It Sounds Yummy, I Think

There's an art to spacing your letters. It's called kerning and is often spoken about in the relationship between two letters, or kern pairs. (It's got nothing to do with an old Scottish couple pulling faces. That's gurn pairs.)

It's the art of moving the type in and out from each other to make the font look good, or "have good colour". It's the opposite of having a rigidly set and unchanging distance between every letter. I don't know much more about it other than the following.

A normal quality font will have between 200 and 500 pre-built kern pairs and a high quality font can have up to a thousand. I know that capital A and capital V should be drawn in together a bit if they're next to each other, and that 'Clint Eastwood' should never be capitalised, for fear of it being misread at a distance.

There's an ultimate form of mal-kerning at a set of lights near my place that always makes me smile. I'm not sure why, it's not even logical. In a hand-built sign, where the owner has put each letter on a seperate sheet of A4, he's gone a bit big with his 'O'. It really looks like you're staring in the window of a 'Factory Cutlet'.

It's an Easy Mistake to Make

I had a dream that I met a guy called Alexander Graham Poe, the inventor of the electric vampire. I remember thinking at the time "That will make a good plot for a sci-fi horror piece." When I woke up, I realised how silly it was. Alexander Graham Poe invented the electric raven, not vampire.

Miner Disturbance

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you – BASTARD!

If you don’t know what that bird is instantly, be grateful. It is a Noisy Miner and it isn’t a droll nickname, like being called ‘bluey’ when you're a red-head.

Not to be confused with the Indian Myna (who causes all sorts of problems for people in completely different ways) this one is an Australian native. You are therefore not allowed to trap them and do youth-in-asia on them.

First to the Myna that isn’t so much of a problem to me, the Indian Myna.

It’s the black and brown jobby with the yellow beak. A good mate has had his house made unliveable on occasion, by having hordes of them move into inaccessible parts of his roof. They build huge nests and then go about recolonising the rest of the house with their mites (and that’s not a fond colloquial term for their offspring. I really mean their parasites).

In a complicated manoeuvre involving a split level trap and a load of dog-food, he has managed to trap dozens and dozens of the mongrels. The trap comes with a canvas sleeve that fits over it. The sleeve has a built in hose that goes straight to the exhaust pipe of your car. Neat. Unless of course you have a brand new car that has the type of engine that puts out cleaner air than it takes in. No joke. He described pulling the canvas off the cage with a magician's flourish - to reveal 4 and twenty mynas, all fresh eyed and breathing deeply. Plan B, Borrow an old car.

My problem is with the intractable attention seeker, the Noisy Miner. (Strange that they should be spelt so differently too). I have been driven out of the house some afternoons by these things with their ceaseless ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma.

It is not a pleasant call. It is not a musical noise. It does not allow you to commune with nature. They don’t do it to a particular rhythm, they do it near, they do it far. They do it from dawn till dusk. They drive other birds out of the area because… well because other birds haven’t paid quite the same amount in real estate as I have and can just pick up and go. I would too if I only had to look for a branch with approximately the right circumference.

Knowing that I can’t do anything harmful or soul-releasing to these feathered fiends but wanting to move them on, I bought a truly extravagant water pistol. One of those ones that you can ‘over-pump’ to really build up a bit of pressure.

The result? Noisy Miners can hear me starting to pump the thing up, they fly just out of water pistol range, and then when they see that I have exhausted the water pressure in the thing, fly in and poo at me. They actually make aggressive little bombing runs at me now.

I can’t help but admire them a little.

Felt Like a Good Polling

I had a tiny little poll running over there (points right) and it has not helped at all. I suppose if I had made the questions more definitive and easier to follow, rather than just amusing myself, it might have turned out a little clearer. Hanging chads I done tells ya.

The question was whether I should move Fahrenheit 72 off the blog, because it sort of gums the thing up. Essentially, F72 needs to be a certain number of words, and I know that some of you enjoy it. But if you’re not interested, it can be off-putting scrolling, scrolling, scrolling to get to the shorter more easily digested frippery that I clutter the interweb with. Let’s face it. If it’s too hard, you link out and elsewhere and I’ve lost the audience.

The results show, that of the massive sample taken:

10% say ‘Yes’ move F72, but link from this page.

40% say ‘No’, don’t move it.

40% say ‘Go and own the Bird Flew Press domain and stick it there’, which in essence is a vote for a move, so 50% say “move it”.

10% say stop it all together you twit. Which I have to be able to cop on the chin. I have wandered into the semi-public domain and put it out there, so there’s always a chance the reaction is not going to be what you expected and you just have to man-up and take it. You just have to say to yourself “Well AGA, you were asking for it, and if you divide the troops a little on the way, well so be it, it just shows that you are doing something right…maybe.” You just have to remind yourself that in the early days of being a radio-host, people could be a little unkind if you didn’t meet their tiny-minded, fuck-arse expectations, but you eventually won them over, despite the fact that it cost a little of your soul to do so. You didn’t lose that much sleep over it, and all you have to do is 'keep on keeping on'. You don’t want to measure yourself by the knockers, that means the death of all fun and creative urges. It doesn’t worry you so much anymore. Years of counselling and drugs have made sure that the bile rises less. The funny blurry effect when you’re watching the television is not as frequent now. The crushing, personality-blow headaches don’t distract you from the task at hand (as you sit there on the long, lonely, cold nights in The Bomb, staking out dead-end after dead-end on the trail of Fruitnose) in anything other than the most lightly paralysing ways. No. You’re fine with it AGA; no probs. Angels fly because they take themselves lightly. Spruce up your wings little AGA. Clear up rainy face.

I have made a decision.

I will move Fahrenheit 72 off the blog. Eventually. (Hah. That showed ‘em) And I’m not going to stop the case either. Other pan-dimensional gum-shoes might give up at such fierce resistance, but not this agency, oh no siree. AGADA is on the case.

Like a Tourist From the Ashes

I had to send something to China recently and found it necessary to look at international shipping prices. (It was for Jana Rawlinson’s spare toe - I hope I’m not the only one amused that she called a press conference to apologise for being a drama queen.)

At short notice it was almost cheaper to send the Smurf in the seat with an overnight bag, and the goodies in the hold. (It was even cheaper per head to have me in the seat, the goodies in the hold and the Smurf in the overnight bag, but HR got onto me again about Occupational Smurf and Safety.)

In our research we came across another of those cultural divides that are continually cropping up as we close in on the Olympics. One of the best deals we found was from Air China, and it was for a “Phoenix Fare.” I have to make sure that Smurf has his flame retardant under-chunders on. He's going to have a great time.

Semi Detached is Not Just About Small Houses

Usually I feel pretty well connected to the world. I drive by the seat of my pants. I use the phone to make arrangements to see people in person. I eat too much at restaurants when I’m having fun. I buy music cds with money I earn at a job where I work with a team of friends and colleagues, where we work with actual stuff.

But!

I think the forces of Meh are trying to upload me. I dreamt last night that I was writing a blog read by strangers, in a Sims game. The game was being played in 3rd Life, which is a sub-reality of Second Life, which I was going into remotely through terminal services, using a wireless keyboard and monitor goggles with built in earphones.

At times like those, you can wake up with your personality in a glass by your bed and a zombie body going off to work for you.

Nursing Home Plight Worsens

"It has just been terrible," said Ida Lump, resident of the Seeping Pad Retirement Home.

"We've been overrun with stray popes. They come in here, and if they can't steal some of the gruel... they chew the table and try to lick the varnish off the sideboard. It's not like we've got a lot to start with."

This indignity was not enough it appears. Earlier in the week Ida and her fellow residents were evacuated for an emergency fumigation for a pilgrim infestation.

"It was quite strange," said Esther Estherhausen. "I'd be looking for the remote control, move the cushion, and there'd be hordes of the little buggers running for the shadows chanting 'Go Jesus'."

Normalcy and sense will be returned to the home as soon as the eradication is complete, promised a manager who preferred not to be named.

Three or Four Days of Night

You can't use the garlic at that range, it's not effective. It's stakes or silver bullets.