P.S. A Column On Things

Meme O' The Week: Proofreader's Marks

Thank you Esther Schindler on LinkedIn for finding Grant Snider's cartoon.

Meme O’ The Week: Unflattering Yet True

Meme O’ The Week: Unorthodox Cat

Four-Way Tie on Gates and Allen

With regard to last week’s meme, I offered a tip of the PSACOT hat to the first person spotting the error in my Microsoft profile from 1980. It was a four-way tie between four friends from MIT: three The Tech colleagues and one WTBS pal. In alphabetical order, Beth Karpf, you get a tip of the hat. Harrison Klein, you get a tip of the hat. David Tenenbaum, you get a tip of the hat. Neal Vitale, you get a tip of the hat. These are four friends who read the column very soon after it is posted.

And for those of you who didn’t spot it, the error was that the caption flipped the IDs for Gates and Allen. I wrote the caption. Headquarters might have flipped the picture during the printing process. I never heard from Gates or Allen, but I know for certain they saw it. In fairness to me, no one knew what they looked like at that point.

Advertising Advice

Meme O’ The Week: Can You Spot The Error?

You will need to double-click the image to see it full size. First correct answer gets an all-expenses paid Tip of the PSACOT Hat for one.

 

 

 

Meme O’ The Week: Nvidia / Shovels

This has the added charm of being true. For 13 years, I taught my 8^th graders that the real money in the Gold Rush was made Collis Huntington, who sold shovels in a hardware store, and Levi Strauss who made sturdy pants for miners. No gold panning for them. So, good on Nvidia for making shovels.

Meme O’ the Week: Passwords

 

 Stephen Vaughn-Williams

Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type (6)

How font-crazy am I?

Who else would notice?

In 1977, when I was at Bank of America, the company had an official type font (probably Franklin Gothic Condensed). Use of any other was proscribed.

Vicki follows Mātā Amritānandamayī, whose worldwide organization uses Garamond in signs and typed material

The London Underground has its very own unique type font, which I used on my PowerPoint slides while I was teaching. Ditto the French Metro (Parisine), which I didn’t use.

I was designing coffee mugs for a family company that owns rental properties. So I (Borrowed? Paid homage to? Plagiarized?) Downton Abbey’s distinctive logo. It took only a little research to find that the words Downton Abbey were in Adobe Caslon Regular Small Caps. I had to buy it―good commercial fonts, like all the Caslons, London Underground, and Parisine cost money. Here’s what that logo looked like. I don’t want to broadcast the name, so I used gibberish―Lorem Ipsum (look it up) to replace the company name: 

The whole series: Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type.

Meme O’ The Week: Be Kind