As those of you out there who follow my Twitter feed may have noticed, my beautiful wife and I have been on the road for the last couple of weeks, heading for the wedding of some friends in Connecticut.

Along the way, we saw a whole bunch of the country. On our way to the wedding, we stopped off in Pittsburgh to meet and spend some time with one of Mle’s longtime blog-friends and associated personages. Pittsburgh, as it turns out, is a truly beautiful city, not at all the run-down, ramshackle Rust Belt city still waiting for the steel industry to come back. If you’re in the area, I do recommend stopping by.

After the wedding, as we were heading down the east coast, we stopped in for a day in Philadelphia. We met another old internet friend of Mle’s and checked out her very cool vintage clothing store. If you’re in the area, I do recommend stopping by.

Anyway, after the San Francisco Alphabet and the New York City Alphabet, the found-letter photography game has become something of a tradition and something of a habit when we’re in new big cities. And in the space of about 24 hours each, we managed to get complete alphabets in both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Working in a shorter time-span means a little less depth of shots from which to choose the final complete alphabet, but even so, I’m quite pleased with the way they came out.

Go have a look:

Pittsburgh Alphabet

Philadelphia Alphabet

Full disclosure/credit where credit is due: Mle has always been very good at spotting letters, but I generally take all the photos myself. However, Pittburgh’s “F” and “Z” are both shots that Mle took on her camera.

Out of all the annoyance of the completely idiotic LeBron James saga that has dominated far too many headlines this summer comes something genuinely hilarious. Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert wrote an open letter to the team’s fans – promising that the Cavs would win an NBA Title before BronBron does, no less. But the truly funny part is that he wrote the letter in Comic Sans, one of the ugliest and silliest widely-popular typefaces in existence. Really, it’s gotta be one of the three or four worst faces that comes as part of the standard package with pretty much every computer in the world. For my money, nothing’s worse than Papyrus, but Comic Sans is up there.

Anyway, Dan Gilbert wrote this letter in Comic Sans, which earned him a round of well-deserved mockery from the internet. But that’s not really my purpose, here. Apparently, the richly-earned mockery was notable enough for CNN.com’s “Tech” page to write an article about it: The author of the article, John D. Sutter, tosses out this gem a few ‘grafs in:

Unless you’re a fourth-grader, or being ironic, or the author of a comic book, or on vacation from the 1990s, never use that typeface.

Attention, John D. Sutter: No self-respecting comic book letterer would ever, ever, EVER use Comic Sans to letter a comic book, comic strip, webcomic, graphic novel or anything else. And despite the assertions of Comic Sans designer Vincent Connare, quoted in CNN’s article, Comic Sans bears only the slightest superficial resemblance to good comic book lettering.

Here’s Comic Sans:

Ugh. I feel dirty just having it on my blog.

Anyway…let’s see. Here’s a sample of old-fashioned hand lettering, in a panel from Sandman #8, written by Neil Gaiman, drawn by Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III and lettered by Todd Klein, one of best letterers in the business:

Nothing like Comic Sans.

Here’s a look at just a few of the typefaces available – for free, no less – at www.blambot.com:

Any of these, and any of dozens of other choices available to letterers is vastly more interesting and attractive than Comic Sans. Just because it says “Comic” in the name of the typeface doesn’t mean it’s actually anything like comics lettering. No comics letterer would EVER use Comic Sans. Comic Sans is ugly, boring, sterile, lifeless and, in spite of what some people seem to think, there’s nothing even remotely “fun” about it. Well, okay, I guess it’s “fun” if your other choices are Arial, Courier and Times New Roman…but still. Comics lettering – especially hand lettering – is beautiful and full of life. Comic Sans is not.

Again: No self-respecting comics letterer would ever use Comic Sans. For anything. EVER. Thank you for your attention.

And here’s the obligatory link to Chris Onstad’s Achewood strip on the subject.

Two of my favorite people, as you may know, are Leah and Simon.

Is it because they’re swell folks all around, fun to hang out with and generally good to know? Sure. Is it because Simon was totally psyched to wear a kilt in my wedding, was a fantastic groomsman (how many groomsmen are willing to take the groom out to get mugged for his bachelor party? That’s commitment, I tells ya!) and a terrific MC for the wedding reception? Yeah, sure. Is it because they’ve almost always got a guest bed, a hot tub and a well-stocked liquor cabinet available for us when we’re visiting the Bay Area (even if they don’t always manage to get the house spotlessly clean when we come over, much less make us feel like we’re staying at a fancy B&B)? I guess. Is it because I am endlessly amused and delighted by the Wombat they made whenever we hang out with them? Yeah, sure, why not?

Okay, okay, is it because they taught us to make sushi?

Could be.

Call it un-American if you wish, but as much as I love barbecue, I can’t think of any better way to celebrate the independence of our great nation – especially on a hot July evening – than with cold fish, balls of vinegar-dressed sticky rice, seaweed salad and the ever-popular inarizushi, aka “tofu bags.”

Perhaps it is a reminder to us all that so many of the things that made America the mostly-great country that it is today came from overseas and across borders.

Or perhaps I just love raw tuna and felt like eating it tonight. Couldn’t tell you.

* According to my little Mac translator widget, those Japanese characters stand for “Independence Day.” No idea whether that’s actually the case or not, but it looks kinda neet, don’t it?

The scene: June, 2008. Two RECORD COMPANY EXECUTIVES are having lunch in a trendy L.A. restaurant. EXECUTIVE #1, an older guy, is pretending that “cold gin” and a martini are the same thing. EXECUTIVE #2, a young go-getter, is pretending to like kombucha, like people do these days.

EXEC 1: I just don’t know what to do anymore. It’s getting so hard to find good acts these days. Anyone who’s got any talent gets snapped up right away, you know?

EXEC 2: Well, it seems to me that you’re going about it all wrong.

EXEC 1: How do you mean?

EXEC 2: Back in the day, you went out and tried to find great acts who could really sing, really play their instruments, people who had stage presence and charisma and appeal. You signed ‘em, you put out their records and crossed your fingers that the audience liked ‘em.

EXEC 1: And that’s not how it’s done anymore?

EXEC 2: Jesus, no, Tony. It’s the year 2008. Finding actual talent is so 20th-century.

EXEC 1 (“Tony”): So how do we do it now?

EXEC 2: Well, let me ask you something: do you really think we’re in this business to help people find and buy great music?

EXEC 1: I don’t know anymore.

EXEC 2: No, it’s not music. It’s product. You’re doomed to fail if you’re relying on the public to decide what they want. These days, you’ve got to tell them what they want before they have a chance to think about it.

EXEC 1: How do you mean?

EXEC 2: Okay, you’re not going to convince 30 or 40 year olds that they want what you want ‘em to want. So you have to start them early. Condition them. Like, y’know, Chekhov’s dogs or whatever.

EXEC 1: Chekhov’s Dogs? What are they, punk rock?

EXEC 2: No, no, no. I mean that you have to start with the kids when they’re ten or so, get them used to the idea that they want the product that you’re offering. Kids don’t get a $20 check in their birthday cards from Grandma anymore, Tony. They get a $20 iTunes giftcard, and they’ll have no idea what to spend it on unless you tell them.

EXEC 1: So, how do I make them buy what I want them to buy?

EXEC 2 (sips his kombucha and tries to conceal his “Jesus, this stuff is awful” wince): You remember Titanic? Shitty movie, right? But it made a billion dollars because every 13-year-old girl in America went back to see it ten or fifteen times because they loved Leonardo DiCaprio.

EXEC 1: So…?

EXEC 2: So, the point is: girls with nothing better to spend their money on will throw it at anything that features a boy who they find attractive in a sexually non-threatening way. Boyish and dreamy, right?

EXEC 1: So we need to find boys who can sing and who teenage girls will find attractive?

EXEC 2: Fuck no, Tony. Jesus, try to keep up, okay? Remember what I’ve been telling you: if you’re letting them decide for themselves, you’ve already lost. You don’t try to guess who teenage girls will think is attractive, you tell them who they think is attractive. You call up the crew over at Tiger Beat and Seventeen and say, “Hey, we need you to get our boy on the cover.”

EXEC 1: Seventeen? I thought we wanted 13-year-olds?

EXEC 2: Yeah, and they’re the ones who read Seventeen.

EXEC 1: Okay, so you don’t have to find someone who’s attractive. Just someone who can sing.

EXEC 2: Why would you need someone who can sing?

EXEC 1: Because we’re selling records? Songs, you know?

EXEC 2: Autotune, Tony. Autotune. You think the target audience has the slightest idea whether the music they’re listening to is actually any good or not? You think they care?

EXEC 1: They don’t?

EXEC 2: Have you even read any of those marketing research reports I’ve been sending you? Look, our research indicates that all you need is 6.3% of the girls in any average suburban junior high school to be listening to any act, and bada-bing-bada-boom, herd mentality, domino effect and you’ve got 88% saturation inside six weeks.

EXEC 1: But…you still haven’t answered the original question. How do you know what talent to pick? Who do you sign?

EXEC 2: Anyone.

EXEC 1: Anyone?

EXEC 2: Anyone. Look…

(EXEC 2 waves the BUSBOY over.)

BUSBOY: Yes, sir?

EXEC 2: Take a look at this kid, Tony. What’s your name, kid?

BUSBOY: Justin, sir.

EXEC 2: Can you sing, Justin?

BUSBOY: Not really, sir.

EXEC 2: Can you dance?

BUSBOY: No, not really.

EXEC 2: You play an instrument? The guitar, the piano?

BUSBOY: No, sir.

EXEC 2: You have a lot of girlfriends, Justin?

BUSBOY: No, sir. Actually, the girls at school say I’m goofy-looking.

EXEC 2: Thanks, Justin, that’s all for now.

(The busboy wanders away.)

EXEC 2: Well…?

EXEC 1: Him?!

EXEC 2: Sure, why not?

EXEC 1: I don’t believe it.

EXEC 2: We make up a backstory. We say he’s from…I don’t know, Canada or some shit. Pretend we discovered him on the internet, YouTube or something. We get him on the cover of Tiger Beat, put him on a couple of TV shows…and we’re wipin’ our asses with hundred-dollar bills inside two years.

EXEC 1: I don’t believe it.

EXEC 2: I’ll bet you a thousand dollars that he’s multi-Platinum two years from today.

EXEC 1: You’re on. Easiest thousand bucks I ever made. The music business just doesn’t work that way.

(A beat.)

EXEC 1: He’ll at least need a haircut. Girls won’t go for that done-with-a-Flowbee hair-in-the-eyes thing.

EXEC 2: Oh, Tony, have you heard nothing I’ve been trying to tell you?

I have figured out how the universe works.

The day those assholes are done digging mysterious holes in the street ten feet from our front window and filling them in with various materials each day, with their jackhammers and air compressors and beeping backhoes and rumbling tractors and shit?

That will be the day that I get a job and we move to California.

Because the universe hates me.

Lotta folks linking today to Gene Luen Yang’s comic calling for a boycott of the upcoming film The Last Airbender. Can’t say I disagree with him. To cast white actors in a film version of a story rooted quite deeply in Asian culture seems silly at best. If it were just “colorblind” casting across the board, I’d be far less bothered by it. The fact that all the heroes (implicitly Asian or Inuit in the original cartoon) have been turned into wholesome American-looking White People while the primary villains are played by Brown People (Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire, Cliff Curtis, a Maori actor best known for his role in Whale Rider, and Shaun Toub, who has been playing Generic Ethnic Personages in Hollywood for years) is just bizarre and troubling.

I suspect that some of it stems from Studio Suits declaring that “Americans” won’t go see a Summer tentpole (potential franchise) movie if the hero is played by a non-white person unless his name rhymes with Schmill Schmith.* I suspect it was the same force that led to the casting of that movie star whose name and face are the first things that come to mind when you think of Persia and Persian people, Jake Gyllenhaal, in this week’s Prince of Persia.

*Or, perhaps, in the case of the upcoming awful-looking Karate Kid remake, the potentially-marketable son of someone whose name rhymes with Schmill Schmith.

And all that is a perfectly good reason to stay away from this movie. But there’s something else, too.

And that comes back to the question I’ve asked about so many things over the years…why does Avatar: The Last Airbender need to be a movie at all?

For those who don’t know, Avatar was an animated series that ran on Nickelodeon for three seasons from 2005 to 2008. It was, as the title might lead you to believe, about the last Airbender in a world where rival factions of Waterbenders, Earthbenders and Firebenders vie for dominance (or, more accurately, the Firebenders vie for dominance while the other groups generally say, “Yo, fire dudes, why you gotta be such dicks all the time?”). And it. Was. Awesome. Stylishly designed, full of great characters, a fun story and some of the most kickass action scenes ever animated for American television.

And now, for some reason, I guess it needs to be a movie. Because adults won’t watch cartoons, I guess? Hey, nobody tell the people who go see the movie that in spite of the presence of live actors, all the fight scenes and air-, water-, earth- and fire-bending stuff and flying bison and fantastic scenery means that the ostensibly “live action” movie is more or less a very expensive cartoon.

But, I guess it’s gotta be a movie. Followed by at least one, and more likely two, sequels more than they have any material, real ideas or creative energy for. If everything flows smoothly, according to my best reading of the Hollywood Official Creative Bankruptcy Act of 1988, we’re on track for a Last Airbender Broadway musical no later than 2021, followed by the 2025 film adaptation of Airbender!: The Musical.

But I digress. My real point is that the material is goddamned brilliant as an animated TV series. And part of the reason for that is that it’s endlessly easy to suspend one’s disbelief when you’re looking at animation. It’s so, so much easier to let a certain level of unreality slide when you’re looking at animation, whether you’re talking about a cat who can survive falling anvils and exploding dynamite or an Airbender and a Firebender engaged in super-powered battle.

Here, take a look at this:

On the left are the movie’s Aang and Sokka, and on the right are the cartoon originals. Compare the two top images. On the left is a simplified face – simple shapes and angular lines. And I think that’s really it – the angularity suggests a certain aggression, the impulsiveness and ability to be a badass warrior when called upon that are the hallmarks of Aang’s character. On the right is a chubby-cheeked, round-faced lad who looks like we could almost but not quite buy him solemnly telling Keanu Reeves that there is no spoon. And the movie’s Sokka…well, he looks like he ought to be hanging out with his friends outside the Circle-K, practicing skateboard tricks and asking passing adults to buy him a pack of cigarettes.

Great special effects are no guarantee that what looks amazing in animated format will translate to live action. There’s a certain thrill to seeing something like The Lord of the Rings or Spider-Man adapted to the cinema, because you’re seeing life and motion where before they didn’t exist. But  The Last Airbender already exists as a motion picture. This story is already available in a medium to which it is perfectly suited. So, really, why does it need to be a big-screen movie? I don’t like the casting and it’s just one more reason not to see the movie. But more than anything it is the movie’s very inessential nature that makes it not worth seeing.

A little while ago, Mle and I were chatting and the Spanish word for “rabbit” came up: conejo.

I assumed that this word was connected, linguistically, in some way to the rural English slang for rabbit, “coney” (e.g. Samwise Gamgee, the most stereotypically “pastoral” of Tolkien’s hobbits, telling Gollum, “There’s only one thing to do with a brace of coneys!”), though I wasn’t sure of the source of that connection. Fortunately, I have access to this amazing connected network of computers with a surprising amount of information shared between them – some sort of “inter-net,” you might say – and I was able to do some research and figure it out.

English is a particularly weird language, being thousands of years worth of mishmashed influences of Celtic languages, Germanic languages, Latin and Norman French. Spanish, on the other hand, is much more directly evolved from Latin, and one can generally find the Latin roots of most Spanish words (at least of Spanish-from-Spain words; many American Spanish words come from the languages of the various Central American native groups).

But…the generally accepted Latin word for “rabbit” is lepus – or at least, if you plug “rabbit” into an English-to-Latin translator widget, that’s what you get. The French word bears this out: lapin. But, as with any linguistic detective work (especially anything relating to the always-bizarre English language), this is just the surface and one must dig deeper.

So: what’s the connection between the Spanish conejo and the Rural English coney? Well, it turns out that the Latin lepus is more properly the word for “hare,” which is, of course, a species related to but distinct from the rabbit. More specifically, we’re talking about the European rabbit, native to the Iberian penninsula, for which the proper Latin word is cuniculus. The Latin cuniculus transformed into both the Spanish conejo and, eventually, the English coney.

Here’s where it gets interesting: because tunnels and burrows were so strongly associated with rabbits, the word cuniculus was borrowed to apply to tunnels and burrows in general. Thus, the Linnaean nomenclature for the Burrow Owl is Athene cunicularia, and there is a species of tunneling ant called Formica cunicularia. Underground channels for the diversion of water were known as cuniculi.

But, the human brain being what it is and working based on patterns and comparisons, and language being what it is, forever developing slang and using pre-existing words for different ideas…well. The word meaning “tunnel” or “burrow” also developed into the Latin cunnus, a vulgar term for a portion of the female anatomy that resembles a tunnel or burrow. From this we get the term cunnilingus, and, speculatively, one of the English language’s more rude and vulgar 4-letter words (though no definitive connection between the Latin and the English words has been proven).

So, there you go. Unknown connection between rabbits and ladyparts. Just where beavers come into the picture, I’m not certain.

…there’ll be no Annie.

Tribune Media Services is pulling the plug on Annie, the daily comic strip chronicling the adventures of the dot-eyed little orphan girl with a penchant for red dresses. According to the article, the strip is now appearing in fewer than 20 papers. Here’s the weird part, though: TMS VP of Licensing Steve Tippie says this about ending the strip’s run:

“Annie is more of a kids’ property, so it’s less relevant to newspaper audiences than say a Dick Tracy or a Brenda Starr.”

Um…yeah. Show of hands: how many of you out there who read a newspaper (or syndicated newspaper comic strips in online form) on a regular basis actually find Dick Tracy or Brenda Starr “relevant?” Obviously, he’s dancing around the fact that in today’s terms, “newspaper audiences” = “people eligible for an AARP membership.” But even taking that as a given, does anyone – other than Josh Fruhlinger – actually care about Dick Tracy these days? To say nothing of Brenda Starr, which appears only once in nearly six years’ worth of archives on Fruhlinger’s site, and that in a post by occasional Guest Curmudgeon Uncle Lumpy. That’s right: even the guy with a bizarre fixation on Mary Worth, Apartment 3G and Judge Parker doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Brenda Starr.

Oddly enough, the two strips he mentioned both happen to be TMS offerings, as well. Okay, so he’s just trying to promote the brand. And maybe the folks at TMS imagine that there are people out there who actually do care about the adventures of Dick and Brenda. But really, if you look at their catalog, the only strip they offer that has any kind of passionate following is the god-awful-but-inexplicably-popular Pluggers.

Of course, when you consider that Little Orphan Annie‘s creator, Harold Gray, has been dead for 42 years, you’re really just left wondering how it’s lasted this long. Dick Tracy‘s Chester Gould retired 33 years ago and has been dead for 25. Dalia “Dale” Messick, creator of Brenda Starr, retired in 1980.

Those ~20 papers that are losing Annie could give that space to something new, something coming from the pen of new talent. Instead they’ll just plug in Mandrake the Magician or Gasoline Alley or Gil Thorp or something else boring and stupid that’s a near-contemporary of the Yellow Kid and is on its fifth or sixth creative team. The editors will say, “Well, sure, we could run something new…but now that we’ve got a spot open, we can finally start running Mutt and Jeff!”

Is it any wonder that younger comics artists are turning to the web?

The 12th of Fucking May. For fuck’s sake, people, it’s the 12th of Fucking May, and this is what we see out our front window this morning. NOT FAIR! Colorado, I love you. I really do. You know you’ll always be Home to me. But if you’re trying to convince me that moving to California is the right decision…well, you’re going about it the right way.

My lovely wife says she’s defective. She’s not. She wonders what she’s missing out on by not coveting “stuff.” Our home doesn’t look like a Pottery Barn catalog or an Ikea showroom…and I think that’s okay. Because here’s what it does look like:

Featured here are paintings from China, a print of a painting we liked on what could reasonably be called one of our early dates at the Denver Art Musuem, and a radish I drew for her last summer when she was saddish.

The oh-so-Pottery-Barn faux finish that we did ourselves, photos from China, a piece of Chinese calligraphy that is not from China but nicely fits the theme…and a couple of tubes of cat medicine.

Curtains that she made herself, a Kennedy-style rocker my grandmother gave us (and that my grandparents acquired when Kennedy was actually in the White House), a world map that reminds us of all the places we haven’t been (yet), a mobile her college boyfriend made for her, flower photos that she took herself…and a cat.

Style is personal. Is our house likely to be picked for a spread in Sunset or Better Homes & Gardens? Not especially. But is it full of things with personal significance, reminders of good times and fun adventures and the people we love? I’d say so. And I’d call that style of our own making.