Funny, I didn’t know the pharaohs were Irish. (Yul Brynner, too?)

Brian Bouldrey’s Monster: Gay Adventures in American Machismo is a collection of generally delightful and always sprightly magazine and newspaper(-style) features.

“The Old Man and the Spa,” pp. 229–230 (emphasis added):

I assessed the room…. The stall where all my clothes hung on a single hook, a big glazed window, a toilet with a roll of strikingly pink toilet paper….

From the tub across the too-big room, the toilet seemed to be shrinking and lonely, but the paper was still fifi-pink.

Another LazyWeb request: I need one or more newsfeed files (templates, whatever the hell they’re called) for a page that’s manually updated – the What’s New page at Screenfont.

If a knowledgeable person can create such a thing and tell me how to use it, that person receives my thanks and a free double espresso the next time we meet. Or a smooch on the cheek, as appropriate.

So: What’s been happening at the den of iniquity with the stainless-steel industrial décor, Steamworks? [continue with: SteamworksWatch →]

As many readers will be aware, for some months I have attempted something unorthodox in screen typography – the use of script fonts for headlines.

Everything I publish is standards-compliant, of course, but this personal Weblog only looks right in Mac OS X, since the first font-family I specify is Zapfino, also used in the graphical page header.

But what fonts does one specify so that nearly every visitor using a conventional browser sees a script font? Boy, has this been a problem.

font-family:

Base

• Zapfino,

For designers (most of whom will have Zapfino installed, save for the Mac OS 9 cohort; these are for amusement purposes only, really)

• "Apple Chancery",
• "Lucida Handwriting",
• "Caflisch Script",
• "Poetica",
• "Sanvito",
• "Ex Ponto",
• "Snell Roundhand",
• "Nuptial Script",
• "Palace Script",
• "Park Avenue",
• "Poetica",
• "Shelley",
• "Kaufmann",
• "Zapf Chancery",
• "Zapf Chancery Medium Italic",
• "ITC Zapf Chancery",
• "ITC Zapf Chancery Medium Italic",

Windows substitutes (every known script font shipping with a Microsoft product; I did a text extraction from their drop-down list); multiple alternate forms for font names may not be necessary

• "Monotype Corsiva",
• Corsiva,
• "Zurich Calligraphic",
• "Bickley Script",
• "BriemScript",
• "Brush Script MT Italic",
• "Brush Script MT",
• "Brush Script",
• "Edwardian Script ITC",
• "Edwardian Script",
• "Freestyle Script",
• "French Script MT",
• "French Script",
• "Kunstler Script",
• "Matura MT Script Capitals",
• Matura,
• "Mercurius Script MT Bold",
• "Mercurius Script MT",
• "Mercurius Script",
• Mercurius,
• "Palace Script MT",
• "Palace Script"
• "Script MT Bold",
• "Vladimir Script",
• "Chancery",
• Sand,
• Textile,
• Mead,
• Script,

Unix selection (minimal at best)

• "URW Chancery L",
• "URW Chancery L Medium Italic",

Generic family (fat lot of good it does us)

• cursive;

And no, I will not specify Comic fucking Sans.

LazyWeb requests

1. Could users of oddball systems – Mac OS 8 or later; any and all variants of Unix (you heard me); OS/2; Windows 3.1; whatever – please mail me screenshots of whatever fonts your system uses? (joeclark commercial-at fawny dot org.) Do tell me what browser you’re using. For best results, use this SXSW posting, since the headline is almost guaranteed to be longer than one line.
2. Can anybody tell me what CSS hacks to use so I can apply my current line-height: 217%; solely to Zapfino users (we can model that, if imprecisely, as “not IE/Win”) and apply a smaller line-height to everyone else?

An overlong and repetitive paper by Terje Hillesund gives a new way of looking at the lifespan of language and writing, a text cycle. [continue with: Text cycles →]

Consumer Guide to BigMuscle(Bears), Episode 2, currently onliné (op. cit.).