A few days ago when I was trying to get a good picture of a cricket and a wood wasp my 2 year-old son came up to me with his first solo-capture: a beetle. I was just glad he did it without hurting the thing so we wouldn’t have to talk about being more careful and how it’s okay to kill chickens and cows but not beetles; unless they’re not endangered and you’re going to eat them of course. Then, buon’ appetito!
Kalahari was going crazy barking at something in the park behind the house. The park comes up to about 10 feet from the master bedroom windows and there is no fence. Willow creek is about 30 feet from the window. We’ve had a rash of kids screwing with stuff in the park and some graffiti down the street so I took the dog and the Hi-Power out back for a look see.
Got back there and heard something down by the creek. I called out, “It would be a good idea for anyone down there who is not a raccoon to come out now.”
After 10 seconds of presumed deliberation the loud chirrup of a pair of raccoons came from the brush. I understood it to mean, “Don’t let that dog loose, man. We’re leaving, okay.”
My daughter is showing all the signs of being a naturalist prodigy. Completely unprompted and uncoached she knew that a deinonychus would make short work of a lion on any castle balcony in the world.
Shopping on the way out of town while the house is watched by a twitchy, underfed Belgian shepard and a grad student, of same disposition if not race, who is unaware I wired a spy cam in what must remain an undisclosed room for now.
I had a short list, only thing of somewhat importance was diaper wipes. We never use them at home but on the road it can be a matter of life and death. Literally. Well, not literally at all but I’m tired of everyone else getting to use it while I can’t because I know what it means.
The diaper wipes were the only thing I forgot because I have never been able to stand to watch Three’s Company. I feel like I should not explain that. Let it remain that visible part of the iceburg. Refrain from explaining how I cannot bear embarrassment, especially in others, not even fictional embarrassment. Stop just short of describing the geriatic gentleman who was shopping the diaper wipes first, distracting me so I had to flee to the pet products by which time I’d completely forgot why I was on that side of the store at all.
Too late.
Considered, just for the joke, selling it on eBay. Reconsidered when considering the DNA. Speaking of which, how is it that one can have no less than four distinctly different hair colors?
There once was a boy who was extremely naughty. He never did the things he was supposed to. He was instructed by his peers to make his communications brief and useful, not Byzantine and vexing. He was instructed by his elders to use bullet points, yet he continued to write complete sentences which illuminated, rather than oversimplified important issues. He was told to be in his chair so that he might be helpful to the townspeople. Instead he bought a dive knife and ran away to a far off land to wear a wet suit and chase whale sharks.
In that far off land he had dim memories of strange beasts... Unix, DeskAvailability, CGI, PhoneShifts, EmailReviews, and something his gut told him was to be feared -- Customers. He happily forgot these dark visions amidst fresh fish and Vietnamese whiskey with his feet in white sands and blue water.
One day he was wading in the surf with a gig trying to get a nice little tang or goatfish for lunch. He saw something shiny crowning in a swell far from shore. He stared but it disappeared. Not knowing why, he threw the gig down on the beach, grabbed his fins and pulled them on along with his mask and snorkel. He splashed into the surf and cut a path in the direction the flash had caught his attention.
A hundred yards from shore he realized there was a large sand shark that was circling below him. He remained still, hoping the lack of splashing would let the animal's attention shift elsewhere. It continued to circle. The boy had left his dive knife on the beach with his gig. He kept himself pointed toward the shark so it could not surprise him.
The shark made a quick turn. The boy had to take a couple of fast strokes to keep above it. It bumped him with its nose. The boy hit the shark on the gills. The shark didn't like that at all and swam away quickly.
All the quick swimming and excitement had distracted the boy so that he didn't notice he was in a rip tide and being taken quickly away from shore. He was frightened but forced himself to stay calm. He pulled the mask down around his neck so he could swim freestyle more comfortably and cut a strong stroke not against the tide, but perpendicular to it. He knew it would be impossible to fight it directly.
After his leg and shoulder muscles were burning and he could barely continue because he was breathing so hard he realized he was free of the tide. He turned his course more directly to the island though he would land far from the beach he had started from. As he took a couple of strong kicks to get himself over the swells he saw the thing in the water again. It flashed green. It wasn't far. He knew it was foolish but he swam out after it anyway.
He found it shortly. It was a green glass globe wrapped in netting with some kind of paper inside it. It was somehow important, he was sure. He secured it to his trunks with some of the netting.
He was now so tired he could barely swim but it was swim or drown. He put the snorkel and mask back on so that he wouldn't take such smothering effort.
After another 15 minutes he was nearly back to shore. He saw he was passing over some rocks. The water was dark and silty from the rough tide. Shafts of light stabbed down like tarnished silver. He thought of the shark again. He passed over an immense brain coral. It was at 12 meters across. He forgot to be scared at that point while he watched the amazing undersea terrain glide beneath him.
When he passed the coral he saw glimmers rising toward him like a stack of shiny pipes. He knew they were barracuda. Several of them were huge and they were all swimming closer.
The boy swam faster, not caring if it excited the fish. Large barracuda can be dangerous and he had nothing to fight them with. He was in shallows already. The sandy bottom was dappled with sunlight filtered through the waves.
The barracuda were closer and one of the large ones lunged at him. He saw it coming and twisted so it didn't connect. He beat his fins back at it, trying to splash air into the water. He couldn't see much while doing that. He felt something impact his thigh. He knew, though it didn't feel like anything, that he'd been bitten by it, or the other.
He was so close to shore, he made a break for it. His blood was only likely to excite the fish or bring even worse ones in to see what was happening. He made it to the shore in just a few strokes but had no strength to stand.
He dragged himself higher on the beach as the surf washed up gently under him. He barely had the strength to crawl. He rolled under the shade of a tall rock and fell asleep in moments. The glass ball dragged up behind him on the sand.
When he woke, he saw the pit in his thigh the barracuda had made. He'd bled some and the sand was brown under his leg, but he'd stopped bleeding right after he'd fallen asleep. He thought only of the prize that almost cost him his life. The glass gall and its message.
There was a huge cork in the top of the ball. He could remove it, so ended up forcing it into the ball so he could access the paper within. He pulled it gently out. The paper had a company letterhead with a beautiful swash. It had monospaced printing in a style the boy knew to be native to the techno-valleys of the Western coast. His hands began to tremble. He read the words slowly, English had become strange to him in those two weeks on Thailand beaches.
The words read:
Do you want to make a custom vacation message?
Remember to make it short and sweet. Our suggestion is:
I will be out of the office until <date>
Then he knew he had wronged his fellow cs-representatives again. He had gone on vacation until the 22nd of June and left a vacation message that was horrifying difficult to unravel.
He knew then what he had to do. He had to leave Thailand immediately
to fly back to Seattle and revise his message before someone
unfamiliar with "Alt d" was hurt with his disregard for the no-email
iniative.
miss you,
ashley
--
ps: anyone who violates my personal code of what is acceptable email
while i'm gone will be punished. that is to say, if i come back with a
bunch of useless mail from you that shouldn't'a been sent, there's
something called "the annoymeter delux" in your immediate future.
For anyone who doesn’t already know: on *nix systems you can leave a .vacation (or .vacation.msg) file which is sent as an auto-reply while you are, did you guess? on vacation. That is the dot-vacation file I left when I took two weeks off from Amazon.com to go to Thailand.
So that’s what I didn’t get to see the other day when I got nailed by a crow.
Today I heard a strange and loud bird cry overhead. It was one of the resident red-tailed hawks complaining about being chased by crows. He parked in the biggest maple tree. The crows set about strafing him. They continued for a couple minutes before, as always, they drove him off to find a more tranquil roost.
The one below is my favorite. It’s blurry but you can see the crow is twisting his head around, totally focused on where the hawk is as he wheels for another rake with the talons.
4 July 2006. Ashamed. With the knowledge that there have been more shameful chapters in this lady’s history than are generally repeated. Still, this experiment outdistances all else. First in personal rights, first in commerce, first in armed forces, first in invention, first in scholarship (with 3 times the Nobel prizes of the nearest runner up and 200 times most comers)…
We’re not yet first in corruption, or torture, or human rights abuse, or theft, or violence, or even murder, or any number of other things even more ignorant nations like England peg us for.
Still, a shameful state in which we find ourselves. A state which would be unrecognizable to the men and women who created it and willed it to us.
I used to berate and belittle—um, literally?—Calvin for constantly claiming he was 6'5". He was a bit taller than I and I am 6'2" so every time he brought up his height, especially in front of women, I’d call him a liar. He’d counter by saying I was wrong about being 6'2". I’d point out to everyone that I had no reason to short myself, ho-ho, so Calvin must be the one exagerating his length.
That’s how everyone came to distrust Calvin and feel that he was always trying just a little too hard to be something more than he was in fact. There were even rumors his exagerations of stature extended to all parts extending.
Calvin is a much better guitar player than I am. And you. And everyone you know that plays guitar. And everyone you think is the best guitar player you’ve ever heard. I’m not. None of those. So, I’ll tell you, I didn’t mind having the frequent chance to undermine.
Recently, tired of reading about the bones in the feet and bored in the doctor’s office, I stepped up, besocked, to the old measuring tape and gave the level a shove up and back to meet my head. Turns out I’m well over 6'3", almost 6'4".
So I guess I owe you an apology, Calvin… But you still don’t wash dishes very well!!!
So, this site is a combination of experiment (I wrote the software that runs it), assignment and exercise (I’m supposed to be writing something for it everyday; ha!), and archives for the reams of things I’ve written or done in the past.
Today was the first major stab of wanting to quit it. Even dusting off old writing or photographs takes a fair amount of time which I just don’t have and would be better channeled into projects that make money, like Sage or The Devil’s Dictionary X.
Speaking of which.
So Barnaby, if that really is his name, sent me a picture of him playing a guitar for his new band’s site (Babelshack). Art warning.
Part of me hoped it was a new model of Schecter or a Cort I didn’t know. I didn’t begrudge him that. Most of me said, that’s a Paul Reed Smith. Life is so unfair.
I wrote to ask. It is a PRS. He swung it through a situation where the owner was deceased and the wish was not to see it go to the pawn shop eBay.
Well, okay, Mr. I-have-one-and-you-don’t. Take that.
When I was teaching English in Korea I was requested at Hyundai. Corporations in Korea are styled after the Japanese idiom. Everything on a function approaching zaibatsu. Salarymen; a second family in the company.
Sitting at the long tables, eating monkfish and rice from thin stainless steel dishware in the cafeteria one noon I was told this joke by a student–
Q: How many Koreans does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Four. One to screw it in and three to call Japan for instructions.
The place was depressing and while I had some great students I also had dozens who slept through classes and were only showing up to get company credit. An attempt to head for middle management. I failed almost all of them.
The two other aids to higher career paths were Japanese, obviously, and Chinese, obviously.
The Japanese teacher was an entirely dishy—and unlikely representative of known local mammalian dimensions—Miss Li. “An” not “the” because I must have met 2,000 Miss Lis in Korea; neck and neck with Miss Pa(r)ks.
The Chinese teacher was actually Chinese. A cultured, polite, natty fellow. I ate lunch with the two of them because he was pleasant and she was, I think I might have mentioned, dishy. No English though or I’d certainly be telling a story about her instead.
The Chinese professor—I’m embarrassed I can’t remember his name… or was it also Lee…? ah, clan culture—insisted on making me pronounce Chinese words and phrases. Korean is nearly monotone and he was plagued by his students’ utter inability to capture any Chinese accent at all.
English, while much easier on the tongue than Chinese, is still miles ahead of Korean in lingual-aural coordination. So, I was the guinea pig to at least give him some little bit of satisfaction in getting someone to speak some Chinese sensibly.
I got «你好吗？» (roughly: ni hao ma) down pretty well then. It wasn’t from lack of trying either. I think he had me do about 100 call and responses with it while he gave feedback to tweak my tone and accent.
That was years ago. Tonight I went to Target® with my kids to get Veri something to reward her for her first dental visit and her perfect behavior and bill.
Going in, we met an elderly Chinese couple with their English speaking daughter. They were focused on us. The couple freaking out about how pretty Veri is. I gave them my best «你好吗？» and that was the ice-breaker they needed.
Through their daughter they asked if they could take a picture with Veri.
Now, if a Caucasian or obviously American man of any race requested a photo with my kid while sidling up to her, I’d probably put a palm in his chest and set him smartly on his ass for answer.
China, like Korea, is traditionally a Confucian culture. Family is terribly, really terribly in some cases, important. Children are adored. They are the focus of the family while young. It’s why Chinese kids so totally kick ass in academics.
In Korea, and I’m sure in China too, it’s not unusual to touch others’ children on the head or hands. Even a stranger might be asked to watch a child for a moment in a train station or such. I miss that so much. So dearly.
I asked Veri if the photo-op was okay and she said, “Yes.” I didn’t give it a thought. Just left it to her. So they hoisted her up in the air while the daughter worked a digital camera. Veri gave one of her patented disappearing-lips smiles but still managed to look nice.
God, they were happy. Saying «谢谢» and waving and saying bye and saying «谢谢» and waving.
I wouldn’t have bothered to write it up but I’m still sort of smiling about it and I’d like to be able to read this again later when I’ve forgot the feeling. Get it back. Just as I know they will when they see the photo at home in Beijing or Taipei.
I think all North America used to be full of colorful town names but they're almost all gone. I believe there was even a Whisky Fuck once upon a time. Somehow Intercourse, Pennsylvania just doesn't seem funny enough. Maybe it's the Pennsylvania part.
Had a strange, but pleasant, experience yesterday; fighting back some nostalgia for Renate all of the sudden. Luc Devroye, a CS professor at McGill University in Montreal, wrote up a bit about my typography on his site.
The reason this is strange is I haven’t been much of a typographer in a long time. I haven’t put anything online—except as résumé points—since 1996 at the latest and I think I did most of it in 1995. He linked to one of my fonts, Element, at dafont.com. I didn’t even know it was up there. I put out about 6 of them as shareware on AOL back when they were the only game in town.
I suppose the fonts have migrated around a bit just because there weren’t 
that many fonts back then. Today there are 10s of thousands of free fonts or rip-offs of licensed fonts available.
I haven’t quit designing them—as you can see—but I haven’t done one digitally since 1998. Right about that time support for my favorite font editor, Fontographer, evaporated. The software was sold around a couple of times and new versions ceased just as Apple was switching OSes—again—and I was leaving the country—again.
My .fog files languished on a Mac 5300 for 8 years. Today I discover that there is a 4.7 Fontographer
release which is compatible with OS X. So, looks like I’m back in the font game as soon as I cough up the $99 update fee. Of course now a new Wacom tablet is in order because of Apple’s new hardware standards and nearly total lack of support for their old stuff. Che scemo.
In any case, you can get Element by clicking on its image above and I’ll post more of my typefaces soon and see about rendering some of the new designs digitally.
