Last weekend I ran across a receipt that tells a bit of a story from my days as a design student at Spokane Falls. RA-TEL’S Art Supply, owned and operated by Darrell and Karen Sullens, was one of only two local art supply stores back then—a place where students could buy sketch books, pens, markers, paint, special papers, spray mount, and so on for their school projects. Though it was a small store at the time (they later moved to a larger space) RA-TEL’S was one of my favorite stops. It was like my very own Cheers: friendly faces, funny stories, and lots of laughs. The kind of place where you lingered a little longer; where relationships were formed that outlasted the immediate need for student supplies. In fact, over the years, both Linda and I remained friends with Darrell and Karen, who, sadly, recently passed.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  comments(1)

David Gelernter, Yale University computer scientist and subject of one of the stupider (not to mention more lazily partisan) newspaper headlines in recent memory,* has some pretty interesting things to say in a recent Atlantic piece.

On whether beauty is objective: “Take any civilization, ask for its artistic masterpieces; today, they are almost guaranteed to be valuable all over the world. There’s almost nothing less subjective than the sense of beauty.”

On taking new architecture seriously: “Take a chance, dammit.”

On raising children without comprehensive ethical views: “…a recipe for one of the riskiest experiments in history.”

On understanding artificial intelligence: “The people who know the mind best aren’t neurobiologists, they’re novelists & poets.”

On music: History’s greatest composer is Franz Schubert, but “Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, his op 110 and 111 sonatas, his string quartet in C# minor and the Gross [sic] Fuge are the greatest music of all.”

*It was just a year ago that Time magazine called him an “arch-genius.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Happy Twin Peaks Day, everyone.

Hearty recommendation: The History of English Podcast. I mean, dig this Indo-European Family Tree.

Whatever happened to Greenland’s Vikings? “You can do a lot of things right,” says archaeologist Thomas McGovern. “You can be highly adaptive; you can be very flexible; you can be resilient—and you go extinct anyway.”

So apparently it’s OK to end a friendship based on political differences now. What an amazing world we live in.

Etiquette tips for graphic designers. (Well…not exactly. It’s just that each is accompanied by a helpful illustration. And there aren’t any big words.)

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“As I scurried down a frost-covered slope into the cave, I couldn’t shake the distinct feeling that I was stepping into the maw of a prehistoric beast.” That’s Mark M. Synott, writing in the March 2017 issue of National Geographic, about a 31-member expedition put together to explore what could very well be the world’s deepest cave.

Called Dark Star, this “monstrous limestone cave system inside a mountain in a remote corner of Uzbekistan” was first discovered in 1984—but another six years went by before a British team reached it and began exploring the system.

The whole claustrophobia-inducing account, complete with great photography and a video, is available online here.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

The Recording Industry Association of America has updated its list of the 100 best-selling albums of all time. Naturally, I have some observations.

Fully 16 percent of the list is made up of “greatest hits”-type records; another six percent are motion picture soundtracks.

In theory, one in 10 Americans owns Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Which seems low, to be honest.

Seven are by Garth Brooks. Seven! Let that sink in for a moment.

Def Leppard, Celine Dion, and Kenny G are on this list. David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and Radiohead aren’t.

No jazz, no blues, no classical, no bluegrass—like walking into a Baskin Robbins and discovering that all 31 flavors are subtle variations of vanilla.

Can we draw any conclusions from the music-buying habits of the American public? Probably not. But we can totally be judgmental. Unless, of course, you’re into Def Leppard, Celine Dion, or Kenny G.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Spend any time on the Internet and you’re bound to run into one of those Buzzfeed-type lists of The Very Worst Words in the English Language. In it you’ll find the usual suspects: moist, phlegm, smear, et al.

There’s one word that rarely makes the cut, however, and it’s a particularly appropriate one for Valentine’s Day (or, as the more rational among us might refer to it, Dumbest Holiday Ever™).

The word is lover, and it gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Not only is it a wee bit pretentious and French-sounding, it’s skin-crawlingly prurient in its imagery. It’s far too intimate and familiar; far too suggestive of the sorts of things you do behind closed doors that the rest of us don’t even want to think about you doing behind closed doors. Plus, there’s an air of illicitness around it: “I took a lover.” (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)

Then, of course, there’s this.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, stick to boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, or spouse. Even partner, in all of its corporate-sounding efficiency, is better.

Thank you for your cooperation.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

If you’re planning on, um…taking a turn among the cabbages this Tuesday, BBC News has some recommendations for your playlist. Key among their findings? Forget the show tunes—R&B is where it’s at. (Did they really need to commission a poll for that?)

What’s intriguing is that, according to the survey results, hymns are three times more popular in the British bedroom than musicals. Hymns, people. So if your significant other breaks into a stirring rendition of “How Great Thou Art” right in the middle of sexy time, it may not necessarily be an accurate assessment of your performance.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

The word lede is essentially journalism jargon for the introductory sentence or paragraph designed either to (a) provide all the pertinent information of a particular story or (b) simply entice the reader to read the entire article. For a textbook example of the latter, check this out, from an Atlantic story by Ed Yong:

The American novelist S. E. Hinton once said, “If you have two friends in your lifetime, you’re lucky. If you have one good friend, you’re more than lucky.” By that logic, boxer crabs are the luckiest creatures alive because they can turn one good friend into two by tearing it in half.

Yong did the impossible. He made you want to read an article about crabs.

And that’s really the trick, isn’t it? I mean, I knew that most people didn’t care about tattoos when I once opened a story about them with “On Thursday, September 19, 1991, high in the Austrian Alps, two German hikers discovered the mummified remains of a man lying face-down in a pool of glacial meltwater.” Sure, it’s a bit dramatic, but I think it worked—in part because, like Yong’s bit about tearing a friend in two, it’s so completely unexpected.

Of course, there’s a downside: the better your opening is, the harder it is for the story itself to live up to its promise. Kind of like relationships, isn’t it? A good first date is a really well-written lede; the marriage that follows is just another story about crustaceans.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment