I believe this is what the kids these days might call a “packaging fail.” Or maybe I’m the only one who sees “nipple” and just assumes there’s a bottle of breast milk in the office fridge. Alas, it’s actually ripple. Which isn’t nearly as funny. (I’ll be honest, though: Just saying “pea milk” makes me giggle.)
Did y’all hear? Oakhurst Dairy settled an overtime dispute that “hinged entirely on the lack of an Oxford comma in state law.”
I’ve long held that there’s literally no reason whatsoever to omit the Oxford (or “serial”) comma. I mean, here I am back in 2010 making the case for its preservation.
The New York Times offers a couple of defenses for its anti-Oxford position, only one of which is believable: “[N]ews writing has traditionally omitted the serial comma—perhaps seeking a more rapid feeling in the prose, or perhaps to save time and effort in the old days of manual typesetting.”
Here’s the thing: Ambiguity, the chief result of omitting the Oxford comma (as the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled last week) doesn’t lend itself to “a more rapid feeling in the prose.” You know what does? Clarity. And that, my friends, is what the Oxford comma offers in spades.
In an interview at Vulture, New York magazine’s culture and entertainment site, the legendary Quincy Jones has a lot to say—about Big Pharma, uneducated rednecks, and who really killed JFK. Then he was asked about his first impressions of the Beatles:
[T]hey were the worst musicians in the world. They were no-playing motherf***ers. Paul was the worst bass player I ever heard. And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it. I remember once we were in the studio with George Martin, and Ringo had taken three hours for a four-bar thing he was trying to fix on a song. He couldn’t get it. We said, “Mate, why don’t you get some lager and lime, some shepherd’s pie, and take an hour-and-a-half and relax a little bit.” So he did, and we called Ronnie Verrell, a jazz drummer. Ronnie came in for 15 minutes and tore it up. Ringo comes back and says, “George, can you play it back for me one more time?” So George did, and Ringo says, “That didn’t sound so bad.” And I said, “Yeah, motherf***er because it ain’t you.” Great guy, though.
About time somebody was brave enough to say it.
“Every time I see a woman in public reading a book by a man (usually dead, usually white),” writes Danielle Lazarin, “I fantasize about offering her a book by a woman instead, replacing the male voices in her head with female ones one book at a time.”
That’s funny. Every time I see a woman in public reading a book by a man (usually dead, usually white), I think, Yay! Somebody’s reading! And then I imagine that, as a grownup, she’s probably capable of making her own decisions—since she probably knows better than some stranger with an axe to grind exactly what she likes to read, and most likely isn’t making that decision based on the author’s sex, race, or current state of existence.
But then, I’m a man. What the hell do I know about lady readers?
In honor of helveticka’s thirtieth anniversary, we’ve uncovered a few items from our past and put them on exhibit in our office entry. With assistance from our newest team member, Steven Kutsch, we filled our display cases with some old-school objects and ephemera: tools, thumbs and marker comps for our first annual report, high-tech gadgets, and a number of things that will definitely require an explanation for a younger audience. And it only took about two minutes to put together. Seriously. Check it out for yourself—and stop by any time to see how lucky we are to be able to use today’s design technologies.
Twenty-four finalists (out of 450) have been selected in this year’s Book Illustration Competition run by The Folio Society and House of Illustration. The book, to be published later this year, is The Selected Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Entrants were required to read A Scandal in Bohemia, The Man With the Twisted Lip, and The Musgrave Ritual, then provide an illustration for each, as well as a design for the book binding. The Guardian put together a gallery here; you can view the longlisted entries—and cast your vote for the People’s Choice Award—here.
Presenting my third annual iPics of 2017. I shared twelve images last year, but this time around I could only muster ten that I would attach my name to. Thanks to the professional photographers I work with, I can only claim to be an observer of my surroundings. And with only mobile optics, I’m a JV shooter at best (whenever possible, I deploy the cheap trick of using the b/w mode to enhance the mood). This year’s subjects range from big cities to small towns and from national parks to my own back yard. I even included a self portrait (one of two possibilities shown).
I don’t care what anyone says. Trigger Smith, owner of the Continental, a “divey mainstay of Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood since 1991,” is a hero. And it gets better, according to Grub Street: Smith also hates the phrase “my bad”—which makes him doubleplusgood in my book.
So how about it, Spokane? Any dive-bar owners willing to take a stand against the barbarians? Pour me an Old Fashioned—I’ll be right over.
Today is Friday. Normally, that would be cause for celebration. The weekend is nigh; the promise of fun and frivolity is sure to bring a smile to even the most dour among us. So it gives me no pleasure at all to be the first to tell you that we’re all going to die.
What—no time to read? Let me just summarize for you:
“Parts of the planet will become uninhabitable.”
“Devastating streams of particles from the sun, galactic cosmic rays, and enhanced ultraviolet B rays from a radiation-damaged ozone layer, to name just a few of the invisible forces that could harm or kill living creatures.”
“The consequences for life on Earth could be ruinous.”
“It will have its way with us, no matter what we do. Our task is to figure out how to make it hurt as little as possible.”
“It’s time to wake up to the dangers and start preparing.”
I don’t know about y’all, but I think I’m gonna hit up Costco this weekend and stock up on canned goods.
Remember these? No, millennials, these are not drink coasters, but that’s about all they’re good for these days. 3.5″ floppy disks were commonplace in the late 1980s and early 90s. With a capacity up to 1.44 MB, it would take only 711 of them to equal a GB. New software would arrive on several numbered floppies. And up to four new fonts at a time on a single disk. Crazy, huh? And sharing our digital art files with printers on what we called a “transfer disk” was pretty amazing.
Ever heard of Bitstream? QuarkXPress? And imagine our excitement when we first downloaded Adobe Photoshop—version 2-POINT-O. Or when we took a digital tour of our brand-new Apple Macintosh SE/30 computer in 1990 (that’s the disk in the lower right). I guess it’s one of the reasons I’ve never gotten overly excited about buying new tech equipment or gadgets. It seems they’re almost as fleeting as the ephemera we design for our clients.
I have good news and bad news. First, the good news: The end of the world isn’t happening any time soon. The bad news? Well…let’s hear it from an actual time traveler who’s totally, definitely for real.
The birth of ambient music: “I started hearing this record as if I’d never heard music before. It was a really beautiful experience, I got the feeling of icebergs, you know? I would just occasionally hear the loudest parts of the music, get a little flurry of notes coming out above the sound of the rain—and then it’d drift away again”
The average profit margin among U.S. companies is 7.9 percent (6.9 percent when you exclude the financial sector). The public thinks it’s 36 percent.
“Facts are facts and truth is truth,” wrote Thomas Stuart Ferguson. Unfortunately for him, the truth he found wasn’t the truth he was looking for.
In 1989 we purchased our first computer, a Macintosh CXII. We borrowed the money from my business partner’s mom (thank you, Virginia!) to pay for the CPU, large monitor, and printer. Our second computer, an Apple SE/30, was used mostly to type letters and make lists—and served as our first poor-man’s laptop, as I recall taking it home on several occasions in its not-so-sleek carrying case.
We purchased our first mobile phones locally from Cellular One in 1991. They were expensive, but we bought them for half off their regular price ($450 instead of the usual $900) since they’d been used by firefighters during that year’s Fire Storm. Back then, they came with an eye-catching short- and long-form antenna.
We actually did business with these things.
Our firm’s first real laptop arrived in 1997. It was an Apple PowerBook G3: At 2.5″ thick and weighing a sturdy six pounds, it was much easier to transport than the SE/30. And back then, Freehand was our preferred design software.
Technology has, and will continue to have, the single greatest impact on our industry. Ironically, it has little to do with original ideas. One only has to review the great work produced prior to the mid-80s to see that creative thinking and its execution never relied on amazing tools.
There’s a chapter in Leszek Kołakowski’s wonderful Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing? 23 Questions from Great Philosophers (Basic Books, 2007) entitled “Faith: Why should we believe?” in which he outlines an argument from the Pensées by Blaise Pascal. Here’s the money quote:
“It is remarkable, Pascal says, that people don’t think about the things that most vitally concern them: their deaths, immortality, salvation. They do not think about them because they do not want to think about them; they would rather not be reminded of what awaits them. They flee from what is most vital, escaping into amusements of all kinds, anything to forget; their entire life becomes a series of amusements, a way of escaping. We invent all sorts of ways to avoid confronting the fundamental issue: hunting, theatre, parties, intrigues—even wars—all these are just ways of anaesthetizing the pain of existence.”
Happy Monday.
“Poetry,” writes Christian Wiman in today’s New York Times, “is the deepest expression, and the best hope for survival, of a culture’s very soul.” We need art, he explains, not only “to explore the darkest recesses of our lives and minds,” but also “to tell us why this world is worth loving, and therefore saving.”
As with anything Wiman writes, it’s well worth your time to read the essay in its entirety.
The Oatmeal has, as usual, nailed it: “Two half-wits do not equal a full-witted person. They equal a quarter-witted person.”
Of course, the problem runs much deeper than a meeting attended by half-wits. It’s the whole idea behind “there are no bad ideas in brainstorming,” which is not only demonstrably false, but also quite obviously dreamed up by someone who’s never participated in a group brainstorming session. (My conservative estimate, after 16 years in this business, is that, of all the ideas generated by three or more people in a room at a single time, roughly 98.5 percent are terrible.)
I think some of the misunderstanding comes from the mythos surrounding creativity. There’s no single proven method, because we all approach our jobs in different ways. I prefer the quiet of solitude, where I can think through a problem, uninterrupted, and try to come up with multiple ways of solving it. Others feel the need to express themselves to anyone who will listen, gauge feedback, and adapt their solutions accordingly. But because we as a society seem to be obsessed with consensus-building—not to mention the idea that collaboration is always better—the latter approach almost always wins out.
I’m not so sure, though. There seems to be a single-mindedness behind most great ideas. While you can bet that committees are responsible for stuff like this.