June 2007 Archives

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SATURDAY. After what had been a rough Friday night for practically everyone:

-Continental's tour de force performance on the streets of Miami Beach followed by a close, personal conversation with Senor Porcelain;

-Gilby getting his t-shirt and his key stolen at the pool, leading to the vice cop security guard busting out door down at 5:30 am;

-My losing out on the hot tubs sweepstakes when I couldn't get into my room to change into shorts because Continental had my key;

Saturday was shaping up to be an epic closing to our run in Miami. At the very least, there was no shortage of classic stories.

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FRIDAY. Friday morning, there was serious shopping to be done, so in spite getting just over 2 hours sleep, Dick and I headed across the street to the parking garage and climbed into The Bull. The first stop was "Art Deco Burger King", a BK in an art deco structure that made it OK to eat chain food on vacation. Actually, BK started in Miami so if you eat at one in Miami its not a chain and therefore not in violation of "The Men Of Frutiger Dining Charter" which explicitly states:

"When out of town, at no time will it be acceptable behavior to dine at a chain restaurant. Furthermore, the mere suggestion of dining at a chain restaurant will not be tolerated."

Seriously, if you go on vacation and you eat at Applebee's, Chili's, TGI Friday's, or Olive Garden...I don't know how to say this nicely...YOU SUCK. YOU ARE LAME. Frankly, you shouldn't eat at those places when you're home either, but particularly not when you're on vacation. Go somewhere local. I came up with this decree after a trip to Cincinnati with Cliff Glypha where we ate at TGI Friday's twice in three days, and I decided NEVER AGAIN. Now, where was I? Ah yes.

I've spent the last five days in Miami Beach, USA, and have not had time to properly document the week yet. That will come tomorrow and Thursday. So stop back tomorrow for the Part I of Polyfro in South Beach -- including YouTube videos, photos galore and more!

You bet.

"I don't know how you guys can do that."

That was Glypha on Saturday, upon hearing that Dick Herculanum and myself had been out with several friends for drinks after work on Wednesday, and then closed down the Homy Inn later that night...and then had drinks at four places on Friday night, taking in a concert at one stop. "How can you do that and get up in the morning? Aaaarrgh! Dammit!"

How? Why does one ask a question that one knows the answer to before finishing said question? Ah, the mysteries of the universe are vast and varied, no?

So Friday, we started with a little after-work pre-party action, and with the six-pack of Tecate, the six-pack of Bud Light, the bottle of wine and most of the six-pack of Sam Jackson, I mean, Sam Adams gone, we moved on for dinner. It was on the way to dinner that we learned that there might be a possibility of a free ticket to The Faint concert later that night. Interesting...

If you're a designer like me, or you've ever worked with a designer, you might be familiar with placeholder text. That's right, Lorum Ipsum Dolor -- I'm looking at you, baby!

Me: "What's up, Lorum?"

LID: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua."

Me: "Its all greek to me."

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum">According to Wikipedia</a>, "In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is standard placeholder text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout. Lorem ipsum also serves as placeholder text in mock-ups of visual design projects before the actual words are inserted into the finished product. When used in this manner, it is often called greeking."

Where am I going with this? Stick around and you'll find out!

So, on top of the GI Joe and He-Man movies recently announced, I now hear there is a Thundercats movie in the works. This should be hilarious as it develops. I take a lot of heat for my steadfast refusal to back off my support of He-Man, because dammit, I loved He-Man when I was six and I'm not changing my mind now. Hell, a couple of weeks ago I even wore a Masters of the Universe shirt to a party...and from the reaction you'd have thought I wore a shirt of "The John Mayer Coldplay Trio". That bad.

Now, my brother who is three years younger than me was a Thundercats guy. Which by correlation meant I saw every episode, as we had to compromise on what we watched after school. In my mind, the beauty of Thundercats has always been that detractors have to work a lot harder to discredit the show. With He-Man, you can pull out the "He-Man/Prince Adam is gay" thing. One of my roommates in college would argue over He-Man with me, but knowing the usual argument didn't work with me -- who gives a crap if he is/was gay, does that change the fact that he was a first rate bad ass? -- he had to work a little harder. And that, of course, is extraordinarily entertaining. Anytime a person has to go beyond the "easy" bullet point and come up with something else to discredit a show, its entertaining.

His claim was that the logo on He-Man's crest was eerily similar to that of the Aryan Nation, and that his blonde hair/blue eyes power combo stood as further proof of his white supremacist nature. See what happens when you have to work a little harder to discredit something? It ends up being hilarious. No way He-Man was a white supremacist. How ridiculous!

Many years ago at the infancy of the medium, I had another blog on Blogger called "Blog'd After Dark". The odd name was, I suppose, a takeoff of Tone Loc's 1989 masterpiece, his Sgt. Pepper's, his ZOSO: "Loc'd After Dark". But it also applied because, well, I blogged it after dark. Makes sense, right? Probably not.

I quickly lost patience with the early blog technology and abandoned it after just over five weeks due to the software's poor compatibility with the Mac. The blog ran from January to March, 2003 -- its not there anymore, but the address was one of those generic "bloggdafterdark.blogspot.com" things. Heinous. That summer, with an upgrade in their technology for Mac, I gave it another try -- this time at the now-famous "polyfro.com" domain.

One of the posts from Blog'd After Dark was a recap of my trip to Cincinnati with Cliff Glypha for a Midwest Design Retreat. I stumbled across a Word Doc version of it over the weekend on an unmarked CD of documents, and found it an amusing read. Its over four years old, but what the hell, here it is. There's enough interesting things in the post to overcome the rather dated nature of it -- particularly the caution-to-the-wind approach I took to telling stories of a rather personal nature with the privacy of a pseudonym and an anonymous Blogger site that none of my friends read. Anyway, I've made some fairly substantial edits to bring it up to my current standards of decency and nomenclature, but other than that, this is pretty much how I recalled our trip to Cincinnati in February of 2003.

Enjoy. You bet.

In just 16 days, I'll be in Miami. South Beach to be exact -- the only thing seperating our hotel from the beach is a pool. The street they show on the opening credits of CSI:Miami while blaring "Won't Get Fooled Again"? That's where we're staying for this conference...a ridiculously close distance to bars that stay open until 5am.

Did I say conference? Yep, I did. The same graphic design organization leadership retreat that took us to Austin and St. Louis and Pittsburgh and San Francisco now takes us to Miami. And guess what? The Twins are in town playing the Marlins that weekend -- and I won't be able to see a game. Lets not go there, its kind of a sore subject.

Anyway, a trip to Miami seemed like a good excuse to buy Miami Vice on DVD. The TV show, not the lame-ass movie from last summer. I'd always resisted doing so, but the length of the episodes coincides perfectly with the amount of time I ride the exercise bike every day, and combined with the fact that I will actually be in Miami I could no longer justify not owning at least Season One and quite possibly Season Two. Problem was, nobody had it in stock. Well, Amazon did, if I was willing to wait five-seven days for it to get here -- hell, I'll be in Miami in 16, so that's no good.

Our buddy Gilby had been planning to have a party last Friday night anyway, but when I went to write it on my calendar, I noticed something. Saturday was the one-year anniversary of the beginning of VOSSTAG. Meaning that at 12:01 am on the night of the party, we would need to celebrate the anniversary properly -- and 4/5 of the original VOSSTAG crew would be there!

I ran this idea past both Gilby and Dick Herculanuum, both of which agreed it was a dominant idea. But how to celebrate it? How about with world-famous Tangermeister shots -- available at, as far as we can tell, just one bar anywhere in the country. Seriously, all the places we've collectively been to, we've never seen them available anywhere, and its not for a lack of looking...

The only bar that serves them is the faux-dive bar The High Life Lounge in Des Moines, a place that is relatively new but built to look like its been around for 50 years. Consisting of 3 oz. of Tang and 1 oz. of Jagermeister, a Tangermeister shot is ideally served in a bomb shot glass so that the two liquids don't mix until you tip it back for consumption.

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I got an email from my Mom a couple of weeks ago while they were in Savannah, Georgia on vacation. "Did you know there's a movie about Helvetica? They're showing it at the design school here."

Yes, and sadly, the film has yet to come to Omaha. "Oh man, they're showing Helvetica there? It hasn't been here yet, might have to wait for it to be on DVD..."

"You must feel so awed that you have such a cutting edge Mom that I would recognize a film like this and know you'd get a kick! Too funny."

Indeed. Ah, Helvetica. The font of Target, American Airlines, Toyota, Verizon, Panasonic, Tupperware, Nestle, BMW, the list goes on and on like one of my stories. The font the IRS uses on income tax forms. The font used everywhere throughout the NYC subway. See what I mean? Ah, Helvetica, you glorious beauty, you.