most terrifying web ad ever?

also

i watch a lot of 'scrubs,' because it's on when i get home from work and because donald faison and john c. mcginley are hilarious. by the time the show is over, i'm usually checking e-mail or something in my room, so i end up listening to the first few minutes of 'becker' before i remember that 'becker' sucks harder than a prostitute comprised of black holes and turn off the television.

now for something kinda different.

one of the comic strips we run at work, funky winkerbean, is AWFUL. when it tried to be funny, it fails. when it tries to (incredibly heavyhandedly) talk about The Issues Facing Teens Today, it fails. yet we run it, because old white men apparently looooove their crappy comics. but almost once a day one of the hip kids on the copy desk makes a crack about how awful the strip is. for a while, to have someone annoy you about something stupid was to be 'funky winkerbeaned.'

anywho, tonight i realized that 'becker' is the funky winkerbean of syndicated sitcoms.

things you can do when you live alone

it's only week 3 or so of the living by myself experiment, but right now i give the whole experience two thumbs up, way up. some of the perks are pretty obvious. (when i wash dishes, they stay clean!) others emerge after short bursts of contemplation. i don't remember which method of discovery contributed to the pantslessness that i am currently enjoying, but oh boy is it nice.

i'm easing into it slowly -- watching tv without pants, washing dishes without pants -- but i want to go bigger. making eggplant parmesan without pants. making appointments via telephone without pants. wearing pants without pants (DID I JUST BLOW YOUR MIND?!?)

i like fonts.

as you've probably gathered, i'm a bit of a font nerd. i think part of it stems from my early designing days. i wasn't really good enough to design intricate, complex layouts like some people i know, so the tiny building blocks of design were front and center for me. i could grasp typography. i could explain why the italic ampersand in garamond looks so damn cool.

my friend mack recently sent me a poll on slate.com of writers responding to this question: what is your favorite font, and why.

surprisingly (to me, at least), a lot of people went with courier. the rationale is that they use it every day in manuscripts. a couple went with staples like times new roman and palatino, and one courageous soul named hoefler text as the best font of all the fonts.

i recently queried the brain trust on which fonts they liked most. here's what the people who actually replied had to say:

Katie Tanner (friend, former co-worker): I've been using Tahoma a lot as a sans serif. I liked Gill Sans and Hoefler Text. Specifically, I love the swirly font Jose uses for mini review bylines in Paste: Hoefler Text-Swash italic.

Katie Davis (friend, former co-worker and pirate): didot italic. (i know, shocker.) i like its architecture, and its subtle serifs. and it made an omelet for me one time. with cheese and bell peppers. and bacon. and class.

Becky Snowden (friend, former co-worker, animal whisperer): Selfish and Porcelain but now it's EVERYWHERE... well porcelain is. It really depends on what it's for. LOVE cochin. Dang there's a font I'm really loving but it's on my comp at work...

Marilyn Cole (friend, computer science goddess): I really like plain ol' monospace these days. I'm always in terminal mode, with white text on black screen, and you need one of those for
coding. I do remember being a kid and seeing things like Courier and
thinking, why would anyone pick such an overtly ugly font?

Monospace is sweet, though. I also like Computer Modern, which is the
LaTeX font that Knuth (a computer science god) designed with vector
math.

And back when I was less dorky (?) I liked Garamond best for serif, and
Verdana best without.

Thorough enough analysis for your taste? I could go on.

Brandon Reynolds (friend, former roommate, owner of a fatass cat): Brandon:arial

me: mmk

why?

1:47 AM Brandon: i think it has many uses

it looks good at any size

me: that's what she said!

hioooo

as for me, i'm a fan of the futura family and bodoni lately, if only because those are two of the nicer fonts available to me at work.

least favorite font? comic sans, a hundred times comic sans. make the madness stop.

what are your favorite fonts? (and karen, i bet i can guess your's.)

mama has hit the big time

a blog about cheese linked to an article full of fake 2006 new year's predictions that my friend katie and i made way back in the day for my old newspaper. (i realize that was a very convoluted sentence, and i'm sorry, but i'm so EXCITED.)

everyone wants a shot of paris

how the mighty have fallen.

on shaving in small spaces

the shower in my new place is tiny, like dorm-bathroom tiny. it is WEE. there's no tub, and the shower itself is so small that i barely have room to rotate, much less shave my legs.

as i contorted myself tonight, i noticed myelf employing various yoga poses in an awkward attempt to make myself all smooth and pretty-like. there's this one move where you stand on one leg and put your other foot by your knee -- i have no idea what it's called, and in the end result you look like an epileptic crane, so i'll call it the epileptic crane -- and that's pretty much the only way the back of my knee is touching razor. other showertime-yoga favorites are the trapped bear and the bleeding swan.

it's uncanny

mural, originally uploaded by brookage.

side-by-side comparison of butthead and andrew jackson as seen on a mural in our office

i'm missing out on nachos

it's 12:43 a.m. on what is now technically a sunday, and i am not at a bar. i am at my desk, in my tiny terrarium-office, and i am waiting for the press to run.

this has pretty much been the story of my last six months. luckily for all involved (including you, gentle reader), mama is about to get a brand new bag in the form of a brand new schedule. due to an ever-fluctuating staff (and my general awesomeness), i now get to design pretty lifestyle pages. this is good for a panoply of reasons -- who doesn't love pretty things, right? -- a major one of which is the upcoming schedule change. no longer will i toil crazy late hours. no longer will my weekend fall on sundays and mondays. no longer will my social life consist mainly of tivo and reading material! i'm beyond thrilled, as you can probably tell by the exclamation point. i am not a woman who toys idly with punctuation.

i also moved this past week (third time in a year. i'm beyond thrilled, so far beyond it that i somehow circled back to annoyance). mama and i worked on making the new digs cozy, and after a day's worth of paint and a couple trips to ikea, i think this is the beginning of a beautiful tenantship. it's a tiny basement apartment in a house in va-hi, and for the first time ever i live by myself. i worry about getting lonely, but hopefully kickball and volunteering and freelance will keep me plenty busy.

the bad side of moving all the damn time: mama is broke. (i've started to refer to myself in third person as 'mama' all the time. it's becoming a problem.) so no fun in the immediate future where money's concerned.

so while i may be broke and stuck at work on a perfectly lovely saturday night, every cloud has a silver lining. my silver lining at the moment is the summer kickball league.