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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.