a message of good will
“There was starlight, but no moonlight. Moonlight reminds me of a mortuary and the cold wash of an unshaded globe over a marble slab, but starlight is alive and never still; it is almost as though someone in those vast spaces is trying to communicate a message of good will, for even the names of the stars are friendly.”
—Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955.
the red of porto, the orange of cointreau, the green of chartreuse, the cloudy yellow of pastis
“A curious garden sound filled the café—the regular drip of a fountain—and, looking at the bar, I saw rows of smashed bottles which let out their contents in a multi-coloured stream—the red of porto, the orange of cointreau, the green of chartreuse, the cloudy yellow of pastis—across the floor of the café.”
—Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955.
male plumage
“I noticed that his crew cut had recently been trimmed; was even the Hawaii shirt serving the function of male plumage?”
—Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955.
A blue lizard
“‘He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American,’ I summed him precisely up, as I might have said, ‘A blue lizard,’ ‘A white elephant.’”
—Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955.
gray-green eyes
“I am always amazed by what lies buried in the mind until one day for no particular reason it rises up and makes itself known. That night in bed, a vision of Elizabeth’s face entered my consciousness, and I saw clearly that she had gray-green eyes. It was a small fact I hadn’t realized I knew.”
—Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company, 2003.
The Peace Symbol Turns Fifty
“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
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.