July 31, 2003

Vintage Woods
I've decided that a man can't have enough hobbies or collections of things. For that reason I have decided that I will focus the rest of my energies for this decade to become the midwest's largest collector of vintage golf clubs. Specifically, vintage woods that are actually made of wood. This all came to a head last night in the a southern suburb of our fair city, when I walked out of a place called The 2nd Swing, the proud owner of an old Arnold Palmer 3 wood. The folks at the store considered the club junk and sold it to me for $1.99.

I own a set of vintage clubs already. They are a bit short for me and not perfect but the aesthetic is what's important. The woods are all real woods and they have a sweet airplane logo on them followed by the letters PGA set in a Trade Gothic Bold Extended type. The airplane helps you aim the club properly. The gold bag is real leather and bright red to boot.

The desire to amass a collection of vintage woods meets two of my key criteria when deciding to become the Midwest's largest collector of anything. One, the old school design aesthetic and craftsmanship are all top notch and, two, nobody wants 'em and you can get 'em for cheap. I'm so turned off by these new oversized clubs that are as big as a VW bug and look as if they were constructed with recycled aluminum cans. These clubs are popular for the single reason that they have way more forgiveness than older woods. So like many other items in the current American retail market they allow for less discipline and focus when considering your approach. The old woods demand a more concentrated swing and closer attention to be paid to club selection. It's very similar to the reason that MLB doesn't allow aluminum bats. So, if you see a nice mahogany fairway wood sitting around your parents basement. Send it to me: c/o The Golden Bear Vintage Golf Woods Association.

July 30, 2003

Terror Futures Market Closed
Well that didn't take long. Only 24 hours after I posted about the Terrorism Futures Market, the story has bounced all over the world and come back to slap the Pentagon straight across the face. In effect, they have pulled the plug on the terrorism market. I guess the idea market (a.k.a the internet) started selling short on the idea early. Sadly, by the end of the day, the Pentagon had little more then a grotesque pile of tax payer funded flip charts and coloring crayons to show for their work.

July 29, 2003

A few random shots taken along Lyndale and Hennepin Avenue. Two stencils on the left. Obey Giant on the right. The bottom shot is from a printed sign on the back of a truck. Checkout the funny typo. I like seeing a glaring typo like that because it doesn't make me feel so bad about all my own.

Blog This
OK. It looks like Blog This for Safari works swimingly. Almost too good. It could be addictive. I'll have to show some restraint. Unfortunately there isn't a spell check with Blog This so I probably wont be using it too much.

Interesting discussion over at Metafilter about how the Pentagon Plans Futures Market for Events in Mideast. The site in question is this one. I'm not sure what to make of the whole betting on Middle East disasters and assasinations, but I do know that the logo for the Policy Analysis Market continues a fine cryptic graphical tradition of scary all-seeing-secret-society logos.

It looks like Blogger finally rolled out a Blog This link that works now with all browsers including the one I use - Safari. So this is me testing it out to see if it works.

July 28, 2003

Children of The Corn
Glorious and perfect, ripe within an inch of exploding, Minnesota Sweet Corn has returned to our dinnertime tables. Whether gently grilled over hot coals or dropped in a pot of boiling water for three minutes, the end product gets slathered with butter, sal, and a bit of cayenne pepper - making it the perfect summer candy.

This weekend I was a pathetic slave to the Sweet Corm and ran all over town to buy it and eat it. I braved the farmers markets. I dodged the incense venders and endless rows of 14 pound zucchinis. What the hell does one do with a zucchini the size of a two year old boy? My efforts paid off and I was rewarded with heaping sacks of corn, a few peaches and a barrel full of green beans.

In between my fevered corn feastings this weekend, I rented a canoe and paddled around the lake of the isles in and amongst about 5000 other people who had the same summer idea. It was comedy. If not for my confident and daft abilities in the stern of a canoe, I'm really not sure I would be here today writing these words. It was truly amateur day at the lakes. When renting the canoe I wondered why it was necessary to put down a damage deposit. But after witnessing the physical limits that other paddlers pushed with their own boats, it became all too obvious that the deposit was necessary insurance. I saw one poor older women in a yellow kayak get pinned against a rocky embankment when two large, blisteringly sunburnt humans, paddled (and I use that term loosely) their canoe directly into her starboard side pushing her vertically up against the wall. The funniest part was that you could see most of the impending accidents almost a full 30 seconds before they occurred. Steering challenged folks would get on a course and if anything got in their path then it was game over. Instead of actually trying to correct any of their navigational mistakes these people spent the last fifteen seconds before an impact pre-apologizing to the people they were about to slam into. I just sat back and drank good rum from a flask, smoked small cuban cigars and watched the action take place from a safe distance.

July 25, 2003

JTB Always On
This is the kind of medicinal story I like to read the morning after I've been drinking Labatt Blue Big Cans and singing along to JTB songs at the Avenue. A great time on all fronts. Today, I am frantically trying to get some client work done before taking the afternoon off for a round of 18 holes on the palatial county fareways of Apple Valley's finest course. One might think that taking in a rock show one night and then strapping on the golf bag the next day just doest seem cogent but in these days of summer anything is possible - esspecially golf. Golf and Greyhounds.

I should add that if you haven't yet seen the movie 28 Days Later, and you want to be scared out of your well-grouned faculties, then you should put this one on your to-do-list this weekend. There are some really interesting layers to 28 Days Later that invoked a mountain of classic cinema while adding something to the modern political discourse of men and monsters. And if the movie isn't frightening enough for you than this article in the Guardian about the unchecked and gruesome practices of the Coca-Cola company in India should do the trick.

July 24, 2003

My New Segway
I'm looking at this Green Machine to become my new Segway. It's way greener, way cooler and hella cheaper. And damn it's got three wheels. It seems unconscionable that I would pay $4,850.00 more for a machine that only has two lame little skinny wheels. Checkout the wheelbase on the green machine. It's like a foot wide.

I got great memories of my first Green Machine. At age five, the green plastic chariot was the love of my life. It was also my forbidden fruit and fall from innocence. In the end it would become the cause of my first real fight. I wound up the first kid on the block to own the coveted Green Machine and like anything material at that age it became highly sought after by the other five and six year olds who were still riding around Fred Flinstone style. I had the mack mobile-unit. The equivalent of Cadillac's Snoop DeVille. I guarded her night and day, and pimped her out to other kids for a penny a ride. But then one day, when I had turned my back for a second, she was gone. I was completely devastated. I went through the five year old stages of grief quickly and landed with both feet squarely in the camp of revenge and violent determination to get my wheels back. My search for the perpetrator didn't take long. The five year old criminal mind isn't quite what it will later become through the required recidivism that repeats like bad acne all through Junior High. I hadn't walked a block and half from my house, when there before my eye's was one of my so-called neighborhood friends tearing up his drive way with repeated e-brake tricks, something the Green Machine was famous for. I was livid and violence came quick. I blind-sided him with an elbow to the head, knocking him into the rock garden that surrounded his edging around his driveway. We tussled there in the rocks and I finally landed a good one in the soft spot under his rib cage. The little delinquent went into a fit of gasping and wheezing. I got up and road my green stallion the block and a half back to my house. I don't think that slack, red-handed traitor and I ever had a play-date set up by our parents again after that incident. But I didn't mind. With a Green Machine in my driveway who needs friends. Lessons learned. If you have your own Green Machine story I'd love to hear it.

July 22, 2003

The Case of The Shoplifted Shopping Cart
Have you ever gone shopping at the grocery store, filled up your cart with loads of delicious items and then all of the sudden looked down at your cart and realized that half the items in your cart were not yours but the product of someone else's shopping habits. Neither have I -- until yesterday. I knew something was amiss when I noticed that all my Freezies were gone and in their place was a giant rotisserie chicken. Somewhere between aisle six and the frozen food section I had inadvertently started using someone else's half full cart. Jeezus. I don't recommend this mistake. The embarrassment compounds as you wander around the store looking for another confused shopper with an illegitimate shopping cart. Once you've found them and explained your blunder you both have to pour over each others carts and determine whose food belongs to whom.

July 21, 2003

More Type Delights
Whew. Typecon2003 finally came to a close yesterday. My brain hurts from being stabbed repeatedly with so many pointy serifs, arching ligatures and retro dingbats. Letterforms have so painfully taken over and squeezed themselves into every vacant fold of grey matter that not a sign or billboard goes by that doesn't call out for a deep scrutiny. While reading T.C Boyle's 'Worlds End' (set in Sabon) last night I came to the conclusion that the word 'Salmon' is perhaps one of the most beautiful words in the english language. Christ, I feel sick with fonts. As a side note, I have noticed that any book I pick up from the library that was printed over ten years ago -- like 'World's End' was -- that the books have a very funky smell like they've been steeped in the pools of Lake Superior at low tide. It's noxious.

But back to Typecon. All in all it was a good conference with tons of diversity between the digerati crowd and the analog craftsmen who play with wood and metal and care to know nothing of the kerning problems inherent in 8 point bitmap fonts. Aesthetic Apparatus put on a great display of their work. Bill Moran put on a great party on the roof tops of his studio. And the Twin Cities represented boldly. In fact, what impressed me most was how much great type and design is coming out of the Twin Cities and it's neighboring midwestern cities. Although it didn't win, I thought Eric Olson's font, Locator (pictured above), was my favorite entry for the Twin Cities Design Celebration

Beyond the Twin Cities designers, I was really impressed with the work of foreign designers especially the display fonts from the Latin American crowd. Check out Downtempo and a mexican wrestling font called Lucha that has mexican wrestling mask dingbats as part of it's character set. Also impressive and lust worthy were some new types coming from the folks down under at the Australian Type Foundry. Check out Iperion and Euron. And finally I will mention FTF Morgan as the type face I will use to re-brand the Township 'Skelton' when I take it over and am named King.

July 17, 2003

TypeCon 2003 Underway
My head is already spinning from all the type talk, ideas, and debate flying around the type conference. As a rank amateur and someone with bad credentials, I have found that my role at the conference is to show the out-of-towners the wonders and delectable of our fine city. So I take folks out for heaps of veggie omelets and then just sit back and listen to the knowledge being dropped. I've learned that many of the type obsessed folks here have a borderline unhealthy obsession with comic books and are very excited when they are led to the comic store I used to work at as a kid.

I'm very excited for a panel discussion taking place this Saturday called 'Talking Type in the Ether: Type & Design Blogs & Online Communities. Presenting will be Jared Benson, Joseph Pemberton, Stephen Coles, Jon Coltz, and Armin Vit.

Tonight at the Walker Art Center will be a lecture presented by the Guru, Matthew Carter, called 'The Summer of Design'. Later in the conference, Carter (the man who brought you Verdana) will be unveiling a brand new woodtype that will be produced by the fine folks at the Hamilton Woodtype Museum.

July 16, 2003

Minnesota Street Scripts
Exhausted and drained today. Thank god I have Frankie Stubbs on the hi-fi belching from the gutter. He's trying his hardest to wake me up. Go Frankie. Already several pots of coffee into the day. Yesterday was another top notch summer day and I spent the better part of it biking all over the Twin Cities to different client meetings. In between meetings, I grubbed vegan biscuits and gravy courtesy of the chefs at The Hard Times Cafe. As is the usual happenings at the Hard Times, I was feasting and conversing with good friend Wainwright, when we were approached and given manuscripts to read. This wasn't the first time a random stranger has found me sitting somewhere in the bowels of the city and demanded that I look over some piece of text that they have written. Usually the writer wants feedback, and not feedback like you'll go home and take a look at it and send them your comments but instant feedback. Read this now please. I'm not sure if I'm being singled out to read these mystery street texts which range from one page leaflets to full on 100 page doctoral thesis written in 10 point Times, double sided and single spaced, or if this is just a common occurrence and others are being peddled these prose. Further research is necessary. It did inspire me (for about five minutes) to start some sort of Minnesota Street Text Site where I would post all the random scriptures (or at least their titles and a writing sample) for everyone else to gawk.

July 15, 2003

Afrojet Presents:

Music to eat freezies by

Muddy Waters - Electric Mud
Prefuse 73 - One Word Extinguisher
Compost Records - Future Sound of Jazz Vol. 9
Cinematic Orchestra - Man With a Movie Camera
Hey Mercedes - Everynight Fire Works
Joyce - Tudo Bonito
Pinback - Offcell
Cursive - The Ugly Organ
Houston - Bottom of the Curve
Led Zeppelin - How The West Was Won
Freddy Fresh - B Boy Stance: Original Old Skool Party Rockers
Amon Duul II - Ua Years 1969-74
Death Cab For Cutie - Something About Airplanes
Trouble Funk - Drop The Bomb
The Replacements - Let It Be

July 14, 2003

Freezies and Fish for Everyone
Beautiful weekend here in Minneapolis. I spent the better part of it enjoying the finer outdoor offerings the city lays at our feet. I have a sweet farmers tan (burn) to prove it. Today I'm wearing a dark t-shirt. The sleeves fall just short of my farmers tan making my arms look like giant Neapolitan ice cream bars. Yesterday I enjoyed a Freezie while sitting around Lake Calhoun watching kids catch sunfish at a steady rate of two or three a minute. One boy exclaimed while pulling a fresh catch from the lake that he had just caught his 17th in a row. Even at those numbers the kids didn't seem any less excited by each additional catch. The father, who was watching his boys pull out the fish, had to validate each one with a silent nod of approval followed by a silent head shake 'no' that the fish was too small to be kept. He was a patient man. I felt some parental twinge in the back of my thalamus, when I noticed that the kids kept laying their polls flat on the boardwalk. Many of the surrounding and gawking kids were barefoot and something told me that I had better get out of there before one of those kids plunged a naked heal into a fish hook. That would ruin my whole afternoon. I have too many memories of brutal fish hook excavations from my youth and if I never see another hooked kid that would be fine by me. But hey, back to the Freezie. For some reason 7-11 stores pulled out of Minnesota many years ago and they took with them their glorious Bionic Blue Slurpee. Sometimes I'll road trip it just to get a good brainfreeze off that classic summer treat. But alas, my Slurpee consumption is few and far between which means finding substitutes. The substitute is the Freezie: tight, compact, cheep and delicious - get your Freezie on! Also note: the freezie works well with booze.

July 10, 2003

Guarding America
This article claims that the Guardian we all know and love and visit frequently online may soon be publishing a Stateside print version - perhaps a weekly. I am very excited by this and hope that it launches. Then I can read from the comfort of my own Captain's chair more articles like this one, about some folks in Boston who have opened their own Punk Rock Aerobics Gym. Leave it to the British to break that story. I like the whole aesthetic of Punk Rock Aerobics and hope that soon the trend will continue and grow to include other garden variety enterprises. Picture if you will Punk Rock Banks, Punk Rock Car Dealerships, Punk Rock Cheese Factories. It could be a better world. It really could. Hopefully the Guardian will cross the ocean and tell us about it.

Operatic and Sotted
Last night the Tonics and Tangurays were put down with all the savageness of a ravenous wolf let loose in a sheep farm. As usual, the site of the sanguinary slide was the Stardust Lanes, and although I actually never got around to bowling a single frame I did sit mesmerized for hours listening to some of the best damn Karaoke these ears have ever heard. It was like witnessing our very own 'South Minneapolis Idol'. These kids were good. One male crooner even went so far as to preform two or three Billy Holiday songs. The sad part is that there were only about 10 of us inthe lounge who witnessed the vocal sonnets this cat was slinging. Another highlight was a complex rendition of Rappers Delight that was preformed by a trio that took the beat and the Sugar Hill Gang's verbal stylings and then flipped it with their own freestyles. But the true high point, was this guy Rich - a 60 year old home town favorite - who did a spot on rendition of Billy Jean. Terrific.

July 09, 2003

No Sign of The Skelton Code
My brother snapped this picture of our namesake sign outside the townhall of our very own township. Neither of us had any idea there was even a township in Minnesota called Skelton. I already feel an immediate kinship to the 372 people who live there. And I kind of wonder - what it would take for me to be deemed King of Skelton? Is it one of those things where I could just show up at the town hall and, upon hearing my name and pure pedigree, they would immediately appoint me as ruler and keeper of the lands? Or, will I just have to amass a small army and march up 35E and take the thing by force? Plans must be drawn up at once!

Yikes, I guess I'm feeling a bit mischievous today. I haven't been sleeping much on account of that damn book The Da Vinci Code. I suspect that this is the same deep engagement and euphoria that millions of 12 year olds the world over are getting from their Harry Potter Book. Last night I surrendered completely to it's cryptographic tractor beam. The Journey is a good one. But I refuse to talk about the book cause that would take all day and I would be hung from hooks for the highest crime of 'spoiling'. In that spirit, I wont even link to reviews but if you're interested you can get a feel for the book by following The DaVinci Code Web Quest: an online treasure hunt of sorts using Google and other tools. Fun stuff.

July 08, 2003

We Have Cans
I was standing outside moments ago when a guy on a bike rode by hauling three huge bags filled with hundreds of cans. He was no doubt on his way to get paid from the recycling plant down the street. Just as he passed me, a megaphone narration broke the air and yelled, "Hey. You on the Bike. We've got more cans for you." It sounded mischievous - not something you'd expect to hear blasted loudly across the streets of the Warehouse District. The guy immediately looked at me to see if I was responsible for the command. I gave him a blank look and shrugged my shoulders. Then we both noticed a fire truck parked at a light about two blocks away. The guy on the bike and I concluded that the words were coming from the fire truck. Sure enough the truck pulled up to us and a fire guy got out, went around to the back of the truck, and pulled out three of his own bags of cans. The fire guy and I helped the guy on the bike balance six bags of cans on his bike and then the fire guy and I watched as the can man rode off slowly, wobbling back and forth down the road.

July 07, 2003

It's amazing how many books you can crush in a long weekend when the usual distractions of reality television, computers, tire changing, grocery shopping duties, and most importantly, humans are removed from the equation. Only the sounds of cardinals and giant mosquitoes were left to remove me from the printed word. I blasted through two Bukowski novels, War Talk by Arundhati, and a book on Japan's influence on Frank Lloyd Wright culled from the depths of the Minneapolis Public Library. All great reading but I hadn't anticipated being able to focus on the reading quite so ferociously and soon I was down to my last paragraph with nothing on deck. Desperate for more words, I traveled from the Log Cabin dwelling and drove the 8 miles to the closest town - New Prague - to gobble up whatever words I could. Just so you know, New Prague doesn't look anything like Old Prague. In fact the new development that was unceremoniously deemed "New New Prague" certainly doesn't bare any resemblance whatsoever to its romantic old Eastern European sister city. Being that it was a holiday most everything was shut up except for the local Econo foods grocery. I was still in the mood for some quality literature but when all you've got to supply your addiction is the Econo foods in New Prague...well that's just an unforgiving mistress. Across from the canned coffee I found the miscellaneous reading materials shelf overflowing with a bounty of bridal magazines and fantasy football periodicals. I actually had my hands on the newest edition of Lowrider Magazine for a heartbeat, but then I wised up. My book choices were singular - dictionaries that had sat undisturbed on the shelf since the Cold War. No luck. I drove back to the cabin with only a recipe on the back of a bucket of store bought homestyle potato salad for enjoyment.

Without reading materials, the rest of trip was spent in the Captain's chair trying to lure some of the hundred or so bunny rabbits over to my outdoor lazy-style HQ with bits of potato salad and bite size Oreoes. No takers. The bunnies did get pretty close tho and hopped about on the outside of my perimeter. Of course they were highly entertaining as I finished of a six pack of Private Reserve. The estate also had a few variety of goats, dogs, and a brand new litter of snow white kittens with baby blue eyes. The kittens were doted over for a good long time.

July 03, 2003

Unplugging for the Fourth
I'm not a big Fourth of July fan. Crowds, alcohol induced patriotism, and explosives will always lead to the inevitable post holiday assortment of news reports documenting the twisted nights of the unkept and dumb. It's always the best time of year to get as far away from humanity as possible. So, I've found a cabin for the weekend. A sturdy thing with lots of knotty pine and iron. The coolers are packed with all the fixings to make as many mojitos as the body can take. I got this sweet Captain's Chair with Footrest from Target. And I'm planning on stopping by the book store to grab a copy of The Da Vinci Code before getting on the highway and making my way south. Reading will be the order of the days and taking lots of snaps. I've got to get going on getting some photos together for the 26 Things Project. I was thinking of using the Warped Tour photo of the cops to fill the category "Love", but the more I think about it I might use it for symmetry. Be careful out there this weekend.

July 01, 2003

Type for the Twin Cities
Looks like the Twin Cities is one step closer to a new type face. The TypeCon site is featuring a new type by the fine folks at LettError. The type will be called Twin and it will be up to the folks of the Twin Cites to make the type learn. Ambitious. I can't wait to peep it at TypeCon 2003.

Employing OpenType, and based on custom software entitled the “Panchromatic Hybrid Style Alternator,” LettError’s Twin font offers an infinitely varied typographic menu. And, in a remarkable first, a “live and reactive” version can be linked via the Internet to dynamic data, so that urban conditions in the Twin Cities can visibly affect the font’s appearance.

Another type innovation that will soon be unleashed on the OSX crowd is Font Book by Apple. From the screenshots it look like the interface will be a vast improvement over the painful verticle display in Font Reserve. Hopefully it will be the last time I need to spend time reorganizing, relearning and upgrading my font organization habits and techniques. A cool aspect of Font Book will be it's Character Pallet which allows users to "preview a character rendered in every active font". Sweet.

Stencils are everywhere! Check out Bansky. Here is a photo of a stencil left on Hennepin Avenue by ObeyGiant when he cruised through town a few weeks ago.