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The American type designer, Frederic Goudy, is reputed to have said that “[a]ny one who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” That is the source for the title of a wonderful book on type design by Erik Spiekermann & E.M. Ginger: Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works. The book uses straightforward language to talk about the application of design principles to type, acknowledging that in the age of the personal computer the tools of the trade have become accessible to almost everybody. The first edition was published in 1993 so it doesn’t have anything to say about typography on web pages, the challenges posed by cascading style sheets, nor about the hand-wringing that designers inflict on themselves as they try to make their work uniform across browsers and operating systems. Nevertheless the book’s lessons are clear: the visual impact of a typeface can be as important as the text itself; it’s easy to learn and implement principles of good type design; and those who ignore these facts are, well, no better than sheep stealers (or cattle rustlers if you’re more of a beef person). Unfortunately, atrocious type design has proliferated like swine flu through a pork farm, and the problem has only grown worse with the appearance of Amazon’s Kindle 2.

A suberbug is coming,
an evolved pathogen
with tougher DNA,
a variant, a strain.
We delude ourselves (they say)
to believe we grasp the highest
link of the food chain.

I cut through the park
and there, tucked in the grass
was a banana, fresh
from the local grocery store,
unripe, green tending to yellow,
with a label stuck
to its thick skin.

Every year, our street hosts a neighbourhood barbeque.  We close off the cul-de-sac end of the street – down by the Jeffries – and set up two or three big grills for the meat.  There’s a clown and games and face-painting for the kids, and there’s beer and fifty-fifty draws and Alice Kramden’s craft table for the grown-ups.  At the very top of the street, before you go down into the cul-de-sac, we set up a pair of big outdoor speakers and we blast oldies music into the cool evening air.  Later on, when things get dark, we light a bunch of fireworks and give the kids sparklers, and they buzz around the street pretending they’re fireflies.  By then, all the grownups have drunk enough beer and mojitos that the fireworks look twice as brilliant as they did the year before and people who wouldn’t look sideways at you in the full light of day are hugging you and slapping you on the back and reminiscing about the good old days and even – in one or two surprising instances – wiping a tear from the corner of a wistful eye.

From the age of twelve until I started university I took piano lessons from a man named Alan who loved to read and always had a book in hand when he rode the subway. I remember after one lesson, maybe in ’78 or ’79, when we were chatting about – who knows – life, the universe and everything – when Alan laughed and told me he was reading Death in Don Mills, by Hugh Garner. I had never heard of Hugh Garner. It turns out he belonged to that loose affiliation of hard-drinking writers who reported for the Toronto Star and wrote novels on the side. Others in this group included Morley Callaghan and, most notably, Ernest Hemingway. Their prose is spare and to the point. But Death in Don Mills? You’d understand the eye rolls if you knew anything about Don Mills.

Here are photos from Toronto’s rally in solidarity with the people of Iran as part of the July 25th Global Day of Action. Click on photos to make them bigger. It was peaceful, upbeat. I have no idea how many people would have been there. 500 maybe.

The Canadian government is holding a national copyright consultation from July 20th until Sept 13th, 2009. It’s happening under the auspices of the Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, and the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages. Ordinary Canadians can participate in these consultations through the official web site which allows for online submissions, a discussion forum, and a multimedia centre. Operating in tandem with the official discussion is a new web site from Michael Geist (Canada’s answer to Lawrence Lessig) called Speak Out On Copyright. From Geist’s blog:

I am a literary snob. There! I’ve put it out where everyone can see it. I’m not just a little snobbish; I’m steeped in the culture of snobbery. I am a complete and utter snob. When Plato talks about “forms” in the Republic, he uses me as an example of Platonic Snobbery. There I am, holding my nose up in the air, looking down at pulp fiction with the same disdain I hold for dog turds.

The twitterverse has been abuzz with talk of Amazon’s decision to delete Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from its proprietary e-reader, Kindle. As a consequence, Kindle owners woke up on Friday to discover that those two titles had disappeared and the purchase price had been credited to their accounts. It turns out Amazon is not licensed to distribute Orwell’s works in digital format and acceded to the copyright holder’s request to delete them from user accounts.

Yesterday I went to the Royal Ontario Museum’s Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit which the ROM has mounted with the cooperation of the Israel Antiquities Authority and which will continue until January 3rd, 2010. As an educational experience, it’s first-rate, top-drawer stuff, the perfect follow-up to last year’s Darwin exhibit. But then again, being the perverse person that I am, I don’t think I got out of the exhibit quite what the exhibitors intended. Let me explain by recounting my visit as a bit of a narrative that begins with me reading a book on a bench outside the ROM and ends a few hours later with me reading the same book on the subway ride home from the exhibit.

Nothing stirs up controversy like debates about female anatomy, especially the bits to do with reproduction and sexuality. We saw this in Canada with last year’s induction of Dr. Henry Morgentaler to the Order of Canada. Walking past his Bank Street abortion clinic in Ottawa just after the announcement, I saw the usual coterie of conservative Christians marching with their placards on the opposite sidewalk. All were older white men. Meanwhile, the silent liberal majority assumed self-congratulatory airs, having scored a victory on behalf of women’s bodies and the hard-won freedom of self-determination. This is one more degree on the long but ineluctable arc of social progress that saw its beginnings with the suffrage of Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung.

Dear Mr. Comeau,

Let’s revisit the question I posed in my “Quitters Are Winners Too” post: what is it about American life that increases the prevalence of depression? Americans are more depressed than any other group in the world. The answer offered by evolutionary medicine is that the persistence required to fulfill grandiose goals undermines our natural response (low mood) which acts as a warning sign that protects us from severe depression by prompting us to withdraw from unrealistic or unattainable goals. Because American culture, more than any other, promotes the pursuit of grandiose goals, Americans are more likely to suffer from major depression.