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26 June 2012

No. 1,847 (cartoon)

I worry that I may have made a fool of myself.

Stop worrying. You did.

27 June 2012

California Job Case

There’s something curious about Cedric’s California job case. The most obvious thing is what the wooden case contains: hundreds of pieces of metal type used for letterpress printing. And then there’s the layout.

All of the characters are more or less where one would expect, except for the letters j and u: they’re below the letter z. There’s a reason for this, a very old reason. Once upon a time long, long ago, English printers used twenty-four letters; j and u were added later. The layout of the pieces of type in the California job case reflects this relatively recent change.

I wonder how people spelled “jug” with a twenty-four-character alphabet? Maybe the jug wasn’t invented until after the letter j and u were?

28 June 2012

Gratuitous Photo of the Weak: Civic Center Station

The Bay Area Rapid Transit System has forty-four stations. For years I’ve been planning on making one photograph in each of them to create The Forty-Four Stations of BART. Sort of like the forty-four stations of the cross, only different. I made this photograph in the Civic Center Station, only forty-three left. I need to hurry; station number forty-five opens in 2015.

29 June 2012

The Ticket Reader

I took a half-hour subway trip to the airport tonight. The man sitting next to me spent the entire trip reading the minimal amount of text—fewer than a hundred words—on his ticket. He slowly read one side, then flipped it over to read the verso. He repeated this exercise repeatedly until the train stopped at the airport.

I was impressed! I thought I had a low entertainment threshold, but observing a master at (not) work humbled me. I have so much to learn and/or unlearn.

30 June 2012

86,401 Second Day

Today’s been a long day. Due to airline perfidy, I arrived in the sauna that is Panama City twelve hours late after an unwelcome detour to Miami. What really made the day usual is the addition of a leap second: this is the longest day of the year. I started to consider how I could make use of the extra time, but the second has passed before I even had an inking of an idea.

I shall have to plan ahead and find out when the next leap second day is so that I don’t waste the extra time in a steamy swamp.

1 July 2012

Questionable Allegiances

A Global Witness report notes that one hundred and six environmental activists were murdered in 2011, a sharp increase from previous years. I don’t believe that any of the slain environmentalists were associated with the nonprofit groups here at this year’s International Whaling Commission meeting in Panama. All the save the whales lobbyists are so ineffectual that I can’t imagine anyone wasting the price of a bullet to stop them.

Natural disasters killed some twenty-seven thousand humans last year. I think all these people defending nature may want to reëvaluate their allegiances.

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©2012 David Glenn Rinehart