warren for president 2016

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Dogs love us like we wish we could love others; they are faithful where we are feckless. For as long as they are able, they endure. - Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh, in Hounded By Grief Over A Canine Companion

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How I love thee, Jon Stewart.

Via Prose Before Hos

love

Leap
by Brian Doyle

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.

Via Aaryn

on globalization

Your car is Japanese. Your pizza is Italian. Your falafel is Lebanese. Your tortillas are Mexican. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your movies are American. Your tea is Tamil. Your shirt is Indian. Your oil is Saudi Arabian. Your electronics are Chinese. Your numbers are Arabic, your letters Latin. And you complain that your neighbor is an immigrant? Pull yourself together!

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Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. - Bishop Desmond Tutu

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"How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone." - Coco Chanel

happy birthday freddie

Happy birthday, Freddie. Your light burns brighter than ever.

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“Modern cynics and skeptics see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.” -John F. Kennedy

font geeks of the world, unite

I'm a typography geek. And I love "Doves". Carry on.

Know This Headline's Font? You're 'Just My Type'
September 4, 2011

Are you an Arial person? A Times New Roman? A Garamond? A Lucida Handwriting? So much of our communication is expressed in text these days that people become deeply attached to the typeface they use to type out their thoughts. Bold or unbold, serif or sans-serif — like the car you drive or the clothes you wear, your font expresses who you are ... and can go in and out of style.
A Font For Radio

Many NPR staffers read scripts all day, so fonts are near and dear to our hearts. We asked some familiar NPR voices share their typeface of choice:
Garamond: "It's got little feet on it — serifs. It's a very clear, simple font."

Garamond: "It's got little feet on it — serifs. It's a very clear, simple font."
Gill Sans: "The cleanness, the simplicity of the Gill Sans is what I really like. I like that you can experiment with different fonts, but finding one that really works is nice. I feel like I'm not wandering through the font desert anymore."

Gill Sans: "The cleanness, the simplicity of the Gill Sans is what I really like. I like that you can experiment with different fonts, but finding one that really works is nice. I feel like I'm not wandering through the font desert anymore."

"Type, like fashion and music, comes in and out of vogue," Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type, tells NPR's Audie Cornish. So what's in right now? "I think now script fonts are making a comeback," he says.

Fonts didn't always hold such a significant spot in the cultural imagination. Before personal computers, type looked largely the same. "Everything basically looked like the typewriter font," Garfield says. "It was a liberating thing in the '80s" when it became possible to manipulate fonts with the click of a mouse.

But with great power comes great responsibility ... and some didn't use their typeface forces for good. To wit: Comic Sans. If you've ever printed signs to advertise a yard sale or sent invitations to your child's birthday party, chances are you've employed the wildly popular Comic Sans. The playful letters became so overused that it inspired a backlash. Garfield is hardly a fan, but he comes to Comic Sans' defense.

"The key thing with Comic Sans and with all fonts is really the use to which it's put," he says. "If you used it ... to invite people to your school fair, that was great. [It was] not so great, however, when it began appearing on the sides of ambulances and gravestones." Garfield recalls one member of the Ban Comic Sans "movement" saying: "If you use it in the wrong place it's like inviting a clown to a funeral."

Then there's Helvetica — a typeface used so widely that for many people it has become essentially invisible. (The 2007 documentary Helvetica chronicled the many uses of Helvetica in our everyday lives, from public transit signage to corporate logos.) In Just My Type, Garfield follows the story of one man who tried to spend a day without Helvetica — and found it almost impossible.

"He couldn't get up in the morning," Garfield says. "His T-shirt label instructions had Helvetica on them. He couldn't use a dollar bill because the numbers were in Helvetica. He couldn't go on the New York subway because [all the signs were] in Helvetica as well. It's really taken over the world."

But fonts come and go, and Garfield says that Helvetica has a rival these days: Gotham. (You may recognize Gotham from Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign materials.) But while fonts today simply fall out of fashion, back before computers, getting rid of a font wasn't simply a matter of waiting for it to fade away. Take, for example, the Doves typeface, which met a rather abrupt end.

"Doves, like the bird, is a fleeting type," Garfield says. The typeface was designed in 1900 by T.J. Cobden Sanderson, who was "a real aesthete. He thought he could invent the perfect, most beautiful type," Garfield explains. (You can see a page from the 1903 Doves Press Bible here.)

Sanderson formed a publishing house that printed using Doves type, but after a terrible falling out, Sanderson decided that he did not want his publishing partner to be able to use the font after he died. "So he took all the letters that had ever been made with Doves and he took them to Westminster Bridge over the [River] Thames and threw them in," Garfield says.

... don't get any ideas, Comic Sans haters.

happy re-birthday to me

Today, I'm eight years kidney cancer-free. Lots has changed in my life since my diagnosis and treatment. I have much to be celebrate. I also have much to be sober about, including the current illness of my father (stage 4 bladder cancer) and other friends who are waging their own battles with pancreatic and breast cancers.

If nothing else, please do as I'm doing today -- take a moment to savor a wonderful meal, hug (and laugh with) your loved ones, and do something healthy for your mind/ body. None of us are promised tomorrow. But we can all make today glorious.

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“Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.” -Stephen King