New from Pelikan, FullForever ink cartridges: “Due to a special chemical process, the ink ‘regenerates’ overnight so the fountain pen is constantly ready for use. And remains so.”
My favorite pen is a Pelikan fountain pen. I start any piece of writing of any length with that pen. I can’t wait for this ink to appear in bottled form.
A related post
Five pens
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Pelikan FullForever cartridges
By Michael Leddy at 7:34 AM comments: 3
Monday, March 31, 2014
How to disable Chrome Notifications
The Chrome Notifications bell showed up in my menu bar this morning. And also this morning, OS X Daily explains how to disable Chrome Notifications. According to OS X Daily, this feature gets enabled at random. No thanks to Google for enabling without a user’s permission. But many thanks to OS X Daily for explaining how to get rid of Notifications — doing so is hardly intuitive.
[chrome://flags? Really?]
By Michael Leddy at 11:18 AM comments: 0
At the Library of Congress
[“Men and women looking up books through the card catalogue at the Congressional Library.” Photograph by Bernard Hoffman. Washington, D.C., 1941. From the Life Photo Archive.]
Sara, have you been time-traveling again?
A related post
Library of Congress (1946) (A short film)
By Michael Leddy at 8:38 AM comments: 3
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Oxford Vampire comma revisited
Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, talking to the Columbia University student publication Bwog:
“I’d seen there was this Facebook group at Columbia called Students for the Preservation of the Oxford Comma, and that was the first time I’d heard of an Oxford comma. And that appealed to me in a lot of ways, because it has Oxford in it, and I like anything Oxford: Oxford button-downs, Oxford University, all that stuff. But then the fact that it’s a comma, the combination of something like really regal and at the same time, absurd. I remember sitting at my parents’ piano, and that was the first thing that came to my mind: ‘Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?’”The article’s writer lumps the Oxford or serial comma with “useless punctuation marks.” But as Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage points out, “virtually all writing authorities” outside of journalism recommend using the Oxford comma. Take that, journalism.
Here is Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma.” And here is a discussion of punctuation with VW and Stephen Colbert. The comma talk kicks in at 2:42.
Related posts
How to punctuate a sentence (Includes the Oxford comma)
How to punctuate more sentences
By Michael Leddy at 3:02 PM comments: 2
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Recently updated
Fonts and ink and $ Casting doubt on the Garamond v. Times New Roman story.
By Michael Leddy at 8:17 PM comments: 4
Baseball and handwriting
The New York Times reports on baseball players’ illegible autographs. With a beautiful account of Harmon Killebrew explaining the importance of good penmanship to Torii Hunter:
“Think about this: 150 years from now, you’re dead and gone, and kids are playing in a field,” Hunter recalled Killebrew saying. “A kid hits a home run, hits the ball in the weeds — far. They’re looking for the ball, they find it, and it says, ‘T, line, dot dot, H.’ They don’t know who it is. They’re like, ‘Oh, we found another ball to play with,’ because they can’t read it.Related reading
“But just rewind that. A kid hits a ball, hits it in the weeds, they’re looking for it, they pick it up and they can read it. It says, ‘T-o-r-i-i H-u-n-t-e-r.’ And they’re like, ‘Wow.’ So they go and look it up and they see this guy was a pretty good player, and they put it on the mantel and cherish it.”
Killebrew said, “You didn’t play this long for somebody to destroy your name,” Hunter recalled.
Celebrity-handwriting crisis
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
[Harmon Killibrew: I remember him from baseball cards.]
By Michael Leddy at 12:02 PM comments: 2
Fonts and ink and $
The buzz over a fourteen-year-old’s discovery that Garamond uses less ink than Times New Roman doesn’t surprise me. It’s a good story. But Suvir Mirchandani is hardly breaking new ground. In March 2009, designers Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth found Garamond to be an ink-thrifty font, thrifter than Courier, Brush Script, Times New Roman, Helvetica, Comic Sans, Cooper Black, and Impact. Also from 2009: Ecofont, which comes in a free version. There is nothing new under the sun, at least not in the recognition that some fonts use less ink than others.
[Granted, Robinson and Wrigglesworth’s novel methodology couldn’t produce numbers.]
*
7:38 p.m.: Daughter Number Three pointed me to Thomas Phinney’s analysis, which casts doubt on Mirchandani’s method and conclusions:
Garamond lowercase is about 14% smaller than Times lowercase (while its caps are only about 4% smaller). So it is no surprise that it uses less ink at the same point size. . . .Phinney (unlike CNN) includes a highly visible link to Mirchandani’s work. And, yes, the samples of Times New Roman and Garamond in the study are markedly different in size.
This is why most scientific studies comparing typefaces first compensate by resizing the fonts to eliminate differences in the lowercase height (called x-height by us font geeks). This study failed to do that. . . .
It should be obvious by now: you could just as easily save ink by setting the same font at a smaller point size.
In photographs of Robinson and Wrigglesworth’s experiment, the Garamond and Times New Roman samples appear (to my untrained eye) to be the same or nearly the same in size. So perhaps Garamond does save ink?
Even if Suvir Mirchandani’s work is flawed, I salute its spirit of inquiry. Why should the world run on Times New Roman anyway?
Thanks, DN3.
By Michael Leddy at 11:51 AM comments: 2
Proust et Zippy
[“Long Island Longing,” Zippy, May 4, 2013.]
Today’s strip is not the first Proustian Zippy. The Zippy archive has six more Proustian strips: “Proust Reduced,” “Forgetfulness of Things Past,” “Taste Is Everything,” “Proust Schmoust,” “Within a Budding Groove,” and “Dead White Cornflakes.”
Related reading, via Pinboard
All OCA Proust posts
All OCA Zippy posts
[For the reader who needs a frame of reference for today’s strip: Levittown, on New York’s Long Island, was the archetypal American suburb.]
By Michael Leddy at 10:39 AM comments: 0
Friday, March 28, 2014
NPR speaking
“Here’s some really cool music from Chile that I can’t stop listening to at the crib”: that’s NPR speaking, a few minutes ago. Maybe ironically, not that ironically would be helpful.
This kind of talk reminds me of a wonderful line from Ghost World (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2001): “You guys up for some reggae tonight?”
Another cranky NPR post
A yucky Wednesday on NPR
By Michael Leddy at 4:13 PM comments: 1
Work from a “paper class”
The scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been in the news for a while. But this ESPN report has a sample of work submitted for a so-called “paper class”: a paragraph-long Final Paper (at 3:06). Read it, and weep.
By Michael Leddy at 10:39 AM comments: 3