Comic Sans is the font you can often see on JavaRanch pages. As I understand, it was chosen to communicate the idea that the place you just came across is anything but formal.

Here Vincent Connare tells how the font was created.

I started with the font drawing software Macromedia Fontographer, trying to make the capitals in a similar form as the lettering used in DC, Marvel and all other company's comic books. The Dark Knight Returns a Batman book was one of the books I referenced often. I took care not to copy the letters but looked at varying shapes in different styles. Also most samples only used capital letters so I had little reference for them. I printed it out so that the weight was about the weight of the Marvel and DC books. I looked at the varying letterforms that each book had since all the letters vary because they are manually written.

If you are interested in fonts which are used in comics, here are more.

On a bit tangential note, here is an interesting article about fonts that "are recommended and used by dyslexic people", which says: "some dyslexic people find that Comic Sans is one of the more readable of the commonly-available Windows fonts".

And speaking about letter-induced diseases...

COMMON TYPOGRAPHIC DISEASES Various forms of dysfunction appear among populations exposed to typography for long periods of time. Listed here are a number of frequently observed afflictions.

TYPOPHILIA An excessive attachment to and fascination with the shape of letters, often to the exclusion of other interests and object choices. Typophiliacs usually die penniless and alone.

TYPOPHOBIA The irrational dislike of letterforms, often marked by a preference of icons, dingbats, and -- in fatal cases -- bullets and daggers. The fears of the typophobe can often be quieted (but not cured) by steady doses of Helvetica and Times Roman.

TYPOCHONDRIA A persistent anxiety that one has selected the wrong typeface. This condition is often paired with OKD (optical kerning disorder), the need to constantly adjust and readjust the spaces between letters.

TYPOTERMIA The promiscuous refusal to make a lifelong commitment to a single typeface -- or even to five or six, as some doctors recommend. The typohermiac is constantly tempted to test drive "hot" new fonts, often without a proper license.

Ellen Lupton. Thinking with Type.

Yes, these infamous catroons...

When I saw them, I, like probably many other non-Arabs and non-Muslims, thought "so what is a big deal about it? They are just cartoons!"

Today I was checking Ihath's blog and was surprised to read about her reaction to them. She is an Iraqi woman living in Canada - that's for a short introduction. Her background is much more complex and interesting, you can read about it here. I came across her blog in 2004 and am reading it since then, and I always appreciated her often passionate yet well argumented writings.

This is what she wrote:

I saw the cartoons and they deeply offend me and hurt my feelings and I am not even religious. Perhaps these cartoons made a few people laugh but they make me want to cry.

It was an instance of the fantasy of understanding I was involved in when I thought that the cartoons are maybe silly, but harmless:

      i was
beginning to arrive at a notion of how far we might be from
  each other and what sort of distance we might have to travel
      i would
like to contribute to human not understanding i would like
  to slow down the fantasy and illusion of understanding so
    that we could inspect the way and the pace at which we are
  approaching or leaving other people and see how far away
they are and whether there is any reason or prospect for
  reaching them because one thing that's been promoted
    endlessly in this world is the fantasy of understanding the
  notion that it is always possible desirable and costs
    nothing

(From David Antin's tuning.)

Meanwhile, the cartoon war took an unexpected turn. From comments to Ihath's entry I learn that Israeli group announces anti-Semitic cartoons contest:

“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Sandy “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”

I am not a cartoonist, so here is my humble, verbal, broken-English-anti-Semitic contribution:

The war between the West and Islam is being won by the Jews.

"What if garbage dumps were beautiful?"

This is the question Freeman Patterson asks in his Photography and the art of seeing book. Garbage dumps deserve a separate post, this one is about garbage cans. Garbage cans are beautiful, or, rather, they can be beautiful, just like people. And like with people, sometimes their beauty is induced, caused by them being a part of beautiful environment, and sometimes it's inner beauty. I always keep an eye on garbage cans when walking on city streets.

Says Freeman Patterson:

The camera always points both ways. In expessing the subject, you also express yourself.

Oh. I wish I were as useful as garbage cans. To take all the trash we put there and never throw it back in our faces, explaining that we deserved it... And all they got for this is tentative "What if garbage dumps were beautiful?"

How could I miss this???

Findings from the Nun Study indicate that low linguistic ability in early life has a strong association with dementia and premature death in late life.

More details:

Some studies published over the past decade suggest an even more intriguing connection between writing style and Alzheimer's. It's claimed that a simple index of stylistic complexity, measured in short texts written at about age 20, is correlated with low cognitive test scores and neuropathologically-confirmed Alzheimer's disease, 50 to 70 years later.

So the conclusion is: wtite more entries like this ¹⁾ and avoid Alzheimer's !

1) I recently learn that it is now called link love, or linky love.

William Safire:

Link love is "an unsolicited, posted link that aims only to amuse or interest." Other blogophiles call it linky love and stress a more intimate sense of reciprocity: "to link to another blogger because that person has linked to you."

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed is exactly what it promises to be -- a report of author's 6-month long expedition into a terra incognita populated by various tribes of minimum-wage workers. You'll get all you were promised: Barbara's observation of alien lives from inside, reasonably intelligent, sympathetic, often humorous, and well-prepared for your enjoyment, with a little drama added for the book not to be boring, yet not too much, for not to make you feel uncomfortable. In the introduction she writes that she could chose to take a bus for her minimum-wage job hunting instead of using a car, but who would want to read about her waiting for buses? In short, it's a good book. I donated my copy to the local public library.

Yet there is one absolutely brilliant insight in the book.

The world is coming at me in high-contrast shapshots, deprived of narrative continuity.

She is onto something here. Not confined to the lives of minimum-wage workers, this may be the central experience of "living" as such, of feeling "alive" in those rare moments when we feel alive. I had a similar observation, which I formulated differently.

In the final account, the only thing our education is good for is it provides us with a set of artifacts we can use as bases for methaphors in our attempts to express ourselves. "My life is not integrable," -- I complained to my friend, recollecting vaguely from my college years that to be integrable, the function must be continuous. And my life is not.

the function is continuous if, roughly speaking, the graph is a single unbroken curve with no "holes" or "jumps"
Wikipedia. Continuous function.

Barbara Ehrenreich again:

Educated middle-class professionals never go careeing half-cocked into the future, vulnerable to any surprise that might leap out at them. We always have a plan or at least a to-do list; we like to know that everything has been anticipated, that our lives are, in a sense, pre-lived.

Perhaps we only feel that we really live when we abandon our pre-lived lifes, wether intentionally or not, and venture into life unprepared, "vulnerable to any surprise". This includes broad range of life trajectories, from emigration to living through a war.

One can say briefly, that a function is continuous if and only if it preserves limits.
Wikipedia. Continuous function.

Does this intense experience of being alive always imply lack of "narrative continuity"? I don't know. But our lives are only meaningful as a narrative, each separate episode "no one of which can be said to be more important than another" has no meaning, as it can be a part of many narratives, can be made fit many personal myphologies.

...I found myself trying to recall an Andre Bazin observation. When I got home, I found it in Bazin's What is Cinema? Vol. II. In Umberto D., writes Bazin, "The narrative unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden turn of events, or the character of its protagonists; it is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis."
Via LanguageHat

.

Tarkovsky's masterpiece " Andrei Rublev" is made as a sequence of disconnected episodes. I remember, the movie was utterly confusing when I saw it for the first time, precisely because it lacked the organizing idea I got used to. Now thinking about why Tarkovsky chose this format, it can be that he intuited the way Rublev, the Russian icon painter who lived in XV century, experienced his life.

This is how Rober Hass explains the difference between the metrical and free-verse poems:

The difference is, in some ways, huge; the metrical poems begins with an assumption of human life which takes place in a pattern of orderly recurrence with which the poet must come to terms, the free-verse poem with an assumption of openness or chaos in which an order must be discovered. ...

The free-verse poem, by stripping away familiar patterns of recurrence and keeping options open, is able to address the forms of closure with the sense that there are multiple possibilities and the poem has to find its way to the right one.
Robert Hass. Listening and Making in The Twentieth Century Pleasures. Prose on Poetry.

And thus we write our lives as free-verse poems, which are to find and develop their own forms.

As an example of the distortion that can be produced in trying to 'project' a spherical object (the earth) on to a flat rectangular surface, we can take the example of Gerhardus Mercator's world projection, which is still in widespread use today, but which produces an increasing amount of distortion as one moves further north or south of a mid-position. A dramatic illustration of this distortion is an isotype diagram of the '30s which shows the silhouette of a man placed next to the same image as it would have looked if plotted on the basis of Mercator's system.
Information Graphics by Peter Wildbur and Michael Burke.

This is indeed a dramatic illustration of the concept. I read about how exactly Mercator's projection distorts sizes, but this diagram makes the point co clear, and with such cleverness and elegancy, it's impossible to forget -- you want to remember it. The proverbial case when one picture is worth thousand words.

I had hardly seen snow until I was eighteen and so the intensity and neutrality of the New England landscape is permanently strange and vivid to me. And present. Because it does not belong to childhood, it calls up no longing, is the after-image of nothing lost; and it makes me completely happy, except for a small sensation of wonder which is like itch. The happiness is like an experience of pure being; the itch is wondering what it means or what to do with it.

Robert Hass: Tranströmer’s Baltics: Making a Form of Time. In “Twentieth Century Pleasures. Prose on Poetry.”

I read this sentences in Hass’s wonderful book and once again wondered, how differently people experience things. When our experience is so different, how can we understand each other at all? The only way I know is to translate experience of others into my own. Always, because no two people can feel the same, and it’s only when we imagine that we can ignore the differences, then we decide “I understand what you mean” right away.

Snow was a part from my world from the beginning, and one of its best parts. Now, when I think about “home”, it’s most often a winter’s evening, when the street lights are on, and the light melts with snow into a warm red glow. Because of this warmth, I don’t remember these winters as “cold”, only parts of them were cold – my Mom’s cheek, for example. One night I had one of these American dreams, which for some personal quirks of mine are about home, not about getting a mortgage. In my dream I heard my parents returning from bazaar (that’s a Russian word too), and I went to open a door for them. I kissed Mom, and her cheek was cold. When I woke up, in tears, as usual, I was bemused that my memory keeps this detail.

Orhan Pamuk wrote about a guy wandering from house to house in Istanbul “buying things that made us us”. Snow, among other things, belongs to all these redundant tchatchkes (and that’s a Russian word too) that I gave to the Goodwill international outreach team, when leaving. André Aciman: “An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.” I rarely see snow now, and every time there is a lick of pain pulsating somewhere in the depths of excitement.

It’s the beauty of our symmetrically opposite experience – “the after-image of nothing lost”? – that charmed me. It was like a mathematical formula, and it was so tempting to substitute variables. I put “ocean” instead of “snow” and the equation was solved, and I had “The happiness is like an experience of pure being” in the result. And I could see why I shun any thing from my past – the pain always pollutes a pure feeling and leaves me numb, nullifying any affection I might have, and why I am so attracted by anything new: it’s a pure happiness, pure being, childlike, painless.

If you are a legal Permanent Resident and you want to become an American citizen, the Department of Homeland Security has a deal for you. For $330 (plus $70 for the newest version of your fingerprints) it will sell you a form, N-400, Application for Naturalization. The first part of this 10-pages compendium of conundrums mostly contains questionnaire of your personal trivia that you kept on submitting to the esteemed Department during the process of obtaining your Permanent Resident status, but becoming a citizen is a very special event, no arguing about this, and the Department wants to read this information once again. The second part is far less trivial.

Form N-400. Part 10, question 10.

Have you ever advocated (either directly or indirectly) the overthrow of any government by force or violence?

My first thought was that the right answer is "no". If this question is asked, then the answer bears some importance for the decision of whether you will make a good citizen or not (or, rather, if you will make a citizen at all. In Instructions for the N-400 form it is said that "We will use this information to determine your eligibility for citizenship. Answer every question honestly and accurately. If you do not, we may deny your application for lack of good moral character"). What government wants revolutionaries as its citizens? After some more thinking, I am not so sure. If the right answer were "no", then the whole current administration with its President had to be stripped of American citizenship. Together with about a half of current American citizenry that indeed advocated the overthrow the Iraqi government "by force or violence" (for now, I am leaving out a budding question of what the meaning of "or" is here). Therefore the aspiring American citizen is better off drawing a firm mark in "yes" square.

Only this cannot be right. The bold "ever" in "have you ever..." cries "don't answer "yes", dummy!" The very placement of this question cries "still didn't get it?" The previous question read:

9. Have you ever been a member of or in any way associated (either directly or indirectly) with:

a. The Communist Party?
b. Any other totalitarian party?
c. A terrorist organization?

And the next question is:

11. Have you ever persecuted any person because of race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group or political opinion?

Followed by the inquiry of the nature of your relationship with the Nazi government of Germany.

I really don't mind informing the esteemed department whether I've ever been a communist, terrorist, Nazi, prostitute, habitual drunkard, drug dealer, deserted from the U.S. Armed Forces, been in jail or prison, committed a crime for which I was not arrested, failed to file a Federal, state or local tax return, smuggled illegal aliens into the USA, practiced polygamy, gambled illegally, failed to pay alimony (questions 12-32), even though I am getting an inferiority complex just thinking how much more interesting and eventful lives my fellow aspiring American citizens have...

But tell me, since when overthrowing governments is considered un-American?