Saving more money for holiday shopping...

Here's a thought...instead of blowing some serious coin on graphic layout bond, try spending $2.79 for thirty square feet of parchment paper at your local grocery store.  This (of course) is not meant to be a permanent solution, but it works great for preliminary drafts and budgeting for holiday expenditures.

Getting more mileage out of your paint.

You've reached the end of another tube of paint...in the middle of a job...and you don't have a backup.  There are many techniques for getting the last figments of pigment out of the tube and onto the canvas (the roll method, the press method, the squeeze method, the re-roll method) but none of them seem to yield enough paint when you need it most.  Behold...the "insert-clever-name-here" method.  

Step 1:  The culprit...take your nearly empty tube of paint and press as much of what's left towards the traditional evacuation point (keep the cap on while completing this step).

Step 2:  Grab your scissors and cut off the top of the tube (cutting point will vary for each tube).

Step 3:  Discard the top portion of the tube.

Step 4:  Pry open the remaining portion of the tube to reveal the precious pigment pressed down from the first step.

Step 5:  Grab a paint brush and paint directly from the tube.  Preserve any leftovers by wrapping plastic wrap over the opening or scraping out the pigment and transferring to another container.

Final notes:  This method may be applied to toothpaste, hair gel, shampoo, face wash, body wash and other various products packaged in plastic tubes and materials that can be cut with scissors.

Meditative interlude.

A weekend of blatant typography abuse.

It's not every year that one, by luck alone, gets to enjoy the long Thanksgiving weekend due to a work scheduling snafu.  Thanks to this fortuitous vacation, a trip was hastily put into action and in no time I found myself relaxing in a little cabin surrounded by old growth forest (near a town that shall remain nameless), eating Tofurky and gorging myself on carbohydrates (beer).
     After Thanksgiving I had a chance to explore the nameless town (let's call it "Town A") for a couple of days.  Now "Town A" is a great place to get away from the big crowded city.  It's a town that allows one to walk a full stride, drive the speed limit, walk right into a restaurant and sit down at any table (except Sunday for breakfast after church, of course).  "Town A"  also has a great local economy that is matched, possibly surpassed, by the friendly laid back attitudes of its local population.  Not to mention the wineries and tap houses are plentiful and among some of the highest quality. 
     Walking around downtown "Town A" also provides a chance for typophiles to see some excellent (sometimes alarming) obvious examples of font abuse and overuse:

Care-less use of Papyrus (this one actually kind of works)...

...nothing says hungry like those finely nibbled edges...

...one more for good measure.  Maybe the posters are actually printed on papyrus paper?

Winer, "We don't like to be associated with you descender types."

    Now we're talkin'!

Classy.

         

Clown wins battle with alcoholism , finds new life in brain teaser industry.

"Pooter-the-clown...put 'er there!"

Twenty years after Buck Russell made the comical entertainer rethink the drink, Pooter-the-clown has transformed his life and career out of the spotlight of children's birthday parties and into the realm of print publication.  Pooter has made a seemingly miraculous turnaround from being in the gutter (perpetually intoxicated, homeless, living out of his mouse modified Volkswaggen) to gracing the full cover covers of word seek puzzle books across the nation.
 

   A video for those of you born after 1984...

The library floor ...ready for print.

An interesting floor at the Seattle Public Library.

Mathmagical Drawing - Fun with Graph Theory

Time = Wasted