8 September 04
Name That Typeface
I once designed, for a final project in design school, a board game called “Name That Typeface.” Game pieces were type slugs set as their face (so Garamond was set in Garamond, Electra in Electra); there were cards with questions referring to type specimens; I even got a local binder to foil stamp the “spine” of the board.
Type’s changed a lot in the years since I finished school, and I struggle now to name some of the more trendy ones, even if they’re used all over the place. But designing type is an exciting field and there’s some wonderful work going on. It must be a great time to take a typography class.
I haven’t signed up for one of those, but for an online calligraphy class (Roman Majuscules, fiendishly difficult and something I’ve never taken enough time to learn properly). I’ve never taken an online class (our teacher lives in Melbourne, so this should be interesting). It starts in November; I’ll let you know how it goes!
7 September 04
New Horizons In Image Search
Here’s a tabby cat, perhaps on his way to Cheshiredom.
(From LibrarianInBlack)
6 September 04
Piggyes Bones
One of the wonderfully unpredictable discoveries of a commonality with Siona is an interest in bones and skeletons. She took a quick look through our sketchbooks on Saturday and said without hesitation “wild boar” at the sketches of a skull, one of which is pictured at left.
I’m not sure what it means that we both went into raptures over the bad taxidermy at Harvard’s Peabody Museum.
5 September 04
A Home for Carlos and Blake
Carlos and Blake, the two kittens that emerged from the cornfield behind our house a couple weeks ago, got adopted today. Just as last Sunday, they went to the Petco today where Feline Lifeline holds their adoptions. It didn’t take long before a family came by with a little boy who was quite interested in Carlos. Then the mom started to handle Blake and immediately bonded with him. It turned out that her 13-year old cat just died of cancer Thursday. They came into Petco looking for another kitty and ended up leaving with two! So Carlos and Blake, tentatively renamed Tumble and Pumpkin, are off to their new home, shared with a yellow-orange 6-month old tabby named Flash (three different shades of orange cats in one house).
Here’s a picture of Blake at Petco, curious as ever.
4 September 04
Such … A Deal!
Today we drove to El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley, and hopped on BART to get into San Francisco (called “The City” in Northern California). Our first stop was the California Academy of Sciences temporarily housed south of Market street while their new facility, a grand and expensive proposition designed by Renzo Piano, is built over at Golden Gate Park. We had a fine time drawing the skull of a wild boar and this axolotl that put me in mind of Jenny’s daughter’s Pablo.
Next we headed over to Stacey’s to meet up with Siona. Every experience I’ve had of meeting a blogger in person has been a wonderful combination of the expected—we know each other’s writing well—and the unpredictable. This was no exception. We spent a pleasant time in Stacey’s, found bargains in philosophy (see left), and ended up with a tea a block up Market.
The drive to the Bay Area these days seems to take half an hour longer than it used to. The traffic we hit near Pinole that stayed till after the tolls and then regrouped before Fairfield made us decide to make the next trip by train.
When we got home, we discovered the kittens had made off with an avocado the size of a small melon, seconded it in the bedroom, and eaten a good chunk. I have no idea how you clicker-train a kitten to leave an avocado in the fruitbowl…
3 September 04
From Pixels To Digital Dust
We are becoming digital pack rats. I’ve been consistently keeping my sketchbook journal for three months now, and am trying to sketch something, anything at all, in it every day. I’ve gravitated much more towards sketching than digital photography, and one of the reasons is the vast amounts of digital clutter a digicam produces. It’s so easy to take 100 Mb of images in a single outing with a digicam, and since storage is so cheap then keep 90% of the images. It doesn’t take very many sessions to end up with thousands of images, and a cataloguing and digital preservation problem. Sketchbooks stay nice, small, and self-contained, have a longer potential lifespan, and are lots of fun to browse through.
(From The Shifted Librarian)
2 September 04
Patterns
The patterns above are how I learned to write. It was at a British primary school in Madrid in the early sixties—somebody must have heard of Alfred Fairbanks or something. We had to trace the patterns in pencil. Nobody made sure we did it right, like downstrokes instead of up or right strokes instead of left, or that we held the pencil lightly. Everyone’s handwriting turned out terribly, including mine (I’m an adult convert to Italic).
Across from me at the squat formica’d table was a girl who struggled more than everyone else. She had a huge head and her tongue was always in sight. I forget her name—I’ll call her Julia—but I can’t forget the way she smelled or the creative mess she made of her tracing paper.
Statistically, Julia is long dead, victim of an extra chromosome and a culture ill-equipped to deal with her. I hope she felt at least some connection with the little folks at her red formica table that ay as we all pushed graphite around more or less haphazardly. Some of us got a second chance…
1 September 04
Click On Cats
Monday evening we went to the library where I found a copy of Getting Started: Clicker Training for Cats by Karen Pryor. I’ve seen references to clicker training before but never read anything about it. Basically, the idea is that you can train animals by getting them to associate a good behavioral action with a marker signal such as you clicking a clicker box. Soon the animal learns that a click means a treat is coming and starts to expand his behavioral repertoire so as to produce more clicks.
Pica went and bought an inexpensive clicker box and we’ve been having fun working with Charlie and Diego. Both are now able to follow a dowel about and touch it as a target. Tuna is working well as a treat, though we need to figure out the best way to dispense it.
Speaking of clicking on cats, Rate My Kitten is a good site to visit if one is looking for distractions.
31 August 04
Fearing Safety
It is a luxury of someone (white, educated, well above the poverty line) living in a democracy (at least for now) that I can expect pretty much expect to live without fear of being arrested unless I do something stupid. I live in a place where I can leave my car unlocked, both at home and at work if I should by some chance drive to work. My commute doesn’t take me through a war zone, unless you define the Solano County Mosquito Abatement Squad in those terms.
I’ve been reading, on the recommendation of Maria from Alembic, who had it from the London Review of Books, Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer and intellectual of staggering vitality. When I compare my life with hers, I see no hardship, no rigors, no wars. I see a privileged life as the daughter of an expatriate, endowed with two passports which expands your choices enormously of where to work (especially since they’re both “desirable” nationalities), where the obvious planting of oneself in opposition to the prevailing culture confers yet more privilege (sometimes points can be gained from being a Brit, even a stuffy one).
Going to the Code Pink Counter Convention in Davis’ Central Square tonight, I am filled with a mixture of fear and despair. Fear for the ignorance that might, just might, get Bush reelected. Despair because the world in such a scenario looks much worse than it did in the 70s, when it looked pretty bad, all those nights I stayed up arguing with my father about the Bomb.
We must not be safe. We must avoid hiding behind our gated communities, real or imagined, and feel as though all this is outside our sphere of influence, interest, or humanity. We must keep looking for a way to make our own existence more precarious—for the safety of all.
This is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Making a Safe Space.