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In praise of em-dashes
May. 31st, 2011 02:13 pmMy response to the recent screed against em-dashes is that I love em-dashes so much that half my love for silent movies is for the frequent use of double em-dashes in the intertitles:
Baseball typography
Aug. 11th, 2010 09:00 amI went to the Mariners game at Safeco last night with Andy and Carrie. The Mariners are epically awful this season, but it was a lovely night, King Felix was pitching, and hey, they even won the game 2-0 over the Athletics. Woohoo!
However, the reason I really wanted to make it down to Safeco this year was to buy a shirt. The Mariners have an Australian pitcher named Ryan Rowland-Smith. His nickname is The Hyphen, because he's the first Major League Baseball player with a hyphenated name, or so the story goes. So this year they have a shirt that prominently features a hyphen on the front. How many sports shirts do you know of that are a purely typographical design? Just because Rowland-Smith is, like his team, having an epically awful season and has been put on the disabled list just so his battered psyche and statistics don't have to suffer another shelling every five games is no reason not to wear such a shirt with pride. I've been faunching for one ever since I first heard about it on the teevee.
I was planning to have my picture taken at the stadium with the shirt on, but when I got there I discovered that the batteries in the camera were dead. Amazingly, in that huge mall disguised as a stadium there is apparently nowhere to buy batteries. So here's a picture from an online store instead. However, my shirt is actually white with a Mariners-blue hyphen. I like these colors better, dang it, and now I want this shirt instead. Aside from that, I must say that it actually looks more like an em-dash than a hyphen.
However, the reason I really wanted to make it down to Safeco this year was to buy a shirt. The Mariners have an Australian pitcher named Ryan Rowland-Smith. His nickname is The Hyphen, because he's the first Major League Baseball player with a hyphenated name, or so the story goes. So this year they have a shirt that prominently features a hyphen on the front. How many sports shirts do you know of that are a purely typographical design? Just because Rowland-Smith is, like his team, having an epically awful season and has been put on the disabled list just so his battered psyche and statistics don't have to suffer another shelling every five games is no reason not to wear such a shirt with pride. I've been faunching for one ever since I first heard about it on the teevee.
I was planning to have my picture taken at the stadium with the shirt on, but when I got there I discovered that the batteries in the camera were dead. Amazingly, in that huge mall disguised as a stadium there is apparently nowhere to buy batteries. So here's a picture from an online store instead. However, my shirt is actually white with a Mariners-blue hyphen. I like these colors better, dang it, and now I want this shirt instead. Aside from that, I must say that it actually looks more like an em-dash than a hyphen.
One thing I learned
Jun. 22nd, 2009 08:16 amFinished the printing of AmaZed and CorfluZed last night. One thing I learned is that carl packs a lot of text onto a page of Chunga. When I printed Chunga last year I burned through black toner like it was tinder. AmaZed and CorfluZed used very little black toner in comparison, even accounting for the much smaller print run. I'm not sure that the Chunga layout has less white space than Luke's lovely layout in AZ&CZ either. It's all about the density of the text. I would never have guessed it would make that big of a difference, although carl has long said that he fits a hell of a lot of words into our pages. Nothing like empirical evidence to bring the truth home.
