Stock and Flow at Orange Crate Art

There's a way of thinking about blog content as stock and flow. Flow is made up of the short, day-to-day posts that constitute most blog content, including mine. Flow posts are usually interesting at the time they're written (if the writer is any good!) but they are somewhat ephemeral.

Stock posts are the ones with staying power -- they're usually lengthier, more thought out, and on topics of greater concern.

A few of my stock posts are Walking Away from Omelas, Jumping into the Deep End, Living with the Chicken Heart Every Day, and much of my Universal Media Syndicate criticism. (Reading those titles, I recognize my weakness for title gerunds. Sorry.)

One of my favorite blogs, Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art, has a very nice mix of stock and flow. The flow tends to be about music, grammar or old office supplies (yes -- from pencils and erasers to staplers), while his stock is almost always about teaching at the college level in the age of the interweb.

And Michael has some truly great posts on this topic:

• How to e-mail a professor
  
• "Extra credit?"
  
• On "On the New Literacy"
  
• Re: the Beloit Mindset List
  

All great, great stuff, and there's much more than that. One other favorite is called Reinventing the wheel, which, while brief, provides such a clear statement of its problem that I have kept the link handy for a time when my daughter questions why writing papers is important if everything we need to know is in the Wikipedia.

I think Michael should collect his teaching-related essays into a book, or at least booklet, depending on the length. I'll do the layout for free!

Find Out More About SmartLean and Fucoxanthin

A new full-page ad in today's paper is selling a pill called SmartLean, which is said to speed weight loss, particularly by increasing metabolism and burning fat.


I'm not going to go into details about the many problems I see with the ad itself (no price is given for the product, it imposes a scarcity deadline to cause us to act now!, and it's designed to look like it's part of the newspaper rather than an ad in the first place -- the usual style of its creators, the Universal Media Syndicate).

But I will say this:

The active ingredient is Fucoxanthin, which comes from seaweed. If you're interested in buying this product, shop around on the price.

Don't be lulled by the information the ad gives about two clinical trials of 151 people. Those studies were paid for by businesses with a financial interest in seeing them succeed, and this type of incentive has often resulted in skewed results in the past. According to fitness coach Tom Venuto,

...even when a single study shows what seem like promising results, I always want to see it replicated by an independent (unbiased) research group before I would ever recommend it. It's astonishing to see how many supplement-company sponsored studies are never replicated by any other research group. Or, other research groups refute the findings of the first study after addressing flaws in the original study design.

Take that little footnote at the bottom of the ad to heart: The statements in the ad "have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration."

William Bloke at Home and on the Street

When I got up this morning and (I confess) briefly checked Facebook, I saw this photo, posted by singer Billy Bragg, with a status that said he "is marching through central London with the students":


He's out in the street, working for the issues that matter to him and have always mattered to him.

It made me think of a recent brouhaha that occurred over Bragg and his house. Having grown up working class in the Barking section of East London, Bragg at some point used some of the earnings from his music career to buy a big house by the sea in Dorset, shown here:


Recently, someone (possibly from the far-right British National Party) distributed a flier to his mostly conservative neighbors. It encouraged them to run him out of town for the hypocrisy of living in a fancy place while espousing the beliefs that he does.

To their credit, the townspeople reacted with horror at the racist language of the letter and defended Bragg generally.

I admit I had a momentary twinge, wondering, Why does he live in a big house like that? Why doesn't he give away all his money, if he believes so much in social change?

But then I realized that Bragg is setting a useful example for everyone else who is rich, whether self-made like him or through inherited wealth: You can pay high taxes and give lots of money to nonprofits you support and still have enough for a nice life and a big home, if that's what you want. You don't have to be Mother Theresa to be consistent.

Politics is more complicated than most of us think when we're young, but there are essentials that must be maintained. As Bragg wrote in his song From Red to Blue*:

You're a father now, you see things in different ways
For every parent will gain perspective on their wilder days
But that alone does not explain the changes I see in you
The way you've drifted off from red to blue

Sometimes I think to myself
Should I vote red for my class or green for our children?
But whatever choice I make
I will not forsake

So it makes sense that Billy Bragg is out in the street today, standing against what he sees as misguided austerity measures that hurt students and many others.
______

* Red symbolizes Labor and socialism in British politics, vs blue for the Tories. Funny how the American media completely changed the meaning of "red" in a few short years. I wonder if kids today have trouble understanding who was supposedly scaring who during the "Red Scare."

When Life Gives You Rhubarb

The World of Soviet Groceries, as recently linked on Boing Boing, is a treasure trove of quaint packaging, made even more nostalgia-inducing by the soft colors that resulted from the printing method and paper used.

I don't mean to say I am nostalgic for Soviet-era groceries (I never had the good fortune to stand in a line at Russian store of that era), but rather that the pictures make me think of our own outmoded packaging and the foods Americans used to eat.


Okay, we didn't actually eat most of the same foods. This image, translated simply as Rhubarb drink, is a case in point.


This picture combines cherry kissel (mousse), boiled buckwheat, and split pea soup for a trifecta of taste never seen in America.


Though this can of peas could have been found on any grocery shelf down the street (except for the Cyrillic, of course).

The World of Soviet Groceries

My Life, by David Sipress

Well, it's not quite this bad.


Though I am posting this from a coffee shop where we are sitting at a table with our laptops back to back. But at least we're facing each other.

An Abbreviated Assessment of the SOTU

Here are the thoughts I can muster about the State of the Union speech:

1. I can't emphasize enough how much I dislike the use of human beings as visual aids. Back in 1982, Ronald Reagan began arranging for a few members of the public to be in the hall so they could be mentioned and shown on camera at the same time to make a point, and we've been stuck with it ever since. It was clearly manipulative and forced at the time, and it hasn't gotten better since then.

2. When Obama made a point of saying that Muslims are part of the American family, I thought it was sad that only half of the members of Congress shown were applauding or standing up.

3. There's one good thing I now know about Michele Bachmann: Her voice and style of delivery annoy me much less than Sarah Palin's. I suppose I should also give her points for getting her Tea Party response speech done early. Clearly, she made no substantive points about anything in Obama's speech, so it must have been written ahead of time.

4. Were you disconcerted to see the State of the Union speech referred to everyhere (at least online) as SOTU? I hate this recent wave of abbreviation (SCOTUS, POTUS, FLOTUS, anyone?). I remember seeing POTUS used repeatedly and having no idea what it meant (president of the United States). Not to mention NSFW. That confounded me for days.

Spam Bomb from Melinda

Yesterday, Daughter Number Three received a flurry of spam comments from the same user, ostensibly named Melinda. My thought is that Melinda is an actual human (rather than a 'bot), since I've got my comments set to require one of those little type-in codes, or captchas, which are hard for computers to do.

So Melinda a is a human being -- just the type of species I love to have comment on my blog. Unfortunately, she has nothing to say that doesn't involve links to generic Viagra.

But I did find the non-spammy parts of her comments amusing for their good-hearted, though ungrammatical, attempts to relate to the content of the posts:

On Unconventional Mushrooms: I like to seeing the nature in its conventional way that's the reason I like not only creating that kind of mushrooms but also eating them combined with a generic viagra pill.

Then after I deleted her first comment on the mushrooms:

I had never seen something like that in my life, I've heard that some farmers have developed a rare method to growing their mushrooms crops it is fertilizing those mushrooms with generic viagra because in that way mushrooms will grow up faster and stronger.

On the Universal Media Syndicate: I think the opposite because they all time are inventing new an ridiculous stories for example saying that teenagers have to visiting viagra online in oredr to be informed.

On the Roland Burris Mausoleum Addendum: I have to be honest because I like to going to different mausoleums and taking there my generic viagra to get so crazy and seeing things I had never seen that's perfect.

On the Chicago Tribune Lobby: I also visited those stones in that case because I told to my sister I wanted to going there in order to taking my generic viagra because that's like a myth I have.

On America the Beautiful: I read a similar story, I think something a little bit strong, it was related to a man that turned on an addict of viagra online and he's not guilty because that really works.

On Resist the Feed: This book it's perfect because we can get many advices at the same time I can get excellent information from viagra online, I think that's something really similar.

And after I deleted her first comment on M.T. Anderson's book:

I think this is the last release because I had never seen something like that before, this book is like a book I read some years ago called viagra online it has been one of the most rare books I've read.

As a reaction to this spam storm, I've decided to require approval before a comment goes live on my oldie-but-goodie posts (the ones that are more than two weeks old). My apologies for the delay to all the real humans who have something substantive to say about topics other than Viagra, but I should be able to approve things pretty quickly.

Finding the Good

It seems like there's been a lot of good stuff in the Pioneer Press lately. Sunday's paper had not one but two extra-large illustrations by Kirk Lyttle:



Ruben Rosario's column, in which he talked back to the xenophobic readers who assailed him for opposing "English-only" education, made for both amusing and dismaying reading. After starting out quoting Ben Franklin on how German immigrants were going to drive our country into the ground, Rosario ended the column with this observation from a volunteer English tutor:

"Practically anyone who has ever given even an hour of volunteer time in an ELL (English Language Learner) program knows that while English-only advocates like to preach English, they don't necessarily offer any assistance in actually teaching it," he said.

Once someone volunteers, "it's quickly seen that this is one area where demand exceeds supply," he added.

And there have been a number of articles and op-eds, some house-written, some from wire services, that have served up facts I never knew:

• 2.3 percent of Americans in good mental health committed a violent act in the previous year. (From an Los Angeles Times article on the incidence of violent crimes among people with mental illness.)
• "Last June, student debt surpassed credit card debt for the first time." (From an op-ed by Mark C. Taylor. More to come later this week on Dr. Taylor, who appeared on Kerri Miller's Midmorning MPR show today.)
• The civic health (volunteering, voting, interaction with neighbors) of the Twin Cities tops that of Miami. Not a super surprise. Except "...people with more education and income engage more in civic life. But individuals in Minneapolis-St. Paul in the lowest income group are more likely to be civically involved than are people in the wealthiest tier in Miami." (From an op-ed by Harry Boyte titled Spreading the Minnesota Way) Another reason not to model our state on Florida.
  

Oh, and I really liked the opinion piece about our health care system by Dr. Virginia Dale from the Sunday Star Tribune, too:

To come to terms with the crisis we will have to limit -- in more inflammatory terms, we will have to ration -- health care. The good news is that our fear of rationing is exaggerated by the inflated value the American public perceives in health care....

Why are we willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to stall and argue with death at the end of life, but aren't willing to spend that, or less, to educate a person earlier in his or her life, when it might truly enhance life's quality?....

The de facto purpose of modern health care, the enterprise, is not to maximize health, but to maximize medical technology. Like the silken-voiced computer HAL, this purpose has taken over the ship. In the current system, none of the actors -- physicians, insurance companies or individual patients -- can stop it....

We should collectively define our purpose -- by creating a basic package of health care benefits available to all, using tools to set reasonable expectations regarding cost and benefit. Services outside of that basic package could be purchased by individuals.

Would this create a two-tiered health care system? Yes, it would. Would it create two tiers of health? It would not. The parts of health care that matter would be provided to all, while the parts that don't matter that much -- well, they don't matter that much.

Jambox in a Shoebox

The product is about as big as a slimline brick, and feels similar, if bricks were made from metal. Or maybe a heavy, extra-thick version of an old-fashioned chalkboard eraser.


It's called Jambox, and it's a tiny amplifier that works with the iPhone. No need to plug the phone into the Jambox -- it works with the wireless Bluetooth system. And it doesn't need big speakers because it uses the table or whatever it's set on to generate the base sounds. In my case, it is often set on the clothes dryer while I am sorting through basement detritus.

All that is nifty enough, even for someone like me who is not a tech geek: a small, battery-powered amplifier for my phone/iPod that just works.

But the thing I liked even better was the package it came in. You know how tech stuff always comes embedded in Stryofoam® cushions you never manage to throw out, but always find stashed somewhere years later? (13 percent of my basement detritus is, in fact, Styrofoam or other packaging materials.)

None of that for Jambox. It's all recycled and recyclable, and designed for ease of use. Plus, the whole thing is so damned clever.


The box is a shoebox. Even the label on the short end looks like the labels shoe companies use.

And there's a two-part joke that starts with this illustration of a big boombox just like one I had in the 1980s...


...and ends with the tiny product, nested in a bed of recycled paperboard.


Once you lift out the unit using the finger holes, a new bit of instruction is revealed. Kind of like the Drink Me bottle in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.


The top layer pulls out easily to reveal the other components. Instead of Styrofoam, the battery charger, manual and other accessories are cozy within layers of corrugated cardboard.


It's a masterpiece of 3D visual thinking and die-cutting, and not one piece of it has to go into the trash.

So far the only thing I've noticed about the product that's less than perfect is that it only works with the iPod app on my phone, not with the MPR app, so I can't use it to listen to the radio, just to my own music or podcasts I've saved.

But other than that, it and its packaging get an A+ from me.

Spelling It Out for Them

Lately on Minnesota Public Radio I've been hearing a sponsorship plug for a company called Plaudit Design. To paraphrase, they design websites and do internet marketing for small businesses; they've been doing so for over 10 years.

Plaudit, I thought. Now there's a word you don't hear every day. It has a formal, maybe even slightly archaic connotation. It makes them sound stodgy, definitely not like a cutting-edge web design firm.

I wonder what kinds of calls a business-to-business company gets from an MPR spot? Is that really the best way to bring in new work?

And to top it off, the plug ends with their web address (plauditdesign.com), including the announcer spelling out the word "plaudit."

If I were the writer, I might have used the challenge of recognizing and spelling that word as a way of prequalifying the leads generated by the spot. Because if the client can't spell plaudit, do you want to work with them on something as complex as building a website?

Chipotle Firings, Burrito Logo

Today's Star Tribune greeted me with a story about a massive worker firing at the Twin Cities Chipotle chain.


I read the story, which told how hundreds of Chipotle workers were summarily fired after the INS audited the company's HR records. There were lots of questions: Did the company delay paying the fired workers what they were owed? Did the company give the employees, many of whom had worked there for years, a chance to provide documentation?

But on top of all those questions, I also couldn't figure out why the Strib had put a Chipotle burrito above the story, next to their logo.


But then I looked at it a little more closely and realized it was a photo of the Metrodome with its collapsed roof:


For some reason, the designers decided to run the photo with curved corners and in the slightly low-fi world of newspaper printing, that snowy sunken roof looks just like the glinting highlights of a foil-wrapped burrito if it were printed on newsprint.

A Paean to Printers

Book artist Xavier Antin has created an edition of 100 books printed with four machines from four technological eras.


Called Just in Time: A Short History of Production, the book is printed in the usual process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black), but each of the colors is applied by one of the printers as the sheet of paper drops into its paper feed.

The oldest printer, an 1880 stencil duplicator (known to us oldsters as a mimeograph) was used for the magenta; a 1923 spirit duplicator (again, the trademarked name we know is ditto) printed the cyan color; a 1969 laser printer did the black, and a 1976 inkjet laid down the final color, yellow.


You can see the result doesn't look like commercial printing, nor is it intended to. I'd love to see one in person.

Dittos and mimeos hold a special place in my memory. I can still remember the smell of a fresh ditto; I imagine those solvents were responsible for the loss of a few of my brain cells. The mimeo were patented by Thomas Edison (I didn't know that!) and licensed to the eponymous A.B. Dick in 1887. It was Dick who trademarked the name "mimeo."

The irregular newspaper I edited my senior year of high school in the late 1970s was first printed with purple dittos; we were thrilled to be upgraded to mimeos after a few issues. It was even more special when we got access to the electrostencil machine, which made it possible to draw artwork and have it burned into a stencil, rather than trying to draw on the stencil.

Mimeos were completely supplanted by photocopiers after I left college. According to the Wikipedia, they're still common in developing countries because they're cheap, easy to use and fix, and can be run without electricity. Sounds like a good reason to bring them back here, too. Here's another cool fact: the sheets were made from waxed mulberry paper.

I didn't see my first laser printer until 1985. Because I was accustomed by then to phototypesetting machines, which made a symphony of clunks and clicks as they set type, I almost couldn't believe it when the laser printer silently spat out a sheet of black type without the aid of photochemicals. I knew then that the end of typesetting was in sight.

via Boing Boing

Media Weirdness on a Winter's Night

It's supposed to hit 20 below zero tomorrow night, so it's time to turn a cold eye to a few bits o' media weirdness from recent days.


This dog-bites-man story was on the front page of the Star Tribune. It must have been a slow news day.


I hope I'm misunderstanding this ad for Medica, one of our local HMOs. I've read it multiple times, trying to see if there's a twist in the copy that would make it clever or sarcastic. But all I get is that it would be good for these kids to look like the guy on the magazine, who clearly used some type of steroids. If Medica meant to say that looking like this is unhealthy, this ad utterly fails.


It was only a month ago that I noted a Star Tribune obit that used the dated, offensive phrase "in her own right." Today's paper used those words when describing Dr. Maxine Heinrich Amplatz. It wasn't the first time sexism played a role in Amplatz's life:

As a young woman, Maxine Amplatz bussed tables to pay for medical school in Texas. She graduated at the top of her class -- only to discover that the powers that be didn't want a woman to be valedictorian.

"Her school offered her a $100 scholarship to give up the valedictory speech," her daughter said. And because finances were tight, "she gladly took the money."

Later, she developed depression after three of her four children were born, and battled it the rest of her life. Looked at by an outsider like me, Amplatz's life seems to be an exemplar from The Feminine Mystique. So having the Strib use the faint-praise phrase "her own right" seems even more inappropriate.

Zenith Puzzles, to David from Grandma Clara

At some point, I had the habit of trawling antique stores, looking for anything interesting. What did I mean by interesting? I'm not sure. Usually it involved old packaging, which is often good for design inspiration.

Somewhere along the way, we picked up this set of puzzles, maybe as a toy for Daughter Number Three-Point-One, or maybe because of the box. But it's been sitting in the basement for a while, and it's time for it to move on.


But first, an appreciation for its classic appearance. I appreciate that it was sold as "suitable for boys and girls," unlike so many toys these days that take gendering to an absurd level.


Inside, the puzzles came attached to the cardboard liner.


It has a set of instructions, dated 1950.

Imagine anyone selling a toy this simple today. Puzzles like this are still sold, don't get me wrong. But they each come in their own little plastic box, where the packaging costs more than the product.

And here's the most poignant component of the Zenith puzzle box that's spent the last decade or so in my basement.


Who was David? Did he play with the puzzles? Did his mother make him leave the gift card inside the box so that he'd write a thank you note? And who finally sold the puzzles, David or his parents?

It's an odd thing to feel nostalgia for someone else's past.

Colleen Rowley: Dissent Does Not Equal Terrorism

Colleen Rowley, a former FBI agent known for her attempt to alert the agency to one of the 9/11 hijackers before the attack, had this to say in Sunday's Star Tribune about the recent raids of peace activists' homes.

At issue is the Patriot Act (no surprise), which changed the definition of "material support of terrorism" to include "expert advice and assistance" given to "foreign terrorist organizations."

Rowley provides a couple of choice quotes showing how anti-terrorism officials think:

In 2003, a spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center said, apparently without thinking too hard, that evidence wasn't needed to issue warnings about war protesters: "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that [protest]. ... You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act."

In a similar vein, the Department of Defense asked on its annual mandatory antiterrorism test, "What is an example of low-level terrorism activity?" The correct answer was "protest."

Following this type of logic, the FBI raided the homes of six people and the Justice Department has called them to testify at a Grand Jury investigating who knows what.

Thanks to Rowley for reminding us all of the raids. They're a bad use of taxpayer money, as well as a clear infringement of First Amendment rights.

Reading John Rebus

Inspector John Rebus is a man evolving and devolving, drowning in sadness and loss but still managing to solve intersecting crimes that expose the underside of the Scottish capital city he loves. In 17 novels, Ian Rankin has explored both Rebus and Edinburgh, as Rebus ages ungracefully and Edinburgh is constantly reborn.

Meet John Rebus

I discovered Rebus during a Scotland visit in 2007. The house I stayed in had shelves and shelves of books, but one title sprang out at me even though it was just one spine among many: Fleshmarket Close. I'm always a sucker for a great title, and this one was racy but enigmatic. Sightseeing in Edinburgh a few days later, I realized Fleshmarket Close was the name of a narrow street that runs off the Royal Mile. It had literally been a fleshmarket, where meat had been sold.

I bought a copy of the book not long after returning home (the name was changed to Fleshmarket Alley for the U.S. market, unfortunately) and was hooked. I scrounged every title I could find at the library, reading forwards and backwards in Rebus's timeline.

I managed to read seven of the 17 books this way, completely out of sequence, but I had entered Rebus's life only a few titles before the last book, so it was a less than ideal way to meet the guy. A few months ago, after reading one of the earliest books (number 4, Strip Jack) I wandered into the Minneapolis mystery bookstore Once Upon a Crime and found they had the entire set. On impulse, I bought every book I hadn't read. I've been working my way through them ever since.

The Books

I don't usually read murder mysteries or police procedurals, and if my introduction to Rebus had been the first novel, Knots and Crosses, I doubt I would have read the others. It's not bad; it's just typical of everything I assume about the genre -- too tight a plot, too many coincidences, a character with an emotional life that feels a little too contrived.

The third book, Tooth and Nail, is my least favorite, because it forces the reader into a first-person account of a serial killer. No thanks -- that's not something I want to read again. But I knew that Rankin never used this technique in the later books, so I put up with it.

Somewhere around or just after number 4, Strip Jack, Rankin finally found the real inner life of John Rebus and also learned to plot his stories in what appears to be an effortless way. It's amazing how he can pull apparently unrelated events together into a single, interrelated chain of events without forcing the pegs into their holes.

I don't ever want to see the television series that has been made; I guess that shows how much I admire the books. I can't stand to see how they would be simplified.

The Language

Late in my reading, I started keeping a list of words I was learning from the books. I wish I'd thought of this sooner, because I'm sure there were lots of others.

Irn-bru -- I never looked this up until I'd read at least nine of the books. From the context, I knew it was some type of drink, but I didn't realize it is a bright orange soft drink that's come to be a symbol of Scotland, standing up to the invasion of Coca-Cola and other multinational brands. Daughter Number Three-Point-One has tried some (as it's sold in the U.S.) and says it tastes like a melted popsicle mixed with cough syrup.

setts -- quarried stones used to create a paved street. Different from cobblestones, which are naturally shaped. Referenced frequently in the books because they must make for a jarring drive. Before looking it up, I had imagined they were some type of traffic-calming device or directional barrier that kept people from driving the wrong way on a one-way street. So much for figuring it out meaning from context.

harled -- the walls of buildings are sometimes described as harled, which is a time-tested Scottish method of making maintenance-free exteriors. According to the Wikipedia, the harling process involves plaster, pebbles, and lime wash and results in a surface that breathes, so it won't crack in the cold Scottish winter.

thrawn -- a Scottish word for crooked/twisted/misshapen or perverse/contrary. If you Google it you'll also find out it's the name of a Star Wars villain.

invigilator -- according to the Free Dictionary, this is "someone who watches examination candidates to prevent cheating." Which I gather is a term commonly known in the U.K. With our current test hysteria in the U.S., I suppose this will soon come into vogue here, too.

The City

Rebus gives the reader an anti-grand tour of Edinburgh, including many visits to the public housing projects that are never on a tourist's list of sights, the docks, bridges, parks, rock outcroppings, not to mention the libraries, prisons, and many a public house.

The last half-dozen books take place during the half-decade or so when the Scottish Parliament building was being planned, built or had just opened, and the change in that part of the city is described in vivid detail.


The post-modern Parliament building, adjoining the historic Queensberry House with the red roof. One of the Rebus murders is set in Queensberry House. On Calton Hill in the background are the Nelson Monument (left) and National Monument (right). Photo by Ed O'Keefe

I have to go back, now that I've learned so much more about the place. I'll just be sure not to visit during the Edinburgh Festival in August, which all the locals, including Rebus, hate and try to avoid.

_____________

Here's a list of all the novels, taken from the Inspector Rebus Wikipedia page:

1. Knots and Crosses (1987)
2. Hide and Seek (1991)
3. Tooth and Nail (original title Wolfman) (1992)
4. Strip Jack (1992)
5. The Black Book (1993)
6. Mortal Causes (1994)
7. Let it Bleed (1996)
8. Black and Blue (1997)
9. The Hanging Garden (1998)
10. Dead Souls (1999)
11. Set in Darkness (2000)
12. The Falls (2001)
13. Resurrection Men (2002)
14. A Question of Blood (2003)
15. Fleshmarket Close (published in the USA as Fleshmarket Alley) (2004)
16. The Naming of the Dead (2006)
17. Exit Music (2007)

Plus two short story collections A Good Hanging and Beggars's Banquet, and some other short stories as yet uncollected.

Fake AP Stylebook

Twitter's impostors make life a little bit more fun.

For a while, Angry Paul Rand (later replaced by Nice Paul Rand) skewered the graphic design world. Many impostors' names acknowledge they are not the real person or institution, although others give no hint they aren't official, such as BP Public Relations. (I suppose it's obvious that almightygod isn't actually on Twitter.)

My current favorite is Fake AP Stylebook, using its 140-character bursts to point out the inconsistencies, foibles, and hypocrisies of journalism. Here are a few recent favorites:

It is actually illegal to do a story on technology trends without asking where flying cars are. (January 7)

Remember what happens when you assume: you save yourself a lot of work. (January 3)

Charities only ever do anything around Christmas, so limit coverage on them to mid-to-late December. (December 21)

A fact that is contrary to the misconceptions of the majority of your readers is "opinion," and should be avoided. (January 5)

You know, "yam" is one letter away from "yum." That ought to take care of most of the headlines in your Food section. (November 24)

Run stories about white people concerned about being overrun by illegal immigrants alongside kids' accounts of the first Thanksgiving. (November 22)

You can replace comic strips that are ending with strips created this century, or just run more ads for used cars. Your call. (November 17)

Fake AP Stylebook is written by a group called The Bureau Chiefs. They've just signed a book deal, like so many other comedic writers who have found an audience on the interweb (think Cake Wrecks, the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, or Stuff White People Like).

Best Typo Ever

From Dear Abby in the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

In, On, Sofa, Couch

Did you ever wonder why we sit in a chair, but on a sofa?

At least to me, it sounds a bit odd to say I sat on a chair... it only makes sense if I were perching on the arm of the chair, rather than on the seat.

Although sit in the sofa sounds even worse. As if the cushions had been cut open and you were nesting inside them.

Oh, and this reminds me: I grew up calling an upholstered, multi-seat piece of living room furniture a couch, rather than a sofa, but found out couch was hopelessly wrong when I worked for a hip furniture company. My grandmother called the same piece of furniture a davenport, which none of us ever understood.

More from Billy Bragg

I admit to following English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg on Facebook. Here are a couple of neat items I got from his newsfeed recently.

First, a quote of his from a Guardian article about him:

The market's like fire, you know? Constrain it, harness it, and it'll provide you with warmth and light and heat for your cooking … Let it rip, and it'll destroy everything you hold dear.

Then, on a completely different note, this post on Facebook:

Finally found time over the weekend to play with my Xmas present - a 35mm film negative scanner. Had a lot of fun digitising photos from the 1970s. Much mirth about my bad haircuts and sartorial choices, but here's one that had my son green with envy: me having just received tickets to see the Who at Charlton and the Stones at Earls Court in June 1976.

Here's a more recent photo to show what he looks like these days.

The Freak Observer Wins!

Congratulations to Blythe Woolston, whose first novel, The Freak Observer, just won the William C. Morris Debut Award.

One reason I'm glad is that it means every library will have at least one copy, and more people will get to read it.

One Reason Spelling Reform Would Be Bad

The NPR Sunday Puzzle by Will Shortz reminded me of something that would be lost if we ever managed to bring about English spelling reform (here's my earlier post on that topic).

Shortz provided a two-word hint phrase. The contestant was supposed to think of a synonymous two-word phrase in which the words look like they should rhyme, but they don't. (Listen to it here.)

The phrases were:

hears bears
shows cows
clasps wasps
gives wives
bans swans
rolls dolls
wounds hounds
halves valves
sands wands
breaks streaks
does toes

It's pretty silly that those sets of words don't rhyme, but the fact that they don't makes for a nifty puzzle.

Emanuel Schongut, Part 2

I just discovered a couple of sites that display nice scans of Emanuel Schongut's book cover art, here, here and here.


Worth checking out, if you like his work as I do. It seems Schongut's fans are finally finding their way into the interweb... maybe we should get organized!

Scardigan!

Here's a fun bit of apparel, which my significant other just received as a birthday present from his parents. It belonged to his grandfather, so that gives you an idea of the vintage.

It's a scarf... no, wait, it's a dicky-form cardigan:


It's a Scardigan!


I love the little pockets and the buttons.


And the cute fringe at the bottom. Although the fringe makes it look a lot more like a scarf and less like a cardigan.

Nosing around the interweb, I see that some Scardigans look more like cable-knit sweaters. Perfect for the man whose abdomen gets cold when he's wearing a sport jacket that's too small to allow a full sweater underneath.

Silhouettes Matter

What adjectives would you assign to the people represented by these four silhouettes? (No points will be given for "badly drawn.")


Think about it for few minutes. No peeking down below.









First, I'll tell you what mine were, from left to right:

Woman 1: Overweight*, realistic, comfortable, mobile
Woman 2: Insect-like (check out those legs), unrealistic, unbusinesslike, partygoing, posing
Man 1: Confident, businesslike
Man 2: Schlumpy, defeated, overweight, informal

Now for the context. These illustrations appeared with a Star Tribune story about recent research that found skinny women are paid more than normal-weight ones, and much more than overweight or obese women. Skinny men, on the other hand, are paid less than normal to overweight ones. Obese men were paid less also.

Here's how the illustrations were used:


Front page of the Variety section; the illustration is about a quarter of the page.


Next to the jump head on page 2; the illustration is about 1" x 2".

Were sloppy, dishonest or lazy the words you would have assigned to woman 1? Did driven, successful and hard-working pop into your head when viewing woman 2?

I have no argument with research that finds people think these things in general, or that companies pay their employees differently based on appearance. (Although I did wonder how the researchers controlled for other factors.) But I do think the Strib blew it when attempting to illustrate the research findings.

Why does the thin woman have to pose like a model, standing in the classic all-your-weight-on-one-foot stance? Confident people stand on two feet (like the normal weight man). The point of this type of bent-kneed pose is to make the woman look vulnerable.

And the contrast of pose between the two men isn't much better, serving only to exaggerate their differences. The overweight man would look less schumpy and defeated if his silhouette was shown straight on.

To make the illustration helpful rather than misleading, the Strib designers should have used the same pose for all four illustrations, or at least a common pose for the women and a common one for the men. But that would have been more work on deadline, I imagine; they would have had to shoot photos to use as reference instead of just trawling through a stock photo site.

One final note on the incompetence of the drawings: Silhouettes are a lot harder to do well than people think they are, but little effort seems to have gone into these particular ones. The shapes of the skinny woman's knees are bizarre and I still haven't figured out if she has three feet or not. The overweight man's gut, while not completely unrealistic, seems to have been exaggerated. And the fussy little shadows below the figures gave me quite a laugh -- they should begin just below the feet, as they do in the skinny woman drawing. In the overweight woman and normal-weight man images, the shadows make it appear as though the people are standing on one foot.

No wonder these illustrations ran without crediting the artist.

________

* I'm chagrined to admit that "overweight" is one of the first words to pop into my head when I look at woman 1 (although her shape is pretty similar to mine). I would have qualified it with "somewhat" or "slightly," but was trying to stick to just one word per thought.

I Read and Obey

Why did I keep this useless bit of paper for over a decade? Obedient must be my middle name.

No more, though. It's gone into the recycling.

The Joys of Transposition

There's an old saying in the Untied Staets: You catch more files with honey.

One More for the Logo Pile

Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources recently held a press conference to show off the new logo for the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment. This logo will mark every site and event that receives funding from the taxpayers through the Legacy Amendment.


The new logo was created by Bernadette Stephenson, a graphic designer from St. Cloud. Stephenson wasn't hired by the DNR to create the logo, however -- her work is the result of a contest. About 70 logos were submitted, and Stephenson's was one of three finalists.

I would love to see the other two finalists. Heck, I'd like to see all the entries. The challenge was pretty silly: Create a mark for a program that has a six-word name, while also representing four divergent areas of funding (clean water, the outdoors, parks and trails, and arts and culture). Right from the start, it's a stupid assignment from which no good can come.

Given the unrealistic requirements, I'd say Stephenson did about as much as could be expected. A couple of problems I have with specifics of her logo are:

• It's too busy to be a great logo. But that's clearly not her fault, given the rules for submission. She did her best to unify the four disparate areas. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the logo is a good concept for a poster... it's just not a logo.
• The stacked vertical shape will be a problem for every designer who has to use it. Possibly, Stephenson has been asked to make an alternate version, something like this. At least, I hope so:
  
• When I first saw it, I couldn't figure out what the illustration in the blue area was supposed to represent... then realized it was a fish, and now can't believe I didn't see it. Is that just me?
• What happened to the damned comma? Now we're saddled with Clean Water Land forever. Actually, I know what happened to it -- it was left out on purpose because it wouldn't allow the R in WATER to align on the right side with the letters above and below it.
• The spacing between the letters, particularly in WATER, is not very good. Bad kerning like this is always easiest to spot if you look at the typography upside down. Notice how much more space there is on either side of the A than there is on either side of the E:
  
• The logo doesn't work very well in black and white, as I saw it in the Star Tribune this morning. This may seem picky in an era of all-color-all-the-time websites and cheap color printing, but it's still important to make sure a logo will have visual impact in black and white. It also won't work very well when it's small. And small and black and white will be quite bad.

Despite all of these problems, the Legacy Amendment has instantly improved the average quality of Minnesota state government logos. Here's the hit parade, from best to worst:


MPCA wins the prize for the best state agency or department logo. Somebody there knows what they're doing, as evidenced by the beautiful displays they've put on for years at the Living Green Expo and the State Fair. Although I have a feeling the little white Minnesota shape inside the green area was added after a committee insisted on it.


Both the Ag and Labor department logos are inoffensively professional, although a bit generic with their swooshes and cogs.


Nothing much to like or dislike among these three logos. The VA logo echoes the federal VA logo and is executed in an understated way. The Health and Children, Families & Learning logos stick to type treatments, which are usually a safer bet. (Although the CF&L logo goes a bit off the rails in terms of readability when it's used small, as it is here.)


Education's logo tries too hard with the scripts and the line between the words, and uses the apple cliché, too. The DOC gets points for restraint (no pun intended), but I am so creeped out by that menacing symbol -- yes, the state plans to lock up every last resident. And soon!


I've never understood the DOT logo. Somehow, a pine tree and a star don't say much about Transportation. In fact, when I first moved to Minnesota, I thought this was the DNR logo.

And the DNR logo looks about as unnatural as a logo can get. So here's my suggestion: The two departments should switch logos, and the DOT can substitute a more appropriate symbol to obstruct the center of the state's outline:


One other thing that bugs me about the DOT logo, while I'm at it. Whose idea was it to put the word Minnesota at the top of the circle, right side up, and the rest of the name wrapping around the bottom, reading in the opposite direction? After reading Minnesota, it's way too easy to start reading the next word as NOI and then run into that upside-down T.

The VA logo's approach is a lot easier to read.


Finally, the bottom of an almost-bottomless barrel. Human Services got out the clip art to represent every type of person, and then made it worse by putting all the type in a single line so that it's tiny. This logo is unreadable at any size a logo would usually be seen at.

Public Safety's logo is generally boring and generic (another outline of the state of Minnesota -- thanks!) but the triangle with the star in the center overlaying the state appears to be random graphic junk, unless it's some kind of Masonic symbol I'm not clued in on.

The Commerce logo is just ugly. Yet another outline of the state, overlaid with a badly drawn script letter C. Honestly, I cringe each time I see this.

Good or bad, though, one overriding thing that stands out when looking at all of these logos is that they make the state appear completely incoherent. Now that's a message I'll bet they didn't mean to send. But it's not hard to understand how it happened, once you consider the bad logo that started it all, our Minnesota State Seal:


Compared to the Seal, the Legacy Amendment logo looks pretty good.