The Meaning of an Extra Period

Wish I'd seen this for myself, but the photo is almost as good.


From the Twitter feed of Hemant Mehta.

Signs from a City that Shall Remain Nameless in this Title

I've heard the entry sign to Intercourse, Pennsylvania, is the most photographed one in the U.S.

Well, here it is:


You'll note that it doesn't say "Welcome to Intercourse."

The folks in these parts seem a bit reluctant to use the name of their town as the lead-in to their business name. Most signs say the name and then add Intercourse, Pa., below it, which isn't as funny to the 7th grader hiding out in my brain.

Here are a few that did allow me to channel my long-lost preteen:


Yes, put that fire out!


If only it could be preserved this easily.


So that's where Amish handcrafts come from.


Probably the best one of all. Note the Official Emission Station sign at right.

One final joke: I couldn't believe how easy it was to stop anywhere I wanted in the middle of Intercourse to take a picture.

A Logo for the Ages

I usually gripe about logos, and, it seems, especially bank logos. So if I see one that's acceptable, I feel a responsibility to note it.

I had commented on a different bank logo just the day before: "Bank logos are so bad because they have nothing to symbolize. What does a bank do that you can make an image of?"

So I was pleasantly surprised to see one where the bank got around that problem by referring to its age and connection to the community. Even better, it then created a visually pleasing, attention-getting mark to convey that concept:

I'm less crazy about the font they chose for the name. Sans serif seems right, but edging toward the pseudo-futuristic is a bit off.

The bank's tag line is "Rooted in Things that Matter." It was originally founded in 1870 as Seneca Falls Savings Bank, a perfectly good name, really.

But there's only so much a bank can do -- when you get to the fine print, it sounds just about as inhuman as the next corporation:

In March 2000, [the bank] reorganized into the two-tier mutual holding company structure. As part of the reorganization, the bank became a wholly owned subsidiary of Seneca-Cayuga Bancorp, Inc., and Seneca-Cayuga Bancorp, Inc. became the wholly owned subsidiary of Seneca Falls Savings Bank, MHC. The same directors and certain officers who manage the bank manage Seneca-Cayuga Bancorp, Inc. and Seneca Falls Savings Bank, MHC. In 2012, the bank's name and the insurance agency's name were changed to Generations Bank and Generations Agency respectively.

Seen in Auburn, New York.

Boilerplate for My Day Job

I don't write often about the ins and outs of the design world (my day job), but this recent item from Twitter seemed like it deserved its own post. Written by Andrew Clarke, a U.K. designer and web developer:

Hey James,

Thanks for writing and for thinking about us. We'd love to help you with your branding and website design but I'm afraid your £1,500 budget is an issue.

If a web designer charges £60 per hour -- not an unreasonable rate and certainly not excessive in comparison to other professionals, such as lawyers or even plumbers -- that's £480.00 per day for an eight-hour day. Divide your budget by that and you get just over three days.

I don't think you'll find even the most efficient designer who can produce new branding and design and develop a website in three days.

To answer your questions:

1. Are you able to give an estimate of what a website with this content may cost?

Yes.

2. Will it be possible to get some of your ideas on look and feel, colors, etc.?

I'm sorry but no designer should work on spec, before being properly commissioned to take on the work.

3. Can you supply the professional graphics and will I own this once the site is developed?

Yes. And when all bills are paid, you'll own all the work.

4. Can you help with Logo design once I finalize the company name?

Definitely. We'd love, love, love to help you.

Love,

Andrew Clarke
Designer, author and podcaster of Unfinished Business

Summer Time, and the Tweeting Is Easy

July 2013 includes a lot of tweets about George Zimmerman and institutionalized racism, plus a little bit of Egypt, Edward Snowden, and Jenny McCarthy. But only two about the royal baby, and they're good ones.

Learning about feminism is like learning about typography. Once you know, you see the injustice everywhere. And it hurts.
By Jan Lehnardt


This is another one of those "Adulthood Tests" isn't it?
By Garrett Miller

God grant me the serenity to accept the tabs I cannot close, the courage to close the ones I can, and the strength to know the difference.
By Laura June

I wonder if we're reaching the point where genuine human emotion is cliché and a sign of bad writing.
By Ryan Dow 

Will the people who won't let public speakers be clear just stop.
By Chris Steller 

Girl are you a copy editor ’cause your body is [sic].
By matt 

You know how women writers have had to write under male names for centuries? Male developers should release code as women just to see the hatred.
By Jack Danger Canty

The more roads you build the more parking you need. Cars don't fit in cities.
By Free Public Transit 

Dear President Obama: If Michelle Bachmann and yourself both agree on NSA dragnet surveillance, I'd suggest you get a reality check.
By Nikhil Goyal 

The royal birth cost $15,000. The average American birth is billed at $30,000.
By Ezra Klein 

My daughter asked 2 questions tonight; why don't women have a Tour De France & why do women stand on the podium doing nothing. I had nothing
By Simon Clancy

"Millennials are lazy," declares generation that could spend an entire decade hitchhiking on acid and still buy a house before age 30.
By Michael Hingston

Let's respect the fact that the Royal Baby is very important to people who have no concept of what is and isn't important.
By Frank Conniff 

What did we we not want to know and when did we not want to know it? #Weiner
By Chris Steller 

It's really touching to see so many white conservatives all torn up about the number of black youths being killed in Chicago.
By Christopher Hayes 

If a restaurant's website doesn't have a long musical intro, how can we ever know if we're in for an elegant dining experience?
By Julieanne Smolinski

We can put a man on the moon yet we still keep using the same dated analogy for scientific progress.
By matt 

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT. Does it change the myth of Sisyphus for you if Sisyphus is paid? Does it make it better or worse?
By errolmorris

"Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it’s easier, it scales and it’s profitable."—Seth Godin
By Nikhil Goyal 

"Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?" -Edith Wharton. Flip this: Make Ideals Real
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter 

Great news if you lose your job! Thomas Friedman says you can make living renting out your kid's room, power tools and car. PROBLEM SOLVED.
By Tom Tomorrow

Do white folks using the term 'reverse racism' know they're admitting that white folks are the source of racism?
By Sherman Alexie

Nowadays they don't say the N word. They say code words like Detroit, Stand Your Ground, Voter ID and food stamps that mean the same thing.
By Keith Boykin 

Everyone SAYS they want a fairytale wedding but when I show up and curse their firstborn suddenly I’m a jerk.
By Atom Bombshell

A thrill of being indie is earning money even while you’re "not working." The flip side is earning nothing even as you work your ass off...
By Daniel Jalkut

Opinions are like assholes. Everyone wishes strangers would unreservedly compliment theirs.
By Merlin Mann  

99 little bugs in the code 99 little bugs in the code Take one down, patch it around 117 little bugs in the code
By Alex Gnatishin 

Note: when a black man (the Prez) discusses racial profiling he's "dividing the country" but when whites deny racism they're uniters!
By Tim Wise

Can Ta-Nehisi Coates please replace David Brooks on the @nytimes Op-Ed page?
By Nikhil Goyal 

When did the pretentious of "Let me know your thoughts" replace the simple "Let me know what you think?" #BusinessSpeak
By Robert O. Simonson 

No offense, but am I the only one entirely failing to see the hotness of that Tsarnaev photo?
By Monika Bauerlein 

Don’t let anyone tell you that public education cannot work. If we give students dominion, honor teachers, fund schools adequately, it can.
By Nikhil Goyal 

I think we'd mind insomnia less if we thought of it as a fun little art house retrospective of all the worst things we've ever said or done.
By Julieanne Smolinski

Big difference between OJ case & Zimmerman case is that after OJ got off every white blonde woman in America wasn't afraid for her life.
By W. Kamau Bell

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating people who are being oppressed, and loving people who are doing the oppressing.”
By Nikhil Goyal 

Sometimes, I look at "news" story and feel like reporting on it just gives the stupid what it wants. #JennyMcCarthy
By Maggie Koerth-Baker 

Horrible that USA Today describes the link between vaccines & autism as "controversial" instead of "a goddamn lie."
By Anil Dash

Unlike Florida today, only if threatened by another gun did "Wild West" codes of conduct allow you to shoot another person.
By Neil deGrasse Tyson

If only Zimmerman had leaked government surveillance documents. Or shared JSTOR articles. Or sold weed.
By Joshua Eaton

If the networks that went wall-to-wall Zimmerman can't be bothered to cover protests after the trial maybe they need to be sites of protest.
By Jay Rosen 

How do you know when race has something to do with it? You see white dudes forcefully trying to explain why race has nothing to do with it
By leighalexander


Why hasn't EVERYONE RT'd this by @johndonoghue64: Anyone got a photo of a church that looks like a confused chicken?
By Philip Ardagh

Idea: Thought Leader-hosen
By Chris Steller 

Arizona: "At least we're not Texas." Texas: "At least we're not Florida." Florida: "You can't prove we're Florida."
By Guy Endore-Kaiser

If only Zimmerman had taken this long to decide if someone was guilty.
By Alex Baze

The great thing about the phrase "clothes horse" is how perfectly it sums up horses' notorious love of clothing.
By Tim Carvell 

A person who is nice to you but is not nice to the waiter is not a nice person.
By Bill Murray

The fundamental danger of an acquittal is not more riots, it is more George ZImmermans.
By jay smooth

Oh, Galleria. You make me want to sell everything I own & never buy anything again unless it's a boat to take me far, far away from you.
By Molly Priesmeyer 

Ten out of one women is a Russian Nesting Doll
By Megan Amram

AKA fear of being treated like you treat women. RT: @homophobes: Homophobia Driven By Fear of Unwanted Sexual Advances
By Erika Hall

I keep reading about these amazing designers who live perfect minimalist lives. Three kids will mess your shit up I'll tell you that much.
By Josh Williams 

Cars selling like hot cakes, methane melt plumes are 1km in diameter, and #freetransit is extreme?
By Free Public Transit 

Walmart finds it outrageous someone would use their power to dictate payment levels. Wonder what their suppliers think of that
By ryangrim 

Diamonds are a terrible, deadly scam so please let's stop getting engaged with them, okay?
By lia bulaong

I would be an awesome mom, but only for 15 minutes a day. Which is pretty much the culturally-accepted definition of an awesome dad.
By Paul Ford


DontSpy
By Bruce Sterling

"Too Old" Hillary is 65. "Inexperienced" Warren is 64. Funny thing about double standards. Whatever they are, you can't live up to them
By Wyeth Ruthven 

Sometimes I think the "artists must never have a profit motive" thing is so they can be easily manipulated by people who do.
By Brooks Sligh

Autocorrect tried to turn "gov't" into "gotcha"
By Chris Steller 

If ignorance is bliss, then why are Glenn Beck’s supporters so unhappy?
By Joel Ross Housman 

If we provide free buses, we get immediate payback of all the benefits of fewer cars on the road. A medium city exports $1.5M a day for gas.
By Free Public Transit 

Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.
By Kyle Marquis  

Please check to make sure your industry is dominated by the children of subsistence farmers before calling it a pure meritocracy.
By Pinboard

Things Our Children Won't Understand: a phone ringing and someone yelling "I'll get it!"
By Cabel M. Sasser

Just very quietly saying “lean in” during times of stress is a great way to completely enrage the women in your life.
By Paul Ford

The increasingly ubiquitous social sharing prompts at the end of user workflows are the “exit through the gift shop” of consumer computing.
By Alex Payne


The time an interviewer tried to get Toni Morrison to shame pregnant teens, and she was totally not having it.
By D. M. 

Is it just me, or do feral children seem less respectful, more unfocused, and have bad attitude these days?
By Bigfoot TheBigfoot 

Mandatory ultrasound before you can get an abortion. Brought to you by the people who pretended to fear "government takeover of healthcare"
By The Mountain Goats

People who don’t build things themselves greatly overestimate the value of ideas.
By Luke Chamberlin

You have to admire the Kochs. They realized they could only buy 1% of climate scientists, so they bought 99% of GOP politicians instead
By Donald J. Drumpf 

David Brooks says Islamists "lack the mental equipment to govern." Too bad they can't be as smart as neocons and advocate disastrous wars.
By Robert Wright

Capitalism wasted the oil and created an unequal mess. Does anyone expect it to be sensible and fair about #degrowth?
By Free Public Transit 

Funny how genetics folks always think genetics is key to improving agriculture, when much of world is actually limited by soil and water.
By Jonathan Foley 

We already have a punctuation mark for sarcasm, it’s called the period.
By Okay Type 

Canada is a chilling reminder of what would have happened if there had been no Declaration of Independence
By Pinboard 

I don't like when people ask me what my five or ten year plan is. Treat every day like your last.
By Nikhil Goyal 

America is a place with a lot of imperfections where you feel there's always a chance of those problems being fixed
By Zaid Jilani 

Take a minute this July 4th to thank the immigrants and socialists that made America free.
By Mike Monteiro

If structural racism benefits me everyday, what good does it do to think of myself as "not racist"? Make me feel better?
By Brother Ali

"Vision without execution is hallucination.". Thomas Edison.
By Neil Hawkins 

North Americans use more electricity on Christmas lights than the entire yearly usage of the entire African continent.
By Injustice Facts 

I'll admit that a small, conservative part of me looks at Egypt and thinks living in a revolutionary society would be *exhausting*.
By Christopher Hayes

Egyptian Army says Morsi is now its "guest" -- then that's all he ever was: in a coup-driven system, a president is always the army's guest.
By Philip Gourevitch 

Imagine how woefully uninformed you'd be if you get all your news from TV. That's a majority of the population.
By Anthony De Rosa

So glad the NC state legislature is attaching abortion restrictions to an *anti-Sharia* bill, because basing laws on religious texts would be crazy!
By sethdmichaels

I hope all the journalists penning anti-leak screeds will foreswear the use of anonymous sources from here on out.
By Tom Tomorrow 

from @CNN tonight: " N word or cracker...which is more offensive?". Probably the one you won't spell out, you fucking hacks. Just a guess.
By el-p

No, no, "cracker" isn't the "N-word" for white people. You want to drive a white person crazy? Call him a "racist."
By daveweigel

"Winning over Hispanics" seems sorta like walking up to a woman and patiently, awkwardly mansplaining that you're going to get her to kiss you.
By James Poulos

The proper collective noun is "an intrusion of cockroaches. God Bless the English Language
By Nicholas Beaudrot 

I regularly give thanks for various failures at learning social rules -- poor gender socialization has done wonders for me.
By Nancy Sims 

Said a white, old man. MT @aspenideas You need to be a pretty serious drug offender to go to jail. - Asa Hutchinson #AspenIdeas
By Nikhil Goyal 

All that surveillance, and yet there seems to exist just one goddamned picture of Edward Snowden.
By Paul Kafasis


1 car space = 10 bicycles
By erik spiekermann

Here's an #aspenideas idea: hold these sort of things, not in Aspen, but some super poor town in middle America where no one has a job.
By ... (@hoosier114)

Think #freetransit is only about oil? It makes the city attractive, shows the auto unnecessary, and breaks the critical mass of #autosprawl.
By Free Public Transit 

Unlike #Zimmerman, the average racist doesn't have the guts to hunt & kill a black person, so they use Twitter as a fantasy lynching league.
By W. Kamau Bell

Never forget that the U.S. Government classified Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and the CIA helped have him imprisoned for most of his life.
By Jonathan McIntosh

Where the Stick Figure Families Come From

Those stick-figure drawings that appear on minivans became a "thing" while I wasn't paying attention. In fact, they didn't rise into my consciousness until I saw a negative comment on Twitter:

I can ignore your stick figure family or a pithy right-wing rant, but my god if you have a “Swim Taxi” sticker I'm running you off the road. (By @AmyJane)

Since then, in true Baader Meinhof phenomenon fashion, I've been noticing them everywhere.

Yesterday, while shopping in a small-town grocery store, I found out where some of them come from:


These are not the only versions in circulation, however: Googling shows there are lots of people who've gotten in on the sales action. And lots of haters out there, too.

Don't Question the Chickens

What motivates any particular person to put a sticker on the bumper of her car? There has to be some element of presenting the self to the rest of the world. This is known to have implications.

But when the message you're motivated enough to adhere to your $15,000+ investment using permanent glue is something like these words, I wonder if those implications still apply:



Past bumper sticker posts:

• Watch Out for Those Bumpers
• Stickers of Late
• But What Do You Really Think?
• Sticking It to Them
• Possibly, They Hold the Truck Together
• Misuse of a Semicolon
• Say It Loud, I'm Whack and Proud
• From Bumper to Bumper
• Possibly the Worst Bumper Sticker Design of All Time

No T for You

Whenever you see a 0 (zero) used in the wording of a vanity license plate, it means the plate belongs to an amateur radio operator, and the plate is the person's call sign.

Recently, I saw this call on a plate:


It's a well-known fact that states won't issue vanity plates with messages that could be considered offensive, and also that they screen out three-letter combinations in their standard plates that could be read as offensive, such as FAT.

This ham radio operator's call is one that probably wouldn't be issued, if it were up to the state. I wonder how the owner feels about it?

Mocking the McDonald's Budget

I've been meaning to write about the McDonald's budget advice mishap, but The Colbert Report beat me to it. There's not much else to say:



Sometimes Colbert's parody is painfully similar to the people he mocks: "If I were poor I wouldn't be." There clearly are people who think that way.

Signe Wilkinson and the Perfect Image

If you ever need a single, perfect image to summarize the case against education "reform," this cartoon by Signe Wilkinson is it.


Wilkinson has been the editorial cartoonist for the Philadelphia Daily News since 1985, after a four-year stint at the San Jose Mercury News. She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for the craft.

I'm ashamed to say I wasn't aware of her work until today, when this cartoon floated (without attribution) through my Facebook feed. Scanning through her bio, I only needed five words: raised by Quakers in Texas.

Here is some more of her work from the past few years:

Trying to Talk to a Friend

Notes from a thorny, thorny conversation about George Zimmerman and white women fearing black men.

Black girls and boys and men and women are the most vulnerable citizens in America, with black gay, lesbian, and transgender folk at the top of that list. If the Stand Your Ground defense was applied equally across races, they could be spraying bullets left and right in response to real or perceived threats all day long.

By what sleight of mental hand do those who get the mother-lode of bullshit, the most exiled, suspected, and hunted, with the most cumulative trauma—get recast as the most dangerous of people in the minds of strangers and the public?

And how do we unhinge those terrible associations?

One of the best things I've read about the underlying meaning of the Trayvon Martin killing.

Letters Out of Context

At the rare books collection in the University of Minnesota's Wilson Library, there's a set of sad but beautiful artifacts.


At some point in the late 19th century, a German collector cut the initial letters out of hundreds of old books and assembled them into binders the way a stamp collector would. This destroyed the books, of course. But brought together this collection, with notes on which book each set came from, which was recently donated to the library.

Here, with varying quality of photography (sorry about that!) are some of the ones that spoke to me.

First, the weirdest one I saw. An aardvark (?) playing the bagpipes:



Others range from people to allegories to animals to the beautifully ornamental:












It's a fascinating smattering of history adrift in four blue binders.

Gnomes, Mazes, and the Master Narrative

There's an architect- and artist-designed mini-golf course over at the Walker Art Center again this summer. It's in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Sculpture Garden.


I think it's the best course they've had yet, on the whole. Here are the highlights.


This hole was covered in a half-dome that looked like a golf ball. Inside were miniatures of the museum, Cowles conservatory, and Spoonbridge and Cherry. It's your moment to experience Land of the Giants!


Very inventive -- once you get the ball up to the fairway inside the red box, your fellow players can help (or hinder) your approach to the hole by playing Garden Gnome Foosball with your ball.


This one isn't visually interesteing, but it's probably my favorite from a player's perspective. It's one of those big mazes that you tilt to get the ball to drop into the hole that's worth the fewest points.


This one is a pinball machine, so you can't really control where the ball goes. To get the one-point score, you have to put the ball into an impossible spot at the center of the bottom sidewalk arc. So not so great for a skilled player, but fun to look at and well-designed.


This Ames Room isn't the greatest as a playable hole, but it's the best photo opportunity. If two people stand against the back wall, one near each rectangle, and then a third person takes a picture through the little black rectangle at the center of the white railing, it looks like this:


The biggest academic props go to the last hole, which is called "18 Holes in One: Collapsing the Masters Narrative."


The text for it reads "A thrill and challenge for both the novice and seasoned mini-golfer alike, this hole is a physical manifestation of an overlay of all 18 legendary greens at Augusta National Golf Course, home of the Master's Tournament. With 18 potential targets, you are about to encounter a nonlinear spatiotemporal golfing experience like no other."

More Fun to Read than Dr. Seuss

Not sure why, but I've never heard of the poem "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité (Netherlands, 1870-1946). Thanks to Daughter Number Three-Point-One for sharing it with me.

Very fun to read aloud:

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!

The pronunciation insights I got from reading this:

• Gunwale -- I had no idea it wasn't pronounced "gunwail."
• Groats -- is it really pronounced "grits"? That seems to be the implication here. I knew that "victuals" is pronounced "vittles," but I guess the "grotes" are "grits," too.
• Dost -- okay, maybe it sounds familiar to pronounce it "dust," but when I saw it that wasn't what I thought.
• Query -- it seems to sound okay to me when pronounced to rhyme with "very." But also pronounced as "queery." But then again, I also think Mary, marry, and merry are all pronounced the same, too.

 I can't help pointing out that I knew how to pronounce:

• Terpsichore (although I only learned it last year because it's the name of a peony variety)
• Viscount
• Melpomene

Finally, the poem reminds me of this wonderful point: people who mispronounce ten-dollar words need an extra hug because their errors mean they learned the words from reading them. They read them -- they've never known anyone who uses these words out loud, but they're brave enough to use them in a conversation.

Readers know how to use big words in a sentence, but not how to say them because they're readers. We should be praised, not reproofed, for our errors.

No Hitch-Hikers

While checking out this broad collection of mid-20th century commercial printing samples, I saw this bit of lost Americana:


What a fascinating sociological artifact.

It tells us that hitch-hiking was common and that hitch-hikers expected to be picked up. That lots of people didn't want to pick up hitch-hikers, enough that someone started making NO fists to the point where "these dynamic stickers are sweeping the country!!"

That someone else then saw those stickers as an advertising opportunity. The stickers were sold to the advertiser -- such as the car dealer shown in the sample -- who would then give them away to customers. The ad faced the driver, with the unfriendly red NO fist facing the world.

The poster also tells us someone thought all of this was such a great idea that it should be copyrighted.

Photos, Photos, Photos

Some random photos from the past week or so.

From streets of the Twin Cities:


It looks as though Coors has a new brand to peddle, pretending that pre-Prohibition beer was somehow different in a meaningful way. As if their target market understands anything about Prohibition (or what beer should taste like, for that matter).


Saint Paul prints short poems into its sidewalks here and there as the department of public works replaces the concrete. I liked this one, even though it's not strong on nuance.

From the mysterious world of hospitals:


Ouch.


Not as interesting as it sounds.

From a bookstore:


I hope the publishers didn't pay too much for these lookalike covers.

From a mall parking lot:


Get a complete set of Fish®!


Aaaarggghhhhh, Disney from womb to tomb. (In case you forgot, I wrote an anti-Disney song.)


Yes, that's a spork in the road.

Two Letters About a Tragedy

Two letters from today's Star Tribune about the George Zimmerman verdict run the gamut, as I suppose letters to the editor should. First, one that makes no sense at all:

The lesson of the tragedy of the Trayvon Martin case is that we as parents must teach our children respect for authority. To my generation, authority meant parents, adults, schoolteachers and law enforcement. We as youths were taught to respect them and to act politely and deferentially with them. 

Any adult could question our behavior, and often did so. We were taught to politely explain what we were doing — but above all, not to get into a confrontation with authority. 

Ken Kimble, Brooklyn Park

What does Kimble mean? That Trayvon Martin should have obeyed the "authority" of a self-appointed vigilante? Or that Zimmerman should have listened to the 911 operator who told him not to follow Martin? I have a feeling it's the former.

Mr. Kimble, that is incredibly stupid. You think all young people should listen to and obey all adults, huh? Even at night, in the dark, when the adult is following you? Your simplistic world view takes my breath away. Your authoritarian personality is a bad fit for democracy.

Second, a letter that echoes some of my thoughts:

Anger toward Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin tragedy is mostly a waste of otherwise productive energy. This outcome is, alas, a completely expected result of the country’s runaway gun lust and the multitude of state “Stand Your Ground” laws. We should be up in (fleshy) arms over this dangerous legislation. And we should show solidarity with those standing up to the juggernaut, like our own governor, who vetoed a similar bill last year. 

Ben Seymour, Minneapolis

Seymour is right that the Stand Your Ground law was an essential part of the tragedy, and I share his thanks to Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton for vetoing a version of the law that was even worse. Concealed carry also contributed, since it's hard to believe a law-and-order-lover like Zimmerman would have been carrying a gun if it wasn't legal for him to do so. If he hadn't had the false courage of being armed, he never would have engaged with Martin.

Repealing these laws is an important part of making gun possession as safe as possible in a civil society.

Upward Mobility, Part Two

A few months back, I wrote about a Star Tribune op-ed that told of a low-income student who had done everything right in school, but was having no luck getting college scholarships.

I ended the post like this:

What I bet will happen now is that someone will step forward to contact Lockhart with money for Malik to go to school, and that will be a great thing. But it's like the problem with the cute endangered animals getting funding when the homely ones go wanting -- it doesn't address the larger problem.

Today's Star Tribune had a followup column by editorial writer Lori Sturdevant. Several someones did step forward with money not just for Malik, but for other kids from his high school. "The scholarship committee at Patrick Henry received a stunning $28,000 in donations, which was distributed this spring among 35 college-bound grads in increments of $750 to $5,000."

$28,000, one should note, is probably just about how much a single student needs to go to the University of Minnesota for a year, including room and board and expenses.  But instead it was divided up in smaller amounts for more people. Some of those amounts are almost meaningless, unless combined with lots of other scholarships.

Malik himself got a better financial aid offer from the U, and he'll be starting there this fall. An anonymous donor funded two other full-ride scholarships at the U as well.

So that's a little better than I predicted, but still fits into the "cute endangered animals" scenario, in my opinion.

What Sturdevant included in her story, though, was information on an organization that tries to address the larger problem: College Possible and its founder, Jim McCorkell.

“Who will earn a four-year college degree by the age of 24? Nationally, kids from the upper-income quartile earn those degrees at a rate of over 80 percent. Kids from the lower-income quartile earn degrees at a rate of about 8 percent.”

“The good news is that there’s lots of opportunity to do better. There are literally thousands of kids who want to go to college in this state, and whom colleges would take, that aren’t going at all. We can change that.”

Why Isn't It Free in the First Place?

This just in: According to the Star Tribune, Twin Cities Metro Transit is going high-tech to catch bus riders who don't pay their fares. The story is vague about what that means, but clear on several other points.

• 96 percent of bus riders pay their fares, but the 4 percent nonpayment rate is a problem. Light rail and Northstar Commuter trains don't have a fare evasion problem, because they have a 99 percent compliance rate. So the difference between 96 and 99 percent is a "problem."
  
  
• Metro Transit's annual budget is $300 million, of which a third comes from fares. So in other words, we could have free public transit for $100 million a year -- one fifth of the public cost of the new Vikings stadium, or about $30 per person annually in the metro area. Probably not much more than the $10 charge per car they're talking about as a "wheelage" fee.
  
  
• It wouldn't even cost $100 million to replace the lost fares, since there's a substantial cost to collecting fares and enforcing their collection. As they say on freepublictransit.org:
  
  "Having a fare, any fare, requires a basic fixed cost of collecting the fare. Accounting costs, printing transfers and passes, selling and collecting. These people could be working on cleaning and security. Large transit systems actually have more fixed fare-related costs, but they put them in another accounting bucket: security. Do you see all those stainless steel turnstyles and all the caging and fencing to prevent fare avoidance. They cost a bundle."
  
  
• Collecting fares also wastes a lot of time for riders. A recent Economist story cited a New York MTA study that found fare collecting took over 16 minutes of the total route on one bus, more than a quarter of the time spent on the entire run.

The bottom line is we have to stop driving so much, and use what fuel we (the people of Earth) can afford to burn safely to run public transit.

The way to encourage transit use is to make it free; charging a carbon tax or wheelage fee on cars would be an added incentive.

Was Anything Learned?

Minneapolis police sergeant David Clifford, convicted of first-degree assault a few months ago, was sentenced yesterday to almost four years. He'll serve a bit over two years, plus probation.

The recommended sentence for his crime is seven years.

The judge's sentence strikes me as just about right. Clifford clearly needed to serve some time, instead of just probation, even though his lawyer tried to argue the now-former cop had "been punished because he no longer can be a peace officer and lost civil rights because he's a felon" (quoting the Star Tribune).

Ironic. If he'd acted like a peace officer, he wouldn't have been prosecuted in the first place. And it's almost funny that his lawyer said the loss of his civil rights is a punishment, when no one seems to care about that when the people losing their rights aren't white.

At the same time, seven years seems too long a sentence for a single punch, even though his victim, Brian Vander Lee, has suffered substantial, ongoing injury as a result. Clifford couldn't have imagined that one punch would be so devastating. But his indifference to that possibility merits the four years he got.

I should note that I probably wouldn't have posted about this if it weren't for one incredible detail added to the story in both the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press coverage. As the reporters approached the Cliffords and Vander Lees for comment after the hearing ended,

Clifford's wife, Kelly Clifford, had parting words for the Vander Lees after the hearing, telling the couple, "Don't drink too much," before quickly leaving the courtroom. 

Wow. That's some gall, lady.

Connections Are Not About Appearances

Jason Kottke's post today, titled How to Talk to Little Girls, got to me. He quotes a short essay by writer Lisa Bloom, in which she relates the story of meeting a 5-year-old at a friend's dinner party and how she successfully did not comment about how cute the girl was or on what she was wearing.

Instead they talked about books and the child opened up instead of shutting down. Kottke added his own observation about his daughter:

People do the "OMG, you're so cute!" thing with Minna all the time and it bugs the shit out of me. (I mean, I get it, she's cute. But come on.) It also completely shuts her down because she suddenly feels so self-conscious about herself and her appearance...which has led to her to be more cautious about new people and wary of cameras, the ultimate unblinking eye of cuteness collection. And this is a very chatty, social, and engaging kid we're talking about here, but the "you're so cute" conversation opener twists her up into a pretzel of self-consciousness that's so unlike her usual self.

What is it with us and our need to comment on what people look like? There's a connection here to the research on how comments about women politicians' looks affects people's assessments of them.

And it's not that different from the incessant questions to people of color about "where they come from."



We all need to get over starting conversations with what seem like easy openings but are actually repetitive if not actively offensive gambits.

Aging with Mr. Irby

You've probably heard about Dale Irby's yearbook photos.


(Click to see it at its full-size, brown-vested best.)

The Texas gym teacher wore the same brown sweater vest and polyester shirt for 40 years of school photos, at first by accident, and then as an annual joke.

The thing I love about this the most is seeing the way a person ages. It's a great example because, in addition to the consistent posing of the institutional photographer, Irby barely changed his hair (whether on head or face) over the years. It's only his glasses that vary, and those are not wildly different either.

I think the biggest changes in his facial appearance happened in his 40 and 50s (the end of the third row and most of the fourth row), followed by the ones in his 50s and 60s (the last 10 photos).

This makes me want to go dig up photos of myself starting in 1983. But even if I can find one for each year, they won't have consistent poses, let alone the clothes or hair. Ah, Mr. Irby, thanks.

Two Photos from Spain

I took a lot of photos in Europe, but these are my two favorites among the ones that weren't dedicated to the trip's theme of type and typography. Both are from Denia, Spain.


This one expresses the commercial nature of a beach town while also showing that I know how to compose a photo. (Go, me!) And I think it's funny.


This is not so great in the composition department, but it's such a good example of a puzzle picture. What the heck is that, anyway? A giant bug bursting through, or a crazy wooden reindeer figure stuck in a fence?

Nope. It's trumpet creeper (Campsis radicans), an aggressive vine that has been cut back to keep it under control.

Lost in Translation, Part 2

A few more photos from Italy, but mostly from Germany.

First, a sign from Treviso whose meaning I am unwilling to look up:


Then, from a Venice church, two of those signs about what not to do or bring inside. The first icon appears to say No Pants:


The second sign appears to bar people who are wearing old-fashioned bathing suits:


On to Germany, which included the mysteriously named Sport Fink store:


And a green stop sign. Also, we noticed that stop signs in all three countries were written in English. Is this common everywhere?


Nordsee is a German fast-food company that sells fish:


It was closed when I first saw it, so I couldn't see the merchandise, and thought it was a Christian organization, based on the use of the red fish symbol, more commonly seen in my part of the world on the bumpers and back windows of the faithful.

Still not sure why the city of Mainz wants to ban women with small children:


Finally, there is the mysterious word schmuck:


It didn't take long to figure out that it means something like "decoration" or "ornament," sometimes interchangeably used with the word "jewelry."

In this example, it was part of an old type specimen book, along with that other mysterious word, Akzidenz:


But it's hard for an English-speaker not to giggle like a five-year-old every time it turns up on a sign:


Now there's a job I wouldn't want to explain to the wrong person.