A visit to Faber-Castell

At Contrapuntalism, Sean begins to tell the story of his journey to Die Bleistiftstadt:

About a month ago, I received an extraordinary invitation: Faber-Castell wanted to know if I would like to come visit their headquarters in Stein for a few days, to have a tour of the castle and production facilities, and to meet with Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell.

Holy graphite! Here is part one.

[Die Bleistiftstadt: the pencil city.]

A 2013 calendar, mine

In late 2009, I decided to make a plain and dowdy wall calendar. My inspiration was the Field Notes Calendar: beautiful, but could I justify buying two? I couldn’t. So I sat down, opened a blank document, and started in. And so the hours passed.

I just finished making a calendar for 2013 (in a fraction of the time): three months per page in beautiful Gill Sans Bold, readable from a good distance — from at least ten feet, I’d say. If you’d like a PDF, send me an e-mail. (If you’re seeing this post in a reader, click through: my address is in the sidebar.) And if you’d like to design a calendar of your own, I have one word for you: tables.

[This calendar is mine, not Mayan. But if the world ends today, I may not be able to reply to your e-mail.]

Red cabbage

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Red cabbage: the psychedelia of the vegetable kingdom.

A related post
Psychedelic book cover

Jerry Seinfeld, writing by hand

Jerry Seinfeld writes his material on legal pads with blue Bics. From an interview with the New York Times:

“Do you always write on — ?”

“Always, yeah. Yeah.”

“Have you ever tried to — ?”

“No.”

Related reading
All handwriting posts (Pinboard)
Larry David’s notebook

[My transcription.]

Disable Blogger’s mobile view

Blogger blogs of my acquaintance now appear in “mobile view” on my iPad. Google appears to have made the change sans announcement. The change is not reader-friendly: showing a line or two of text per post and requiring the reader to tap on arrow after arrow to read posts makes for a tedious experience. And if a blog has a sidebar, mobile view removes it.

Blogger users: it’s possible (at least for now) to disable mobile view: open your Blogger account, click on Template, and have at it. Blogger readers: you can read on a mobile device in the old-fashioned way by changing the extra info that ends a mobile-view URL: change /?m=1 to /?m=0.

To my eyes, the column of text and pitchers that is Orange Crate Art looks great as is on an iPad or iPhone, and I’m keeping it that way as long as Blogger allows.

[From my template page: mobile view is disabled.]

The tap-per-post format wouldn’t be designed to increase page views and ad revenue, would it? Google wouldn’t offer an inferior reading experience just to make more money, would it?

[If you use an ad-blocking extension in your browser, you might not know: Orange Crate Art has always been an ad-free blog.]

A Pennsylvania postcard post

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

A. A. Milne, supposedly

I am far from disorderly — I know exactly where things are, or at least most things. I don’t know where I came across the above observation, and then there’s this postcard I had lost track of, until I rediscovered it among — guess what? — other postcards and things of that nature.


[Click for a larger view.]

The postcard, a product of Pittsburgh’s Minsky Bros. & Co., is a two-fer: heading east through the overly large state of Pennsylvania, it depicts the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Kittatinny and Blue Mountain Tunnels. The card reads:

Kittatinny and Blue Mountain Tunnels are called the "Twin Tunnels" as there is only 800 feet of daylight between them; then the mountains are behind you, and the Turnpike runs straight as a ribbon for long distances through the fertile Cumberland Valley.

And the message:

(Written Tues) April 26 [1949]

Hi! We're heading fast toward Wash. D.C. The country is really rugged. We travel way up high on hills — valley is way low beneath us. The high altitude makes my ears stop up. Mon. night stayed at Pittsburgh. Today went to Gettysburg. Tonight — Washington. This picture — went through these tunnels (mile long each.) Rosie

[Click for a larger view.]

The tunnels are not quite a mile long, but they are long, and the country is rugged, and must have felt more so in 1949, when people drove with far fewer amenities. We used to take the Turnpike when driving east from Illinois, and I remember the relief I felt when we made it through the last of the tunnels, the ones pictured on this postcard. My ears stopped up too, and I like the lack of self-consciousness with which Rosie acknowledges the effect of high altitude. Is she worried about looking unsophisticated? Not in the least. Am I?

*

In December 2013, Elaine and I did our best to recreate the scene on this postcard: The Pennsylvania Turnpike, then and now.

Related posts
From Lena to Rena (a 1907 postcard)
Re: “things of that nature” and “whatnot”

[For anyone who must drive through it, yes, Pennsylvania is overly large, ridiculously so.]

Quicksilver fix to close

The Mac app Quicksilver has an annoying (annoying to me, anyway) feature of showing the result after copying or moving a file or folder.¹ I found a workaround by Rob McBroom, a Quicksilver developer. It’s easy to make the change he describes: right-clicking on Quicksilver.app and Core Support.qsplugin and choosing “Show Package Contents” will get you to the necessary file.

¹ If you don’t use Quicksilver, this sentence and, well, this post will make no sense. Don’t worry about it.

Senator Feinstein’s bill

Here, from Senator Dianne Feinstein’s website, is a fairly detailed description of an assault-weapons bill that has been under development for more than a year. Feinstein (D-California) plans to introduce the bill on the first day of the new Congress — January 3, 2013. I am confident about how Illinois’s senators will vote: Dick Durbin (D) and Mark Kirk (R) have received F ratings from the National Rifle Association. I will be calling them anyway to register my support for Feinstein’s bill. My representative in the new Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), has an A from the NRA. But I will be calling him too to express my support for the bill.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, December 17, 2012.]

Hi Flagston today reprises a role he performed on February 9, 2009, that of the stingy landlord who sends up a miserable nickel’s-worth of heat. Shame on you, sir, for making your tenants wife and children freeze. In 2009, Hi joked about checking the price of oil before raising the thermostat. Today, facing Lois’s anger and condensed breath, he jokes that “It helps to get all hot and bothered.” Listen up, Hi: if you don’t change your ways, things are going to get a whole lot colder in your house, and they’re going to stay a whole lot colder, especially in a certain room of your house, if you get what I mean, and I hope that you do.

The good news here is that the workers on the Hi-Lo line have figured out how to construct a classic Honeywell thermostat. Compare:


[2009, 2012.]

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Dropbox, onward, upward

Dropbox for iOS just hit version 2.0 with what its developers call a “shiny new design.” The new icon, though not exactly shiny, looks good to me.

After updating Dropbox on my iPad, I began to wonder: how does one update Dropbox in OS X? Dropbox isn’t in the App Store, and there’s no way to check for updates from the app itself. I found an explanation at Practically Efficient and went from 1.4.12 to 1.6.5.

If you’d like to try Dropbox, this referral link will give you and me each an extra 500 MB of free storage.