I hate to do this, but here is the link to the company that claims it has created the first human clone baby. I find the whole thing kind of sad and fascinating at the same time.
I think the whole thing is a fraud (we’ll know sometime this week apparently), but if it’s not, how did these fellas gain access to such advanced bio-technology? Second, Rael, the group’s leader looks a bit like Saddam Hussein with a small mustache. Third, Brigitte Boisselier, the CE0 who announced the birth, has the most amazing voice — a cross between E.T. and an early Brigitte Bardot. Lastly, why would anyone in their right mind actually want to give birth to *themselves*! Gross. By the way, the group claims it plans on cloning *Dracula*…

In my travels, I stumbled on this very nice little Web site, typographer.com, which discusses new type releases, font issues, and book and software recommendations. Very nice design throughout. Now that I look at it again, this Web log masquerading as a news site looks remarkably like Deckchairs on the Titanic. My predilections are becoming predictably prone to preposterous visual processes.

Thanks to bloggers, Mr. Lott was brought to light. This is some very good news about blogging — putting the lie to those who say Web logs are simply “personal diaries” of the unpublished and disenfranchised. Thanks, VS, for this reference!
A very happy and joyful holiday this week, all.

I’ve always had my eye on type. I think it all began when I was a kid and really took a good hard look at the RCA logo, a company that employed my grandmother for a number of years. The logos and font-faces of yesterday’s big companies, such as RCA, Ford, Chrysler, IBM, GE and many others, are back as the logos and font-faces of today’s big companies. Fascinating.
As I’ve become increasingly interested in today’s font development, I’ve found thatTypophile is a very nicely designed and useful site. It features a review of the new book called Indie Fonts edited by Richard Kegler, James Grieshaber, and Tamye Riggs, for which I recently put good money down at Amazon.com, and which contains 33 original fonts that in and of themselves seemingly outweigh the cost of the book itself ($39.95).

I believe that every person in the world has a series of questions in their head at all times or some of the time. Many of those questions may be of the existential variety (e.g. “Why am I on this planet?” or “Who is G-d to give or take life?”) but many are more mundane. Here are a few of mine while in the car:
1. Why do some automatic cars roll back on hills if you take your foot off the brake? Shouldn’t all cars not do that, unless of course they are manual?
2. How can gasoline still be so cheap and plentiful when a great majority of people say that fossil fuels are scarce and getting scarcer still? Is the government really subsidizing gasoline through highways subsidies and wars as some allege?
3. What percentage of people still have their user manuals for their cars in the glove compartment? And how many of those that do have read them?
4. Why aren’t cops pulling over people using their cell phone without a hands-free device? Isn’t it law in N.Y.?

Chafee Calls for Senate Leadership Change I’m all for getting rid of Mr. Lott, as he is a bad egg, and hasn’t truly represented his constituents, his country, or even himself. He sucks. But, and this a big but, I’m not enthralled with the way the left has sunk its teeth into this issue, which is what Bush and his Rovey friends have strategically devised. The charge of “getting rid of Lott” deflects all issues away from Bush and his party; the reality is that there are many more bad eggs in the Senate on both sides of the isle and the political left appears just too wimpy to go for broke on this one.

In my recent past, I worked on pitching a number of eGovernment contracts — I still believe they would have worked and apparently, so does President Bush, who signed the E-Government Act of 2002 today. While it remains to be seen how this money — $345 million — will really be used and whether it will go toward greater government transparency (as NYC.gov has done with its online record of public health reports about restaurants here) or toward privacy invasions, remains to be seen.

In a rare double-billing on today’s Deckchairs, one must read today’s Post editorial: Lott Must Go. Why did Lott feel the need to apologize 4 times for his ignorance of history, race, and national politics? Perhaps because he didn’t really mean it the first, second, third, or fourth time.

I don’t much like George Will or his sometimes laughable political positions. However, this article on the disarmament of another country in another time is quite powerful. Mr. Will argues in A Retrospective on Disarmament that countries were optimistic that they could multi-laterally disarm Germany after World War I. They were wrong and President Wilson was right: “Germany will deny. The governments will discuss. Public opinion will be divided, alarmed, nervous, and finally, the League unarmed will have brought to pass in the world not general peace but general uncertainty.”

FontLab, the company, recently released a new Mac version of FontLab, the product. It’s now “Carbonized” meaning it can run on the stable OS X platform and it’s very, very cool. The software allows you to design your own fonts — for the Mac, for PCs, or for anything in between.
Designing fonts used to be a job for Macromedia’s Fontographer program, which hasn’t been updated in years and is looking very unstable now (it runs on Mac OS 9). FontLab 4.5 allows you to build any type of font, including those in Hebrew or Arabic. Finally, there is a font editor and building tool that looks like it will work functional wonders. (My secret goal is to build a font that is even more beautiful, more legible and more useful than Verdana. Oops.)