Category Archives: Miscellany & Minutiæ

Morning cup o’ links

Perhaps it would have been better to make a sausage analogy for these links, rather than a coffee-and-sausage one. But since one of the links is to a post written by Marco Arment, coffee seems appropriate. (Then again, a Google search reveals that I am far from the first person to use the phrase “morning cup o’ links” so maybe I should spend less time worrying about it being a non sequitir and instead worry that I am horribly unoriginal.)

Each morning I start the day by perusing the latest on Twitter and my RSS feeds, and I almost always find something interesting to read. But today was more interesting than most, and simply retweeting the links didn’t seem adequate. Also, some of these links may become topics for discussion on this week’s episode of The Undisciplined Room, so this is your homework.

First up, we have a post on The Verge discussing homeless hotspots at SXSW. This is a topic I’ve been reading about for the past few days, but this post was the first that made me think beyond my gut reaction that this was shameless exploitation.

Next, with a HT to Daring Fireball, and via Marco Arment, we have a look at Curator’s Code and why it’s a bad idea. The evidence has been mounting for me that Maria Popova’s 15 minutes of (borrowed) fame are almost over (especially when I’m reminded of her love of Ayn Rand and Malcolm Gladwell), and Marco helps solidify that thought.

Then we have type designer Mark Simonson (who designed the Proxima Nova font that I use in the Room 34 logo and branding materials) discussing font anachronisms in The Artist. As much as I enjoyed The Artist, issues with the fonts it used (especially straight quotes, and the fact that it used fonts in a lot of places where hand lettering would have been more appropriate) even distracted me, so I can’t imagine what it must be like for someone like Mark Simonson or Chank Diesel. (Full disclosure: I did development work on Chank’s mobile website.)

And finally… Chicago musician and multi-talent Joshua Wentz has just announced the release of the Side 2 EP by Absinthe and the Dirty Floors, one of the many musical projects with which he’s involved. He’s also made a video for each song on the EP, like this:

The Lorax: shockingly bad

I was not at all shocked that the new Lorax movie is bad. But I was shocked at how bad. Without question, Dr. Seuss has always been my favorite children’s author, ever since I filled the entire checkout card of my elementary school’s copy of The Cat in the Hat with my name. Yes, I just renewed it over and over, because I loved it. (And, apparently, my mom did not, or she’d have just broken down and bought me my own copy.)

Over the years I read a lot of Seuss books at the school library, but none made such an impression, both immediate and lasting, as The Lorax. I loved it like nothing else, and I still do. I loved the book, and I loved the 1972 animated TV special, which not only captured and expanded upon the spirit of the book, but did so with the kind of funky music that only could have appeared in a children’s television program in that decade.

Therefore, it was almost a given that I would hate the new CGI animated feature film adaptation. But I was not prepared for how much I would hate it. OK, the notorious Mazda commercial gave me a clue, but I had been lulled since first staring gape-jawed in disbelief at the audacity of a car company claiming that an SUV with a standard combustion engine was “Truffula tree approved” into thinking that maybe the movie wouldn’t be so bad, after all.

Oh, how wrong I was. I was wrong — as were the filmmakers — in so many ways that I can barely begin to catalog them.

Fortunately I don’t have to. In his Vulture review, The Badness of The Lorax Is a Shock, David Edelstein says it all for me.

Almost.

We disagree over whether the source material is any good, apparently, and Edelstein seems to like most the part of the movie I hate most — the tacked on conventional family movie chase sequence in the final 20 minutes. I found it so gratuitous and unbearable (and frankly just plain boring) that I excused myself to go to the bathroom, but I really just wanted to get the hell out of the theater so I didn’t have to witness any further abomination.

Please. Do not see this movie. Read the book. Or watch the 1972 TV special four times instead.