Seen on King Street West, a block east of Dufferin:
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You young’uns may have learned about typefaces and the difference between serif and sans serif from using the “font” settings on your computers, but I learned from using Letraset (and often, its budget-priced brother, Geotype). They were sheets of rub-down transfer lettering and clip art. The principle behind Letraset wasn’t all that different from temporary tattoos. The stuff went the way of the dodo once desktop publishing and laser, inkjet and dye sublimation printers caught on.
Graphic artist and typeface fancier Jessica Hische – who recently wrote the brilliant “The work you do while you procrastinate is the work you should be doing for the rest of your life” – posted this great graphic showing the evolution of her type taste from grade school to the present day. Click it to see it at full size. Oh, I remember my Helvetica Condensed Black Oblique phase…
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A Deleted Scene from “Tintin”
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R.I.P. Pauly Fuemana
How could I not like OMC’s one hit, How Bizarre? It’s a catchy little pop tune penned by a Pacific Islander that features the accordion (the credits say that Hershal Herscher played it) prominently. Although it has a happy “Pacific Rim pop” sound with its C-G-F chord progression, its bounciness belies its subject matter: gang life and trouble with the cops, New Zealand style. It’s a gangsta campfire song!
Released in New Zealand in 1995, it went triple platinum there, an achievement that Wikipedia says had not been surpassed as of 2005. In 1996 it found its way into the Australian, British and Canadian charts and even did well in the U.S., despite its being released for radio airplay only and not as a commercially-available single. How Bizarre sold nearly 4 million records between 1995 and 2000, making it the best-selling one ever to be recorded and released by a Kiwi band. (Somewhere, the guys from Split Enz are fuming.)
Pauly Fuemana, the lead singer of OMC, died on Sunday shortly before his 41st birthday. For making an infectious tune with accordion that was a party standard during some of my partiest years, I pay tribute to him. Requiescat in pace, Pauly.
Here’s the video for How Bizarre:
Click the comic to see the full story. It gets weirder — much, much weirder!
Update: And now I know where the original comic — which got emailed to me, unattributed — is from! It’s from Humon comics, and you can see the whole thing here>
For those of you who are fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation, there are some lovely “behind the scenes” shots of the cast and crew on the TrekCore site. I’ve posted a couple of my favourites here.
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Montreal Bound
Photo by Tom Purves.
I’m boarding a Porter flight bound for Montreal, where I’ll be attending CUSEC (Canadian University Software Engineering Conference). I’ll be there from today through Saturday afternoon, watching technical presentation, flying the Microsoft banner, hosting DemoCamp and having a beer (or twelve) with my fellow conference-goers. I’ll be posting notes and photos from the presentations and other goings-on, so watch this space!