free variable

I’m mainly posting this for Andrea’s benefit, but it is probably amusing to a general audience: “I am not and have never been a vegetarian”

Facebuster, a new slab-serif by Silas Dilworth, has caught a lot of buzz lately. It’s pretty nice, but the real delight for me was in idly browsing through the rest of the Type Trust site and remembering how much I like Dino Dos Santos’ Leitura Sans.

Apropos of this observation of WT and my undying, white-hot scorn for Elmo, here’s an interesting post from Language Log on the subject of toddler illeism and personal pronouns.

“[O]nly two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name them,” and other comforting thoughts. (Thanks to Tony for the link.)

“The flood of scattershot references is so witless, it makes Family Guy look like Jonathan Swift.” —Sam Adams, reviewing Disaster Movie for The Onion

“South Ossetian independence is a joke. We are talking about a smugglers’ paradise of 60,000 people financed by the Russian security services. No one can seriously consider that as an independent state.” — Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt

I noticed (via the MF catalog) that Electro-Harmonix has just released something called a “Bass Blogger.” In addition to being a colossally stupid, already-anachronistic name, this somehow sounds really dirty. From looking at the product description, I can’t tell it apart from their other 74 bass distortion pedals, but whatever.

I suppose that I either need to be less frugal with the “humor” and “snark” tags, or I need to start embracing more fully a new rôle as someone who will give the same story to get a bit of attention.

Graphic Design Goes to the Games: a very nice overview of Olympic branding from Khoi Vinh; scroll down to see some beautiful Swiss-influenced materials from the 1972 Munich Games.

Here’s your spot of D.C. nostalgia for the day: “The quotes are part of the phrase.” (See also here.)

Unfortunately, these videos of talks about the LLVM compiler infrastructure and virtual machine were released at precisely the moment when I have the least amount of free time in recent memory. (But you might be able to enjoy them now).

I’m finding it hard to suppress a big smile after reading Love At (Almost) First Email at Ben Brown’s site. (You might enjoy it even if you don’t know Ben.)

Mark Pilgrim: “I never really understood how people found bugs like this until I had kids.” My experience confirms that toddlers are experts at fuzz testing.

Whenever I talk to people I haven’t seen for years, I’m reminded of this classic Onion op-ed.

Amusing: “Ways to Lose at Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,” from McSweeney’s

Audio Damage Automaton looks like a lot of fun.

Apparently, the USPTO has granted Dell a trademark on “cloud computing,” a generic term of art that (1) predates any mention of it by Dell and (2) describes a software model to which Dell has contributed approximately zero research or development effort. Words fail me.

I don’t use Microsoft Word, but I’ve seen enough invective directed towards it to know that if you do, then you will appreciate this gallery of glitches.

I’m not sure if these one-star Amazon customer reviews for The Little Schemer are amusing or just depressing, but I am sure that each reveals more about the reviewer than the reviewed.

Gary Hustwit is following Helvetica with Objectified, a new documentary about industrial design.