DJ Misc – Page 95 – hexachromatic

The Peace Symbol Turns Fifty

“It was fifty years ago today,” according to the author of The Peace Symbol Turns Fifty. I found more on the famous “nuclear disarmament” mark at Wikipedia (just scroll down a bit), and that’s where I learned this:
“In Unicode, the peace symbol is U+262E: ☮, and can thus be generated in HTML by typing ☮ or ☮. However, many browsers will not have a font that can display it.”

a history of TV test patterns

As if a history of TV test patterns won’t be interesting enough, I am also hereby posting a link to TV-SIGNOFFS.COM, a growing online archive of American television sign-off and sign-on snippets. A labor of love, it is not be missed! I particularly enjoyed the Raleigh-Durham, NC Area Sign-offs & Sign-ons, probably because that’s where I grew up. But . . . they’re all good.

Bob the Builder

“According to an anonymous tipster from the Clinton campaign, Obama has
outright stolen his campaign slogan. The tipster said that the slogan, ‘Yes we can,’ was lifted directly from Bob the Builder, a British
construction worker who coined the phrase in 1999.”

—Barack Obama campaign plagued with scandals, say anonymous tipsters at the Clinton campaign.

Wrong Font

Wrong Font Chosen For Gravestone. Via MB, Michael Bierut at DesignObserver. He’s a funny man, Michael Bierut is, as anyone who has seen Helvetica knows. A funny man, with an eye for the occasional funny font-related Photoshop collage. . . .

the wrong star

“‘I have found out everything. We have come to the wrong star. . . . That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange.’”

—G.K. Chesterton, The Ballade of a Strange Town, from Tremendous Trifles, 1909.

Chip Kidd

blog!

“Working men of all countries, blog! And working women too, and
unemployed bastards, CNN journalists, and disgruntled students and
angry wives, and everyone else with a grudge, a bean to spill and a
story to tell. You have nothing to lose but your gags.”

—Erik Ringmar, from Guerrilla Bloggers and the Old Elite, a response to the recent sacking of Chez Pazienza by CNN, for having a blog.

Don Cherry in Bombay

a kind of dreaming

“Some blogs—by pundits, professors and pompous gits—would seem to have little to do with . . . identity-creation, but of course that’s not really the case. These blogs are superficially about current events, but their real topics are their authors. The blog is where you make yourself into an authoritative person, a source of information and insightful analysis. A long-haired, middle-aged, professor might use his blog in order to affirm his identity as an eccentric outsider still in touch with his students. This . . . is a kind of dreaming, a fantasy-creation which the blog helps make real.”

—Erik Ringmar, A Blogger’s Manifesto, 2007.

Your blog

“Corporate practices in recent years have become increasingly repressive. Computerized technology has provided unprecedented ways of policing staff. Email and web use are monitored, and keystrokes on computers are routinely recorded. As American companies in particular have come to realize, scared workers bring in higher profits than happy workers.
But computers are not only enslaving employees but also helping liberate them. Employees are turning to the web for emotional sustenance and support. You blog in order to make friends, deal with stress, with unreasonable bosses or difficult colleagues. You blog to sound off or take the piss and you blog to subvert a corporate image which presents you as an ever-smiling manikin. You blog to stay sane. You blog to stay human. . . .
In this new and far more insecure world, your only source of protection lies in your personal achievements and in the friendships you can strike up. Your blog helps promote both. The blog showcases your talents and it connects you to a larger world. In the new labour market success comes to those who stand out, while the people who get screwed are the ones who keep their heads down and hope for the best. It actually might be safer to blog.”