A Donkey on the Edge

I sometimes wonder if Hemingway was a real jerk and ‘A Moveable Feast’ was a hopeless piece of name-dropping… I worry about attaching importance to the appearance of various celebrities at various times in my life. I wonder about my father and his relation to celebrity and this tangent could run and run ‘cause all I wanted to write was that Nicki and I saw Jane Birkin in the Tate today.

We were catching the nude victorian thing at what is now (and I wonder about this name - if ever a building didn’t help help from the brand posse it’s the Tate) the ‘Tate Britain’ - sugar refiners of the British Isles unite ;-)

The show surprised by being quite interesting. A lot of the issues missed, discussed, hinted at or circumnavigated by the artists and critics of the time are still worth thinking about today. In particular our relationship to children’s sexuality and how that hinders our management of our own complex sexual awareness - with particular difficulty as it relates to the abusers of our children and the pornography they create and consume… I still can’t believe that story about the pediatrician marched out of town by Yorkshire brown-shirts (ok, it wasn’t in Yorkshire and they didn’t wear brown shirts, but without digressing further and researching the story I can’t remember the exact details - if you lived in Britain in 2001 you know the story I mean).

I must have been about eleven or twelve when Gainsbourg’s ‘Je t’aime - moi non plus’ was in the charts. I can still remember an evening meal with my family when the song came on pass the carrots and Jane Birkin’s simulated orgasm and the salt Dug if you don’t mind so dear how was your day went on endlessly.

So I felt it was strangely appropriate to see Jane B at a show about prurience, embarrassment and simulated (or suggested I suppose would be more accurate in most cases) sexual exhaustion. She was muse and companion to one of the twentieth century’s great artists, and there she was, all grungey and frumpy in baggy denim and clunky shoes, peering through the ‘peep hole’ of a victorian French film display.

It made my day it did.

I wanted to clap and say ‘thank you’ and get her autograph and tell her how much I loved her work. But I didn’t.

That I have the spelling skills of a four-year-old. Taunts and jeers to dug@pumpernickle.net if you please.

This is crazy, really. I’m bilingual and manage in a further two languages. You’d think spelling in your mother tongue would be the easy part (ah - yes, but I can’t spell in French either…). And there’s another thing, as I am about to be a dad for the first time, I’m wondering if I should speak French to my baby. This is probably a seriously stupid idea as it will no doubt make the difficult (I’m guessing) process of learning to speak even more confusing for baby.

Chris (http://chris.raettig.org) said why not make a web log (a Blog) so I thought, sure, this year has been crazy, maybe I should keep a record of it.

So I headed over to blogger.com and registered this stupid url with them and chose a template and filled in all manner of daft questions including a poll on wether or not one should really be paying for the blog service in the future. Once I had finished all my inputing I went to ‘publish’ my oeuvre and oops - javascript error.

Now I just wanted to say that I’m getting bored with having to commission web applications to use people’s websites. I mean this sort of defeats the purpose don’t you think. Appart from Blogger, I recently had to sort out some form pages to apply for Tesco online store registration. I’ll say that again: to register on the Tesco website, I had to create another website to feed the data accross.

mmmm?

Oh, so in the end I rolled my own. Hence the feature-poor, clunky web publishing tool you are currently using ;-)

Spending one’s Christmas with family really reminds one of that not all web users have good eyesight.

There have been hundreds of articles written on accessibility in web design, and the w3c’s web accessibility initiative (http://www.w3.org/WAI/) is a good place to start for super accurate information on the subject.

As a typographer, I always used to use the EM measure to indicate spatial relationships by proportion. A long dash was an EM dash, leading in Bodoni was one and one-third EM and so on. The idea was to preserve the ‘character’ of a piece of design by managing the distances between parts of the composition in a manner that was independent of any size measurements.

The EM measure appeared in CSS a few years back and I tried to start using it then (what was it Andrew, 1997?) but came up against design requirements from clients. It was impossible to get the type on screen to display at a predictable size, and most clients wanted to mimmic the 9/11.5 point size of their brochure. Of course all of this was ridiculous - creating content for any specific rigid device description is just plain silly and defeats one of the Internet’s greatest features, its lack of platform dependence.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, this is a web log - no client! I can do what I like:-) So the fonts on this page are going to be experimented with as a learning exercise. Today’s style sheet specifies a base font size of 0.8EM or in other words, just slightly smaller that the standard size for a given environment (in theory).

Hilda and husband came round to look at the flat (Dug and Nicki live in a groovy two-bed flat in West End Lane in London - a flat that requires some serious work that Dug was supposed to deal with but didn’t) this morning and liked it. It’s funny, when you deal direct with people (as opposed to estate agents) everything seems so mellow and low pressure.

No offense to the estate agents of the world, but it just might happen that one couple sells a flat to another without either one being stressed to death. There’s a nice thought for the day…

Great chieftan o the puddin race. Have you learnt your poems? We’re off to Billy and Ohna’s tonight, and by the time the cron job that posts these things runs I hope to be largely whisky :-)

I wonder what he’s up to these days…

Ok so now the width of this column is defined as thirty times the width of a monospaced character. If you zoom your browser’s type-size settings in and out, the width of the column should expand and contract such that there is always a theoretically ideal number of words in each line.

My personal readability preference is for thirteen word lines.

OK the stylesheet is being tampered with a lot today — mea culpa. Apologies for purple type on purple background;-) Actually, the current scheme was created by Nicki, for a wall in our flat…

On Sunday, January 27, 2002, at 10:54 AM, josé-antionio sobrino reineke wrote:

The deed is done, photos to phollow, the cyber-savy atendees did not pack a digital camera to the ceremony.

Sabine and I were married the city of New York, in that funny building which you remember. Thursday,/01/24, at or about 1:00 PM. Danny and Juan Carlo as witnesses.

We had lunch at a Viet, next to where Pho Pasteur used to be. Followed by a cool banquet in a chinatown restaurant. All attendees were my close family and those of our tribe which still call the city home.

The definitive ceremony is still planned for Kln on/05/18th, invites to follow.

This is the last week of/01/2002. Nicki (My wife) is six months pregnant with our first baby. I’m deep in a new-business struggle (If someone had told me I’d have to weather another recession I’d have laughed - what? twice in one lifetime, my gran only had 1929 to deal with…). My desk is piled high with paperwork and unfinished previous work, and to cap it all off, the limited company that owns my freehold has had all its Companies House deadlines arrive at once. Damn, how do I manage to appear so calm?

But I thought I’d mention that I’d spotted a bug (a spare double quote in the markup) which was breaking the newer link in the site masthead. Should work ok now.