It's coming...

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 3:31 PM
subject: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

Incorrect and alternate definitions

One em is sometimes said to be equal to the width of a capital "M" in a particular typeface, as the "M" was commonly cast the full-width of the square "blocks", or "em-quads" (also "mutton-quads"), which are used in printing presses. However, in modern typefaces the character M is usually somewhat less than one em wide. Moreover, as the term has expanded to include a wider variety of languages and character sets, its meaning has evolved; this has allowed it to include those fonts, typefaces, and character sets which do not include a capital "M", such as Chinese and the Arabic alphabet.

:::::::

Likewise for the en dash. Can we say, do you think, that em and en now correspond to M and N in a digitized age of type? If not, we can no longer do the graffiti thing.

(This doesn't take away from the fact that most en dashes, such as those in the NYC subway, are too short. If a letter M is actually narrower than an emdash, and an en is half of one em, then the en dash should always be at least half as wide as the letter M.)


from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 3:43 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

it's interesting the orientalizing use of Chinese and arabic examples there. in fact, the term "gothic" to refer to sans-serif fonts (and not blackletter, for which it is sometimes also used), comes from a japanese type that got rid of the traditional finishing strokes at the end of characters. more generally, the em-width is in many ways script-independent; in fact, gutenberg's invention almost sqaures the alphabet in the same way traditional east asian block printing squared (and made discrete) monosyllabic characters.

i would say, that pre-printing, a dash was a dash. but since an emdash situation involves trailing off, while the hyphen was a direct joiner, there was probably some sort of natural tendency to come into different lengths anyway. graffitos came to age in a time when the en dash existed; they should be expected to use it.


from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:01 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

But we haven't resolved our policy: whether our en dash is the width of a capital N, or a little bit wider.


from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:07 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

our endash is half an emdash of whatever font we use. i think tying it to letterform width is only a useful heuristic. the point is: larger than hyphen, smaller than emdash. entirely distinct from both. there will certainly never be an endash thinner than the capital N, which makes it easy to judge if the duck used is the duck needed.


from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:13 PM
subject: Re: Important
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Useful, and enforceable? I think so. I think that, reliant on computers and not block type, this should be the rule, if it is not already


from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:15 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

And did you know about this? This is precisely what Queens addresses would need. It is, however, almost exactly the same width as an en dash, depending on font.

Figure dash

The figure dash (‒) is so named because it is the same width as a digit, at least in fonts with digits of equal width.

The figure dash is used when a dash must be used within numbers, for example with telephone numbers: 634‒ 5789. This does not indicate a range (en dash is used for that), or function as the minus sign (which has its own glyph).

The figure dash is often unavailable; in this case, one may use a hyphen-minus instead. In Unicode, the figure dash is U+2012 (decimal 8210). HTML authors must use the numeric forms ‒ or ‒ to type it unless the file is in Unicode; there is no equivalent character entity. In TeX, the standard fonts have no figure dash; however, the digits normally all have the same width as the en dash, so an en dash can be substituted in TeX.

[MESSAGES MISSING]

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:44 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

Possibly. Did you know that Oct. 18th is Meat Loaf Appreciation Day? The edible kind – but we could have our power-ballad party that night!

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:46 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

imagine a Power–Ballad Party.

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:49 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

Knowledge is ballad, as they say.

Shockingly Domestic

Just like that Flaming Lips album, but more powerful and ballady, try simultaneously pressing play on the following (may require calisthenic mouse skills.) Then, watch (maybe with volume off?). Also, probably NSFW suckas lolz.

Spoiler Alert!

In a most definitive sign that the long-dreaded phased redeployment of the Enlightenment—that is to say, the epochal obsolescence of a certain Clinton-era barfly counter-intuition—is already rather underway, Christopher Hitchens, twelve sloshy, warry, heretical years after the century-defining appearance of The Missionary Position, has finally gone there: yes, a vehicular-manslaughter-with-exacerbating-CNS-factors takedown of Harry Potter in the Times Book Review, a publication whose recent paper-stock and brain-cell cutbacks have made it squarer than ever. (Zing!)

The objections raised are going-through-the-motions shite that Hypegeist had long ago introduced into the conversation (if not quite online, because he refuses to be a blog, because he somehow believes in blogging), and what Hitchens' front-page placement this week proves is nothing so much that, unlike every other 10-year-old girl, 45-year-old girl, heroin addict, and rancid MTA metrosexual/MetroNorth commuter in the world, it took Hitch weeks, not days, to finish the Deathly Hallows. Now, I understand that me complaining about this is pretty unforgivably pot-calling-the-kettle-a-Harry-Potter-(which-is-to-say-holocaust-) denier (Hitchens unhelpfully asks, "Are the Malfoys as black as they have been portrayed?", which means nothing to me, because, as is now cliche, the cliche doesn't make sense), but shouldn't Scotch-and-Trotsky goggles in fact make whatever you're looking at more attractive, if also harder to read?

So yes, I agree, insomuch as I care or it matters, which it doesn't, which may be the point of Hitchens taking the time to write this and cashing the check and spending it on totally not food or shelter, that Rowling doesn't focus enough on puffy, blossoming girls, the fascist problem, or the sensitivities of expat two-score-and-eighteen-year-old neighborhood-watch bogeys (in roughly that order). But why submit yourself to the scrutiny of non-chattering-class muggles, or more to the point, the worst muggles in the chattering classes, who pretend to love the fun, yay!, super-fun liberation of ta(l)king juvenilia seriously? Oh, Chris(t), why?

The ban on sexual matters is also observed fairly pedantically, though as time has elapsed Rowling has probably acquired male readers who find themselves having vaguely impure thoughts about Hermione Granger (if not, because the thing seems somehow impossible, about Ginny Weasley).

Of the 2,000 or so people in the forecourt, perhaps one-third had taken the trouble to wear prefect gowns and other Hogwarts or quidditch impedimenta. Many wore a lightning-flash on their foreheads: Orwell would have recoiled at seeing the symbol of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists on otherwise unblemished brows, even if the emblem was tamed by its new white-magic associations. And this was a sideshow to the circus, all across the English-speaking and even non-English world, as the countdown to the witching hour began.

I would give a lot to understand this phenomenon better.


That the main characters nonetheless have a strong moral code and a solid ethical commitment will be a mystery to some — like his holiness the pope and other clerical authorities who have denounced the series — while seeming unexceptionable to many others. As Hermione phrases it, sounding convincingly Kantian or even Russellian about something called the Resurrection Stone:

“How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of — of all the pebbles in the world and test them? [black swan sighting] I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist.”

...

As one who actually did once go to boarding school by steam train, at 8, I enjoyed reading aloud to children and coming across Diagon Alley and Grimmauld Place, and also shuddering at the memory of the sarcastic schoolmasters (and Privet Drives) I have known. The distinctly slushy close of the story may seem to hold out the faint promise of a sequel, but I honestly think and sincerely hope that this will not occur.

The thought of Hitchens as a boy—or reading to boys— is one only an ethical sadist like Hitchens would conjure. But after copying and pasting (and making different colors!) the Hogwarts longings of the biggest waste of prodigious talent ever, perhaps I do now kind of see the point of him dipping his disgusting, divine hobbit toe into the tar stream of educational culture (broadly conceived). Indeed, what better rejoinder to the relativists who care about J.K. and her billions, than paragraphs about "Ginny Weasley" and "Wizengamot" and "Dumbledore" that read like they're important without having to convince oneself to be a good sport?

Charitably, then, let us consider Hitchens' performance one of those deadly serious pranks meant to instill the ramrod of Empire in the English boarding school, or, you know, whatever people pretend to say about that kind of stuff. "A boring subtext, about the wisdom or otherwise of actually uttering Voldemort’s name, meanwhile robs the apotropaic device of its force."

Yes, infantiles, leave prose to the pros.

Sturm und Drang: A Walking Tour of German Romantic New York

STOP #1.
In case you'd forgotten about signing that lease, here's a bust of Goethe in Bryant Park. He is facing the carousel on 40th Street.


That is all.

Two Years Late in Hypegeist: Machinima, the Machines of God

Clearly retaliation for that umbrella song right?

Quarter- (okay, Third-) Life Crisis Update: I Will Never Have This Much Fun

"Sk8er Boi"–era Avril: Critic. "Girlfriend"-era Avril: Genius.

Note how she scrunches her nose when saying "remix."

Live Blogging the Dubya/Putin Mandate

No. No grand bargain has been reached. I mean mandate in the old homosocial sense—lobster, fishing, hanging out at dad's house. CNN's showing the press conference live with Vlad and George talking in their respective mother tongues (interpreters off-screen) in front of a beautiful coastal-Maine backdrop. Bush made small talk (does he make another kind these days?) about how Putin was the only guy who caught a fish this morning. Putin riffed back that it was a team effort and that credit has to be given to the captain of the ship—"the 42nd president of the United States."

Bush's giggles hid the reporters' stirrings, but I trust they were there. The 42nd president? Was Clinton clandestinely on the Bush family vessel, he and H.W. divining away below deck for another tsunami to get people to care about the brains in the family again? The only other explanation is that Putin counts Grover Cleveland (generally considered the 22nd and 24th) as one person, which obviously makes more sense than the more typical counting method but still seems awfully, with apologies to Sulky, Russian.

Then Putin offered, unprompted, that they let the fishy go. The coverage cut away before any Chechens could get ideas.

UPDATE: According to CNN, George H.W. Bush gave Putin a Segway (as a token of American culture? Its like McDonald's in Moscow all over again). Putin rode the Segway around the Kennebunkport compound. Umm, WTF?

What I'll Be Wearing Next Spring

Thanks to Electress Cathy Horyn's transcendent On the Runway blog, I've learned that my friend Junya Watanabe (right) and others at the Paris shows have decided to dress me in manpri high-water pants next season. It's about time! Somehow when Horyn overcomes what must be an awful case of carpal tunnel and gets on AOL to tell me this is a trend, it makes sense in a way, say, David Skulls Skulls Skulls Colman's article last year on the same short-pantsed subject did/could not. Or as commenter Anjo writes re: Cat's flood-pants entry:

Cathy, I think it does matter—unless you think it doesn’t, in which case I concede the point—but cropped trousers have been on nearly all the runways this season.

Unless you think it doesn't, in which case I concede the point! I AM WHATEVER YOU SAY I AM, IF I WASN’T THEN WHY WOULD I BE WEARING THIS? [Incidentally, the designer most cited as the foremost theorist–practitioner (or practitioner–theorist) of male ankle nudity is a guy named Thom Browne, whose schooldays were likely an unrelenting series of noogies and wedgies and growth-spurt rejection.] In any case, now that Rorty's dead (lol!), let us again praise Horyn as the one public intellectual we have left who really improves the conversation and whatnot. A poster on On the Runway named Autre:

RAF SIMONS’ SS COLLECTION: THE BIG HOMECOMING

My, my, what shall we do with this...There is a problem with amazing designers that go back to reality, to the “material”, rediscovering (= key word) the street like Ghesquiere, youth tribes (”the alternative chic is only chic” as we call it here, from pseudo-rebellious collegiates, to hackers/travelers/ globetrotters). Usually, it comes down to nothing but showing just fashion (no wonder it was Prada-esque, just a bit harder, edgier)...

If anything, the idea behind the material is simply wrong, and even desperately naive. Plus, it relies on a truly childish alternative between the globetrotting youth that are out there, discovering and rediscovering Mother Earth, constantly moving, with large backpacks not being in the way, “writing it with actions” (Raf by Raf Simons slogan), and the inertia of the “www-generation”. What I immediately thought of was Immanuel Kant: the man practically didn’t leave his hometown all his life, looked like a living mummy, yet he gave us something that will be read and read and read. Because the mind travels farther.

No strategic essentialism on the runway! Tactical universality! The critique of pure fashion continues for hundreds more words, leading an Alex W. to write to Autre: "It’s late but I wanted to add, I thought your post was brilliant, you completely touched on decontextualization (the African Queen in Paris/Paris in African Queen)...To be honest [w/r/t Galliano] I didn’t even pay attention to the clothes, so much as the overall message." I'd probably still wear socks with that outfit.

BTDubs: I suspect "SS" stands for Spring/Summer (Spring–Summer?) and not, you know, SS.

A Million Little Blue Pills

Question: how does a notorious fabulist rebuild his confidence after the humiliation of a Quaker justice campaign led by America's emasculator laureate Oprah Winfrey? If this correspondent's Gmail spam box is any indication, the answer's obvious: start shilling cut-rate E.D. drugs. Sneaking a peak, I discover that "[i]n fact, more than half of all men over 40 have difficulties getting or maintaining an erection. This issue occurs with younger men as well!" Yeah, right. Fool me once, shame on you; fool my twice, Mr. "Jame" Frey, shame on me!

Not Organic, But Rich in Antioccidents

From the food court of an alcohol museum (!) outside Taipei, another lesson in cultural relativism. That is to say, whole-food fetishism is as much an Austin aberration as George W. Bush; it turns out most of the world finds putting unmodified nature in one's mouth positively ga-ross. Your faithful ethnographer must report, however, that this particular stall does not in fact sell Biotech,Baked Food. "Biotech Baked Food" would be similarly misrepresentative of the establishment's wares, as would, regrettably, "Biotech-Baked Food."

In conclusion, let us just say that the ideographs characters words above advertise a biotech–baked food (or baked food–biotech) joint. Meaning, if memory serves, they sell cupcakes with vitamins inside.