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About Scott Eric Kaufman
Scott Eric Kaufman is an English graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. He earned his B.A. from Louisiana State University and hopes to earn his Ph.D. sometime before his funding evaporates. He had one fancy title: Senior Instructor of Literary Journalism. He is currently working tirelessly on his dissertation. His scholarly interests include everything—and he means everything—pertaining to American literature and appropriations of evolutionary theory c. 1890-1910. His blather can also be read on The Valve.
Email Address: firstname.lastname@example.com
Website: http://acephalous.typepad.com
Posts by Scott Eric Kaufman
Monday, May 25, 2009
Book Event: Jenny Davidson's Breeding
Beginning tomorrow, The Valve will be hosting a book event on Jenny Davidson's Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. Peter Gay has already reviewed the book for Bookforum, which is rather remarkable when you consider this was an academic book published by a university press—then again, it's a rather remarkable book.
The introduction and first two chapters are available online.
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Sunday, May 03, 2009
BREAKING NEWS: John Cheever not remotely like a character in a John Cheever story, actually.
From "How Cheever Really Felt About Living in Suburbia," published in today's Times:
[His] writings suggest that he seemed to take a jaundiced view of so manicured and lovely a setting.
But there is evidence in a new biography of Cheever that he relished his life as a suburban burgher and did not disdain his fellow suburbanites as a class. Cheever was "crazy about the suburbs," said Blake Bailey, whose book, Cheever: A Life, published in March by Knopf, was written with apparently unrivaled access to Cheever's journals.
"He loved the natural beauty of the Hudson Valley," Mr. Bailey said. "He loved walking through the woods along the Croton Aqueduct. He liked his neighbors."
I'm not sure how someone can have "unrivaled" access to materials held by Harvard and The New York Public Library, but that's neither here nor there. This article—from the hard-hitting Connecticut desk—is a full-scale assault on the body of Cheever's work by people who insist that, in truth, they were all quite normal, thank you very much. Cheever himself was a conventionally quaint exurban alcoholic:
Mrs. Cheever casually took care to point out that her husband wrote only in the mornings because by the afternoon he was often drunk on gin.
"In those days, people did drink ever so much more than they do now," Mrs. Cheever said with a chuckle. "It sounds shocking now, but it was not shocking then."
Not to mention boyish and civic-minded:
"He once got to drive the fire truck, and that was a big thrill," Mrs. Cheever said.
His family were old-fashioned:
"We were old-fashioned," she said. "We were brought up in private schools."
He was old-fashioned:
"He was that old-fashioned," she said.
He was utterly unlike a character in a John Cheever novel, except when he wasn't:
Yet at the same time, Cheever could say in ["The Housebreaker of Shady Hill"], "If you work in the city and have children to raise, I can't think of a better place."
Note that "say" there. Cheever didn't write that sentence, because if he had, it'd be a sentence written about a character in a Cheever story and we can't have that, now can we? It would be inaccurate in the way all the unhappiness Cheever wrote is and will forever be inaccurate.
How deeply pathetic is it that the Times tries to deny Cheever ownership of his insight by doing to him what he undid to his characters? It was all very fine, the Times implies, like in that famous story of his that ends:
The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed? Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys' for supper? Had the girls joined her there or gone someplace else? Hadn't they agreed, as they usually did on Sunday, to regret all their invitations and stay at home? He tried the garage doors to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and rust came off the handles onto his hands. Going toward the house, he saw that the force of the thunderstorm had knocked one of the rain gutters loose. It hung down over the front door like an umbrella rib, but it could be fixed in the morning. The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked the place up until he remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.
Then everyone yelled, "Surprise, Neddy Merrill! It is your birthday and the place looked empty because we cleared the room so we could dance!" Neddy's daughters approached him, one after another, and planted a kiss on his cheek and a tie to his chest. "I love these ties," Neddy exclaimed. Everyone at the party drank judiciously and no one died on the way home. It was the best day of Neddy's life.
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Monday, April 27, 2009
Concerning the inherent superiority of printed text to irresponsible online drivel.
Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us enough already?
Why does this same issue contain a write-up of a forum from the 2007 MLA convention? Did it really take two years and change to transform that panel into something print-worthy? So I take it the first sentence is supposed to read:
In contributions to this 2007 panel of the division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, titled "Untiming the Nineteenth-Century: Temporality and Periodization," periodization, a venerable mainstay of comparative literarature safeguarded by its apparent neutrality, is critically arraigned.
Lest you think I'm mocking the author of this sentence, Emily Apter, let me make this absolutely clear: Apter's introduction is lively and interesting—historicists like myself tend to be interested in arguments about or against periodization even when we disagree with them—but how well is her intellectual project of two years previous served by appearing so belatedly? How well is her intellectual integrity represented by an error so basic only a typesetter could have made it? These are the standards against which necessarily inconsequential (because) online conversations should be judged?
Maybe I'm still in a foul mood, but I don't think so.
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Thursday, April 23, 2009
Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II
(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me. They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary. I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary. So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)
Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized. Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.
But canonization into what?
In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation. Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward. When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades. Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.
When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan. It took three months to arrive. Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in. Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan. Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background.
Are those novels good? No. Do they deserve canonization? No. Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular? Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time? Is that not a viable object of study? Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical?
For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility). So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs. To wit:
The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge. An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating. No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.
Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last. I did that on purpose. Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like. ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.) From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this. Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos. But remember:
Verisimilitude is not an end. It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means. What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text. For example, this comic sucks:
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Sunday, April 19, 2009
How awful have these past few months been for contemporary letters?
Here's a paragraph from the late David Foster Wallace's review of the late, as of today, J.G. Ballard's 1991 collection War Fever:
J.G. Ballard is not a great fiction writer, but he is an important one. If that seems like an inconsistent judgment, be advised that American readers who know Ballard only via his moving, Spielbergable memoir Empire of the Sun do not know the real J. G. Ballard. The real Ballard has since the early '60s been a pioneer of a certain sort of literary science fiction I like to call Psy-Fi. Psy-Fi, often parodic, surreal and grotesque, and almost always set in some near and recognizable future, seeks to explore the psychopathology of post-atomic life, stuff like high technology, mass-media, advertising, PR, totalitarianism, etc.
When he wrote this in 1991, Wallace himself had just started writing an "often parodic, surreal and grotesque" novel "set in [the] near and recognizable future" that sought "to explore the psychopathology of post-atomic life, stuff like high technology, mass-media, advertising, PR, totalitarianism," and more than a little et cetera. I'd never considered my passion for both novelists related until I stumbled across this review a few months back. The coldness Wallace speaks of in Ballard's prose is utterly unlike anything you find in Wallace's own work. Even when his narrators speak, as he claimed Ballard's do, in a "flat, scholarly narrative voice, [with] an air of lab technicians looking at stuff under glass," the result never resembles the clipped, clinical speech of which Ballard was a master—for in Wallace, such disinterested precision is always affected. But without Ballard, there would have been no Wallace; in fact, without Ballard, contemporary literature would look very different.
A British friend once told me that Ballard was "Our [meaning English-speaking] Borges." I'm not sure he was right, but I'm not about to argue that he was wrong.
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Friday, April 17, 2009
"Things like severely beating men dressed as fetish bats are all that keep me sane, some days."
I received an email in response to this comment on John's latest post, but because my explanation required images, I decided to throw it online; however, because it contained so many images, it would take me hours to reformat it to display properly over here. So if you're interested in how I teach a subject dear to my heart (historical context) in a rhetorical vein via a single funny book (Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth), you can do so here.
(Title taken from the book. Be glad I didn't go with an alternative.)
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
What's wrong with Reading Comics? Quite a bit, actually.
Because late to the party is better than never, I'm reading Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics. When I'm not maybe being mocked, the book is a compelling read. This is a problem. Since tradition dictates picking nits with blurbs, I'll start with the quotation from the Los Angeles Times printed on the cover:
Deliciously quotable.
Of all the Times blurbs to pick with nits, this one may not even be the best. From the back cover:
Everything is here.
If everything is there and there is deliciously quotable—but let me begin with the second blurb, because it concerns a minor point. No matter how you define "everything," Reading Comics does not contain it all. Wolk periodically informs the reader of this fact:
There are . . . several very big names I'm barely mentioning or neglecting outright in the following pages: Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb . . . (137)
And we can ellipses away there because this is a book about comics that barely mentions or outright neglects Jack Kirby and Robert Crumb. Why the Times would make claims the author explicitly rejects I don't know—but I suspect its decision relates to the tone of casual expertise Wolk displays throughout the book. Every reference I catch—about half of the ones Wolk drops—complements his argument; however, the way you wear your erudition lightly on the web differs from how you do it in print. The book's delicious quotability is a byproduct of its learned chattiness, and if the medium is ever to attain academic respectability, its expositors will need to try a little harder than this:Continue reading "What's wrong with Reading Comics? Quite a bit, actually."
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Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part II: HELL STALKS ON FOUR PAWS!
I concluded the previous post with a nod to William Blake as someone who explored the word-picture relationship and I will get to that, but first I should clarify a few issues I raised without fully addressing yesterday:
- Vance rightly noted that titles of paintings were often left to benefactors and history, so putting that much interpretive weight on such thin ice might not be the best idea. I agree. I fully intend on leaving this series of posts immersed and hypothermic.
- JPool noted that treating paintings like panels could be a category error and Miriam and Gene implicitly agreed, suggesting I might be better served by a Hogarth or one of his ilk. I agree. But I chose to go with Caravaggio and Blake over Giotto and Hogarth because I wanted to focus attention on an individual image before I moved to discussing the interaction between multiple images arrayed in narrative.
- Andrew liked the arrows and will be disappointed with this post.
Now that I have well and cleared my throat, let us venture forward to William Blake and "The Tyger" from Songs of Experience (1794). It reads:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Where to start? Should I go full Keats and spend a day on each stanza? Probably . . . especially when you consider that 1) his manuscript looked like this:
Because 2) he spent tedious years perfecting the placement of every word on every line. Maybe I'll declare next week Blake Week and do just that. But tonight I want to focus on the general impression of feline bad-assedness created by the text of the poem. What we have here is a TYGER! MADE OF FIRE FORGED BY DREAD HANDS AND SHARP TOOLS OF METALLURGY TO HAVE DREAD PAWS. So FEROCIOUS is this FIRE TYGER! that the poet cannot even imagine THE ABOMINABLE FOUNDRY in which SOME DEMENTED LORD created SO GRIM A BEAST.
TRIGGER WARNING: IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO LOOK INTO THE BRUTAL MAW OF HELL ITSELF DO NOT CONTINUE READING THIS POST BECAUSE I AM ABOUT TO POST THE PICTURE OF THE FIRE TYGER! BLAKE INCLUDED WITH THE POEM. SERIOUSLY IT'S WAY TOO MUCH FOR YOU I MEAN YOU CAN BARELY EVEN WATCH R-RATED MOVIES THIS WILL BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU TURN AWAY I TELL YOU TURN AWAY!Continue reading "Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part II: HELL STALKS ON FOUR PAWS!"
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Sunday, April 05, 2009
Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part I
Were I to muster a defense of comics as potentially serious objects of rhetorical analysis in, say, a textbook, I would begin by pointing out that while there may not be a ready-made critical apparatus for comics as a genre, there exists a robust tradition of analyzing visual narrative. Consider Caravaggio's "Calling of St. Matthew":
I present the whole painting here so you can see what occupies the center of the painting. (Many reproductions of "The Calling" crop the upper third off. I will too to save bandwidth below.) If we assume that the eye of the viewer is drawn to the center, it becomes evident that Caravaggio didn't intend his static painting to be experienced as such. We light first on the boy's eyes and follow them:Continue reading "Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part I"
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Sunday, March 29, 2009
Standards? Who needs them? Or, Thomas Urquhart & That Which Is Infinitely Superior to Cricket.
Teaching composition exclusively leads to (1) a greater appreciation for the pedestrian complexity of correctly subordinated clauses and (2) a bone-tiredness for the unmerited praise of student peer reviews. As someone with a penchant for paragraph-length sentences, I find (1) wholly salutary; but (2) irks me endlessly. Why? In one of my undergraduate History of the English Language course, the professor handed out slips of paper on which he had written a single sentence and told everyone to decipher what it meant, because he wanted us to present the sentence and the paraphrase to the class in ten minutes. My sentence read:
Another thing there is that fixeth a grievous scandal upon that nation in matter of philargyrie, or love of money, and it is this: There hath been in London, and repairing to it, for these many years together, a knot of Scotish bankers, collybists, or coine-coursers, of traffickers in merchandise to and againe, and of men of other professions, who by hook and crook, fas et nefas, slight and might, (all being as fish their net could catch), having feathered their nests to some purpose, look so idolatrously upon their Dagon of wealth, and so closely, (like the earth's dull center), hug all unto themselves, that for no respect of vertue, honour, kindred, patriotism, or whatever else, (be it never so recommendable), will they depart from so much as one single peny, whose emission doth not, without any hazard of loss, in a very short time superlucrate beyond all conscience an additionall increase to the heap of that stock which they so much adore; which churlish and tenacious humor hath made many that were not acquainted with any else of that country, to imagine all their compatriots infected with the same leprosie of a wretched peevishness, whereof those quomodocunquizing clusterfists and rapacious varlets have given of late such cannibal-like proofs, by their inhumanity and obdurate carriage towards some, (whose shoe-strings they are not worthy to unty), that were it not that a more able pen than mine will assuredly not faile to jerk them on all sides, in case, by their better demeanour for the future, they endeavour not to wipe off the blot wherewith their native country, by their sordid avarice and miserable baseness, hath been so foully stained, I would at this very instant blaze them out in their names and surnames, notwithstanding the vizard of Presbyterian zeal wherewith they maske themselves, that like so many wolves, foxes, or Athenian Timons, they might in all times coming be debarred the benefit of any honest conversation.
That would be from the EKΣKYBAΛAYPON of Thomas Urquhart, best known for his translations of Rabelais.* In Urquhart, Rabelais found less a translator than a kindred spirit; but in Urquhart's prose, I found an unparaphraseable wall of words, before which I stood befuddled but impressed. Granted, I should have been impressed, so the analogy to peer reviews is imperfect; but my comprehension and subsequent paraphrase of Urquhart amounted to what I abhor in peer reviews: salivation at the sight of a dependent clause containing multiple polysyllabes and a "Good!" slapped in the margins—as if knowing big words and including them complex sentences means someone's saying anything meaningful. But now that I teach composition exclusively, I see similar instances of unmerited praise everywhere:
When most former major leaguers write memoirs, you wonder why they bothered; with Ron Darling—Yale graduate, former New York Met and Oakland A, and current Mets broadcaster—you wonder why it took him so long. What other former athlete could write a sentence like this even with assistance from a professional writer (Daniel Paisner): "This right here [his legendary college pitching duel against St. Johns star Frank Viola**] was one of the great epiphanies for me as a competitive athlete, only it took a while for it to resonate." Most former pitchers can't resonate even with help.
Just so you know, my love of béisbol knows no limits; moreover, my love of the Mets generally, and Ron Darling in particular—both as a player and announcer—is unimpeachable. But for the San Fransisco Chronicle to praise a Yale graduate who double-majored in French and Southeast Asian history and who speaks both Chinese and French fluently—to praise him (if it was him and not his co-writer) for using the words "epiphany" and "resonate" makes me want to quodlibetificate into demission this clusterheaded intelligentry, the miserable baseness of whose expectations ought to debar them from the profession of letters.
*But who should be remembered for titling the second volume of his Logopandecteision; or an Introduction to the Universal Language thus: Chrestasebeia; or, Impious Dealing of Creditors Wherein the Severity of the Creditors of the Author's Family is Desired to Be Removed, as a Main Impediment to the Production of this Universal Language, and Publication of Other No Less Considerable Treatises.
**The bracketed link takes you to 95 percent of Roger Angell's "The Web of the Game," a contender for the best essay about baseball ever written.
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Tuesday, March 17, 2009
271 notes (two hundred and seventy-one) from a novel I don't remember reading.*
Before I could return The Damnation of Theron Ware to my beloved library, I had to remove all the notes I'd stuck to its pages. It took me a while:
The resulting note wheel is as lovely as it is meaningless, because I remember absolutely nothing about The Damnation of Theron Ware. From my notes, I can almost reconstruct why I read it:
Theron enjoys the "primitive" pleasures of Catholic picnics; contrast to earlier (235-6) image of it as orderly machine; no, from sociological & intellectual perspective it's orderly, from internal is primitive
If only I knew the antecedent of "it" I might be able to reconstruct my reason for reading the book. Am I the only one for whom the Five Year Rule applies? (And do I really want that question answered?)
*Notation borrowed from a letter Joyce wrote to his mother after arriving in Paris: "Your order for 3s 4d of Tuesday last was very welcome as I had been without food for 42 hours (forty-two)." How's that for passive-aggression?
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Friday, March 13, 2009
You thought I was going to mock the title, didn't you?
Via Savage Minds, I came across this article from the July 2008 edition of Qualitative Inquiry:
I know everyone wants to cry Sokal and loose the hounds of sense, but the title is what the title is. I'm more curious about this:
I was fortunate to be mentored by Corrine Glesne, an absolutely wonderful ethnographer (Busier et al., 1997; Glesne, 1989, 1998, 2003; Martin & Glesne, 2002).
Do my eyes deceive me, or are those citations meant to substantiate the absolute wonderfulness of Corrine Glesne? Is this a cheap scheme to up the number of times people are cited in professional indexes? If so, how is it nobody's—wait a minute. I just had an idea.
Have I ever told you how awesome you are? I haven't? Well then, it's about time that I did. It is my professional opinion that you are awesome. By the authority invested in me by the University of California, I hereby declare that each and every one of you possess more awesomeness than anyone has any right to. You can quote me on that. In fact, I insist that you do. Every time you appeal to your academic ethos, I'd like to see some variation of "Lest you doubt my authority, remember that reputable scholars have attested to my awesomeness (Kaufman 2009)." Feel free to practice in the comments.
For obvious reasons, I will x-post this everywhere. The more citations I score, the more reputable I become; and the more reputable I become, the more my stamp of approval's worth. I think we have ourselves a win-win scenario here. So what are you waiting for? Start practicing already!
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Friday, March 06, 2009
I performed an experiment on myself and I do believe I failed.
A friend sent me the text of a recent WSJ editorial entitled "Will This Crisis Produce a 'Gatsby'?" I'll link to it later—for now I want to recreate my bad-faith reading experience in all its glory. My first reaction was to the title, even though I know authors never write their own titles. But this one seemed sufficiently troublesome to warrant criticism. I wrote:
You would think someone at the WSJ would know that enough about literature to know that The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. If you grant the title its premises, the question should be "Did Someone Write a 'Gatsby' in 2004 and If So Who Was He or She and What Was the Title of It?" But that's not quite right.
The WSJ's infuriating decision to publish the titles of books in quotation marks means that we're not even sure whether the current crisis will be producing a novel affectionately called Gatsby or a fictional Jew with class insecurities who meets an untimely end. Because we have umpteen examples of the latter—Curb Your Enthusiasm may even be a Gatsby-in-progress. Tune in next season to find out!
But even that's not quite right. Given that The Great Gatsby preceded the financial crisis by more than half a decade, maybe the author wants to claim that Fitzgerald's slim volume caused the Great Depression. In which case we must discover and burn all copies of the mysterious 2004 novel or unwrite the fictional Jew. Obama said we all needed to chip in. This is how we, as literary scholars, can do our part!
Then I started reading the text itself. The mention of Louis Adamic seemed promising, and the rest of the article built what I took to be a fairly solid case until the last few paragraphs:
John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath" made the Joad family's flight from the dust bowl into an emblem of people coming together to remake their world. A similar image was implicit in the very title of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor's documentary book "An American Exodus." Even works of light entertainment like the massively popular "Gone With the Wind" or John Ford's landmark Western "Stagecoach" were in keeping with the prevailing message of the times. All these works told of epic journeys in which a group of people overcame destructive competition in their discovery of a common destiny. Each called for Americans to act collectively to remake a democratic society where opportunity would be open to all.
In effect, such declarations helped lay the cultural groundwork for the New Deal, providing the ideological infrastructure for the new governmental institutions created during the '30s.
My response?
If there's one thing I learned writing my dissertation, it's that you can't throw words like "ideology" around like that—especially not when you're claiming that a book published in 1939 laid the groundwork for the policies that were curtailed in 1939 by "Dr. Win-the-War." If I'd tried to end-around history like that I would've—I don't know what would've happened to me, actually, because I'd learned early in my graduate career to avoid situations in which I could be browbeaten by "the fact, man, the irrefragable fact!"
I continued blustering on—scrolling back up the article, snipping the bits that confirmed my claim of sloppy historicism and snarking mightily upon them—until I returned to those final paragraphs and hit the byline:
Sean McCann, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, is the author of "A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government."
At first I thought I'd been pranked. Then I realized I'd done it to myself: I'd read the article about as uncharitably as it could be read. I'd clipped the sections suggestive of causality . . . and ignored all those that spoke directly to the notion that the cultural output of the '30s reflected a growing disenchantment with the vision of social mobility that'd been aggressively asserted in the '20s. See Sean's article for all the details.
Me? I'm off to go where they send half-cocked purveyors of online opinion when they misbehave: to The Corner. (Dunce cap not optional.)
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Saturday, February 14, 2009
Infodumps or Constellations?
The infodump, as Todd VanDerWerff points out, may well be the single generic feature shared by all flavors of science fiction:
You might find some infodumping in a Western or in a period piece, but for the most part, we know the rules those genres play by because those genres take place in our reality, just in the past . . . . To a large degree, the division between hard and soft [science fiction] often hinges on things like infodumps. The hard [science fiction] is often for the people who are really, really interested in the science part of the science fiction equation. The soft stuff skews more toward the fiction end of things and isn't particularly concerned with plausibility much of the time.
This strikes me as wrong in one crucial respect: the infodumps about which people complain occur at the outset of a work. They're presented as the technological enablers of the narrative to follow. They are exposition before the fact—before readers have any emotional investment in the characters whose narratives are enabled by the infodumped technology. No surprise, then, that people whose primarily invest in character or narrative find the lengthy technological preambles of hard science fiction off-putting.
To label as infodump the exposition on the Battlestar Galactica episode "No Exit" is to be a little too literal. "No Exit" did "dump" quite a bit of "info" on its audience, but the information was not intended to make the narrative work, because it already does. You cannot have an infodump four seasons into a series: you can only have a revelation. The argument should be whether too much information was revealed too quickly, but what else were the characters meant to do? Naming an episode after Sartre's No Exit signals a forthcoming entrapment of the character's own devising. Their Hell will be the other people they're trapped with.
But that's not where I'm headed with this post. I think the thematic parallels with Sartre's play are important—certainly significant is the implication that this is a Hell of their own devising, one in which they remain not by force or compulsion, but through fear of the unknown. (That all the characters begin by talking about what happened on Earth, only to become increasingly occupied with their own infighting seems an important parallel, even if I am being a bit literal.) What I want to focus on the effect on a viewer when almost 70 hours of thin-streaming history are followed by one of torrential exposition.
On a certain type of reader/viewer, the result is little different than the cumulative effect reading Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest; namely, this person feels like the night sky yearns to snap into constellations—he feels like the heavens look down on, disappointed, because some personal failing prevents him from discovering the order they contain. So what does this person do?
If he's reading Ulysses, he maps Joyce's universe onto the tram-lines of William Martin Murphy in order to demonstrate that
[Stephen's] attempts at upward mobility are futile, frustrated in large part by Murphy's reluctance to lower the tramfare. However, were Murphy to lower the tramfare, the people riding the tramcars would no longer comprise a tram-riding elite, and Stephen's desire to ride the tramlines might atrophy into little more than a timesaving utilitarian impulse. Understood in this manner, Stephen becomes a pathetic figure obsessed with belonging to a class he can only feign membership in on payday.
If he's watching Battlestar Galactica, he writes the following post.
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Wednesday, February 11, 2009
How to teach [non-canonical] material responsibly in a composition class.
Since I seem to have started a series:
- How to teach film responsibly in a composition class (The Dark Knight)
- How to teach comics responsibly in a composition class (Watchmen)
TypePad generated the ugliest URL I've ever seen for that second link. (I only hope that doesn't somehow reflect its content.)
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Ashray is not like any other company and so you have heard many say before, but we at Ashray, take pride in the quality of the well-designed-product we deliver to our clients. We, as a team, put in a lot of our efforts to help convert our properties into homes for our clients.
Quality, quality, quality to it's absolute last detail, is what we concentrate on and pour all our energies into, thus do not expect anything less from us- than the finest built quality in town.
We know how it feels to walk out of your home in the morning to a well-manicured garden and so we provide all our properties with best-in-the-business gardeners and maintenance personnel to keep the property looking as good as it was when you first stepped in with Ashray and saw it.
We continue to help: providing our clients with house-keeping staff and personnel if ever required, to assist them on their stay, so as to make it homely and convenient on every trip.
For those who choose to make one of Ashray's properties their forever homes, we boast of our friendly, well-known and loved by all our clients team! Our team is always available to all our clients at almost any time of need. We are a family and we take care of our own.
We look forward to welcoming you home-

subset: commoncrawl


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Clacton Sailing Club's Cadet section.
The Cadet section's main aim is to have fun in a safe manner, as well as promoting sea safety. The cadets will learn both sport specific skills in sailing as well as valuable life skills such as team work and socialising ability.
The cadets section offers a variety of different activities, these include, sail training and race training; trips to London and other attractions. As well as this the sailing club has a large social scene and regular racing for cadets to race against each other and other club members.
- Upcoming Cadet Events 2018
- Cadet events at Clacton Sailing Club.
- Boats and Sailing
- Boats Available for use by members
- Past Cadet Events
- Cadet past events at Clacton Sailing Club.
- CSC Sailing and Social Calendar 2019
- Download Here
- pdf (1,072.63kb)
- This page can be found in the following news feeds:
- Clacton Sailing Club - Cadet News


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Akron, OH – October 6, 2008 Today, Skycasters, America's leader in broadband satellite Internet solutions, upgraded its Tier I after hours answering service to true 24/7 Tier II in-house technical support.
Ensuring that business and residential customers who are off the grid are not out of touch since 2001, Skycasters has a tradition of changing its business model in response to customer feedback. Since its earliest days as a broadband reseller, Skycasters' customers had been asking for guaranteed bandwidth, so Skycasters delivered in 2003.
Similarly, Skycasters' has understood since its inception in 2001 that service after hours was the hallmark of a service-oriented firm. Customers' businesses were increasingly communicating on the Internet with colleagues and customers in other parts of the world. Since day one, Skycasters has offered 24/7 Tier I support, and Tier II support during business hours, six days a week. Tier I after hours support permitted customers to relay their needs to a person, and any questions Tier I couldn't answer were followed up the next day by a Tier II agent.
However, customers were increasingly requiring cross polarization and connections after hours, and demanding more of their broadband satellite internet equipment than ever before. The outsourcing company that provided Skycasters' Tier I support could neither provide technical answers, nor provide basic satellite services such as cross polarization and connection.
As part of its 2008 customer service plan, Skycasters resolved to offer customers true 24/7 support with Skycasters' own staff of highly-trained Tier II technical support agents. These in-house representatives help customers and service technicians in the middle of the night, as well as during the day.
Customers frankly can't believe it. A broadband satellite Internet firm whose after hours tech support are not overseas? Prospective customers regularly call our 24/7 Tier II technical support staff, checking our availability and asking difficult questions, and are consistently impressed enough to confirm their VSAT orders with Skycasters.
You can now be sure that when having your new broadband satellite Internet system installed, or just needing to ask a question about your usage, Skycasters is ready to answer your question, day or night. Call Skycasters' Tier II tech support at 1-800-268-8502 FREE, or call 800-268-8653 FREE to speak with the Skycasters sales team. Also, please visit us on the web at www.skycasters.com.
SOURCE Skycasters, LLC.
CONTACT: Media, Michael P. Kister, President, +1-330-785-2100,
or Gordon H. Landefeld, Marketing, +1-330-785-2100 FREE, both of Skycasters, LLC.
If internet connectivity is critical to your business, contact us today to learn more about our backup connections for business continuity. One of our dedicated team members will be happy to explain our plans and get you started today.CONTACT US NOW


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Celebs That Have Had Very Public Breakdowns
infamous celebrity meltdowns. What is it about being famous that drives some stars over the edge?
Celebs That Have Had Very Public Breakdowns.While it may seem like a wonderful thing to be a famous person, it can't be easy being in the public eye all the time, especially if you are under any kind of duress. Whether suffering from mental illness, a traumatic brain injury or simply in need of some down time, celebrities often find their personal issues and episodes exposed for the entire world to see, and in turn, critique. Which—let's just be honest here—is enough to drive even the sanest person a little wonky, even under the best circumstances.
Lindsay Lohan
Lindsay Lohan went from Disney's darling to a story that parents tell their children at night as a cautionary tale. The Mean Girls star morphed from a sweet young girl of considerable talent into a troubled actress, openly battling issues with substance abuse while hopping in and out of rehab facilities. Sadly, the paparazzi did little to provide the troubled New York native with any privacy, and every single one of her episodes was well documented by the media, leaving her little room to recoup. Perhaps it was all too much too fast for The Parent Trap star?
Source: therichest


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If a player had on a Greenwood jersey Friday, chances are he got to play against Little Rock Hall.
Greenwood didn't take long to extend its school-record winning streak to 45 games Friday. It didn't take Hall long to see its losing streak reach 23.
Greenwood quarterback Jabe Burgess threw three touchdown passes and Bulldogs built a 35-0 lead early in the second quarter before a mass of substitutions in the Bulldogs' 38-6 win at Smith-Robinson Stadium. Nine Greenwood receivers caught at least one pass in the first half.
Hall, which managed just two first down in the first half, actually finished with 115 rushing yards against mostly backups in the second half. And that was just fine with Greenwood coach Rick Jones.
"We have 30 seniors, a great group of guys, and mathematically they cannot all start," Jones said. "Our seniors got a lot of playing time. We have eight (junior varsity) games for the sophomores and juniors and it was good to get some of those guys in, too."
With the victory behind them, Jones and the Bulldogs were finally able to look ahead to next week's game against Southside. The Rebels lost 37-7 at Conway on Friday. Greenwood also has Conway and Russellville on its remaining regular-season schedule.
"We know the next three weeks will make or break us," Jones said. "We have to focus all of our attention on going 1-0 this next week. It's similar to the way it was last year. Our kids, we try not to look ahead, but we know who's coming next week — we know where we're going."
The Bulldogs forced a quick three-and-out to start the game and drove 38 yards in six plays for its first touchdown, with Austin Garnes doing the honors from a yard out.
Burgess, who has missed time twice this season due to injury, hooked up with Jonathan Clemons on a 27-yard touchdown on the Bulldogs' next possession. Kevin Jones' second PAT made it 14-0.
Still not done, Burgess hit a wide-open Ryan Padilla with a 46-yard strike on the Bulldogs' next possession.
Greenwood (7-0, 4-0 7A/6A-Central) made it 28-0 early in the second on Hoyt Smith's 12-yard touchdown run. It was Smith's only carry of the night.
Burgess was sharp; completing 6-of-8 passes for 158 yards.
"We haven't quite gotten him back to where he was before," Jones said. "We thought it would be good if he could play a half or so, or long as we could to get the clock running. He did well."
A 26-yard pass to Clemons set up Greenwood's final touchdown. Burgess hit Kevin Jones with a 29-yard score to make it 35-0.
Just before the half, Jake Odell booted a 21-yard field goal that gave Greenwood its final points.
Greenwood 38
Little Rock Hall 6
SUMMARY — Quarterback Gabe Burgess threw three touchdown passes and the No. 1 Bulldogs had no problem extending their school-record winning streak to 45 consecutive games.
TURNING POINT — Already leading 21-0, Hall punter Melvin Walker dropped the ball at his 10 and Greenwood scored two plays later for a 28-0 lead.
STAT — A total of 19 Greenwood players either caught a pass or carried the football in the win.
High School Football
Hall 0 0 0 6 — 6
Greenwood 21 17 0 0 — 38
First Quarter
Gre — Garnes 1 run (K. Jones kick), 8:45.
Gre — Clemons 27 pass from Burgess (K. Jones kick), 6:31.
Gre — Padilla 46 pass from Burgess (K. Jones kick), 4:08.
Second Quarter
Gre — Smith 12 run (K. Jones kick), 11:24
Gre — K. Jones 29 pass from Burgess (K. Jones kick), 9:37
Gre — FG Odell 21, 1:24
Fourth Quarter
Hall — Harper 18 run (kick failed), 7:34
Hall Gre
First Downs 11 17
Rushes-Yards 35-144 24-162
Passing Yards 31 226
Comp-Att-Int 7-15-0 16-25-0
Fumbles-Lost 4-0 3-0
Penalties-Yards 4-30 3-20
Punts-Avg. 5-36.1 0-0
RUSHING — Hall, Harper 7-79, Smith 10-40, Davis 6-13, Walker 6-1, DuHart 2-9, Williams 1-(minus-3), Team 1-(minus-24). Greenwood, Palmer 8-55, Garnes 5-38, Watson 4-34, Smith 1-12, Allen 1-8, Martin 1-6, Sherrouse 1-6, Leonard, 1-3, Bolin 1-2, Jabe Burgess 1-(minus-2)
PASSING — Hall, Walker 7-15-0 31. Greenwood. Jabe Burgess 6-8-0 161, Wheeler 9-17-0 65, Watson 0-1-0 0.
RECEIVING — Hall, Smith 2-9, Holly 2-9, DuHart 2-6, Harper 1-3. Greenwood, Clemons 2-70, Jones 2-27, Bland 2-38, Ciesla 2-15, Padilla 1-46, Morgan 1-18, Jax Burgess 1-9, Higgins 1-6, McGill 1-4, Hughes 1-0, Barker 1-(minus-2), Palmer 1-(minus-5)


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Even after the door had closed, Dominick was leery about turning around, thinking that the woman would try and trick him. Eventually, he grew tired of standing there and took a quick glance behind him. He was alone.
He went to the table and found a tray of food next to his new clothes. On the tray was a great wheel of cheese, a loaf of crusty bread, and a meaty gravy in a wooden bowl. It all looked so inviting, but he needed to get dressed first. So he ignored the tray and moved on to the clothes.
He was given a fresh woolen shirt: white, with long sleeves, and a pair of dark brown leather pants. Dominick had never worn leather pants before and he looked them over with a deep sense of trepidation. Along with the pants and shirt was a long surcoat of blue with the image of a hammer over the right breast. There was no footwear so he'd assumed that Herbert approved of his socks and boots. But first, the underpants.
They resembled long white shorts that hung to the knee. Rather than an elastic waistband, these shorts had a drawstring. They fit okay and actually felt better than the boxers he normally wore.
The leather pants, he was happy to find, were loose fitting and comfortable, as was the shirt. He pulled the surcoat on over his head and used the belt provided to cinch it around his waist. He'd leave the sword for later figuring that it would be more comfortable to eat without it sitting on his back.
Glancing around however, he didn't see the sword. It had to be in the room, though, he distinctly recalls removing the belt with the sword and placing it… Well, that was the thing, he couldn't recall where he'd put it. But then, the room wasn't that big. He turned and the tray of food came into view.
The food sure did look tasty. And the smell was like ambrosia, whatever that was. And so he ignored whatever it was that had begun to nag at him, took a seat on the edge of the tub, and dug into the food.
Having grown up on processed and fast foods, Dominick had never tasted anything like the meal the woman had brought him. He had to admit that the food made the shame of being seen in the raw much easier to deal with. And he was, in fact, sad when he'd cleaned his plate . . . Or in this case, tray.
One finished with the food he looked over what he'd had in the pockets of his old pants. The woman had placed them neatly, side by side, on the table. His phone, his wallet, one pack of spearmint gum, two quarters, three nickels, eight pennies, his keys, and the cracked salt shaker. He stuffed them all in the deep pockets of his new pants and went back to the tray.
Nothing but crumbs left.
He pushed them around, wishing for more food, and thought briefly of his old clothes. To be honest, he wasn't all that sorry to see them go. They'd smelled of grease and of course had been covered with the insides of a lizard. Secretly he hoped that Herbert would have them burned.
After that it was back to the waiting game.
He took up the phone and pressed the home button to wake it up. Amazingly, the phone survived his ordeal on the battlefield and being flung to the floor earlier without a scratch. He keyed in his code and the home screen popped on.
The fist thing he noticed was the weather app. It was showing nothing, of course. He was pretty sure he wouldn't be able to access any networks from this world. Gund.
Still, he swiped and tapped away at the phone. He'd still be able to access whatever was on the phone, he saved nothing to the cloud. He didn't trust the cloud. He couldn't see it so why put anything on it?
He tapped open his music player and tapped shuffle. The pounding drums of Rikki Rocket and the piercing guitar tones of C. C. Deville filled the room as Let Me Go to the Show by Poison tore through the small speaker at the base of the phone. Dominick got up and walked around the room, his head nodding involuntarily to the beat. He made three full circuits of the room before he realized that something was wrong. Something was missing.
What had been nagging at him earlier? He tapped at the pockets of his pants, both front and back, though these pants had none in the back. It was a habit of his. Whenever he got the feeling he was forgetting something, he'd pat at his pockets. Keys in his right front pocket, phone in the left, wallet in the rear right back pocket, nothing in the left. It was a ritual. Whenever he'd leave the house, or work, or even the bathroom, he'd pat his pockets.
He looked around the room again but still couldn't see it. Something about the color blue and his back.
A polite knock sounded on the door, pulling him from his thoughts.
"Yes?" Dominick said.
The door opened and once again Herbert entered nose first.
"You're dressed," Herbert observed. "And you've eaten. That's good. It's time."
"Time for what?" Dominick turned to him.
"To meet the Triumvirate. They are gathering now in the great hall. Grab Arakis and I will take you to them."
"Arakis?" The name struck upon his nagging doubt like a mighty gong. But still did not resonate.
"Yes, the Sword of Power," Herbert said with a note of impatience. "You will want to have that with you when you are brought before the Triumvirate."
The Sword of Power.
That's when it hit him.
The Sword of Power was gone.
Here ends Chapter Six
Posted by Steeven R. Orr at Friday, April 07, 2017
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That Access Bars is amazing! Everything is just falling into place I can't believe it. I'm approaching new & old thoughts with a different way of thinking, it's bizarre really!


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Poetry is about saying one thing so essential the world can no longer be imagined without it. The rest "publishing and politicking "is just baggage.
Some poets avoid the roller coaster of public publishing "the rejections, the faint praise, the smug mission statements, the politics, conferences, networking "not because they have no stomach for it but because their instinct is to protect the flame from the very drafts others choose to ride.
I`ve always been deeply moved by such men and women. I`m not sure their exemplar is Emily Dickinson, although she`s surely one of them. I think rather it`s a matter of self-knowledge, of knowing what is good for them and what might change them in ways they choose not to be changed.
I became aware of such people in boarding school. I had a friend who spent his time in his room making superb paper airplanes driven by rubber bands. We spent hours together discussing the relative merits of the Messerschmitt 109 and the P51 Mustang. I knew an English girl, my first love, who spent her time serving air tea in tin cups to imaginary friends. I never received a more exciting invitation than to one of her teas.
I don`t know if Paul Clemente belongs in this group, but he`s the reason my thoughts turn to such poets. I found his little chapbook, Luncheonette, in Half Moon Books in Kingston, New York, and it reminded me of the private poets I`ve known and admired, most especially my friend, the late Catholic University Professor John L. Brown, also an upstate New Yorker.
The quest for recognition is a business unto itself and its pursuit changes us. John Brown understood this and chose to publish his work himself, a decision that made his life as a scholar, patriot, father and husband to his beloved wife Simonne immeasurably more tranquil. Paul Clemente is a scientist with the New York Department of Conservation and director of the noble Read For Food project, which enlists poets to help raise money and collect food for the poor.
Sonnets are of two kinds, Italian or Petrarchan and Shakespearean or English. But within those broad frameworks are many variations, and the form has proven to be durable and hospitable to innovation. The sonnets that comprise Luncheonette may be called a crown or sequence of English sonnets "three rhymed Sicilian quatrains brought to a close by a heroic couplet.
They are without guile or pretension. One never suspects the poet of having said to himself, This will wow them! His poems are trustworthy:
I will assume that you, my dear reader,are unwilling to suspend disbelieflong enough to allow that fried liverand giblets can cause their fair share of grief.
He ranges restlessly in subject matter, from rumor-mongering to television excitation:
The magazine rack, in my car mechanic`sCustomer Service area, is jammed with newsof today`s fears and tomorrow`s panics.The TV taunts souls while they pray in the pews.
The sonnets, like Clemente`s Hudson Valley, are haunted. The luncheonette is abandoned, peeling away in the sun. Loneliness permeates their structural elegance the way sunlight haunts the empty piazzas of the painter Giorgio Di Chirico. There is a kind of perfection and closure to Luncheonette`s project. It shouldn`t have been part of a larger collection where it might be lost. It is what it is, well wrought, thoughtful, elegiac.
My friendship with John Brown was long and rewarding. He had been a loyal friend of my aunt, the painter Irene Rice Pereira. He had served with distinction in the OSS in World War II, and he was a Gallimard editor and Paul Eluard scholar. He taught at Catholic University, and there is a John L. Brown archive at Georgetown University on the other side of Washington, DC.
John published four collections of poetry of which I`m aware: Awakenings (1995 his last book), Weights and Measures (1958), Shards (1981) and Celebrating Simonne (1991), an homage to his French Canadian wife, Simone, a nurse.
Weights and Measures, an exquisite chapbook, was published by Les Ecrivains Réunis in Lyon, France. I`ve read this little book many times and don`t know why John did not seek trade publication after it. I never asked because I always stood in awe of his intellect and believed it would become clear to me in time.
But there is something about his formal, refined sensibility and craftsmanship that touches me deeply, something about his decision not to publish publicly that exhilarates and reassures me, and, finally, something about Paul Clemente`s work, that reminds me of John, although Paul`s vernacular usages are certainly not John`s dish of tea.
I`ve wept more than once reading Celebrating Simonne. Theirs was a great love affair. I find it hard to endure a world from which such love has been swept away. In the poem Each Morning You Are Born Anew, he sings:
And lying there beside you, I proclaimThe blessings and the joy I owe to you;I gratefully invoke your talismanic name "Simonne, Simonne, Simonne " "Embracing you, my life begins anew.
Here there are the conventions and the cordiality of an earlier period "the line capitalizations and use of words like anew "things Paul Clemente eschews "but the two poets share a common decency, a humility and straightforwardness that invites the reader to welcome them into his mind without any concern for what the poet is up to.
When I consider these two poets, these eminently scrupulous singers "I`m reminded that poetry is not about prizes, competition, recognition, the praise of peers, it`s about our mysterious impulse to sing from the core of our beings for no reason at all, with no motive, no goal.
Djelloul Marbrook is a retired newspaperman. His second book of poems, Brushstrokes and Glances, will be published by Deerbrook Editions on December 20, 2010. His first book of poems, Far From Algiers, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize from Kent State University in 2007 and was published in 2008. It won the International Book Award in 2010. His novella, Artemisia`s Wolf, will be published by Prakash Books of India in December. His novella, Saraceno, was recently published as an e-book. His story, Artists Hill, adapted from the second novel of an unpublished trilogy, won the Literal Latté first prize in fiction in 2008. The pioneering e-book publisher, Online Originals (UK), published his novella, Alice MIller`s Room, in 1999.
Del`s book, Far From Algiers: http://upress.kent.edu/books/Marbrook_D.htmNew review of Far from Algiers: http://www.rattle.com/blog/2009/05/far-from-algiers-by-djelloul-marbrook/ Artists Hill, Literal Latté`s fiction first prize: http://www.literal-latte.com/author/djelloulmarbrook/ His blog: http://www.djelloulmarbrook.com His mother`s art: http://www.juanitaguccione.com His aunt`s art: http://www.irenericepereira.com


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There's nothing more frustrating as an account manager than spending time researching relevant keywords, creating new PPC advertising campaigns, writing compelling ads and sending lots of quality clicks to a client's site, only to have the search terms get hit with a poor Quality Index score.
Google grades your landing pages (the pages on your site where the people who click your ad "land") and gives each keyword in your Google account a Quality Score. The lower your grade, the higher your bids have to be; the higher the grade, the lower your bids, to the point that you can be spending less to be in a higher position than a competitor who has a lower position than you. If your score is bad enough, Google will actually turn those terms Inactive.
Sometimes it's a few simple things than can help, and part of my job as a JumpFly account manager is to look at my clients' sites and make suggestions to help improve landing page quality. There are some great articles out there on what makes a good landing page (and I'll blog about that another day). We've seen clients more than double their conversion rate plus reduce their CPC when they improve their landing pages. In today's economy, that's smart business.


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Fire Response of Reinforced Concrete Slabsby Zuhayr Nizamuddin, (A.M.ASCE), Assoc.; Earthquake Engrg. Systems, San Francisco, Calif.,
Boris Bresler, (F.ASCE), Prof. Emeritus; Dept. of Civ. Engrg., Univ. of California, Berkeley; Principal, Wiss, Janney, Elstner and Assoc., Inc., Emeryville, Calif.,
Serial Information: Journal of the Structural Division, 1979, Vol. 105, Issue 8, Pg. 1653-1671
Document Type: Journal Paper
A mathematical procedure is described by which the structural response of reinforced concrete slabs in fire environments can be predicted. The procedure has been implemented in a computer program, FIRES-SL. An iterative approach is used within time steps to find a deformed shape at which external loads and internal stresses are in equilibrium. The solution method can be used for any specified slab shape, boundary conditions, and placement of reinforcement. Stresses in the direction normal to the slab surface are not considered. A state of biaxial plane stress for concrete and uniaxial stress for steel has been assumed in deriving the material behavior models. These models account for dimensional changes caused by temperature differentials, changes in the mechanical properties of materials with changes in temperature, increased rates of shrinkage and creep with an increase in temperature, and degradation of elements through cracking in different orientations, crushing, and yielding.
Subject Headings: Reinforced concrete | Temperature effects | Fires | Concrete slabs | Concrete structures | Structure reinforcement | Structural response | Computer software
Services: Buy this book/Buy this article
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Elizabeth Warren, who is running for Sen. Scott Brown's Massachusetts Senate seat, slammed New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's keynote address last night with an email to supporters today.
She went after Republicans, saying they reversed 50 years of progressive economic policy when they attacked unions, wages and pensions. The feisty email comes as Warren is set to have a big speaking role at next week's Democratic National Convention.
Warren wrote that Christie's speech blames the American public:
Tonight, Chris Christie and the Republicans told the American people that we're to blame for our broken economy. He told families to tighten their belts. He told seniors to live on less. He told teachers to stop fighting for fair pay.
She then escalated the rhetoric even further:
He never, ever mentioned how much more the richest have taken, and he had no mention that those who broke our economy still haven't been held accountable.
In the email, she says that at the end of the Great Depression the U.S. made a decision to "invest in ourselves, in our kids, and in our future" for half of a century.
And it worked. For nearly 50 years, as our country got richer, our families got richer—and as our families got richer, our country got richer.
And then about 30 years ago, our country moved in a different direction. New leadership attacked wages. They attacked pensions. They attacked health care. They attacked unions. And now we find ourselves in a very different world from the one our parents and grandparents built.
Last month, it was announced last month that she will speak right before former President Bill Clinton at the DNC next Wednesday, so this could very well be seen as Warren testing the waters for her speech.


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Product Description
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Posted: Fri 22. Feb 2013, 21:49
Please use the !rules command to see the latest version of our server rules. It will show you all the rules you have to respect to have a fair game. If you break them, you will be punished. The following list might be outdated:
Greetz GerCry-Team
- No insults
- No spam
- No cheats
- No baserape
- No enemy spotting via spectator mode or team change
- PowerStruggle = Teamwork
Greetz GerCry-Team


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Kitchen Wednesday, November 28th, 2018 14:46:26 PM.
Chair Monday, December 17th, 2018 14:51:31 PM.
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This website contains the kitchen decorating and design, our goal is to provide an interesting idea as a material to renovate and beautify your kitchen that are used today.
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Burnham School Classes
Wednesdays: Grades 3, 4, & 5
Thursdays: K & Grades 1, 2
Region 12 Primary School Library
Junior Library activities and events for Preschool – Grade 12
Program Flyer or visit the Events Calendar
Become a Junior Friend and advise and organize programs throughout the year that will benefit the community. Questions? email firstname.lastname@example.com


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Chief Executive Officer: Barry Kiely, PhD.
One of the original founders of Alimentary Health (AH), Barry has been CEO since the company was first formed in 1999. With close links to University College Cork, he was General Manager of BioResearch Ireland's National Food Biotechnology Centre from 1995 and responsible for campus company development. Prior to his return to Cork he was R&D Manager of International Biochemicals, part of Royal Dutch Shell. Barry completed his degree and Ph.D at University College Cork in the field of microbiology.
Technical Director: Eileen Murphy, PhD.
Eileen joined Alimentary Health in 2008 and has 10 years of experience in academic and commercial environments with particular interests in diet, probiotics, gut microbiota, inflammation and metabolism. In over a decade working in the area of nutritional sciences, she has published in key journals such as GUT, Gastroenterology, Journal of Nutrition and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Eileen is a graduate and PhD. student of University College Cork, with a fellowship from National University of Ireland as well as sponsorship from the European NutriGenomics Organisation (NuGO). Prior to joining Alimentary Health, Eileen was a leading scientist with the Host Response Group of the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC) at UCC.
Production and Logistics Director: Jack Allen.
Jack joined Alimentary Health in 2007 and has over 40 year's experience in the Pharmaceutical and Health Care Industry. A graduate in Chemistry from UCC, before joining Alimentary Health, Jack worked for Pfizer Ireland Pharmaceuticals for 35 years holding several senior management positions in both Manufacturing and Engineering.
Chief Financial & Business Operations Officer: Brian Barrett AITI, FCA.
Brian joined the Alimentary Health team as Chief Financial Officer in 2005. He was subsequently appointed Company Secretary and a Director of the Board. A qualified Chartered Accountant, Brian trained with Ernst & Young moving from practice to industry in 1992. He spent two years with Lakeland Dairies followed by nine years in the technology sector with U.S. multinationals Modus Media and AT&T, all in senior finance roles, during which time he qualified as an associate of the Irish Taxation Institute. Immediately prior to joining Alimentary Health, Brian spent two years in CFO/corporate finance roles in the mineral exploration sector.
Operations Director: Jenny Roper, PhD.
Jenny joined the Alimentary Health team in 2006. A former Partner for start-up brokers FOR Securities, she also successfully spun out a company from Imperial Innovations with the Technology Inventors, Microtest Matrices, an in vitro diagnostics company specialising in protein microarrays for allergy and other relevant markets. A scientist by training, Jenny is a graduate of University College Cork and holds a Ph.D from the University of Cambridge as well as a Wellcome Fellowship from University College London.
Business Development Director International: Alexandre Lepage
Alexandre joined the Alimentary Health Group in 2016 in the newly created role of Business Development Director International. Alexandre will play a pivotal role in the rollout of the Group's products in the EMEA region. Alexandre has over 30 years experience in development of international businesses and partnerships and has been working for 27 years in healthcare. He has a sound knowledge of probiotics through developing alliances in this field for more than 20 years in senior roles in Biocodex and subsequently Mayoli-Spindler, over the 5 continents and he is familiar with both HCP and Pharmacy environments.


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Break BoundariesShop All Mystic
Be Brave, Be Bold
Mystic are all about breaking boundaries. The brand was established by a group of kiteboarders and windsurfers who felt their equipment at the time was lacking. To fix this problem, they broke out on their own to fill the gap. To them, it was about creating equipment that was durable and supporting in extreme conditions, giving them the ability to go harder, faster and higher. This was in 2002, the beginning of Mystic. Since then, they've been labelled the 'innovative trailblazers' of the kite and windsurfing worlds, by creating a range of high-performance equipment that embraces modern technologies and techniques. For Mystic, it's not just about designing products for kiteboarding, windsurfing, wakeboarding and stand-up paddling enthusiasts - it's a way of life.


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March Bloom Box Reveal :)
Hi, everyone! Today I am showcasing our Fun Stampers Journey March Bloom Box!
You can check out my video below to find out all the details about this month's Bloom box. :)
Now for the cards!
Click HERE to subscribe with me!
Thanks so much for stopping by!
Janice :)


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To Be Wise and Strong and Free
My good friend, Shawn, writing his best.
My good friend, Shawn, writing his best.
The Complete Engraver is a tome by Nancy Sharon Collins about the place of engraving in typographic history. Ink used to be a luxury and paper was handmade, so the dedicated act of engraving something turned it into the proverbial priceless heirloom.
What we understand now as engraving took much dedication, patience, and skill to mature into an artful business. It took the perfecting of swashes and hairlines and rhythm, and it took a sense of relational maturity to do include just enough flourish and no more than the event called for. (Yes, that ended with a preposition. And?) Engraving is not done to worthless things; that is not its purpose. Engraving marks now for forever. It is a monument given at a precise moment, a purposeful recall imbued with every ounce of emotion one could possibly muster. It is not to be taken too lightly. Hopefully, beyond the droll act of pressing metal majuscules to hot wax, Collins's book will convince us of that.
In the meantime, enjoy two free fonts that have nestled themselves somewhere between a 14-year-old's whimsical doodles and the maturity of Jessica Hische's designs — but created by a dude — Terrance Weinzierl's Feldman Engraver and JMC Engraver.
Go forth and fancify something.
Apple uses Myriad Pro (with a few tweaks) for its company branding. They used Helvetica for most of iOS until they switched to Helvetica Neue, which they still use now. They have consistently added new typefaces to their reading applications, like iBooks. And they use context-specific typefaces where needed, such as with the LED numerals for sports scores.
With the announcement of iOS 6 and iPhone 5, their video showed a clear all-purpose sans used in Maps.
The lowercase a is not right for it to be Futura, Frutiger, or Proxima Nova. The lowercase y is not right for it to be Soleil, Gotham, or Lucida Sans.
It's Adrian Frutiger's Avenir, the latest addition to the good stockpile of typefaces on Apple systems. Avenir is yet another answer to the desire for a Futura that is not Futura. Frutiger wanted something with more personality and a less harsh presentation than Futura on the printed page. Avenir is still geometric and still understated, but slightly more readable. And let's hope so because your ability to arrive fashionably late now depends on it.
These Jimmy Dean commercials crack me up. I think the cheesy music is perfect, but if I eat a Jimmy Dean breakfast will I be as big as a planet? Or just a gigantic ball of gas? That's not what they should be getting across. Someone didn't think this through all the way.
Small companies that put rebrand exercises on the web tend to get others talking. The rebrand making the rounds right now is Wikipedia from New!.
What caught my eye was that they used Maiola (PDF), one of my favorite typefaces from Veronika Burian and distributed by TypeTogether. I love how they chose such a dynamic serif rather than a safe sans. Maiola has a kinetic energy in every little stroke, even the dot over the lowercase i. I may have chosen to put "wiki" both in italic and bold just to keep a balanced weight to both sides because optically it doesn't strike me initially as balanced; it's a bit light on the left. But it sure is distinct, and distinction wins in branding.
Be sure to check out all the details and their thinking behind the rebrand. It's a great example of being clear with objectives and with execution of an idea. However, I would argue two points. First, I think the large w should have been changed as well. WordPress uses a capital W also so I would like to see a bit more distinction for Wikipedia. Second, I'm not sure about making it look like a newspaper. The concept of news is that it should be completely factual; that is the opposite of Wikipedia since anyone — everyone — can edit or update an article based on . . . nothing. No credentials or experience are necessary. For example, I had a college history teacher who would give us essay assignments with the warning that we should not use Wikipedia. "Historical facts are not democratic," she would say, and she promised to make changes to the pages before it was due just so she could downgrade us.
Anyways, I love Maiola; I've even made it the article heading typeface for my site. It is based in calligraphy and has planned irregularities in the glyphs to mimic hand-formed processes. This same concept is seen in John Downer's Vendetta, but Burian, being Czech herself, set Maiola's trajectory based on two little-known Czech type designers: Vojtěch Preissig and Oldřich Menhart.
The thought is that fonts look the way they should look up close, but the further you get from them, the more they change: sharp cuts and angles soften while smooth curves appear more blobby. Infusing a design with more sharp angles, then, keeps each glyph clearer and helps preserve the original voice of the typeface even as the reader gets further from them. From this perspective it's easy to understand how Maiola's sharp cuts, drastic angles, and contrast are as functional as they are artistic. Check out all the details hidden in this typeface.
Burian created Maiola in completion of her MA at Reading. It has won numerous awards, has been used in everything from magazines to fine book printing, and started her type design career with a masterful first step.
Here's a FontShop link to Maiola.
"Hunt Roman can be considered a prototype for exclusive typefaces, designed for one specific purpose, as opposed to the universally applicable typefaces of the time, such as Adrian Frutiger's Univers or Max Miedinger's Helvetica.The friendship between Jack Stauffacher and Hermann Zapf is the foundation for the development of this typeface."
(via Hunt Roman Typeface Review at Typographica)
This good little article about an exclusive typeface demonstrates what I've said before: Much of design is about great relationships.
Over the past several years NBC has consistently advanced their branding almost solely through typeface selection. The peacock logo, the doorbell tone, the quick screen wipes and reveals, and the bright, solid colors: all unchanged.
The fantastic Sweet Sans (PDF sample) by Mark van Bronkhorst of MVB Fonts leads NBC's fall 2012 season with a website refresh and a series of teaser commercials. Before that, they used Cyrus Highsmith's Antenna, for which they were summarily sued for not purchasing enough licenses. Before that, Gotham. And still further back, Eric Olson's Klavika. Notice the text on their website — all set in Sweet Sans. [I would have either used a lighter weight or more tracking for the smaller text so there'd be less clashing of letters, but overall it's great.]
I love that a major consumer company is pushing their design — again, almost completely through type. And I love that they had the guts to leave behind the safe, overplayed, and now-not-distinct-or-brandable Gotham. Because they were willing to take just such a bold step, they are clearly distinct from CBS (with a history of tech and typewriter faces), Fox (with a history of ultra-weight sans faces and weird mixes of Helvetica and Arial), and ABC (with the most spastic choices used all at once).
As a throwback to historical roots of draftsman's typefaces, Sweet Sans is for NBC a fantastic choice. Gotham is beautiful, even, and reliable, but was too austere; sports it could do, not comedy. With its tech inspiration, Klavika works great in almost microscopic sizes and has an unmistakable voice in display sizes, but it simply didn't invoke the right tone. Klavika is forward-looking so teasers for Dateline felt out of sync emotionally, but Chevrolet has used it to wonderful effect in exactly that way. Antenna worked great and I think it was the best trajectory NBC had until now.
Sweet Sans, though, is pretty much pitch perfect with its cheeky and playful attitude that most viewers equate with the NBC brand. The slight outstroke turns combined with simple, open forms take it out of the zone of a staunch sans and gives it a more relatable tone. The naturally wide characters and the ginormous x-height make it easy to read regardless of point size, and its true zen quality is displayed in all-caps treatments. Sweet Sans readily takes on a supporting role next to show lockups ranging from comedy (The Office, Parks and Recreation, Go On) to drama (Revolution, Grimm, Parenthood) to reality competition (The Voice, America's Got Talent) to news (Dateline) to sports (Monday Night Football, 2012 Olympics). And that was one of the main capabilities missing from past choices.
The small sizes on the website show just how plainspoken Sweet Sans can be while the range of details come through on the commercials because they've set the words so large. So large, in fact, that you don't take the company too seriously. You take them just how they meant for you to: as an entertainment company with equal parts maturity and mirth.
Video: Jonathan Hoefler at AIGA: "Type at the Crossroads"
This is one of the best expressed understandings of type on the web that I have seen. From the introductory Helvetica musings to unpacking the technical details of generating fonts for the web, Hoefler is funny, erudite, and a wordsmith. And opinionated, which makes it that much better. His take on what makes a typeface that certain typeface is spot on — spoiler: it's the feel of it — and the solution H&F-J have landed on is so obviously correct — get it to feel right by letting the idea of a certain typeface determine the form it must take in each medium.
After this, I understand better why it is taking so long for them to get their typefaces on the web. They are, after all, one of the last foundries to port their catalog for Internet use. At least we know they'll be done right once they're released. Until then we can try to contain our smoldering jealousy for those lucky ones already using Whitney on their site.
Inge Druckrey Film: "Teaching to See" on Edward Tufte's website
A 37-minute film covering the teaching of Inge Druckrey. More than a teaching lesson — almost like a manifesto, but with subtlety. Tons of examples are shown, including the minimal dot and line exercises used to design our entry in the Olympic poster competition.
It's only available on Tufte's website for the time being, so give it a minute to load and then learn from one of the best.
"Type as a brand is more lucrative than just a logomark alone."
— Art Blanc, overcompensate website
Couldn't have said it better.
Jen and Omar have made a very special website here. Click the red triangles to go to the next frame or just scroll through. I promise you'll like what happens — all thanks to some fancy and very open coding.
Fonts in use: Museo Slab for text, Gotham for site name and random bits, and Futura for headings.
Once again maybe maps can be cool. And fun.
Gregory Euclide uses whiteboards — between teaching classes — for some of his astounding works. Here's his website with samples, as well as his Flickr account and Behance. With subtle hues of black contrast, and few other colors, and strokes that wind from background to foreground and back again, I find it difficult to reconcile how capriciously they could be wiped away.
Notice the interlocking triangular warning trefoils at the bottom left and the directional arrows at the middle left. In view of how our choices affect the planet, Euclide says his themes center around the now and how humans should approach nature as a steward rather than a taker. He hopes his art would inspire conservation and responsibility for the fragile environment we have. I see the side of a globe, the interaction between industrial and natural elements, and, in some ways, a weeping earth, all running together in poignant vignettes.
Concerning Microsoft's tablet announcement, dubbed Surface, Shawn Blanc today said:
The keyboards are a necessary component because of the software.
The Surface for Windows 8 Pro runs full-on traditional Windows apps — apps which you cannot use with touch input. You need a keyboard and trackpad for those apps.
In what way is a physical keyboard considered a success when it is necessary for a mobile computer? So then how long until reverting to old hardware is inherently understood as a failure? Why not bring back the terminal prompt while we're at it? "Everything is a remix" was an observation, not necessarily a compliment.
I'm happy Microsoft is making some effort in this category, but when your software holds back your hardware from progressing, or vice versa, I mark that as a failure.
I'm no longer posting here.
I have left this site for a better one.
My new happy home is http://www.opinionatedtype.com.
It's clean and beautiful, and that's where I've been posting for a few months now. Update your RSS or your bookmarks or whatever you happen to use, and come see it in a real browser instead of just a feed.
Less than two hours ago, Reuters posted this article, which is so full of nonsense that it makes "The Jabberwock" look rational.
I've reposted it here for demolition. Let's look.
"SEOUL (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics Co launches its latest Galaxy S smartphone in Europe on Tuesday, with the third generation model expected to be even more successful than its predecessor,"
Nothing should be easier than being more successful than old technology.
"which helped the South Korean company topple Apple Inc as the world's top smartphone maker."
Toppled already? That was quick. I mean it only took half a decade. Oh, and what measurements are we using? Because current revenue and gross margin weren't included, at almost 30 billion and almost 50 percent for Apple, but only 17 billion and 13 percent for Samsung.
I understand, though. Math is something we used when we were in school. But now that we're out, we'll stick to link baiting.
"The S3, which tracks the user's eye movements to keep the screen from dimming or turning off while in use,"
Google Glasses proof of concept. I mean really, at this point if the word tracking is used, we expect Google is behind it and making a buck.
"hits stores in 28 European and Middle East countries, including Germany and Britain, as Samsung aims to widen the gap with Apple months ahead of its rival's new iPhone, expected in the third quarter."
Only 28? Do you know how many countries are over there? And if you're going for big numbers and don't want to include America, then China and India are the best bets. Especially if, as you have shown, revenue and margin aren't high on the priority list. By all means, Germany should make the cut.
"The Galaxy S3, running on Google's Android operating system, boasts a 4.8-inch screen,"
Two bummers in one sentence. But at least listing off bullet points is easy-peesy.
"bigger than the 3.5-inch display on the iPhone 4S and the 4.7-inch screen on HTC's One X model."
Oh, so now math is your strong suit. Must be only when it suits the one-sided argument being laid out here: bigger screen is obviously better, rather than better screen is better, even if that screen is only one-tenth of an inch bigger. Next up: projection screen in your pocket. Obviously better. Because it's bigger.
"In the kind of anticipation that has become the norm for new Apple gadget releases, hopeful customers began queuing outside an electronics retail store in Berlin on Monday night eager to be the first to lay their hands on the S3."
How many? It's never said. And kudos for the quasi-cultish reference. The overlord will not forget your act of servitude.
"Major global carriers – from Vodafone to Singapore's SingTel – [sic for the lame hyphens which should be em dashes] have been aggressively promoting the S3, fuelling [sic, should be one l according to Oxford] speculation the smartphone could top the Galaxy S2's 20 million unit sales worldwide."
They've only sold 20 million S2s around the globe? But there's almost a billion people just in the Middle-Eastern-and-Euro pond they're fishing in. And Apple sold almost twice that amount just in the last quarter alone.
"In the two years that [that is such an unnecessary word] we've been offering pre-orders, it's the most pre-ordered Android device we've had in our line-up,' said a spokesman for Vodafone UK, declining to disclose exact numbers. 'It's on track to meet, if not exceed, the level of pre-orders we expected by the time it actually launches.'"
"We didn't expect much, so it's not as great as it sounds, but we know how to spin us some headlines! Set the expectations low, then blow them out of the water!"
"Samsung introduced its first Galaxy in 2010, three years after the iPhone's debut,"
Steve Jobs wasn't kidding when he said they were at least five years ahead of the competition at the first iPhone release.
"to counter Apple's roaring success in smartphones at a time when other rivals such as Nokia were struggling to make much impact."
Apple's roaring success? Check. Other companies struggling? Check. Nothing much has changed here.
"Samsung sold 44.5 million smartphones in January-March – equal to nearly 21,000 every hour – giving it 30.6 percent market share. Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones, taking 24.1 percent market share."
Enough already with the one-metric qualifier for success. And again, em dashes—like this— or spaced ones — like this — would make you look like a, um, uh, professional.
"'The Galaxy S3 is a real challenger to the upcoming iPhone,' said Francisco Jeronimo, an IDC analyst based in London."
Says the person with no information whatsoever.
"'This is likely be [sic, missing word] one of the most sold smartphones this year, though the real test will come when the next iPhone is launched.'"
Mr. Obvious, your obvious observation is not subtle. Analysts of this sort should never be paid. Say something I couldn't have figured out on my own, would ya?
"The race for global smartphone supremacy comes as Apple has accused Samsung of copying some of its products. The South Korean company counter-claims that Apple has infringed its patents. Both have denied the allegations, and a long-running court saga continues."
What other random details can we throw in this article? Steve Jobs is no longer running Apple. Did you mention that?
"Apple plans to use a larger screen on the next iPhone, according to people familiar with the situation. The iPhone 4S was introduced last October."
But these people are super-secret, almost non-existent. Or they are rumor-mongering hacks with no familiarity with Apple's product plans. Either way, only the second sentence is true.
"In a departure from its predecessor, whose look and feel became the main subject of the legal dispute with Apple, the latest Galaxy has a more rounded outline. It also has voice recognition, dubbed S Voice, which will inevitably be compared to Apple's Siri, and image recognition software that can tag and share photographs."
Ah, the lonely S. Apple has never used that before.
"Prices vary depending on the contract. A model with 16 gigabytes of memory costs up to 189 pounds ($300) under a 12-month contract with Vodafone. A similar package for the iPhone 4s costs 159 pounds, but comes with a more expensive monthly data plan."
"Samsung said it will release the S3 via 296 carriers in 145 countries by July."
"Profit from Samsung's mobile division nearly tripled in January-March to $3.6 billion, accounting for 73 percent of operating profit."
Good for them. Now, in comparison.
"Samsung – whose shares have gained 82 percent since late-August, beating Apple's 58 percent rise – is now banking on an aggressive marketing campaign ahead of the summer London Olympics to further drive sales. It has said its mobile market share in China doubled after the 2008 Beijing Olympics."
And we're back to math. Yes, 82 is more than 58. But look at the graph.
"'The S3 is supported by an unprecedented promotional campaign,' said Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight in London. 'Samsung's timing with the Galaxy S3 is perfect.'"
Perfect remains to be seen. As far as we know, the next iPhone is perfect. But you already hate it, so we don't have to go there.
"($1 = 0.6396 British pounds)
($1 = 1185.3500 Korean won)
(Additional reporting by Paul Sandle in LONDON and Tarmo Virki in HELSINKI; Editing by Ryan Woo and Ian Geoghegan)"
Final note: edit first, then post.
This beautiful logo is brightly colored and made of the icon squares we've come to associate with iOS devices. It's a good step away from the monochrome Apple logos we've seen over the last several years, and seeing the individual rounded squares gives a great sense of the developer community that has flourished on the iOS foundation. Though the multilayered effect is good and the heart of the logo beats red, blue still seems the dominant color.
To the unseen designer of this logo, good job. Very effective. I wonder if there's a method to the design, like certain kinds of apps are certain colors while sizes are based on sales? I'd love to see if there's a rationale to it.
An interview with Jon Tan: The Setup.
On 13 June 2011, not even a year ago, Jon Tan did an interview with The Setup, a site that asks what the pros are using and what their ultimate setup would be.
The last three paragraphs are the most amazing to me because, besides a few tangible limitations like a tablet that can grow to be more than the size of a projector and software that knows your thoughts, much of it is now available.
As others have said, we are living in the future. The future is now.
Stylish. Simple. Gorgeous. Rapid-fire expressiveness with heart and humor. You can feel a story brewing behind each frame.
(Via Shawn Blanc.)
Memoriam Typeface Half-price at MyFonts.com
Starting as the New York Times commemorative script for those who left this world in 2008, Memoriam took the editors and designers by such surprise that they used it throughout the entire magazine as its primary visual binding. Patrick Griffin and Canada Type did a thoroughgoing job of this typeface.
From there, Memoriam made not a few waves in the design and type communities. It oozes elegance and finesse, and the OpenType version lets the designer take full advantage of the extreme contrast and the swashes that could either float or sink a barge, depending on use. Speaking of use, due to its ultra-fine details, Memoriam should only be used in extremely large sizes.
Memoriam has grown to include an inline and outline version. The sale is only at MyFonts — through 15 April 2012, the three primary weights (and swashes) are only $75 total for the OpenType version. A few extra hours at work should help you secure your copy.