The R’s have it… “It” being the most distinguishable difference between Helvetica and Arial

The R’s have itWhether or not my aesthetic sense and artistic ability really warrant the appellation “designer,” design has been a part of what I do for my entire career, and I’ve had the eye for detail (minutiae?) since I was a kid. It follows naturally that I have an unhealthy fixation on fonts. Just ask anyone how I feel about Verdana to erase all doubts on that point.

My obsessions seem slightly less unhealthy working in the publishing field, and they’re downright validated at moments like last Friday, when the recent documentary honoring the 50th anniversary of Helvetica was screened in our boardroom over lunch. I loved it.

While I unequivocally loathe Verdana (unless, that is, it’s displayed at such a small point size that it’s hard to tell what it is), I hold Helvetica in high regard. It’s rather plain, I’ll admit, but it’s just such a perfectly realized vision that in its relatively short lifetime it has become the norm. Helvetica is just how letters should look, and any other font’s uniqueness is judged most clearly by how it differs from that norm.

Unfortunately, on-screen type is a world of its own. Although with the advent of Mac OS X, system-wide anti-aliasing has made smooth font rendering possible, most computer systems still look better when fonts are specially tooled for the low-resolution environment of a CRT or LCD display. And for the most part, Helvetica has never really fared too well in such an environment.

So when, in the mid-’90s, Microsoft made what might have been their single most thoroughly positive contribution to the world by releasing a set of standard fonts to be used on web pages that look (reasonably) good on computer screens, I embraced them wholeheartedly (Verdana notwithstanding).

The closest counterpart to Helvetica in this set of fonts is Arial. Many people hate Arial, for reasons generally too arcane even for me to appreciate, but ultimately, for me, the fact that it doesn’t quite hit the mark of being a pure Helvetica clone, it tends to render much better on-screen than Helvetica does, and it’s become my own personal standard (along with another of the Microsoft web fonts, Georgia) for web design.

But this Helvetica movie has turned my world on its ear. For the last week I’ve been hyper-sensitive to fonts, noticing Helvetica everywhere I turn all day long, and becoming acutely aware of every slight difference between Helvetica and its web font doppelgänger, Arial. I think I’ve hit upon the most easily identifiable difference between the two fonts: the right “foot” of the capital R.

To be honest, I don’t really like the capital R in Helvetica. That wavy little foot seems too jaunty, too incongruously immoderate next to its supremely efficient and utilitarian siblings. But if anything is worse than the capital R in Helvetica, it’s the capital R in Arial! What the heck is that? It’s almost enough to make me want to give Verdana another chance. (After all, it’s even used on the Helvetica site.)

A ludicrously large bar of soap

A ludicrously large bar of soap!I meant to post about this a few weeks ago, but I just never got around to it. Then today when I discovered (never mind how or why, exactly) that Google does not have one single page in its index containing the phrase “ludicrously large bar of soap” I simply knew that I must finally make a post concerning the ludicrously large bar of soap.

For, you see, there is presently in the shower at my house a ludicrously large bar of soap. My wife received it as a Christmas present from her mom. Her mom is great with gifts, and she loves to go all-out. This year that meant finding an incomprehensibly, ludicrously large bar of soap.

Your average “large” bar of bath soap, you see, is somewhere in the realm of 4.5 ounces. This “Egyptian Cotton Moisturizing Bath Bar,” however, is a whopping 12 ounces. But knowing that it’s slightly less than three times the mass of an ordinary bar of soap does little to convey just how ludicrously large it really is. In its dimensions, it is roughly the equivalent of six ordinary bars of soap, stacked three in a row, two deep. The first time I attempted to use it I dropped it and the colossal thud was enough to raise the ire of the neighbors’ dogs. Woe to the poor fool who drops it on their foot!

But it is a very nice bar of soap. It has a pleasantly subtle, gender-neutral aroma, and it produces a wonderful creamy lather that is more than adequate for my daily cleansing needs. Plus, I don’t think I’ll need to buy another bar of soap until my kids are in college.

I hoped to locate an image of this wondrous bar of soap online, and surprisingly enough someone is apparently selling them on eBay. But this photo alone cannot possibly do justice to the magnificent size of the thing. In fact, even holding it in the wrapper, it’s hard to imagine how ludicrously large it will actually look once you take it out.

In order to better convey the relative size of this bar of soap to other, more familiar objects, I have prepared the following handy visual aid:

That bar of soap is ludicrously large!

Addendum, 2 minutes later: Just to see how frighteningly omniscient Google really is, I went there immediately after posting this, and once again searched for the phrase “ludicrously large bar of soap.” And yes, it was already there. It even said “2 minutes ago” in the search results.

They’re long gone, but the olfactory memory remains

Ceci n’est pas un Tart ‘n’ TinyToday as I washed my hands in the office bathroom, I noticed that the building has changed the soap in the dispensers. The old soap was basically unscented (although it did take on an unpleasant rusty smell from the dispenser itself), whereas the new soap has a strangely familiar, slightly fruity scent.

I knew immediately that it was the smell of something I ate a lot of as a kid back in the ’80s. My first thought was that it was Pac-Man cereal, but I knew that wasn’t right. So as I walked back to my desk, I sniffed my hands, straining my brain to identify the scent. And then it hit me. I couldn’t remember what they were called, but I distinctly saw a long-gone Wonka brand candy. I described it to my coworkers as having “a sour taste and chalky texture similar to SweeTarts, and they came in a little box similar to Nerds, but they were tiny cylinders.”

So naturally I found my answer by googling “candy sweet tarts tiny cylinders,” which, equally naturally, led me to Wikipedia, and the answer: Tart ‘n’ Tinys. And then to the disappointing reminder that sometime in the ’90s, Wonka reinvented Tart ‘n’ Tinys with a disgusting Spree-like coating. What’s the point? The candy that I remember is no more. I can’t even find a picture online of what they originally looked like. All I have left is the lingering scent of questionable hand soap and the vivid memory of my tongue turning raw from sucking on 20 or 30 tiny, pointy, chalky cylinders at a time.

If everyone’s white, do you even realize the racism is there?

Sundown TownsI’ve probably mentioned here before that I grew up in Austin, Minnesota, a.k.a. Spamtown USA. Of course I noticed growing up that there were few if any African-Americans in town, but it had never occurred to me that there might once have been, and I was never told of any racial conflicts that had ever taken place.

In fact, race (at least the black/white divide) was almost a non-existent concept in my childhood. In the ’80s there were quite a few people in town of Asian descent, mostly refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, which was a source of its own kind of tension, but I’m sure I was at least 10 before I saw a black person in real life (although by then I knew Gordon, Susan, David and Olivia from Sesame Street quite well).

I’m not sure if I had ever even heard the term sundown town until today, when I happened to be searching online for something completely unrelated about Austin, and I was even more surprised to learn about a disturbing incident that took place in my hometown in 1922.

These days racial tension is going strong in Austin, due in large part to changes that have taken place in the economic environment of the city. So race is mixed up, along with economic class, immigration and labor union issues, into a complex and for the most part poorly-understood stew of thinly-veiled hatred, anger and frustration on every side.

I guess it just goes to show that the history of race relations in this country is far more complicated and troubled than many of us even know. In an election year where, for the first time, both a woman and an African-American have a real chance of becoming our next president, it’s important to reflect on how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.

Magma iss de Hundin!!!

OK, I don’t actually know what “iss de Hundin” means, but it’s a phrase that seems to come up a lot in Kobaian. At any rate, Magma is a legendary French prog rock/avant garde jazz band, led by drummer Christian Vander, who made up his own language for the band’s Coltrane-meets-Wagner post-apocalyptic jazz-rock-opera concept. (And now I’ve reached my per-post hyphen limit.) They beat Coheed and Cambria to it by three decades, and did it in an incomprehensible Germanic Esperanto to boot.

I used to have a Magma tribute website, back in the days before blogs and Wikipedia and YouTube. I took it down years ago, but fortunately the band has kept up playing. I saw them in Chicago in 1999 and it was a highlight of my musical life. They’re still going strong, as evidenced by this 2006 video. Check it out!

Of course, the truly indoctrinated will probably prefer this clip from 1970. Lip syncing on French TV, “American Bandstand”-style. “Stoah” of all things. Imagine the trauma of an unsuspecting viewer, just tuning in for the supersonic screeching at the beginning. The world’s collective tolerance for the bizarre was certainly much higher back then.