It’s Webnessday, time to divulge something special from the favorites folder:
You have a sample image of a font and need the font name: Identifont.
You need to download a font, preferably from someone cooler than Adobe: Chank.
You want to preserve for posterity the coolest handwriting ever, your own, forever as a font: Fontifier.
You want the font from a famous title, logo or product: Sharkshock or Smackbomb.
| You are a Social Conservative (36% permissive) and an… Economic Conservative (73% permissive) You are best described as a: Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid |
Excerpted from National Geographic News:
“this isn’t science fiction. A set of extraordinary images captured by Japanese scientists marks the first-ever record of a live giant squid (Architeuthis) in the wild.
The animal—which measures roughly 25 feet (8 meters) long—was photographed 2,950 feet (900 meters) beneath the North Pacific Ocean. Japanese scientists attracted the squid toward cameras attached to a baited fishing line.”
I read the whole article, and nowhere in it are any of the crew reported to have stood five abreast, arms outstretched, fingertip to fingertip, and shouted “It was this big!” in unison. So, I’ll save you the click, if that’s what you were hoping for.
Research is stranger than fish stories.
By way of BoingBoing
More baby pictures on Fickr. Um, Careful. There’s blood and stuff in a couple of ‘em.
The old blog is located at collected notes and scraps. I’ll be moving everything that doesn’t sell at the yard sale over here soon.
I’ll be crossposting for awhile, until I get archives and links completely moved over to the new site. I’ll also be learning WordPress.
So, If you’re linking There, this would be an OK time to move it Here.
As a followup to the previous post I braved Starbucks again. I asked for “A cup of coffee.”
blink. pause. blink.
Nearly everything they sell is a cup of coffee. This is either the easiest request she’s had all day, or it is a heinous trap set by a mole from Seattle sent to test the crew, an undercover barista from the customology department. Whichever way she was leaning on that, she says “Tallbrewedhot for this gentleman, please.”
Sure, I’ve picked up a few words here and there, and my Italian is enough to get me a beer, a bathroom, or a bottle of wine as the situation demands, and Starbucks is like a subdialect of Italian, right? only without grammar, opera, Dante and all of the useful words. I know, for example, that “Venti” is Starbucks for “Large”. I learned that listening to Cartalk. I knew better than to mess around with “Tall” thanks to Dave Barry:
We begin today with a disturbing escalation in the trend of coffee retailers giving stupid names to cup sizes. As you know, this trend began several years ago when Starbucks (motto: ”There’s one opening right now in your basement”) decided to call its cup sizes ”Tall” (meaning ”not tall,” or ‘’small”), ”Grande” (meaning ”medium”) and ”Venti” (meaning, for all we know, ”weasel snot”). Unfortunately, we consumers, like moron sheep, started actually USING these names. Why? If Starbucks decided to call its toilets ”AquaSwooshies,” would we go along with THAT? Yes! Baaa!
In English, I wanted a large iced coffee with milk and caramel flavored syrup. So I asked for a ‘Venti-iced-coffee-with-milk-and- caramel-syrup’. Lame, I know. Almost ALL of those words are actual English words and I used a conjunction, a preposition and a fistful of hyphens, none of which are allowed in Starbucks.
“Caramel Sauce?” black apron man asks slowly, trying not to upset me.
“Syrup.” I said it deliberately, bluffing confidence.
English-only speakers find it frustrating when they learn that caramel syrup that goes into Starbucks coffee bears little-to-no resemblance to the caramel syrup that goes over the top of ice cream in English-speaking establishments like Friendly’s and Swensen’s. If you want that kind of syrup, ask for “sauce”. The French word for “canoe” is “kayak” in exactly this same manner.
Black apron man says something unintelligible to the coffee-making black apron man in the cockpit of all that steam and espresserie, who says something similar in reply. It’s not a sentence, or a phrase, it’s more of a run-on word, the kind of thing operaman Herr Wagner was doing when he first said “Gesamtkunstwerk”. The order handoff complete Bridge to Engine Room, Engine Room confirms to Bridge, I find myself waiting while the next person in line whips out one of those run-on caffenclaturae for her order without so much as a phrasebook or gesturing at the wallmounted menu.
Surely this is obvious, it should be self-evident that I did not get the coffee I wanted, otherwise - no post. Blogging can be so sadly predictable in that way. When you get what you want, you don’t post about it. I’ll try to rectify this in a sec.
Not only does the cafferatzzi reading know that I did not get what I wanted, they know what I got. They know because they speak Starbucks.
I asked for “Coffee”, remember? “Coffee” is not directly translatable to a single word in Starbucks. “Coffee” in Starbucks is like “Snow” in Inuit. The closest thing to “Coffee” in Starbucks is “Latte“. (The closest thing to “snow” in Starbucks, by the way, is “Granita”.) Do not be disturbed that this is the Italian word for “Milk”, there’s no helping it now. I was served a ventiicedcaramellattewithlegs.
Here’s the rectifying bit: I left a tip. I said ‘thanks’ and I waved as I left. I enjoyed my lattething because it was exactly what I had ordered.
When you go to Starbucks, either know the lingo or use your very best and politest English to make your request clear, but don’t bluff. At Starbucks, you can get just about any coffee drink you can describe. Try making a similarly complex custom request at Mickey D’s.
I’m going back tonight, I’m gonna ask for a “cup of coffee” just to see what happens.
3 weeks prior to the 2003 CMM 16 miles into in a late night last ditch effort to cram one more long run into my training program I stumbled. The stumble itself was harmless, the sprawling dive to recover my balance after stumbling is when I kicked a perfectly immobile rock as hard as you’d be willing to imagine.
My toes were obviously broken, entirely the wrong color and doubled in size. I took 3 weeks completely off because of my injury, I wouldn’t recommend that training program to anyone.
The plane tickets were already paid-for, registration to race was paid and the family was going to Nashville. Hey, I could always bail out, right?
On the preceding evening, at the race registration expo I spoke to John “The Penguin†Bingham we traded a few platitudes and hopes for good weather, but he was obviously exhausted from having met many thousands of dear friends that he didn’t previously know he had. I walked away, anxious to keep my purple toes a secret.
It rained briefly on the assembled runners at the start, out in front of beautiful Vanderbilt University. Spectators huddled into the Starbucks and news helicopters hovered. I pulled my cap down to a more serious position.
From the back of the pack, the starters pistol is inaudible; its message delivered by a chain reaction of thousands and thousands of runners taking a running step forward into the person ahead of them and reeling backwards. The space to run arrives minutes later after many false alarms with the crowd heaving and recovering. The road is piled deep with discarded clothes, garbage-bag-ponchos and a shower cap or two.
Running my first steps of the month I started the race well, my pace was as planned and at the 9 miles mark a personal fastest was within reason (a 5:20 would have been possible). I sang along with the band that played Mustang Sally (…guess you’d better slow that mustang down.) My thumbs’ up to the band was returned by the drummer, who did so despite having his hands full.
It was far hillier than I was prepared for, my ‘broken’ toes were weak, causing an awkward stride, and I could feel my shoe getting tight from toes swelling. Every music record company still in business today that you’ve ever heard of has an office or a studio on the course.
Live bands played from the front porches of bars. One band covered the Kinks’ Lola (la-la-la-la Lola. Well we drank champagne and danced all night, under electric candlelight ) from a bandstand in front of a dark red school bus at the top of a particularly unforgiving hill.
Folks in bathrobes ran blenders for daiquiris and coffeepots from 100 foot extension cords out to the edge of their lawns as runners streamed through their quiet neighborhood. Their little TV was set up so runners couldn’t see it.
I ran and walked in scheduled intervals but I was beginning to dread each running interval.
A big box of two dozen Krispy Kremes was moved aside so a pretty woman still in her pajamas could mix up another mimosa from the iced O.J. and Champagne out of the cooler beneath. I asked if she had any Grenadine? No? Crème de Cassis? No? I think she was shocked, either that I’d stepped out of the spectacle and into her tidy driveway to offer to mix her a drink, or because Southern Belles don’t talk to strangers at least not until after they’ve dressed in the morning.
By the time I got to the convent* I had raised a blister on my little toe covering the entire bottom surface and the skin contacting the next toe. There remained only a thin strip of unblistered skin stretching back from the base of the toenail. I ran with my toes pointed outward slightly to keep the weight off the blister until this caused a hot pain just inside my right knee cap and another blister stretching from the base of my big toe to the middle of the ball of my foot.
During a rare stretch of road with no band within earshot, I found myself humming Patsy Cline’s Crazy…. (Crazy for feelin’ so lonely.) Earlier, I had provided a stern tongue-in-cheek warning to another marathoner: Under no circumstances, should you sing, hum, or whistle Patsy Cline. It’ll get stuck in your head! Caught in my own trap!
* I met my wife, my two daughters, and two of my wife’s sisters on the race course at the bottom of the hill below the Dominican Convent where a third sister-in-law (sequentially third, as well as being one more in addition to the two who were visiting Nashville with us.) is in her third year as a nun. The halfway point of the race was just yards from the front gate of the “Motherhouse”.
My daughters knew better than to lay big hugs and kisses on their daddy, they’ve seen me sweat before, I have a prodigious capacity for perspiration, it’s not pretty. So now, I had only the second half of the race to look forward to.
A middle school cheer squad sat on their pompoms looking bored and tired, they’d probably yelled “Go Runners!†a thousand times through those stupid little cones and they were done. I ran through and gave each and every one of them a high five and said ‘thank you for helping today’ to each of them. They got up and did another cheer as I ran off, either encouraged, or fearful that more sweaty guys would demand high fives if they sat.
I stopped at a medic tent at mile 16, where the Doc put a pin right through the first blister and beyond into the flesh of my toe. The fluid they drained from what had been a blister filled with a clear fluid was significantly bloodied. I vigorously protested the idea of similar treatment to the second blister, to the point of denying it’s very existence, and turned my head while the pin-wielding Doc put a thick wad of moleskin on the bleeding little toe. (Technical note: moleskin is appropriate only before the incidence of blisters, is a tremendous PITA to remove from compromised skin, and can firmly adhere a nasty sock to an innocent foot for days)
This is what they mean when they say practicing medicine; they’re just practicing so that they’ll be ready when someday they’re called upon to actually conduct medicine.
After the medic tent the course passed back by the convent where I confided in my fellow runners that behind the 10-foot tall fence we were running along was a hotel swimming pool that presently belonged to the religious order at the top of the hill. We pondered the drowning hazard that wearing a habit into the pool would present and balanced that against the relative hazard to modesty that a swimsuit could present.
Through another neighborhood, this time it was barbeques instead of blenders. A boom box played “dark side of the moon†at its loudest setting…. ‘Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day’
A funk band stopped packing up their equipment so that the bassist could put down his cigarette and play a funereal dirge as I limped through mile 22. Du, Dum, Da, Dum…
I got confused, I lost track of time and forgot to continue to eat my carb gels.
I hobbled on to finish in 6:55, the slowest of the five marathons I’ve done.
We stayed at the Nashville Sheraton Downtown. We had learned upon arrival in Nashville that the hotel pool was out of commission, empty, dry. This was not good news for the girls who had been excited about an extended romp in the hotel pool for quite some time in advance. For myself, I kept on running when the race course wended past the hotel in some small part because there was no pool to flop into.
A quicky mid-week post on my favorite websites.
I have a crossword puzzle addiction . When I walk into a room and realize I’ve forgotten why I went there in the first place I’m haunted by clues like “5 letters, begins with ‘S’.”
I do the Wall Street Journal crossword every week. (requires subscription.) The NYT has a free crossword in addition to a number of other subscription crossword games.
I also cheat. I’m not proud, just finished.
