the Common Place

“Have a fling with Comic Sans, just be sure to trash the files in the morning.”

Why isn’t there an Academy Award for “best typography”? If there was, we probably wouldn’t be subjected to horrors like Helvetica in a 1950’s tv studio. There should at least be an award for best title/credits sequences. Sometimes these are better than the movie itself: “Nanny McPhee” and “A Series of Unfortunate Events” are 2 examples that come to mind. Of course it’s great when both are outstanding, like “Monsoon Wedding.”

Voted for Obama. And John Laird (Prop. 93)

Someday, when I have time and can figure out how to do it without pissing anybody off too much, I will detail why I have distrusted Hillary ever since having to deal with one of her campaign staffers who was giving free -but-overvalued advice to a friend running for local office. And this was in 2006, before there officially was a Hillary-for-pres campaign.

Justin Smith on 3quarksdaily has a hilarious “endorsement” for Obama from the leading Byelorussian newspaper. Here’s what they have to say about Hillary:

Now Hillary Clinton had eight years already in White House. During that time, she set herself one goal: the creation of new polyclinics throughout America, for the promotion of health and hygiene, from Poultry Processing Plant “John Tyson” in State Missouri to High Technology Cybernetics Park “Bill Gates” in State Washington, to public high school “Martin Luther King” in City Oakland. But how many polyclinics emerged from her time in the White House? There are no more polyclinics in America now than during Great Depression. Instead Clinton left America with the “health’s management organizations,” with queues of length we have not seen in Belarus since Great War for Fatherland, and costs that are sure to make any patient “sick.” Americans should be asking to Candidate Clinton: where are the polyclinics? Where can I go for antibiotics or a mustard plaster when I fall ill? Where can I go to pasteurize my children?

Since everybody else is embedding this Obama video, I might as well too:

2 things i did not know about Ivor Cutler: he was a teacher at Summerhill school, and he was in the Beatles film Magical Mystery Tour.

The wikipedia article also yields this:

…leaving a teaching job he held in the 1950s, he cut up his tawse and handed the pieces to the class.

My friend Ruth’s ex-husband George Campbell has a funny story about meeting one of his old schoolmasters, a dedicated user of the tawse, at an Amnesty International meeting.

There’s nothing quite like a Scots education.

More Ivor: Looking for truth with a pin.

And here’s an animation of “Lemon Flower” from the album “Jammy Smears.”

Snow on the Summit this morning, down to 2,000 feet tonight. No class last night because of MLK holiday or I would have had to drive through it on 17. Instead we went on a short hike in Pogonip  right before it started to pour.

I’m going to feature some of my clients when they do (or pay me to do) something particularly cool. Here’s a video by Gary Irving that we put on the GP Surfboards site.

Working for these guys has been cool, particularly when the whole team (7 guys) showed up to preview the new web site design. There has never been so much testosterone in the John Malkovich Suite here at the ID Building Mezzanine.

OK, I’ve decided to go ahead and start this blog, even though I don’t have the design completely worked out. The perfect can be the enemy of the good, as I have to keep reminding myself.

Besides, since we have reached css nirvana, where presentation is totally separate from content, why wait for the visual design before charging ahead? The classic theme will do until I get my own groove going.

To build my custom theme, I’ll be working with “Sandbox” which bills itself as the “Themers’ Theme.” We’ll see how it goes.