2012: Colombian city Medellin tries to shed its crime-related image through progressive architecture and urban design.
1902: British planner Ebenezer Howard suggests you put your town’s lunatic asylum next to its reservoir and waterfall.
Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
“Epileptic Farms”?
(from thenotes)
When I was in second grade, my teacher told us all that when a word ended in a vowel, or perhaps specifically in ‘a,’ the plural took an apostrophe before the ‘s.’ I had fairly successfully repressed this erroneous claim until about a year ago I found myself looking at a deli’s sidewalk sign, advertising its “sandwiches, salads, and pasta’s” and the memory flooded back.
Favorite quote of the season.
Ya burnt!
1. On the rare quite-warm days when I leave the house wearing only a short-sleeved shirt (and like trousers and shoes and stuff) I feel awfully naked.
2. I have on two occasions been forced by sudden weather changes to buy outer garments at thrift stores.
Shit’s dead on.
Too often I say I’m not really into the bookmobile because it’s bringing some books to the community rather than bringing the librarian to the community (many places do, but many places don’t, staff the bookmobile with librarians). As with canning, the bookmobile needs the very best collections and librarians to succeed.
It had never occurred to me that there were opportunities to create special event collections, which makes me deeply ashamed. Well played, SFPL.
Embarrassing prediction time: in September of 2010 I figured the Pop-Up Library was still well off in the future (20 years, Past-Me? Seriously?); though in my own defense I was talking about their being commonplace.
Ryan Mack talks to an unemployed librarian and an architect who converted a bus shelter in Bed-Stuy into a pop-up library — frankly I think this one counts where all those other Public Bookshelves ideas do not because this one has a librarian standing in (or sometimes next to) it.
Finding these things always makes me sad that I didn’t really go for it in my post, because my conception of the pop-up library had begun as wanting to place smart people with internet connections on economically-disadvantaged street corners as a truly embedded reference service.
I’d been scheming and angsting about digital cameras for weeks, Canons and Sonys and Olympi and how I could pretty much afford a small box with a hole on one side, when I finally snapped out of it and said hey: I bought a bunch of rolls of film in 2005 that are still in my fridge. Why don’t I just do that, instead?
So: Expired Kodak 160VC, scanned negatives. Most exposures f/2.8, 1/30.
Tinfoil Hat Man returned, and helped a patron navigate our fairly confusing photocopier default settings; I am now conflicted about making fun of him (though to be fair the extent of my making fun of him was calling him Tinfoil Hat Man).
A question for type nerds:
These are the lowercase ligatures in Adobe Caslon Pro. The first seven (fi, fj, fl, ffi, ffj, ffl) are all fine and lovely things, although I do wonder in which languages the ffj ligature would ever be used.
The next two — ct and st — are pretentious, ugly, and stupid. They do the opposite of what good typography should do: they call attention to themselves, and make it harder rather than easier to read body text. I can see why someone might want to use these in a logo or something like that, to add a bit of ersatz “classiness”. But anybody setting type with these things should be shot.
And then there’s the final five — the fh, fi, fl, ff, and ft, all missing the cross stroke on the f. Who on earth came up with this abomination? And why would anybody of sound mind ever use it? The fl is particularly idiotic. These things are not only hard to read; they make it seem like there was some kind of printing error at the typesetter’s.
Is there a name for a ligature formed by removing the cross stroke on the f? I think there should be, if only to identify one of the few typographic montrosities which is unambiguously worse than Comic Sans.
The ct and st ligatures are basically decorative. You would use them as sparingly as would swash caps, say. No, they’re not for running text. Yes, they’re for a bit of flourish. You can relax about these.
The “final five,” as you’re calling them, are not f ligatures. They are ſ ligatures. Per wikipedia:
The long, medial or descending s (ſ) is a form of the minuscule letter s formerly used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example “ſinfulneſs” (“sinfulness”). The modern letterform was called the terminal, round, or short s.
Feel free to read on. Should you ever need to typeset a very old manuscript with some degree of fidelity, you may find yourself in need of the long s and its ligatures.
If you have a passing familiarity with German, you’ll recognize an ſ ligature that is still very much in use: ß. That would be a long s and short s conjoined.
My main complaint about Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch, beyond Nigel Slater’s incredibly loving descriptions of every single vegetable for which he has recipes (‘Cauliflower! When its first tiny, tender, white shoots appear above the broken soil in my small snowy vegetable patch, I garnish them with my tears; then I pluck them, lovingly salted as they are, and eat them on the spot — you would too if you loved them like I do’), is the use throughout of the ‘ct’ and ‘st’ ligatures.
Frommer’s Illustrates its Concern with Sea-Level Rise and the Future of Island Nations in Perhaps the Subtlest Way Possible, or, Is It Just Me or Is Bermuda Getting Farther Away?
Saw an honest-to-Pete tinfoil hat on a patron yesterday. That, coupled with the Child Who Scream[ed] as Though It Were Being Murdered for Ten Minutes, means I’m only two squares away from winning Library Week Bingo!
Anybody got a Non-Standard (Lizard, Goat, etc.) Service Animal? Come on by! I’m also in need of an “I Pay Your Salary with My Hard-Earned Tax Dollars,” but I’m not really looking forward to testing out my reply to that one.
