Papyrus: A Plague

June 26th, 2008

There are a lot of fonts out there, but it seems that few get as reused as Papyrus does. Since I’ve begun looking for it, I’ve seen it nearly everywhere, from product labels and advertisements to the signs of the stores marketing them. Papyrus is generally the Font of Choice for the organic and healthy food market; it’ll often show up on packaging for teas and whole-grain foods. In an effort to document the widespread usage of this otherwise-unique font, I’ve developed a website, Papyrus: A Plague of Typography, in which users are free to post their own photographs of semi- to wholly- permanent instances of the font. These photographs must be coupled with a concrete street address, because, once posted, they are automatically placed on a map displaying all of these sightings from around the world.

It’d be wonderful if all who are interested would participate in this project.

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NYC / Books

June 23rd, 2008

Last week I had the face-melting pleasure of visiting the grand old city of New York, New York. It was incredible, and I’d have stayed much longer than a day had I the time. There’s hardly a drought of NYC vacation logs on the Internet, so I’ll spare the ramblings about the skyscrapers and Lady Liberty; but I must at least say this: Mars 2121, despite being both a delicious and fun restaurant, smacks of a fancied-up Chuck E. Cheese.

Something more interesting than the buildings, themed restaurants, and historical monuments was the immense variety of people. All shades of colors, all income levels, all with their own set of interests and personalities. And I had my camera.

But how do you photograph someone from a place like that? Everyone seems so pretty, so important, so hurried. I was tempted a few times to ask certain people, “Excuse me, may I take your photograph?” but stepped down out of fear of being punched in the eye or kicked in the navel. Instead, I just put on the appearance of a crazy tourist snapping pictures of buildings, when in reality I was really just a crazy tourist snapping pictures of people.

A collage of people from NYC, all with their eyes censored...or something.

In other news, I work at a bookstore now. With my employee discount and our already cheap prices, I’ve been tempted to buy a few books. After getting my first paycheck, I almost pulled out the few books I’ve been eying; but, in the nick of time, I decided against it and went to the library. It turns out you can save lots of money by just checking out books from your local library! And there are additional, even-more-significant bonuses that you get from library books that don’t come at a bookstore:

  • Strange smells
  • Yellowed pages
  • Ability to know that your book was first checked out on October 7, 1988
  • Brown smudges
  • Contagious diseases
  • Illegible markings

In fact, I’m still trying to decipher what the markings mean in my borrowed copy of The Screwtape Letters. For whatever reason, some dastardly fellow scribbled on multiple pages. Was his intent to highlight his favorite passages? Or did he (or she) simply not like the material on pages xix, xxv, 1, 41, 48, and 53?

I don’t know, and neither did “Rg”–the alias of one of the librarians–who first noted the markings on January 1, 2004.

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Redesign!

June 14th, 2008

Notice anything different? You should, because I’ve redesigned the whole website. That’s right: I’ve crossed over from “pretty boring” to “slightly less boring than before;” this time around, I’ve cut out some doodles of mine and pasted them around the website (digitally speaking, of course). Yes, believe it or not, for the past two months I have been working on the website–I’ve just done a miserable job of updating you (the webcrawlers and one or two friends I’ve coerced into visiting this site regularly).

[NOTE: To avoid copyright infringement, I've changed the name of the Thesaurusizer to the Thesaurifier. I preferred the previous one, but someone already has a hold of it on the Net. Just be grateful I didn't name it the Thesaurinator like I almost did, and would have, had it not sounded like a stupid bathroom joke.]

For starters, I’d like to point out the Thesaurusizer. It’s basically a program that rewords phrases for you. For example, if you don’t particularly like the way the first line of A Tale of Two Cities starts, you can plug it into the Thesaurusizer and read an entirely new beginning:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness

Becomes:

It was the outflank of multiplication, it was the worst of times, it was the eld of wisdom, it was the long time of folly

And if your children’s story doesn’t really have that kick that you want, give the Thesaurusizer a spin:

Rover the happy dog lives in a big box

Becomes:

Wanderer the felicitous frump survives in a self-aggrandising box

If your word comes up with a confusing synonym, simply click on it, and the Thesaurusizer will attempt to find a new one for you.

The program’s not completely reliable, which is evident from only one or two uses, but it helps to pass the time if you’re a little bored. I plan to continue to work on it, so expect to hear back from me on the topic. If you have any suggestions, find any bugs, or just want to comment on the program, you can do so here.

Oh, and for those of you who want to know what the old site looked like, I’ve archived it.

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Issues of Late

April 15th, 2008

There are a few things that have been bothering me as of late: a wild, unsupported argument for shouting a rhyme, and a guy who decided (on a whim, I suppose) to tell me how he’d kill someone with a spoon.

A few months ago I ran across a passage in a literature book that had the audacity to propose that simply speaking of a delicacy would give the speaker the same exact pleasure as if he or she had actually tasted the food. Although I am no culinary linguist, I will stand by my conviction that uttering the words “smooth, rich, gourmet-renowned, crunchy, delicious wafers” does not compare at all to sinking one’s teeth into a savory Necco coin. What’s even more preposterous than a claim of such nature is the example the book gives for one:

I scream, you scream
We all scream
For ice cream.

These lines are an exuberant evocation of the joy of ice cream. Indeed, chanting the words turns out to be as pleasurable as eating ice cream.

The Bedford Introduction to Literature, 6th Edition, Page 675
ISBN: 0312259182

At best, we can assume that the author, Michael Meyer, is making an obscure reference to self-induced hypnosis. But on a hot day, surrounded by a bunch of grody kids incessantly chanting an irksome rhyme, nothing compares to an actual bowl of ice cream.

For the record, these are ice creams I like:

  • Peanut buttery ice creams
  • Caramel-drenched ice creams
  • Not-almond’ed ice creams
  • DONT FORGET THAT I MIGHT ALSO ENJOY HAVING BALLOONS FILLED WITH ICE CREAM AT MY NEXT BIRTHDAY PARTY. They would be fun and delicious to pop. I would bite them with my mouth.

But I can live amongst such ice-cream lunacy. The events surrounding lunch yesterday, however, sent shivers down my spine. As I was standing in line, as I am apt to do, a guy whom I have only briefly seen struck up a conversation with me.

“Hey,” he began, addressing me without any emotion whatsoever.
“Oh, hey.”

He was standing on top of a broken plastic spoon. A portion of the bowl had snapped off, and what remained was a jagged mess of utensil.

“You could kill someone with that,” he said, motioning to the spoon.
“Yeah, uh, I guess you could, huh?”
“I would do it like this,” he stated, demonstrating in a sort of thrust how he might murder someone with a spoon. “Or like this.” This time he had both of his hands in a fist, one on top of the other, and made a stabbing movement towards his neck. “Then I would tear out their throat.” At this, I turned away with a feeling of absolute terror in my heart.

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Pennsylvania

March 31st, 2008

(I am moving to Pennsylvania sometime this year; I’ll get to that later.)

Crude drawing of green hills, a sun, and a mineshaft

That’s how I imagined Pennsylvania: sunny, blue skies; verdant hills dotted with welcoming mine shafts; laughing children sledding down glistening mounds of coal; blackened miners tipping their hard hats to dainty, parasol-carrying women.

Lies! Forget everything your storybooks told you! Pennsylvania isn’t the utopia you and I once thought it was–it’s a little more like this:

Downtown Hazleton, PA

Sardine-style buildings with a constant overcast: Pennsylvania. At least it was fun to explore and look at. Indeed, there were quite a few old, towering brick churches with marvelous stained-glass windows, but we didn’t take any pictures of those; however, we did take a handful of pictures of a convenience store (known as Convenient Food Mart–how witty!)–it wasn’t just the run-down houses downtown that interested us!And don’t forget Hazleton, PA’s famous Blue Comet Diner:

Blue Comet Diner in Hazleton, PA
Gaze in wonder at the other-worldly blueness of the comet.

We went up there (Pennsylvania, not the diner) to get a good look at the area, as my dad is going to be taking a job there soon. The scenery is great–the mountains are beautiful and the forests are many–but so many towns seem to be in various stages of decay. And, as it turns out, piles of coal and towering smoke stacks really aren’t as beautiful as one might think. That’s all fine, though; I’ve lived all over the place, and I suppose I can adjust to the Appalachians as well. But to move to a new state only a year after moving to Delaware? WILL THE INSANITY NEVER CEASE?

Santa decals on some guy's window in Pennsylvania

For those of you who wish to see exactly where I’ve lived, click here for a Google map which illustrates my adventures.

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There Goes my Content

February 25th, 2008

Today I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of friends at a Chinese buffet at about 3 PM. Naturally, it was pretty empty with the exception of an elderly couple, the owners’ kids (concentrating hard on homework), and this bald guy who looked pretty cool. At one point, I got up to get myself some egg drop soup. While I was filling my bowl with the viscous stuff, which seemed to me more mucus-like than soup-like, the elderly woman engaged herself in pointing at some breaded, crispy, meaty looking things and croaking, “What is that? What is that? What is that?” Frankly, I did not know, and I was far enough away that her question obviously wasn’t directed at me. In due time, a man with cooking clothes (apron, chef’s hat, etc.) came over and pointed to the label above the dish. “Pizza,” he said, as he pointed to the crooked label that clearly read, “Pizza;” the food looked more like fried chicken than pizza, so I will unhesitatingly state that I fully believe that this restaurant worker had never seen a slice of pizza in his life.

Unsatisfied with the cook’s answer, the woman reverted to her consistent asking: “What is that? What is that? What is that?”

In less-anecdotal news:

Kristen and I recently broke up, and so I feel obligated to remove the link to the Valentine’s Day shrine to her. I’m a little reluctant, seeing as how it comprises about half of the content on my site, but I also don’t want her to beat me up. I’ve kept the page at http://www.ianmh.com/vday/ but removed it from the tab list on the main page.

I was also about a virtual inch away from having another page of content on my site, but, for legal reasons, I cannot put it up right away. (Don’t get too excited–it has nothing to do with drugs, sex, bombs, or John Elway. In fact, it has more to do with orthography than anything, which is considered by most of the world to be the most uninteresting subject ever devised.)

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Image Manipulation

February 15th, 2008

Although there are already several online image manipulation tools out there, I’ve gone ahead and created one myself, a simple little tool that allows you to crop images to a chosen width and height. I’ve made it for a specific purpose, which will hopefully become apparent sooner than later, depending on how much time I have to work on my projects.

You can view the image cropper here.

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Valentine’s Day, Everybody

February 14th, 2008

Any previous year I would’ve sat back and, with the general Valentine’s Day cynicism, scoffed at the abominable materialism of the whole holiday; how Wal-Mart sells giant plush animals for ten times the cost of any rustic carnival; how I used to be forced into bringing silly little Godzilla Valetines taped with Dum-Dums to my entire fourth-grade class; and how anything Necco produces is the sheer antithesis of “good.”

This year, however, things are a little different. What’s wrong with pandering to the extortionists if you’re doing it to show a loved one you care? Most things, I’m sure. But still. This year, I’ve given in to the Valentine’s Day phenomenon and, as of now, don’t regret it. I’ve got a wonderful girlfriend, and I want to show her I care. (I had a dream last night that I bought her mixed nuts, and I ate a handful of them. She ate the Brazil nuts, which was gross. When I woke up, I said to myself, “Psh, more like Fathers’ Day, if you ask me!”) So, I’ve made a little tribute to her, a recent addition to the site [link removed]. Happy Valentine’s Day, Kristen!

One of these days I’m going to find out if Valentines Day has an apostrophe in it. One of these days.

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