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Archive for February 20th, 2010

Update:  Pornography of meat is defined, below.

Cruel wife and I went to celebrate Valentine’s day tonight.  It beats fighting the crowds.  It was sixteen years and two days ago when I asked her to marry me and she’s regretted it every day since.

We went to eat Thai food.  She got scallops/shrimp with cashew nuts, three stars out of four on the spiciness meter.  I got the Talay Thai (shrimp and roughy), with the heat pegged at 12 out of four stars.  They know me there and turn off all the safety features and just bring me what I ask for.

The waiter who delivered it was wincing/cringing.  His eyes were watering as he set my plate down.

To be fair, it was the second-hottest thing I’ve ever eaten.  My burps are corrosive enough to hurt my throat.  My guts are still in a state of upheaval.  Four hours later Cruel Wife kisses me and says “You’ve still got chilies on your lips – it burns!”  It physically hurt to eat it but I finished it.

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Damn it.  I got one friend recently diagnosed with cancer and another still in surgery hopefully to get out of there into the ICU soon.  Update:  Out of surgery and looks to be doing fairly well – at least as far as cell-phone pics go.

Do you have to win some kind of lottery to have two very close friends in dire straights in one week?  Geez.

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On my way here – I am doing a steampunk poster using chilies – I ran across a book title.  I’d like to not post what it is actually about but instead see what kinds of guesses you have.  Mine were sort of in the ball park but one planet over.

The Pornography Of Meat

Here you go…

The author of The Sexual Politics of Meat returns with an emotionally charged volume based on her traveling lecture-slide show. Adams, a crusader for the rights of women and animals (or, as she calls them, “nonhumans”) charges that both have long been portrayed as consumable, mouth-watering slabs of meat, and she provides graphic backup for her argument in the form of advertisements, signs, photographs and illustrations (e.g., “Strip Tease,” reads a billboard for a steak house).

Basically this is another nut who imagines that humans and animals are interchangeable and utterly equal across the board.

Women are more than just mouth-watering slabs of meat!  I give you some examples…

Excuse me while I find some napkins.  Anyway, did I clearly make my point?

You know how I know that the author’s PoM book is a pile of steaming crap?  Reviews like this one:

“Even readers who do not share Adams’s views should find themselves challenged and perhaps even enlightened by this unique work.” — Library Journal, May 15, 2003

Anytime someone says that a book will “challenge” me, it is a sure bet that it’s utter bullshit.  “Challenge” means that it’ll be a struggle not to toss it in the garbage or in the nearest wood-burning stove.

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ps – if you want to use up 98 minutes of your life in a fruitless attempt at finding some new concept, deeper meaning, or a cheap thrill – do rent “Eden Log“.  That is 98 minutes that you will NEVER get back again.

I would rather suck the marrow out of my own living bones with a steel straw than subject myself to that again.

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Don't know the source but I like what it says.

Subtitled:  The Font of Youth

All right then… you know the cards I’ve posted a few nights now?

When I installed Windows 7 from my XP OS, somehow a few fonts got shredded.  I won’t name the guilty party but it was Microsoft.

To finish the cards with the same font, I would need to find it.  But there’s the rub – I could not remember the font name!  I had a bitmap example of what I was looking for, however:

So what did I do?  I searched and searched and searched some more.  Did you know that out of a million fonts online you will find that fully 999,993 of them are complete utter pieces of crap?  Sure the makers were well-intentioned but they were also completely lacking any talent whatsoever when it comes to making a font that has flow and balance.

I searched high and low:

dafont.com – betterfonts.com – simplythebest.com – 1001freefonts.com – eknp.com – topnotchporn.com – (just checking to see if you were reading this)

I have visually inspected literally tens of thousands of fonts.

No joy.  No luck.  Fail.  Epic Fail.  Painful bone-grinding failure.  Soul-wrenching spirit-mulching consciousness-rending failure.  Mind-numbing repetitive drone-work.

So we try a different tack when desperation kicks in, right?  This option was for me much like stopping to ask for directions.  But at some point you give up.

I went to WhatTheFont.  You upload a scan or bitmap of the text you do have letters for.  You verify that their OCR of the image resulted in the proper letters.  Then it comes back with a list of possible fonts.  It guessed the very first time the proper font – Calligraphic 421.    How about that?

Thing is, I know that font.  Know it well.  I’ve danced with that font, bought it dinner, had my way with that font, and used it mercilessly countless times in my graphics.  Could I recognize it on sight or name it?

Damn, I’m getting old.

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