All kinds of spurious facts...and my comments thereon.

Apr 25, 2007

Thursday Thirteen 90::26 — Font of Useless Knowledge

Well, perhaps not 'useless'...but definitely not vital to the survival of the universe.

1. In Japan, 4 is considered an unlucky number.
   (The Japanese and Chinese consider 4 to be unlucky because the word for 'four' is almost the same as the word for 'death'. Same sound, same tone...only the characters differ.)
2. In ancient Rome, when a man testified in court he would swear on his testicles.
   (I'll bet they all had these on their chariots, too...)
3. The dot over the letter “i” is called a tittle.
   (A jot is any decorative line on a letter — essentially, a serif.)
4. The “save” icon in Microsoft Office programs shows a floppy disk with the shutter on backwards.
   (It's Microsoft. Nuff said.)
5. There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.
   (This is deliberate. If people don't realize how much time has elapsed, they might not realize how long they've been gambling...or might not stop to add up their losses. The timelessness of a casino is part of its draw, and the hook that keeps people inside, emptying their pockets.)
6. If you put a drop of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.
   (Who knew they were prohibitionists?)
7. The first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”.
   (And if you are of a certain age, there's a greater than likely possibility that you owned Peter Gabriel's “So” in more than two formats: album, cassette, compact disc. Yes, I'm guilty...)
8. The mask used by Michael Myers in the original “Halloween” was actually a Captain Kirk mask painted white, due to low budget.
   (He's even more terrifying when he actually has lines. Captain Kirk, not Michael Myers...)
9. In America, someone is diagnosed with AIDS every 10 minutes. In South Africa, someone dies due to HIV or AIDS every 10 minutes.
   (Education is one of the strongest weapons we have against any disease. Arm yourself, help arm others.)
10. The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries.
    (How's that for ironic?)
11. Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.
    (They make lousy getaway drivers.)
12. The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
    (Somehow, I'm not surprised.)
13. Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds; dogs only have about ten.
    (Coincidentally, over 60 of the cats' vocal sounds pertain to the procurement or eating of food. 3/4 of the remaining sounds deal with how foolish we are, and how they tolerate us. Now go open the can...)

Other Participants

• Whiskey Talking with important life questions. How many can you answer?
• Wylie's Words with facts about the island nation of Bermuda
• This Eclectic Life with signs of blogging addiction
• Families are like fudge... with family photos from their home in an isolated area of Cuba
• The Middling Monettes with embarrassing moments
• Books. Lists. Life. with questions about blog layouts
• J's Thoughts and Musings with facts about phlebotomy (blood-drawing)
• West of Mars with framing the house
• For Such a Time as Now with things they just had to have
• Writing Aspirations with facts about literacy
• Fond of Snape with favorite things beginning with the letter 'k'
• The Daily Cat Chase with her material weaknesses

Keywords: | Thursday | memes | luck |
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...fonts, that is. My 25th consecutive Thursday Thirteen features 13 interesting, fun, or bizarre font faces.

Apr 18, 2007

Thursday Thirteen 89::25: Thirteen Faces

I'm not a font specialist, by any stretch of the imagination. I know a small bit about how modern font faces are constructed, which looks better in print versus web and why, how to calculate point and pica size, and a few other odd bits of information. I've even managed to do some pretty creative things with the various dingbat and foreign fonts that are available via the web. However, if someone bought me the nicest, slickest, most intuitive font creator package available, I wouldn't be able to do a thing. I have great respect for the skill of anyone who creates a font from scratch. Here are some of my favorite font faces:

1. Cobb Shinn Stock Fonts, 1920s and 1930s woodcut art turned into font faces by font artisan Jeff Levine. Reminiscent of the "Monopoly" characters, in style, the forms cover the whole spectrum. There are even holiday-themed Cobb Shinn fonts available out on the web.
   
2. ...or, actually, just about anything by Jeff Levine. I could easily populate this entire list with dingbat (decorative) font faces this man has created and made freely available. One of my site designs used graphics created solely from his dingbat fonts. This is a varied, amazing collection. I've done some pretty interesting things with the Floor Tiles and Sun Dings fonts, a filter or masking layer, and a layer tweak or distortion.
   
3. Luc Devroye's Sugaku fonts. The word 'sugaku' means 'mathematics' in Japanese; and each of these dingbat fonts is very clean, precise, and elegant. These symbols could be used as bullets, chapter- or post-enders, title embelleshments...and those are just the obvious uses. (Luc Devroye also provides a gigantic page of link references. Some lead to sites about the art and science of typography; but many lead to additional font archives.)
   
4. Walrod, Codex, and Roughwork are all similar fonts: they all 'rough out' the symmetry and construction of serif font items. But each is just slightly different. I've used them primarily for sites dealing with some form of design or development.
   
5. Listemageren created and distributed postcardware fonts in the early 90s: Mythago, Ornamentals, Listemageren Dings, Fantomet... His decorative, alphabet, and dingbat fonts are available through this site.
   
6. I found University Roman Normal several years ago, when creating a web design for a wedding planner/florist. I was asked to match the font face in some printed materials she had, and this was the closest I found. (She didn't know the font name, only that she liked it and had used it extensively...so it was a case of matching pre-existing branding.) University Extended seems to be related, but has wider letterforms than University Roman Normal.
   
7. I actually studied the Tengwar Quenya and Tengwar Sindarin spoken and written language forms - albeit very briefly - in one of my first-year linguistics courses. I downloaded both fonts in the mid-90s, before the Lord of the Rings movies were really known as being in development - at least among all but the diehard fans, studio insiders, and ever-hopeful conspiracy theorists. Since they're similar to runes, I've occasionally used a character here or there as background 'visual noise'. The linked site offers Tengwar Quenya and Sindarin fonts, along with several other freeware fonts based upon other versions of scripts used in Tolkien's books.
   
8. I am a geek, I am a science fiction fan, I like angular letter forms, so of course my collection includes the Blade Runner Movie Font.
   
9. Speaking of angular font forms, three more in my collection are Roar, Abaddon, and Morpheus. Roar, based on the font used in the 1995 TV series, is a bit more ornamental than the other two. Morpheus is featured in many "Gothic" font collections, while Abaddon is midway between the two: more curved like Roar's letterforms, but with cleaner lines and lighter strokes.
   
10. I taught myself calligraphy in the early 80s, but most of those letterforms I learned were too...familiar. I like the differences in the “eastern”, cursive scripts. Some examples in my own collection are Arabian, Bavand, and Jerash Demo.
    
11. Using dingbat fonts for ornamental accents is always fun. I'm one of those odd folks who would spend hours poring through a new dingbat archive, looking for possible decorative elements. How helpful, then, to find a font actually called Deco Borders.
    
12. I haven't actually found a use for this font face...but since the Mission-style box design aesthetic seems to be making a comeback, perhaps I'll have one soon? (Sadly, I don't remember where I found this font, and wasn't able to find it using Google. The file name is, simply, "glass.ttf".)
    
13. My collection also includes several foreign fonts: Cyrillic, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Syriac, Tsolyani, Torah Sofer, pseudo-cuneiform, and more. I've been very cautious about using them, though. I know how easy it can be for someone to use a nice-looking, but slightly embarrassing (or just plain amusing) character or glyph.

So what fonts do you really like? Got links to them (if they're public domain)?

Other Participants

• Di's Book Blog with things she didn't have growing up, that her own kids take for granted
• J's Thoughts and Musings with thoughts about our social welfare options...and, sometimes, the lack thereof
• This Eclectic Life with life lessons
• Tennessee Text Wrestling with thoughts on being married for ten years (congratulations!!)
• Wylie's Words with alternative uses for hot, sexy postcards
• A little piece of me with things she's learned about, and while, blogging
• BecKaDoodles with a photo eulogy for Oliver, her cat
• CraZedMoM with a post-storm wrap-up
• Writing Aspirations with what tarot cards reveal
• Scribbit with the best remade songs of all time
• The Screaming Pages with quotes from independent films
• The Flatland Almanack with lessons learned about weddings
• Books. Lists. Life. with pet peeves
• Heather Rae Scott with misadventures in furniture-moving
• Angelle Trieste on why she hates turning 29.
• It's all gone tits up with cosmetics she (over)bought [I feel for you - I have far too many different bottles of nail polish.]
• Joystory, having problems with a cranky laptop and a disobedient power cord

Keywords: | Thursday | television | memes | gothic | fonts | fantasy | dingbats | cursive |
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They're nothing if not serenely insistent.

Feb 05, 2007

Yes, I’ve had this happen.

Keywords: | cats |
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Dressed in holiday attire, but still packing a punch.

Dec 09, 2006

Oh bring us some gooshyfoodie
Oh bring us some gooshyfoodie
Oh bring us some gooshyfoodie
Or we'll pee on your bed

We won't hush until we get some
We won't hush until we get some
We won't hush until we get some
What is taking so long?!??

(You didn't expect them to keep singing once the food was available, did you?!??)

The kitchen is approximately twenty square feet (tiny!). Each of the three cats genuinely likes one of the other cats, and will tolerate (or puts up with) the other one. But when the can opener is heard, all bets are off. They'd all gather in an area half the size of the kitchen, if it meant gooshyfood was forthcoming. That photo above is a rare glimpse of family tranquility.

And by 'tranquility' I mean 'they're too busy being gluttons to care about the lack of personal space'.

Related entry: Monkey
Keywords: | parody | Holidailies | cats |
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