Yesterday, I noticed a photo come through my “somerville” Flickr tag RSS feed of the Firefly press’s linotype machine, which I mentioned in passing a couple of weeks ago. Cool, I thought. And then I sort of recognized the name… and it turns out that it is a long lost friend of mine, whom I worked with at CTY ten years ago. How odd. He’s been hiding in plain sight in Central Square. And he’s having his wedding invitations letterpressed by Firefly. And he keeps a great blog. Goodness!

Had a good day in Portland yesterday. Did a lot of walking around the Old Port, at great risk to our personal safety as large chunks of ice and snow kept rocketing off the steep roofs onto the sidewalk. There was a ton of deep, slushy snow, but the upside was that it was warmer than it is on some of our winter excursions. We realized it’s been a long time since we were up. Now that John’s moving back, we’ll have to make it a point to make it up more often.

This is the photo of the sunrise I mentioned yesterday. There are more.

As I was drifting into consciousness this morning, I was wondering about a plot hole in The Graduate. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, and maybe I am forgetting something important. But aren’t Benjamin’s family supposed to be good friends of the Robinsons? Wasn’t his dad Mr. Robinson’s partner? How did they explain that they weren’t inviting them to Elaine’s wedding?

It was 6:30 or so, and I was happy to be awake, for whatever reason, so I went upstairs (Dubs and I are spending a couple of days in Portland, Maine) into the cupola of the place we’re staying and watched the sun rise over the port. Lots of cranes and brick houses and chimneys. I could upload pictures if I had remembered my camera cord. Now I’m waiting for Terri to get ready so that we can go to breakfast, and thought I’d check to see if there’s wireless. There is.

I snooze, you lose. I meant to post this days ago, but now it looks like supermanisadick.com’s server is hosed, so you don’t get to see comics covers with Superman acting like a jerk, primarily engaging in schadenfreude at either Lois’s or Jimmy’s misfortunes. Or, in some cases, causing their misfortunes.

For all you bleeding hearts who were thinking of jumping ship to Canada, here’s a bit of news:

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that Canada wants all governments to accept the testing and commercialisation of “terminator” crop varieties. These are genetically engineered to produce only infertile seeds which farmers cannot replant.

I’m not categorically opposed to genetic modification itself, or many applications of it. It’s just a refinement of techniques which humans have been using for thousands of years. I know it’s not without risk, and that it’s definitely tweaking nature to human ends. But in most cases there are at least tangible benefits, like being able to grow frost-resistant or disease-resistant crops. But how exactly does humanity benefit from Monsanto being able to force farmers (or agribusinesses) to buy new seeds every year? That’s pretty perverse, and indefensible. And Canada’s leading the charge to overturn the international moratorium on the “technology”.

Vladmasters are viewmaster slides home-made by someone named vlad. Titles include Calvino’s Invisible Cities— an all-time fave— and Kafka’s Parables.

I feel like in all interpersonal communications the past several days, I’ve been senselessly cranky, very much unintentionally so. I feel like these cartoon word balloons keep coming out of my mouth with all squiggles and stars and #@%#@#!s. I try to rope them in as they come out, and there are thought bubbles saying “wait, no, that’s not how I mean it.” but I’m doomed to watch the angry squiggles come out against my will.

So I put the Jenny Holzer thing below as a reminder to myself.

I decided to read some of my old journals from –geez– 10 years ago, when I was in Ireland. I think they seem disproportionately crazy. I remember the whole semester I lived there as a wholly positive thing. I was happy, I learned a ton, and I was reasonably healthy. Well, I spent enough time in pubs that all the beer and smoke finally made me feel disgusting enough that I started running every morning, but mainly to offset the trip to the pub later that day. I did drop a lot of weight while I was there. I had to stand in front of my mother for a solid 5 seconds in the airport before she recognized me, and the following semester a classics professor* told me I looked like a wraith of my former self. Anyway, it seems like I was having too good a time to actually sit down and write too much, except when something was under my skin. (If you’re curious about what was under my skin, it seems to be other people on my program, people I barely remember, not even the few I was friendly with, and next to nothing about the Irish (and Norweigian) people in my house who I was spending all that quality time at the pub with). So that, too, seemed disproportionately cranky.

But I’m determined to move beyond it, so I will share an excerpt of something else I found in that journal, a list of words I encountered around then, and liked enough to make a list of. (I have subsequently re-forgotten most of them, so they’re just like new!):

We were walking around Harvard Square during the first half of the Super Bowl. Beautifully uncrowded. But not a lot was open. I guess this is what it’s like being Jewish during Christmas. And then we went to Foodmaster. Also beautifully uncrowded. But we made it back at halftime to see that the Eagles are putting up a good fight, and it’s tied. And now Sir Paul is playing.

Man, does Sir Paul look old. Is that Perry Farrell on guitar? Or Dave Barry? Sir Paul is wearing a vaguely Communistic red T-Shirt with a star in the center. And he’s singing a song about California Grass. But thank god, we’re not going to have to see his geriatric nipples. Actually, we were in Grendel’s in Havard Square during the pre-game show, and the wardrobe malfunction I feared most was Charlie Daniels’ massive belt buckle snapping and decapitating a Black Eyed Pea.

Sir Paul is now playing Live and Let Die, and just to prove it was a James Bond theme song, they keep showing Odd Job playing the drums.

Oh, Jesus, ths halftime show is over, and the background music is “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”, and damnable Joe Buck is on the mike. I’m not going to be able to watch this, am I?

In all the eulogizing last week, it’s kind of amazing that this didn’t get more press:

In its obituary, the New York Times described Johnson as “architecture’s restless intellect.” The Post proclaimed him a “towering figure.” Both articles, like most of the other obituaries, described Johnson as the “elder statesman” of American architecture. Both also mentioned, more or less in passing, Johnson’s “early admiration for fascism and anti-Semitism that he soon recanted.”

But read a bit more and it turns out that this “early admiration” lasted for the better part of a decade. During that time, Johnson didn’t merely sympathize, like Lindbergh, or make a juvenile joke, like Prince Harry. On the contrary, Johnson helped organize a U.S. fascist party. He worked on behalf of the Nazi sympathizer and radio broadcaster, Father Charles E. Coughlin. He attended one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies in 1938, and in 1939 he followed the German army into Poland. “We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed,” he wrote afterward. “It was a stirring spectacle.”

Nat Hentoff (he’s getting up there, isn’t he?) in the Village Voice:

Fidel Castro, I’m sure, never heard of the small town of Vermillion, South Dakota, until late last year, when the Vermillion Public Library-founded in 1902, on the eve of the Progressive era in American politics-began to gain international attention by becoming the first, and only, American library to call attention to Castro’s imprisoning of 10 of Cuba’s independent librarians to sentences of more than 20 years.

Since I still don’t have all the equipment necessary to get the press up and in service, I am keeping myself busy with various surrogates. I spent some time this morning rearranging the space in the basement I’m putting the press for now. Still need some better lighting, but that’s for another day. Went to Paper Source this afternoon for inspiration.

And I’ve just spend some time poking around the web for some letterpress links, which I post below. Apparently, Somerville is home to the Firefly Press, which has no website, but Elsa Dorfman’s site has a page for them, with a video.

I like some of the stuff at Isle of Printing.

I’m interested in the photopolymer process as a way to design stuff digitally and get cuts made. It seems better than metal for a variety of reasons (namely, durability, non-toxicity (well, take your pick between weird photo-chemicals and lead…), and storage (they’re way thinner than metal blocks)). Having limited space, storage is actually my primary concern. Boxcar Press seems to have the best explanation of photopolymer engraving I’ve found on the web. Seems pricey to get them to do it, though. I’m sure there’s a cheaper supplier, but as I’m learning, it seems like a lot of the printing world is either web-invisible, or outright web-hostile.

Just what it sounds like.

In a fit of further narcisissm, I was looking at my word stats (the core narcisissm here of course is simply having a blog to have word stats on), and I realized that it’s a good demonstration of how most search engines work. Since search is my specialty and it’s somehow one of those things that’s ubiquitous but still esoteric, like how TVs work, or the subjunctive mood, I thought I’d explain.

What are the important words in my blog? The ones I use most frequently, right? Nope. Exactly the opposite. The words I use most frequently are “the, to, a, of, and, i, in, that”, etc. It’s the ones I use least that mean the most: “secularist, cuttlefish, smugness, chowdah, lexicon, tearjerker, bowtie”. So, most search engines try to exploit this in some way, and the rarity of words across the whole document set is factored into the (basically bogus) relevance scores you sometimes see accompanying your results.

This approach ultimately sucks, though, and it’s worth noting that Google more or less threw this way of doing things out. But for document sets smaller than, say, the whole web, it usually works as well as anything else. And Google’s way of doing things doesn’t really work outside of the public web.

Terri just told the cat “let’s have some furry devotion”. I think that means it’s bedtime.

Just a note on the snottiness of my last post: I wasn’t really suggesting that it’s common knowlege, even for Cantabridgians, that e.e. cummings wrote a novel called The Enormous Room, but I would think that if you were writing a review of a restaurant, you might inquire into the source of the name…