Midnight Cheese

This is what YouTube was made for. I love this stuff.

Link via BoingBoing.

I just glanced at the preseason college football rankings. USC #1 in both the AP and USA Today polls. Seriously? A team that fell apart at the end of last season? A team that only has 3 ranked teams on its schedule? And none of those three ranked teams are in the top ten? Where do you get #1 from that? #1 on the list of easiest schedule in the country? Sure. USC is becoming the next Notre Dame.

Friday a friend of ours threw a rockin’ 80’s party in which someone showed up with a fully restored DeLorean. My camera phone is terrible, but you can get the idea. I’ve seen DeLoreans here and there, but never up close to where I could actually sit in one.

Now to figure out a way to put gull-wing doors on the Jetta.

The New York Times has a front page featured article (The Road to Clarity) on the redesign of the typeface used on interstate signage in the United States. Amazingly, zero typographic consideration went into the approval of use of the typeface that adorns most of the current signage. The new typeface, Clearview, allows drivers to read road signs several hundred feet sooner. A worthy improvement. Look for Clearview to start replacing the old face as current signs become old and worn.

La Vergne
Sadly, the town I live in has no concept of typography. But that’s pretty much expected. I apologize for the crappy photos, but you can imagine even from just the other side of an intersection how difficult it would be to read our road signs. Just a few of their flaws:

• All caps create illegible rectangles of white from a distance.
• Lack of letterspacing causes the letters to run together resulting in inability to distinguish between letters.
• Selection of a narrow typeface makes the above issues even more pronounced.
• No grid system results in the letters almost touching the white border of the sign making it even more difficult to recognize individual letterforms.

The black border on the “State Law” sign just kills me. It’s thicker than any of the letters. Yet, the border is also thicker on the side than it is on the top and bottom. I don’t think I’ve been in a town with worse signage than La Vergne.

The recent heat wave has been terribly brutal with no immediate end in sight.