Good morning. Hello. How are you? #586
Re-flowing the GMHHAY book, French lawyers, gendered numbers, Airstream dreams, Jane and Roy in a sunbeam.
Good morning! Hello, there. How are you? How are things? Feeling okay? Happy that it’s Friday? Glad you made it. Here’s to the weekend.
Had a lovely chat with my French lawyers yesterday, I sure do like my French lawyers. If there were no pandemic and we were a different sort of company I might even hoof it over to gay Paree one day and have a nice one day symposium with my French lawyers, they are great. As it stands they will just remain virtual friends, and that’s probably okay because hanging out in a room with both my French lawyers for an entire business day would probably cost something like $15,000 just in Lawyer fees, never mind, like, getting to Paris. Though there is a non-stop Delta flight to CDG from RDU. Or there was. And there will be again, later this year.
The other great thing about my time spent communicating with the French lawyers yesterday is I got to say my old work-related catchphrase, “Great. Perfect. Thanks.” Except they are in Europe, so I had to be a bit fancy, so I said “Great. Perfect. Thank you.” Been a while since I got to say my work-related catchphrase. Not because people aren’t doing great things worth thanking, but rather because most of these communications are on slack now, and “Great. Perfect. Thanks” feels slightly too verbose, so I usually just say 👍.
Watched more curling last night, a US Men’s game and a US Women’s game, and I know that there are more Olympics besides curling going on, but there’s just only so much time. We’re watching on an Apple TV in a Peacock app, paid for Peacock (thank you, wife who works for Peacock) and this means there are no ads in all of their replays, and the ten-second skip button works super well, so you can just plow through a curling match in, like, 45 minutes instead of, like, an hour and a half. We occasionally try to watch the live coverage—we watched the last few ends of the US Men’s game live—but the ads are intolerable. There’s more stuff I want to watch, and I’m hoping I can watch a bunch of it this weekend. There’s an outstanding question of low long the replays will remain live in Peacock. Like, can I watch the winter Olympics still, in, like April? We will see. I may just keep watching them for months. I don’t know why, I am not usually a sports fan, and I sometimes think all of these people are insane and obsessed. I like curling because all these people have day jobs. Maybe I will just stick to watching sports where the athletes have to still have day jobs. I bet biathletes all have day jobs. Who else?
Yesterday morning after I wrote to you guys I as watching Jane and she finished up drawing what is probably her most amazing drawing yet. Then I asked her about the writing on the table and she didn’t really answer, but I sat down with her and explained that her sketchbook was called a sketchbook when you were drawing in it, but when you wanted to write in it (that’s what that’s called. “Writing.”) It was called a “journal” and she could also write in it. She didn’t really respond one way or the other but she clearly understood, so she decided to write in it, and this is what she wrote:
Then I left the room to go get a water out of the fridge and she followed me but she stubbed her toe on the door transom, so she ran over into Emma’s office and flopped down on the floor in exasperation. She flopped right into a sunbeam. And the Roy the cat came trotting over and flopped down right in front of her, and then instead of crying because of the stubbed toe, she gently pet Roy the cat instead. All of this happened while the beautiful, delicate song “The Moon” by The Microphones was playing, since I listened to seven Microphones albums yesterday. And it was just a beautiful little moment and I thought “yeah, this life is all right.”
I got another spare Old Navy 10” Brown Bear off of eBay this week. It was not cheaper than the other Brown Bears, but it was not more expensive. My personal infuence on the Old Navy 10” Brown Bear market, causing artificial inflation because there is now a single buyer, seems to be waning. Thank you eBay alert.
I don’t know if you guys read all the comments on the Facebook versions of these posts, but there is an absolutely insane conversation going on between two friends of mine, one of whom grew up believing that individual numbers have genders, and another whose daughter currently strongly believes that individual numbers have genders. The daughter even provided a list of numbers and their genders along with some additional rules. It is… fascinating? So now I am kind of obsessed. Is this a more widespread thing than I knew? Apparently it is a thing! The world is just amazing, I swear. Amazing. Did you — ahem, do you — believe that numbers had genders? Inquiring minds want to know.
Airstream put out a concept of an electric Airstream trailer with solar panels and, essentially, Tesla batteries. It can power itself, it can move itself, it just seems perfect. I am going to buy this thing, someday, when it becomes a production version, and I am going to hook it up to my electric F150, someday, when the thing actually delivers, and I am going to hit the road for, like, six months or something like that. I am going to visit all of you. I am going to take Jane to all of the places on my list of “road trip with Jane” places. I am really hoping my wife comes along. I think she will like it. Except the drive to Alaska, which we are totally going to do since I learned last night that my great great uncle built a good chunk of the Alaska Highway. Also my great grandmother was North Dakota Mother of the Year in 1953. She raised eight kids while blind. And she typed endless letters to them, relentlessly wrote, every day, pages and pages. Sounds like my great grandmother all right. Hats off to you, Delia Couture.
Yesterday I made the painful decision to bump up the type size in the Good Morning. Hello. How Are You? book. Emma talked me out of making it two volumes. Hilariously, we both referenced that giant Mists of Avalon paperback from your childhood. It’s like that. It’s not, like, a super-dense, compact trade paperback with 8-point type and no margins and super tight leading. The margins and leading are relatively comfortable. It’s at ten points. But to me it just still looked too small. So I did some experiments and by sacrificing a teeny, teeny amount of leading (0.2 pts) and margins (less than 1/4”) I can get the type one point bigger, to 11-point, and it seems to work. I am going to try a test print at 11-point, since Emma had a few tweaks she wanted to make to the cover as well. So looks like another week here.
Of course, flowing the entire book to 11-point type from 10-point type meant that I had to zero out every meticulously made character spacing adjustment I made for widows and orphans and redo them all. I’m calling it “character spacing” here instead of “kerning” because I’m not doing it to achieve a visually pleasing result between letters and within words, but rather in an entire paragraph. I’m suddenly not sure if that is a necessary distinction. Anyway, I wish to heaven and hell that Pages.app had better widows and orphans control. You can turn on hyphenation and ligatures but that’s it. I would like one level deeper of control. I’d like to specify the minimum number of letters that appear on the second line of a hyphenated word. I’d like to instruct Pages.app to never hyphenate at -ing or -ly. I would like to specify a ± range of “character spacing,” as Pages.app calls it, that the app can adjust a single line in order to more effectively hyphenate. I’d like to specify the maximum number of lines that are hyphenated within a paragraph. But I can’t. So I’m doing this manually. For seven hundred pages. It’s… somewhat tedious. But Robert Bringhurst and my friend Annie would be proud. Annie I’m doing this for you.
This whole exercise is, in the end, adding about 10 pages to the book, in exchange for a much more readable document, so I think this is the way we’re going to go. I do have dreams of a two-volume hardback set, but I don’t have the energy to re-kern this thing a third time, it is exhausting. I’m just shy of 500 pages down, so I should be able to finish this up today, fingers crossed.
Man I have only been listening to the Microphones for, like, three days, so I am a bit behind on these mixes but luckily today is Friday and and Release Radar is out and I swear I am still trying to leave Spotify it is a giant pain in the ass, that phone is still synching my iCloud music to nothingness it’s ridiculous but I plan on trying again in earnest this weekend. But in the meantime here is a mix of all new stuff along with a Cocteau Twins track and a Microphones track.
Have a lovely weekend it’s going to be a good one the sun is shining.
I'm a believer in the concept that certain numbers are inherently more funny than others. Apparently this is somewhat known/agreed upon in the comedy world?