passed away very suddenly on Tuesday, June 8. He was only 68. He leaves behind his wife, a son and three daughters, and three grandchildren; all loved him dearly. So did I. (I'll talk about RP, Sr. at greater length later.) Anyway, we now feel a great need to be nearer to RP's mom.

Now the good: Around March my parents, who are in their mid-80s, told us they were planning to move out of their house in the Hill Country into an apartment in a retirement community at the end of May. So we proposed that we buy their house and relocate to be near them.

Progress has been almost unnervingly swift. We've already sold our house, for a profit; closing is scheduled for the end of July. RP will be able to keep his job and I can freelance and bring some money in while concentrating largely on my parents. We don't even have to fret about replacing the Explorer — its lease is expiring in August, while the Explorer itself seems set to expire at any second — because RP's mom can't climb up into RP Sr.'s Yukon by herself, and wants to sell it, so we're buying it.

That's not the case at all..

From Ansible, quoting a press release from a cable network: "Following this repositioning, SCI FI is no-longer spelt with a hyphen or dot in the centre (i.e. Sci-Fi or SciúFi) and should always be written in upper caps (SCI FI)."

Aside from the fact that a graphic design decision like the choice of all caps in a logo shouldn't mean a damn thing outside the organization whose logo it is, it's not upper caps, it's upper case. (What, exactly, would lower caps be?) Or, as I just said, all caps.

Hell, maybe Brits are correct to say "upper caps". The main thing I learned from that book that tells the panda joke badly is that the nicest and most correct British usages can be gratingly wrong to Americans as well as the other way around.

Department of iPod segues

Good: "Walking the Cow," K. McCarty > "Sleepwalker," the Wallflowers

Bad: "Mousetrap," Soft Machine > "Little Bit of Soul," the Music Explosion

They're back!

Quark forums :: QuarkXPress, ServicePlus, Enterprise and QuarkAlliance user forums

Of course, this happened last Monday while I was helping the folks move...

On hiatus. Back June 1.

I'm going to Kerrville, Texas, for a week, to help the folks move out of the house they've lived in for ten years and into an apartment. It's a positive thing; it's something they want to do; but I'm not at all looking forward to this.

Anyway, I'll be back on June 1. Though probably I won't post for a couple of days after that while I'm taking care of whatever has to be fixed after I get back.

Gadzooks.

From NewYorkish: The Department of Sad, Sad Hobbies

More Smile info

The Official Brian Wilson Web Site: News:

BRIAN WILSON READIES ALL-NEW RECORDING OF LEGENDARY 'SMILE'
Long-awaited Masterpiece to be Released by Nonesuch Records on September 28
Recording Follows Triumphant 'SMILE' Performances in Europe With U.S. Tour Planned For The Fall

Despite the hype, there's no question that this is good news. It would be even better if Wilson's Gettin' In Over My Head album (to be released in June) turns out to be a solid work like most of Brian Wilson and not just a placeholder like much of Imagination. Do I dare hope?

Date night

RP finally felt like leaving the house, so we went out and saw Troy last night. Silly Hollywood fluff--Helen isn't even the most beautiful woman in the movie, and the dialogue, to use RP's word, was abysmal.

Thanks, Anton!

Ooh, yay, an external link. This could get really incestuous.

The maddening "slippery slope" argument against gay marriage

I've been hoping somebody would cover this. Dahlia Lithwick holds forth in Slate: "Since few opponents of homosexual unions are brave enough to admit that gay weddings just freak them out, they hide behind the claim that it's an inexorable slide from legalizing gay marriage to having sex with penguins outside JC Penny's."

I'd thought of a few of Ms. Lithwick's points myself, but she argues them better than I might; she also covers many points I'd never think of. Interesting links, too.

My problems are over

Well, not all of them, but at least Anton Sherwood and Quark are both back, their absence having been noted in this previous entry.

Hometown blues

I don't envy RP's next-younger sister Rhonda. She's the one who stayed in her hometown while all the other sibs moved to bigger cities. So when their parents need care she gets stuck with a lot of the work.

Well, last Friday, RP's mom went into the hospital with pneumonia, and today RP's dad went into the hospital with a whole sequence of ailments. (He's at the stage of life where he stays healthy only by a delicate and precarious balance of meds, and if he misses a dose he suffers for a week. Same as with my dad, only probably worse.)

Neither situation is life-threatening, but we fret anyway. RP's mom has contracted iatrogenic illnesses before.

RP considered going home, but fortunately another sister--the one who came to help RP and me for a week when he broke his leg--is going, so RP feels better about staying here.

I wouldn't begrudge him going if he needed to, but Kathy's great in these situations; you couldn't ask for a more generous and helpful sister-in-law.

Same-sex marriage becomes reality

Of course RP and I are thrilled that Massachusetts now issues marriage licenses to same-sex couples. What's amazing to me is that large protests like the one that took place here in Phoenix don't seem to be all that common--at least I didn't see stories on such things in any of the major-city newspaper web sites I looked at. (Granted that I didn't look in places like Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, or Bakersfield.)

And this story from CBS News provides some interesting statistics:

A Gallup Poll taken in early May shows the public backing of an amendment is decreasing while the support for same-sex marriage is increasing. The nationwide poll found that 55 percent oppose same-sex marriage (down from 65 percent in December) and 42 percent favor gay marriage (up from 31 percent in December).

Opposition to same-sex marriage went down ten percentage points and support went up by eleven, and in only six months? That doesn't even seem possible. Wow. I might get optimistic about my chance to marry the person I want to in some state that I live in if this keeps up.

May all of those marriages, and all marriages everywhere, be happy and long.

When press aides get uppity

If you weren't watching Meet the Press Sunday, you may not have heard that one of Colin Powell's press aides tried to cut short Tim Russert's interview with Powell. (RP was, and he woke me up to tell me about it.) The aide, identified as Emily Miller, claimed it was because the interview was running long, but it's hard not to think that she was trying to shield her boss from a semi-tough question (which Powell, to his credit, answered and answered responsively).

Here's Wonkette on it: "...disrupting an interview with the nation's highest-ranking cabinet member on national television is not exactly a firing offense in this administration."

We interrupt this program...

For months I've been following Anton Sherwood's blog but it appears to be gone this morning. I do hope it's not gone for good.

I also notice I'm having trouble getting to Quark today. I expect that's temporary as well.

Rich, beautiful prose department

From Echoes magazine, found on the November Music web site: "They weave evocatively heated echoes of Africa, Asia and the Far East in among cooler strains of the European classical tradition."

EphemeraNow

I couldn't have put it better myself: EphemeraNow.com -- Broadband content for 1958.

Aha!

From Macintouch, a solution to a problem that has vexed many: "Font Permissions Cause Print Problems "

Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind

Two months later, I catch up to this article from MSNBC, via Altercation: "Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam."

Zarqawi is reputed to be behind a lot of the nastiest stuff that's happened in Iraq recently, including the barbarous murder of Nick Berg.

Portfolio 7 now out

Here's the product page. I downloaded the trial, and my immediate reaction is that it's unbearably slow. Of course, everything is unbearably slow on this computer.

[several hours later]

Portfolio (and the computer in general) seem to work a great deal better after I killed some of the spyware infesting it. Geez, make one thoughtless click and you pay for it for the rest of your computer's life.

Quark prepares for come-back

From Print Media News, courtesy of Paul Andrews (on a QuarkXPress mailing list): "As a result, QuarkXPress 7 is due out this Autumn with eagerly awaited new features to address the balance with Adobe's InDesign which has been picking up significant business from former XPress users. "

Merriam-Webster's top ten favorite words

Here they are. Defenestrate is number 1 on the list. I was asking RP just the other day which Eastern European leader it was that was defenestrated. We never did figure it out.

XML Hell

Susan Glinert's informative and amusing article on XML at creativepro.com: "Given the diametrically opposite approaches programmers and designers have to creating output, it boggles the mind that anyone bothered to invent a publishing solution that plunges both right- and left-brained people into absolute chaos. I am referring, of course, to XML, short for eXtensible Markup Language."

I can just hear the Big Boss demanding that our materials be marked up as XML. I can just hear it.

And wasn't the GUI invented to spare normal people from stuff like that? I mean, I use Quark or InDesign or Illustrator specifically so I don't have to write PostScript code.

And yet more you didn't want to hear

From Guardian Unlimited: "The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources."

So they're not only abusing the prisoners, they're doing it incompetently. Words fail me.

(Via Radioactive Quill.)

Eleven months and counting

Eleven months after Quark took down their user forums, ostensibly for a revamp/upgrade, this notice : still appears on Quark's web site: "Note: User forums are being restructured. Check back periodically for updates on this effort."

Now Quark doesn't owe the world user forums, but they're so easy to implement that a great many software developers--and more than a few scattered individuals--have done so. (Creating decent manuals is one thing that probably ought to take a higher priority.) I just wish they'd be honest and admit that the forums are gone for good.

More stuff you didn't want to hear

From CNN.com

"Appearing on CNN's "American Morning," an attorney for Pfc. Lynndie England said they were "staged" by intelligence officials who were running Abu Ghraib at the time.

England was photographed holding a what appears to be a leash attached to the neck of a naked Iraqi prisoner

"They are psychological operations photos," said attorney Giorgio Ra'Shadd. "Those were instructed and the ones that were not specifically instructed were inferred by the civilian intelligence people who took control."

Another attorney for England, Rose Mary Zapor, said the photo, "is not a picture of our client abusing a prisoner in any way.'"

Oh joy, lawyerspeak. "No Iraqi prisoners were harmed in the making of this video." Riiiiiight.

There was a bit more elaboration on the "American Morning" program that isn't quoted here, including something to the effect that whatever orders Pfc. England received from civilian intelligence were inherently unlawful.

Now since I'm civilian and a nonlawyer, I may be missing some fine point, but the question that leaps to mind immediately is, "Why was she following unlawful orders?"

Odd dream last night...

I walk across the border into a section of occupied Iraq (a section which has been relocated into Arizona for security reasons, as everybody knows) and am directed by a polite Iraqi policeman up a very long flight of stairs to what suddenly proves to be the most famous roller coaster in Iraq.

The stairs are there, I realize, because Iraqi roller coasters start high, descend to a low point, and come up again.

I find myself riding the roller coaster, very much against my will (in the dream as in real life I hate coasters). However, the experience is nowhere near as bad as my experience on real roller coasters.

Update

Ron lost his iTrip and replaced it with the accessory mentioned in this previous entry. I must say it works even better than the iTrip. The fact that the latter is independent of the car's power supply (drawing instead off the iPod's power) makes it the accessory of choice to use in the office, though.

Lost in translation?

The Czech typefounder Storm Type Foundry is notable both for their excellent types and their commentary on the types, evidently translated from a Czech original into very good but occasionally stilted and cryptic English: for instance, "Tenebra Shaded and Old Face decorate, but do not refine."

I imagine some designers won't care for the individuality and eccentricity that draw me to my faves, but you folks who came to graphic design because you love the shapes of letters will find a lot to look at. Very reasonably priced, too.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Afro-British Composer

I thought KBAQ's announcer was talking about poems set to music and just got the name wrong, but apparently this guy was all the rage around the turn of the last century.

Drat!

I left my iPod at home today. So I guess it's going to be NPR and classical music today.

New photos of prisoner abuse emerge

"Mild rebuke"?: "Two Bush aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said today the president stood firmly behind Rumsfeld despite what one characterized as the 'mild rebuke.' "

Pariah Burke on the Quark vs. InDesign thing

I couldn't say it better myself, although I've tried: "Adobe won't kill Quark, Inc.; Quark, Inc. is the architect of its own downfall and, unless a radical change of direction happens soon, its own demise."

Yeah, what he said.

Attorney says fair trial impossible in Iraqi abuse case

Res ipsa loquitur:

"'I would like the president to quit tainting my jury,' said Guy Womack, the attorney for Charles Graner, one of the soldiers who appears in photographs that have ignited international controversy. "

Two new ones via Adobe's forums

Well, I hadn't heard them before, anyway...

1. Poster A: "I should have told him to RTFM." Poster B: "How would the Kama Sutra help?"

2. "It looks like a huge wombat." From context this appeared to be one of dozens of terms generally comparable to snafu, fiasco, and so forth--and it is, but it's also attached to an amusing acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.

Disappearing Act

One heck of an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: "There is something deeply, structurally wrong with a profession that allows and even encourages the use of cheap, contingent labor."

It happens that the anonymous author of The Invisible Adjunct quoted in the article is talking about academe, but she might well use those words to condemn graphic design, where it seems that any sophomore with a pirated copy of Photoshop can low-ball their way into paying if not profitable work.

Man gives Jackson's underwear to prosecutors

Oooh, gross. The underwear itself is bad enough. But do we really need to know that Michael Jackson addresses his little friends as "rubbers"?

More editing annoyances

Have I mentioned that our manuals are sometimes sloppily written?

"To validate [x]," it says here, "follow the proceeding procedure." Then it lists the procedure to be followed.

I guess if you don't know what "preceding" means you might not spell it right either.

Oh Lord

I wish I were making this exchange up:

"QUESTION:You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?

BUSH: I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it. "

???

From Cox.net, quoted in its entirety: "Verdicts Reached In Charges Against Qwest Execs
04/13/2004 17:04:11

"(Denver, CO) -- The jury in the Denver fraud and conspiracy trial of four former Qwest Communications executives has reached a verdict on 24 of 44 counts. The defendants each face eleven counts of conspiracy, securities fraud, false statements and wire fraud."

Uh. That's nice. Now what were the verdicts?

Amateur hour

One of my co-workers (whose job in our organization has nothing remotely to do with creating artwork) fancies himself an illustrator. He's doing somebody's CD cover, and every now and again he comes around to ask me for some basic pointers.

So far I've had to explain to him why he needs to work in CMYK, why pixel resolution matters, what bleeds are and why he needs to include them in his artwork, and why he needs to talk to the printer himself rather than communicate with him through the band.

Oh yeah--when I tell him this stuff he tells me that he can't stand doing commercial work--the number of commercial projects he's done can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare--because he sees production requirements as arbitrary restrictions on his creative freedom.

Odd dream

I’m still in my late teens, still living at home. I see a movie having something to do with a group of American women offering relief services in Iraq—but not quite the Iraq we know. I write a blog entry about the movie; when I post it I see immediately that the particular blogging software I’m using has filtered my content in a way that is not incorrect or objectionable, but neither is it what I want. I decide I’m going to rewrite the entry from scratch, and just as I do I’m called to dinner.

Dinner is unmemorable except that in the dream version of my family I have a brother.

I return to my room to fix the blog entry. I have two computers to work with. One is the computer I normally use (in the context of the dream; it’s more like a Mac IIsi than anything else). The other is a Mac Color Classic. I’m amazed how quickly it runs Panther, but then in the dream I recall reading that Panther is specially optimized for better performance on legacy Macs.

I should add that I have no siblings and that Apple Computer did not yet exist when I was in my late teens, never mind the particular models mentioned. (I’ve only had passing acquaintance with either of them.)

(There were no blogs then, either, of course.)

There's an echo in here.

I kept the CNN coverage of Condoleezza Rice's testimony on in the bedroom while RP, an inveterate channel surfer, flipped from network to network. The CNN feed lagged about a second behind CSPAN's; the delay on the CBS feed was a few seconds more.

Was CBS afraid of a wardrobe malfunction?

Cross-dressing heats up Texas Republican race

From the Houston Chronicle: "What started as a dull runoff race to field a Republican candidate for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives has heated up due to a controversy over cross-dressing. "

Distressing spam trend #385620

Egad! Some of the randomly generated names of purported spam senders are starting to look familiar; I'm sure Mauricio Sims, Les Puckett, and Robert Velasquez have showed up before. I expect I'm wrong, though.

Fear Factor, are you listening?

From EurekAlert: "Diet of worms protects against bowel cancer". Whoever wrote that headline has probably been waiting for decades for the chance to use that pun (via Dan Goodman).

File-Sharing Getting Bad Rap?

From RollingStone.com: "A controversial new study by economists at Harvard and the University of North Carolina has found that file-sharing is not the cause of declining CD sales. Researchers spent a year and a half analyzing downloads and sales figures for 680 albums -- and what they found contradicts the record industry's claim that online piracy has led to a fifteen percent decline in sales since 2000."

Interesting--I've never felt file sharing had anything at all to do with reduced CD sales, because my take's always been that in the natural order of things a middle-aged guy with a lot of disposable income is going to buy more CDs and be more profitable to record labels than a 20-year-old with essentially no disposable income.

In spite of this, the major labels seem to have a problem selling to me: I don't bother with their traditional promotional tools (like commercial radio and MTV), and they don't seem to know how to reach me. This isn't my fault.

Ford didn't have any trouble communicating to me that they sold a vehicle I might be interested in; why should Warner Bros. or Interscope be any different?

Puppy love -- it's better than you think

From MSNBC: "Pets trigger our 'feel good' hormones, research suggests"

There's something soothing, even hypnotic, about a cat's purring. I notice this with myself, of course, but more importantly it's apparent that when Zoe purrs in his general direction, Toby (our youngest, most rambunctious cat) settles down considerably. Are there any studies on this?

And while we're talking about birthdays...

RP's grandmother, known to everyone even vaguely related to her as Mother Claudie, passed away several years ago at 91, the first of a long string of sad events in RP's family.

So it pleases me to report a happy event: the daughter of one of RP's cousins bore a daughter yesterday. I'm even more pleased that the baby is named Claudia Camille after her great-great grandmother.

Belated kitty birthdays

I've been remiss in acknowledging the birthday of our cats Referee and Zoe, littermates who turned six on March 30.

I'm not a copy editor...

...but there are some things I can't overlook.

The paragraph I'm working on contains three different forms of the term "sub-report", which is not easy to do, especially since the dialog box the paragraph describes contains only one form.

The paragraph also correctly uses criterion as a singular form, but pluralizes it as criteria's. The form in the dialog box is criteria.

Damn it, I hate it when they make me think about things!

Strange grammatical phenomena

Twice today I've noticed uses of the future perfect tense: once in an interview broadcast by CNN (with a French lawyer), and once in one of our rather erratically written manuals.

What's next? Tmesis? The Container for the Thing Contained?

(While I have your ear, I only named those figures of speech because I like them, rather than because they're obscure or uncommon. But that's a whole nother discussion.)

Group suspends bomb threats against French railway

From MSNBC: "PARIS - A mysterious group that claimed to have planted bombs on the French railroad network announced Thursday it is suspending its terror threats while it improves its ability to carry them out."

The article goes on to quote letters addressed to French president Jacques Chirac and to the French interior minister: “There are currently no bombs capable of functioning on the French rail network.”

This is some kind of Monty Python bunch of terrorists? "Well, we don't actually have any bombs in the commonly accepted sense, but once we iron out these little technical wrinkles you're going to be in big trouble."

Aftermath of yesterday's big meeting

Okay, is everybody ready to totally manage some quality?

I thought so.

Thanks, I'll just have water...

Dan Goodman comments on ads served up by Google What's This?: "EatRaw - Living Foods � www.eatraw.com
Raw, Vegetarian, Live Foods & Info Crackers, Cookies, Olives, Books

I prefer my food to be dead when I eat it. On the other hand, Info Crackers sound interesting."

R.I.P, Julius Schwartz

From Ansible 200, March 2004: "Julius Schwartz (1915-2004), US fan, literary agent, influential comics editor, and in later life a DC Comics consultant and `goodwill ambassador' to conventions, died on 8 February aged 88. With Mort Weisinger he coedited what many regard as the first true sf fanzine, The Time Traveller (1932); his and Weisinger's agency Solar Sales Service was the first to specialize in sf. "

I knew Schwartz as an important, influential comic book editor; I hadn't heard of his unique importance in sf fandom.

Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization

Orson Scott Card explains his opposition to gay marriage, at much, much greater length than quoted here: "So if my friends insist on calling what they do 'marriage,' they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is.

"Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage.

"They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes. "

I must say, if I accepted Card's premises (among them, that the whole purpose of marriage is procreation; that if I get married to another guy that the entire institution of marriage-for-child-nurturing is invalidated; and that the tyranny of the majority is a good thing) I would find this article quite persuasive.

As it is I find it well worth reading as a starting point for me to question things I've taken for granted in this debate. A lot of the debate on same-sex marriage seems to be founded in an assumption that the other side is so obviously wrong that their arguments are not to be taken seriously. This is not productive; where's the common ground?

This doesn't mean I don't resent Card saying, for instance, that RP and I are in effect just playing house. or that it's reasonable for me to consider marrying a woman for the benefits of marriage. (Somebody tell me how that's not fraud.)

A startling thing to find in the day's e-mail

Dear user of [ourdomainname].com gateway e-mail server,

Your e-mail account will be disabled because of improper using in next
three days, if you are still wishing to use it, please, resign your
account information.

Pay attention on attached file.

For security reasons attached file is password protected. The password is "23373".

Kind regards,
The [ourdomainname].com team

Needless to say, I didn't open the attached file.

Now who's going to buy this book?

Sorta makes my head hurt thinking about the implications: Homeschooling for Dummies.

Smile.

The best info I have yet on Brian Wilson's Smile concerts. Alas, no word on North American gigs.

Bush has lost this Republican's vote

Wow. And in the Houston Chronicle, too. (Cited by Pete Chvany in his blog.)

Poetry in spam

Re: motet wiener; Interdicted F. Hobbyhorse.

Elsewhere, Shirley and Wallace have "Sincere concerns about your privacy." Somehow I doubt their sincerity.

Oh dear, oh dear

An article in the NYTimes quotes Representative J.D. Hayworth of Arizona to the effect that same-sex marriage is equivalent to "taking the rights and protection of marriage and handing them out willy-nilly."

You mean they don't now? I looked it up: the highest hurdle to getting married in Arizona is the fifty bucks for the license. There's no residency requirement, no waiting period, no blood test. Proof of divorce or widowhood isn't required. As near as I can tell, if you're over 18, you can marry anyone you want to as long as the two parties are unmarried, over 18, and not too closely related. And of opposite sexes, of course.

Fortunately for me, Hayworth represents the next district over.

See? I'm not the only one who does this.

Somebody on the QUARKXPR list cited this: Area Man Knows All The Shortcut Keys.

Drives RP nuts when I do this.

Googlism

How is it I never heard of this before?: "nobody is going to take my bear's arm away"

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution gets it...

On gay marriage, Bush unfaithful: "Given that sanctity refers to holiness or sacredness, shouldn't protecting the sanctity of marriage be the job of religious institutions, not government? "

Lord help us all

Our manuals are written, sort of, by a guy in another country who doesn't exactly speak the Queen's English.

Thus we get sentences like this: "[PRODUCT] also supports Copy and Paste features for single fields; to validate this, follow the proceeding procedure."

Multiple Intelligence Test -- Adult Version

Multiple Intelligence Test -- Adult Version

My score:

The Seven Intelligence Areas

Linguistic: 10

Logical-Mathematical: 4

Spatial: 10

Bodily-Kinesthetic: 4

Musical: 10

Interpersonal: 1

Intrapersonal: 7

Wow. I thought I'd score higher on logical-mathematical, but I'm not all that surprised by the extremes here.

Apparently my life calling is to cut the soles off my shoes, sit up in a tree and play the flute.

Quark's new CEO

From the official press release:

"Aulakh has also been instrumental in establishing dependable release schedules and has continued to improve the quality and reliability of Quark products."

That's not saying a lot, but I guess they could go nowhere but up.

Google

Wonder of wonders! A sales guy actually understood that he could find a file without my help.

Literal Interpretation

Can you italicize a Greek letter?

Variations on a meme

In just under two hours my iPod has served up four or five different classical pieces, more than it usually does in any two days.

I won't list the last thirty tracks that have come up (notwithstanding that it's the meme of the moment), but I will mention that the last three tracks have been Lou Harrison's "Estampie for Susan Summerfield," the Cyrkle's "You Can't Go Home Again," and King Crimson's "Level Five." (Hmm, lots of Crimson this morning.)

So far, not so good

Got scared out of my wits this morning by a bum standing in the driveway by the kitchen door, looking in the window. What got me was the resentful, reproachful look on his face, as if it was his driveway I was doing him out of. I felt bad for the guy, but not that bad.

Then I got stopped for speeding on the way to work. The guy got me totally dead to rights, of course--I was going about 70, about what other people were doing--but it was still annoying.

Finished, sort of

One of the things that's been keeping me from making regular entries is our corporate web site.

It's finished now, except for a number of semi-minor tweaks that need to be made. (By others, not by me. That's a good thing. I think.)

Today's Spam Report

67 spam, 4 quarantined due to worm, 0 real e-mail.

Adobe drops PageMaker development

For those who keep saying Quark will be out of business in a couple of years, look how long Adobe's taken to get to
this point.

On the other hand, Quark's only ever had one successful product.

Spam 351, Eddie 6

Film on that at 11.

Egad.

Dilbert mirrors my life again, with a sequence on office relocation.

Ours was even worse than I'd expected; it took two days to move phones and computers and get systems up and running, and at the last minute I was shoved into a cubicle rather than an office. Apparently it didn't matter that there was no way on God's green earth that my stuff would fit into a cubicle.