Lizard Spit Drug Treats Type 2 Diabetes, notes WebMD. Type 2 only, which assuages paranoiac concerns on my part – that means only you multiplying adult-onset types are in line to become the zombie army of the Lizard King.
Another comforting point: lizard spit is not derived from pituitary glands.
Don’t eat the leaves, saith MoFi of rhubarbinfo.com.
Mmmm. I usta et it by the bowl, strawberries need not apply. Mmmm.
Thanks, Mom.
The United States Business Card Company
“Location:
New York City Weekend Flea Markets (Indoor/Outdoor)
Saturday:
268 Mulberry St. (indoors, year round) between Houston & Prince St.
11:00am – 7:00pmSunday:
I.S. 44 Flea Market, 77th St. & Columbus Ave (indoors, cold weather & rain, April 1st- Nov 1st)”
This sounds most promising. Too bad it doesn’t appear that others do this in the PNW.
From the FAQ:
Q. Well that’s great, but your machine can’t measure up to my laser printer. I’ve got state of the art pixels. What have you got?
A.How many times have you called that 800 number and waited forever to deal with the malfunctioning of your printer? My Platen Press has few moving part, requires a little bit of oil now and then, and has never needed a service call. As for your state of the art pixels, they aren’t as perfect as you think. Look at them up close and you can see that the little dots that make up your text gives it a greyish cast, Yuck! With foundry type, the ink is applied to solid metal, covering the entire surface of the implanted typeface within the press and then crushed into the paper leaving a sunken solid impression that you can actually feel with your fingers. No dots, no cloudiness, and a tactile feeling you can’t ever get with your printer.
Q. Well, Ok Mr. Bigshot Letterpress man. But I’ve got premium paper like Strathmore and Cranes that I can run through my printer. You can’t do that.
A. Yes I can, as well as printing even more! My platen press can print those difficult to print papers and card stocks such as breakfast cereal boxes, papyrus, cardboard, real wood, and that triple thick cardboard. Many commercial printers won’t even touch those. A platen press is especially useful for these specialty papers such as those handmade papers with the deckled edges often used for wedding invitations (And I can make those for you too!).
I’m liking this. No rate citations on his site, alas, and no biz card samples, so I don’t know about the inset or two-color.
Stern & Faye are in the Skagit Valley.
WoodWorks Press appears to specialize in poetry chapbooks and broadsides (and fine instruments). While a $45/year subscription will bring you a year’s output, “including obscure party favors,” I see no indication that Mr. Hunter takes on job type.
Hm, I wonder if ordering a rubber stamp with this design might be about as cost effective, for that matter. It certainly opens stocks for consideration.
I have also been operating on the untested assumption that it’s a bad idea to use inkjet-printed cards, based on the solubility of the inks. It occurs to me that I should test this thesis, and so I will, forthwith.
It’s time once again to engage in my quixotic quest for short-run personal business cards. I’ve used xeroxed cards in the past to meet this need. This time, the burgeoning development of direct-to-plate offset printing and the corresponding flowering of online quickprint with uploads or online layout tools led me to investigate color-based options as well.
Googling on the subject presents a nearly impenetrable thicket of search-engine optimization spam links, which mostly direct the user toward one of two online providers, VistaPrint and iPrint.com. VistaPrint offers an intriguing promo: 250 business cards “free,” plus shipping. Naturally, the completed order is directed through a maze of upsells (faster shipping, remove the backside advertising) such that you’re likelier to spend about $20 on the cards there than not. Having just received one such card from a new acquaintance, I can report that at least the backside advertising is not obtrusive or in poor taste – just a simple logo and line of small black type on the back of the card. Unfortunately, that makes the backside of the card more graphically effective, and in better taste, than the front of the card.
Additionally, the basic layouts that are available are less than optimal and certainly do not offer a satisfactory range of control over the design. For $20 one would expect to do better.
Selecting a ‘premium’ card order does open up the range of possible layouts somewhat but this is accomplished primarily by increasing the number of ill-advised photographic background choices available. The ability to work with type on the card remains very limited – one cannot move the type blocks around, change the size or color of the type either globally, line-by-line, or by block.
Noting this, I was happy to see that VistaPrint does offer direct uploading of card designs in standard graphic formats, including professional ones; but that functionality is only available under IE on Windows, so I’m not even going to spend more time looking into the option.
Pricing for premium cards on a run of $250 is $9.99 (plus the same shipping upsell), so in theory one should be able to execute a run for a total outlay of under $20 – only the failure to provide a Mac option turns me away from at least experimenting.
Looking elsewhere, the presence of VistaPrint’s “free” run of 250 cards makes finding a provider who will even take an order for less than 500 cards somewhat challenging. iPrint.com offers what appears to be competitively priced cards in short runs with a much greater degree of flexibility over the card design – type lines and blocks can be resized, colored, and moved around on the page in increments as small as 1/64 of an inch. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to determine if you’ve accurately aligned baselines in this manner.
Small, in-line graphics can be uploaded to include in the design and layout of the card as well – unfortunately, these graphics are limited to a bitmap format (such as a tiff or a jpeg) and to two colors or to grayscale. Multicolored images are converted to greyscale. The placed graphic, however, may be assigned a spot color, from a very limited sixteen color swatch book. No Pantone equivalents for the colors are specified, so it’s a crapshoot.
Here is a jpeg of the design I’m working with currently, and here is a version of it I assembled in iPrint’s online layout tool.
from iPrint
While close, one may note that the ‘MW’ graphic (a design element I may drop or replace with something else, or nothing) is smaller on the iPrint version, and that one simply has to hope for the best in the matter of type treatment and color. The other point to consider is that while iPrint’s online tools offer a high degree of flexibility, each layout change is executed as a form submission from your web browser – and the layout seen here is nothing like any of the layouts used as a starting point. I’d estimate that it took me about an hour and a half to get the online version of the card to the point seen here, while the Illustrator-based version probably took about 20 minutes or so to develop.
So, given that one of my goals in this experiment is 250 cards for under $20, what would the iPrint version run? iPrint’s price list specifies $19.99 for 250 as a base, but invokes add-on charges such as $3.00 for a graphic, and another bump if more colors than black or used – so the base for this design on a run of 250 would be $27.99, before shipping or any taxes (probably not applicable in this instance).
Hm, thirty bones for a rough approximation of what I want? Bad choice.
A bit more digging yeilded Overnight Prints, which does offer a direct upload tool. The tool also evaluates the file uploaded and will provide semi-cryptic error information if your file is not appropriately configured. In this case, proper is an EPS with only spot colors. I find this an odd choice given that short run and on-demand printing is inherently dependent on four-color direct-to-plate printing. So how much would it run here?
A 250-card run is $29.95 plus shipping (calculated at the time the order is placed) – so $35 to $37 is a probable estimate. The next break above 250 is 1000 for a base cost of $39.95, which puts one back in the fifty-dollar range for a long run – exactly what I don’t want. I am interested in the short runs for the specific purpose of indulging in the pleasure of redesigning the card at frequent intervals – and so I find myself aground, I think. In a couple of weeks I may experiment with the upload option at VistaPrint from a Windows computer.
In the meantime, I am beginning an assiduous search for an in-city letterpress. I think there’s something highly interesting in the idea of Helvetica and seventeenth-century swash lettering meeting on the bed of a ninteenth-century press.
It seems that the School of Visual Concepts was offering letterpress classes in the winter of 2003, and it looks like they still are. $195 for a day’s seminar, taught by one Amy Redmond? Hm, if I can get my 250 cards out of it – might be worth a look. I see, however, that I just missed that exact class: “Letterpress Business Card Workshop,” $225, ran on May 15 and 16, darn it.
Once, there was an active letterpress shop, The Living Museum of Letterpress Printing, at 2017 2nd Ave downtown, but I believe it’s now evaporated. I’ve already bemoaned the fact that one cannot order materials from the Williamsburg printshop online; I wonder, are there any manual presses that also conduct biz over the web? I recognize that cost may simply prove prohibitive if I choose to move in this direction, but the physical act of setting type – letters on a composing stick, or rubber stamps on a toy hand-cranked drum press – is the first thing that awakend my interest in visual creation.
eBay offers at least one tabletop press at the moment. As a child, I had a version of the Cub toy printing press. The version seen behind the eBay link is considerably older than mine – but the principle is the same. I had more or less completely forgotten about this toy until I started writing about it here.
The World of Ricky Gervais’ The Office: Series 1 Trivia helps to tie some things together.
By some odd coincidence, my long-reserved copy of The Office came in on Friday, and Saturday was when we had time to watch it. What should be on Bravo in the ealry evening, just prior to our planned DVDathon?
Viv and I watched all of this back to back – somehow it’s appropriate to my return to the world of the working, er, stiff. Sadly, the other wise admirable trivia guide to The Office series 1 fails to ID the obvious Demotivators poster outside David’s office door visible in episode six. I don’t think I’m linking to the correct poster, but it is a long-wise poster with a red main slogan.
On the other hand, Peter Gibbons is mentioned by name in episode six and cited in the trivia guide.
Just finished interviewing Frezan Ozpetek, a Turkish-Italian film director who is in town for SIFF for a couple of days. The SIFF press suite is in the W, more-or-less next to the new Seattle Public Library. In the large photo that is the most prominent element in the page that opens from the Library link in the prior sentence, I would be sitting just on the other side of the planter in the middle distance, partially occluding the “n” in the word “teens” that may be seen nearer the far wall.
Now, however, there is furniture.
I do have my camera with me but didn’t tote a means of getting the pix from imaging device to computer. I did just take a pic of this open posting window.
The open-access wireless works just fine. I will wander around in here a bit after I catch up on email. There is an ever-changing cast of laptop users, and a steady flow of neck-craning gawkers, many wearing the trademark black of the architecture students’ guild.
It should be noted that my chair is the exact same shade of tangerine as that of the old iBook that I am employing.
Flashes, booms reported over Western Washington [P-I].
Darn. For once in my life I’m not up on the roof at 3 am. The meteorite agency has GOT to do a better job of outreach. Perhaps, like the Peeskill meteorite, there will be video like this [direct link, ~1mb mpeg].
Mythology and Folklore of the Oak associates oaks with druidic and Gaelic pre-Roman culture, but does not investigate the revival of interest in that culture following the end of the Middle Ages. This Google cache describes a medieval painting in Cambridge which employs oak leaves and acorns as a decorative element.
This paper discusses the iconography of a section of Raphael’s monumental painting The School of Athens, originally executed for the residences of the Pope. The link includes a citation that in the painting, the figure of Epicurus is wearing a garland of oak, although a different citation also quoted describes the garland as ivy.
Finally, this link includes a direct quote from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, “They select oak groves for the sake of that tree and will not perform any religious ceremony without its leaves. In fact the name ‘druid’ can even be derived from the word ‘oak’ if one employs a Greek etymology [drys, oak].”
Whatever the etymological relationship between the word druid and the fair dryads ensconced within the trees, it looks as though the symbolic etymology of the oak leaf as a badge of honor is factually pre-Roman, and continued to be used in Europe during the middle ages as well as the Renaissance.