licentious radio

Friday, July 5, 2002
[7:00:01 PM]

More than once, I've eaten breakfast at Cafe Borrone, and read whatever newspaper happened to be left around. Several years ago, people mostly read the San Jose Mercury News -- not the San Francisco Chronicle.

SJMN did a makeover, and now almost everyone reads the Chronicle.

SJMN now looks like the early days of desktop publishing where people tried to use as many different typefaces as possible. The centered headlines serve as final proof of why nobody does headlines that way.

The worst part is the typeface used for body text. It's complicated without being pleasant, and large without being readable. They wanted to use much taller characters than other newspapers, but then they shoved them together horizontally, and then shoved the lines of text together vertically. The overall effect is that the letters are bigger, but more difficult to read than the SF paper.

People should look at the New York Times' type. If you can't do better, just copy theirs. Notice the breathing room each character has, and the space between lines.

Newspapers generally justify lines. I believe the reason is that their lines are so short, the variation in line-length of ragged lines would be a significant fraction of the total length.

[6:35:41 PM]
William Stout Design Books at 27-A South Park in San Francisco is a fine place. Literally shelves of books on typography. There's a copy of "Finer Points in the spacing and arrangement of Type" there now. By the standard quirk of capitalism, there are also many larger, shinier books of dreadfully wrong typographic advice. Alas.

[4:54:28 PM]
If a Democrat wants the nomination, he or she should start by getting the Patriot Act repealed. Just say no one was allowed to read it, and Congress was spooked by anthrax attacks immediately after the September 11 attacks. But now we're sane again, and you can read the act, and no PATRIOTIC American will defend this act. Throw it out now.

[4:48:30 PM]
Liberty has been secured cartoon at Bartcop.com.

[4:45:51 PM]
Did you notice that somebody gave Colin Powell a "leadership" award? How sick is that?

[4:38:34 PM]
Make It Breakfast of Our Champs [bartcop.com] by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

[4:31:16 PM]
Bush explains trifecta joke [gwbush.com]: 'So let me explain: "Trifecta" is a horse racing term. When you get a Trifecta it means you bet on three horses who came in first, second and third. In other words, getting a Trifecta means you were hoping for an extraordinary set of circumstances that came true for you. Just like what happened to me on 9-11! The 9-11 Trifecta has allowed me and my friends to pass our entire right-wing agenda, with Democrats cowering in the corners. Who says Recession and War are no laughing matter? Both have allowed me to hand out a tremendous amount of pork to my contributors--maybe that's why they're the ones that are laughing.'

[10:59:48 AM]
Get Cheney.

Little George's fraud is small-time crookery, like little George himself. But Dick's fraud is already $100 million, not counting his various outright crimes and shenanigans to keep Halliburton afloat. When somebody goes through Halliburton's books, we'd better put Cheney on the watch list -- don't let him leave the country -- cuz the guy's going down. Let's help!

Halliburton.