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Helvetica
Posted 12:06 AM, Feb 29, 2008 |
While watching Helvetica, a movie filled with pretentious typographers and designers talking in thick accents about, well, Helvetica, the ubiquitous type or font or typeface or font family or whatever, I noticed the music, mostly because, well, it’s kind of a boring movie because it’s about a font. The only song I recognized was late in the film, about 1:10. The song is “pelican narrows” off Caribou’s The Milk of Human Kindness.
Why is any of this important?
It isn’t really, because it’s about a font, but it’s worth noting that Caribou’s most recent album, Andorra, uses Helvetica on the cover. There’s a fair amount made about graphic design on album covers in the movie, and so one wonders if the rest of the music used in the film is by musicians whose album covers have also used Helvetica. Or is Helvetica so ubiquitous that, well, like, of course every musician has used it on an album cover.
(Upon further research, I thought that Battles’ album Atlas also used Helvetica (Battles also being on the film’s soundtrack) but the “S”s don’t seem quite right. However, this album cover here might be done in Helvetica. Sam Prekop, also on the soundtrack, album cover here, maybe Helvetica. Or is it? Not sure. Beats me, losing interest rapidly.)
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Plus Ones
Posted 11:11 PM, Feb 28, 2008 |
Today I was listening to Okkervil River’s Stage Names LP and enjoying my favorite song, “Plus Ones,” which, in its lyrics, takes numerical lyrics from the past and adds one, i.e., the lyrics refer to “the 51st way to leave your lover,” referencing Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” (The song’s title also references guest lists at concerts which often include “+1” when additional guest is accompanying an invited guest.) It’s one of my favorite songs on the album and really cleverly written, and today I was happy to note the lyrical reference to “cell 45,” a take on The Zombies’ “Care of Cell 44.”
I thought I would compile a list of the songs referenced in the lyrics, but, of course, this being the age of the internet, someone has already done it, and so I proudly turn over the rest of this post to them.
(Okay, so I’m back for a postscript: the site I linked to gets an extra bonus for sharing my musical tastes - of the 8 albums they list as “current listens,” 3 of them have been in my CD player / computer / car in the last week - Okkervil River, The National, and Menomena. That is all, roger wilco.)
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Misstep
Posted 9:54 AM, Feb 28, 2008 |
At lawn bowls the other day, I was asked to review a potential 2008 roster. Someone had gone through and crossed out the names of old members who did not renew and, as treasurer, I was supposed to verify that those with names crossed out in face did not renew, and those without names crossed out did renew.
I went through and found one person’s name who was crossed out but I was positive had paid dues. I told the president of the club about it and he informed me, unfortunately, that the member had passed away two weeks prior.
Obviously, I didn’t know. Other than that, I don’t really have a comment about the situation other than that it was pretty surreal.
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Congratulations… for What?
Posted 10:06 PM, Feb 24, 2008 |
Last Oscars post for this year, I think.
At least Juno didn’t win Best Picture, but still, Diablo Cody, Juno? C’mon. I mean, we all saw it coming, yes, yes, unfortunately. Last time I checked - and I hang out with a fair number of teens at YOMS - nobody says thinks like “What the blog?” nor do they refer to one another as “Homeskillet,” although I believe that line was actually spoken by an “adult” in the movie. Yeah, mannered and annoying doesn’t make it teen-speak, nor hip, nor realistic.
Juno does get one honor in my book - it’s the only movie that won an Academy Award this year that made me want to leave the theater during the first 20 minutes of watching it. (Yes, Juno got better after that, but only because I stopped hearing the ridiculous dialog, much like how, after 20 minutes of a film in which everyone speaks with a thick accent, it sounds just like normal English.)
Also, what was Diablo Cody wearing? I think an emaciated leopard fell on her before the show.
And lastly, congratulations, Star-Tribune - you’ve already churned out your “Minnesota makes good” article about the Oscars. Last year, Amy Adams, former star of Chanhassen, MN dinner theater, and this year the Coens and Diablo Cody. Things haven’t been this sweet since Field of Dreams set about 12 minutes of film in Chisholm.
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Best Picture
Posted 11:37 AM, Feb 24, 2008 |
The Oscars are this evening, and since I live in Los Angeles, I have to care, right? I don’t, really, except for a couple things. (Who really buys into caring about awards less than the supporting roles?) And, I’m only going to address one thing that I “care” about, “care” here meaning have an opinion about, not actually love or adore or feel any emotional warmth towards.
It’s that Best Picture deal. This is maybe the only year that, prior to the Awards, anyway, I’ve seen all five Best Picture nominees: Juno, Atonement, No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Michael Clayton.
Here’s what will happen: No Country For Old Men will win.
Here’s what should happen: There Will Be Blood will win.
Juno was fine, but too mannered and, frankly, annoying, to really bother with. I enjoyed it, but I enjoy lots of things, many of them not really very good. (Also, if it wins, us Star-Tribune readers will be plagued with weeks of “Minnesota girl makes good” articles, which, frankly, enough already.)
Atonement was not worth the number of words I’ve already devoted to it.
Michael Clayton won a Yoggie last year and was the first in a series of really good, serious films made for adults, no messing around, no cutesy stuff, let’s get serious and make a movie.
No Country For Old Men was the next really good, serious film, and it was really good. Better than Clayton. Almost flawless - Roger Ebert says it is flawless. I don’t know that I agree with that, but I’m at a loss to point out any particular flaw. So how can anything possibly be better?
There Will Be Blood most certainly is a flawed film. It is. But that’s okay. It’s kind of like when people buy hand-blown glass objects and they are able to point to the defects caused by the hand-blowing and say, “Look, this is beautiful.” Sometimes, flawed things are more beautiful and just plain better, and There Will Be Blood is one of those things. It’s ten times more daring than No Country and, frankly, just a more beautiful piece of art. No Country is a terrific piece of filmmaking, but There Will Be Blood actually transcends that.
Ultimately, if any of Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, or No Country For Old Men win, I’ll find no reason to complain, at least not loudly, but my vote is already cast.
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Solutions to Wasting Time
Posted 11:21 AM, Feb 24, 2008 |
Here are a few things I’ve collected, I don’t know from where, that are intended to help you stop wasting time. Most of them are unreasonable.
1) A JPG of a small card you can print out to explain that you will only be staying at any meeting for 15 minutes. You can simply put it on the table or hand it to the meeting organizer.
2) Thanks. No. A nice page set up to explain to those people who send you forwards, mass emails, or unnecessary CCs that, thanks, no, you don’t want any, and you aren’t being rude about it.
3) Five Sentences. A simple policy that all email responses will be a maximum of five sentences, the reasons being that email is time-consuming to write and even short emails can often elicit large responses. (i.e., “What are the five most important things about applying for a job at your company?” - a simple email that may require a lengthy response.)
However, as a commenter pointed out, limiting yourself to five sentences may often be harder and more time-consuming than just writing, say, fifty sentences. This anecdote, allegedly about Mark Twain, is terrific, not only for email purposes but just for writing in general:
Telegram from publisher to Mark Twain: NEED TWO PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS
Response from Mark Twain to publisher: NO CAN DO TWO PAGES TWO DAYS STOP CAN DO THIRTY PAGES TWO DAYS STOP NEED THIRTY DAYS TO DO TWO PAGES
(Taken from this comment from the original Five Sentences thread.)
Lastly, I don’t personally advocate any of these policies. They’re all fun, but, I think, ultimately unrealistic and unhelpful. But I appreciate the spirit.
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Pizza Place
Posted 10:37 AM, Feb 22, 2008 |
I came up with an idea for a restaurant, an idea that would probably work well with dishes like pizza where you start with a simple base (cheese, crust, sauce) and then you add toppings in essentially whatever combination you would like.
On the menu, I would simply list out the individual ingredients, assigning each a prime number. For example, my menu might start:
2 - pepperoni
3 - green peppers
5 - sausage
and so on. Then, when you order, you simply multiply all the ingredients numbers together, and that’s your order. It’s much easier than any other method.
For instance, if you ordered a 10,465, your pizza would contain ingredients 5, 7, 13, and 23. It’s pretty simple. You want pizza #393,162? No problem, we just factor it and put on ingredients 2, 3, 7, 11, 23, and 37. Pretty awesome.
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Science Fair
Posted 3:14 PM, Feb 20, 2008 |
This link to science fair photos is a good one - thanks kottke. Priceless titles include, “Crystal Meth: Friend or Foe?” and “That Will Leave a Stain.” Good stuff all around, good laughs, those poor children, oh my.
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Megapod of Dolphins
Posted 10:36 AM, Feb 18, 2008 |
The EC and I went whale-watching yesterday up in Ventura, CA, and, while we did see at least 3 gray whales, we also came across three separate groups of dolphins. The last group was a “megapod” of common dolphins, consisting of about 2,000 dolphins altogether (based on the estimate that you only see one-tenth of the pod at any given time, as the rest are underwater). The megapod was one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while, and really amazing. The video (click below) doesn’t, sadly, do it justice, but keep in mind that every splash you see in the water is a dolphin, doing its dolphin thing.
(The file is large, so be patient.)
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The Sporting Life
Posted 11:35 PM, Feb 13, 2008 |
ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption has been one of my favorite shows for about 6 years now, but lately most of it is getting more and more unwatchable. Sadly, it isn’t PTI’s fault, but sports’ fault. Each episode seems more like an issue of Soap Opera Digest than The Sporting News.
Today’s show featured about 6 minutes on baseball, steroids, etc. It should be said that I do care about baseball, i.e. topics actually about the idea of hitting a little white ball with a stick and watching men with leather hands run around and chase it for a few hours. Sadly, taking steroids doesn’t fit into this.
This was followed by a section about Indiana coach Kelvin Sampson’s continued NCAA violations, the same kind of violations (against-the-rules recruiting phone calls) that he made at Oklahoma.
(Fortunately, today there was nothing about Gisele “Too Many Consonants In a Row” Bundchen, Jessica Simpson, etc.)
The topics in question, though, that keep coming up refer to things like steroids, recruiting violations, unacceptable gifts to college players, etc. The problem, I’ve come to realize, with sports is this: there’s just too much money.
With as much money as there is at stake - even in college, players are vying for a piece of that professional pot - it’s no wonder everyone cheats. Coaches are paid multi-million dollar contracts, and players get paid even more, and anything they can do to gain a competitive edge guarantees them a small percentage more. When you’re talking multi-millions, though, even a small percentage is, say, more than I make. In 10 years.
Sure, there’s risk involved, and a lot of players’ and coaches’ egos allow them to believe they won’t get caught. But I have to believe that many players, maybe just subconsciously, do acknowledge that they might get caught, but everyone comes to the same conclusion: it’s worth it.
There’s also a lot of ego around, and I know that has something to do with it, too, the egotistical drive to be the best, to be better than all your peers, to see your name in lights and on glossy magazines and hand in hand with Too Many Consonants, but I believe it comes down to money.
Two of the greatest baseball scandals in history, excluding the current one, are the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and Pete Rose’s banishment from baseball. Both of these involved betting, which involves, yes, money. These happened before professional athletes were paid millions of dollars, when players, if they wanted to make grand sums of money, cheated through gambling. Now that players get paid more and more, gambling is less of an issue, I suspect, and the focus of cheating has turned to on-the-field/court accomplishments. (Yes, there’s still betting going on, too, though - Donaghy, some hockey coach, and so on.)
What’s the solution? If you want to talk about steroids, it’s drug testing, although the jury is still out, no pun intended, on what to do about HGH. If you want to talk about illegal recruiting, it’s stricter standards and harsher penalties. And so on.
But if you want to talk about fixing all these problems at once, let’s forget about the effects and cut straight to the cause, which is: money. I can barely blame players for trying to get a hypertrophied leg up on the competition with $15,000,000/year contracts up for grabs. NCAA men’s basketball championships must bring in millions to the winning school, not to mention the pick of the litter in upcoming recruiting classes (there’s a reason Duke, UNC, Kansas, etc., always get the good players and Baylor doesn’t). Get rid of the grand rewards and the grand schemes that players contrive to best the system might start to go away. (Sure, then you’ll have to worry about gambling again, and clearly leagues (I’m looking at you, NBA) haven’t figured out how to solve that one, have they Davydenko?)
Man, this post has me all down now. Maybe there are too many problems, each this hydra-head of temptation, and when you cut away massive salaries and steroids, gambling and corruption take their place. Cut those away and you have recruiting scandals; get rid of those and you have unsportsmanlike, vicious, illegal behavior on the field of play, stuff like Albert Haynesworth’s head-stomp and NHL assault and battery. Maybe it’s time to throw in the towel on sports altogether.
But then look outside, the grass is getting green and spring training begins tomorrow. I think I can handle just one more year. Just one.
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Spelling Memory III
Posted 5:00 PM, Feb 11, 2008 |
Unlike my other two spelling bee memories (here and here), this one isn’t associated with any particular word, but rather with the aftermath of the spelling bee at my elementary school the year I was in 6th grade. I won the bee, after coming in third and second the previous two years, respectively, and, well, that was pretty awesome.
Backstory: I liked to play tennis as a kid. My brother and I would often play tennis on the dirt/lawn in our yard, both with identical silver rackets that may have been made out of aluminum, hitting a flat tennis ball over the five laundry lines that were suspended between giant silver poles. The ball would take all these crazy bounces, and we didn’t know how to properly keep score, so we would get to 40-40 (deuce), and we knew you had to win by two, so we would just start counting with each point worth 5, so you’d get, like, 45-40, 45-45, 50-45, etc. But anyway, sometimes I just wanted to hit tennis balls, but there wasn’t anywhere to really do it. We had a white garage door with a concrete apron in front that was big enough to play some approximation of tennis against. Despite being warned numerous times, I continued to play tennis against it, leaving little tennis ball-shaped spots against it. (Our driveway was dirt, so as soon as the ball rolled off the apron, dirt was introduced into the environment.)
Now, back to me winning the spelling bee. So I won, my parents were in attendance, great joy was felt, and then we drove home. On the way home, I was informed that the first thing I was to do when we got home was to wash, with sponge and soapy, hot water, the garage door, cleaning it of the tennis ball stains from, presumably, the previous day.
The funny thing is, while I remember the events leading up to the assignation of the garage-washing, I don’t remember actually washing the garage. One might think that it was so painful that I blocked it out of my memory except that I have more recent memories of continuing to play tennis against the garage door. I’m not sure what all this means.
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Be Kind Rewind
Posted 1:51 PM, Feb 11, 2008 |
While I should be excited, or at least interested, in the new Michel Gondry movie Be Kind Rewind (trailer here), I’m not. It’s an imaginative idea: a video store has all their tapes accidentally erased, and rather than buy new ones, they instead film their own versions of the movies and rent them out, thus becoming superstars, etc. But, unfortunately, the trailer makes it look like skit after skit of movie parodies - does the movie have any substance? Gondry’s last movie, The Science of Sleep was visually great, incredibly imaginative, but ultimately kind of boring, unbelievable, and, well, not very interesting. This looks like more of the same, sadly. But surprise me.
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Attention To Detail
Posted 11:20 PM, Feb 10, 2008 |
I could never determine
what was important and what wasn’t.
Last week, I received mail
from a long-lost friend and spent
the first hour studying the stamp,
an intricate etching
of a biplane over the coast of Normandy,
and accidentally spilled coffee
on the letter, the thin onionskin pages
soaked and unreadable.
I’ve spent most of my life
studying insignificant details,
the path of an ant across the floor,
the sound a quarter makes in a parking meter.
My mind is a museum of minutiae,
an encyclopedia of everything you might have missed.
My wife says I should be a detective,
but I’m content with collecting the strange details
of poetry.
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Supposedly Empty Equipment
Posted 10:28 PM, Feb 7, 2008 |
Today, received an envelope postmarked 1/31/2008, which is slow, even for the post office, ha ha. The envelope came stamped on both sides with the words “Found In Supposedly Empty Equipment.” According to my brother, a postal service employee, this means it was, well, found in equipment that was thought to be empty, i.e., a hamper, bag, machine, employee’s pocket, etc. (He didn’t really say that last one.)
I asked him if he had a “Found in Supposedly Empty Equipment” stamp. He, unfortunately, does not, but said there’s one around somewhere. I like to imagine postal employees walking around with a big utility belt of various stamps.
“Found in Supposedly Empty Equipment” is definitely the strangest stamp I’ve seen. How many stamps does this post office have? What other strange ones might exist?
“Rifled Through, All Checks and Cash Removed.”
“This Font Looks LIke It Is Handwritten. Do Not Be Fooled.”
“I Already Did The Cryptic Crossword In This Issue of Harper’s. Sorry.”
“Someone Licked This.”
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Spelling Memory II (Available)
Posted 10:18 PM, Feb 5, 2008 |
When I was in 6th grade, I won our elementary school spelling bee and then went on to win the city of Duluth spelling bee, which included the infamous “attackometer.” Having won that, I was entitled to go to the regional spelling bee - for the year in question, it was held in Chisholm, MN, the home of Field of Dreams’ (and the real-life) Archibald “Moonlight” Graham.
I don’t recall where the bee was, specifically, but it was a large auditorium, and the contestants were all seated on stage, much like you might see on the televised Scripps National Spelling Bee but with less lights and less cameras. The auditorium had this cavernous ceiling - it was exponentially bigger than my elementary school gymnasium where our spelling bees were held, which was, in turn, exponentially bigger than the backroom library where the city spelling bee was held. But I digress.
I believe the word “available” was my first (and last) word of the regional spelling bee. This makes my regional spelling bee career even worse than Graham’s baseball career - I got to bat once and struck out. Would I rather have not gotten to bat? Perhaps.
They read the word and my first response was of happiness - “available” was a pretty easy word, far from the words I had been studying in preparation, which were words like “triskadekaphobia” and far worse. (I wish I still had those old word lists and will scour for them next time I’m in Duluth.) But then I stepped up to the microphone, looked out, and pretty much lost all spelling abilities I ever possessed, all of them sucked up into the giant open space and eaten by the glaring lights.
Was it “available” or “avaliable”? How could I decide? I spelled them both out with pencil and paper, as we were allowed, and looked at them. I had no idea. I wasn’t even sure what “available” meant anymore. I was a wreck.
Needless to say, at this point, I chose, for what seemed to me in the immediate and long-term aftermath to be no apparent logical reason, “avaliable.” This, if you aren’t sure, is incorrect. I was knocked out of the bee in my first and only year of competition, as 7th graders were ineligible.
For years afterward, and even most recently, say, yesterday, my family torments me with the word “available,” and each time I typed it in this post, I had to double-check it, even though I’ve only once been unsure of how to spell it.
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Super Tuesday, er, Wednesday, er…
Posted 11:30 PM, Feb 4, 2008 |
Hillary Clinton was in the Twin Cities Sunday night and, according to the Star Tribune, watched the game at Dixie’s, a bar and restaurant on Grand Avenue in St. Paul.
Clinton also told Letterman on Monday night, although it isn’t a direct quote in the article at CNN, that she watched the Super Bowl in a Minneapolis sports bar.
As a Minneapolis resident who seldom took trips to the less fun St. Paul, I’m surprised that Hillary finds them interchangeable. Do I care? No. Do I think you should care? No. But I thought I’d point it out anyway.
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Spelling Memory I (Tachometer)
Posted 12:42 PM, Feb 4, 2008 |
A kid came in to Ye Olde Math Shoppe recently and, as with most new kids, I asked him what his favorite subject was. He replied, “Spelling,” which caused me to think back to the period when spelling was my favorite subject, which was basically all of elementary school, i.e., as long as spelling was considered a subject.
I’m not sure why spelling appealed to me - I think the fact that most of the word lists I studied consisted of words I didn’t even know, so it wasn’t so much the spelling as a chance to learn new words.
I remember, in one city spelling competition, the word I was supposed to spell was “tachometer,” but the sentence that was used with the word involved the words “a tachometer,” which I somehow, against all grammatical reason, interpreted as a made-up word, “attackometer,” i.e., a device to measure how badly you are being attacked. I began my spelling by saying, “Attackometer. A-T-T —” at which point I was interrupted. Clearly I didn’t understand the word, so they said the word again, and I’m sure they said, “tachometer,” but my brain was still stuck on “attackometer,” so I started, again, with the letter A. They stopped me again and conferred, and I was totally confused. I believe they eventually came up with a new sentence, something which used the words “the tachometer,” rather than “a tachometer,” and I think I may have actually said, “Oh!” in recognition, and spelled the word correctly. I remember feeling bad for the girl who came in second - during the “tachometer/attackometer” phase of the bee, we were the only two remaining contestants, so she pretty clearly should have won, but what was I to do?
I have at least two other spelling bee memories I will share later, but this was a good one. It wasn’t even the memory I intended to share when I started writing the post.
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Nickname
Posted 10:57 PM, Feb 2, 2008 |
The EC and I were wondering today what would happen if, three months or two years or whatever significant time period after our relationship started, she had discovered that my first name was not actually my first name, but rather my middle name, and that my first name was Rip-Dick, either with or without the hyphen. This all came to pass in noting that Detroit Pistons’ player Richard Hamilton, for reasons I don’t know, goes by “Rip.” I noted that if I were named Richard, I would want to go by either Rip or Dick or the obvious hyphenate.
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