Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   business opportunities on 14th Street
Sunday, January 5 1997
The sign finally went up today at the Rising Sun Bakery. This was after I put some yellow high lights on the sparrows and put another colour, light grey-blue, on the white lettering at the bottom (this lettering had been too overpoweringly white). The design of the entire sign had grown as I went along, like the way I paint my paintings. There'd been no original plan, just me doing things that were necessary and then tweaking things for balance. Planning beforehand is something I almost never do, except in a very rudimentary back-of-the-envelope manner. Even when I built my shaque, I developed it pretty much as I went along, and it turned out excellent.

I'd been harbouring doubts about the sign as it neared completion; it was starting to look garish to me. But once I'd laquered it and put it up on its pole, it far outshone all the other signs on 14th street both in terms of general design and creative impact. The others all suddenly looked like bland design-school knock offs.

This was, as it turned out, not just my own personally biased opinion. It seems that next door to the Bakery, where a bicycle shop had been, there is now a new frame shop and, beyond that, a new sushi bar. Both places are in need of new signs the same size and shape as the one I'd just made. And as they worked away trying to get their businesses arranged today, the people starting those businesses couldn't help but notice my fresh new sign. The result? People from both new businesses approached me to make inquiries about my possibly making them signs too. If that isn't an endorsement of my efforts, then what is? For the record, the sushi people actually approached Jen Fariello, who was at the time simultaneously promoting my sign career and testing the waters to perhaps get a sushi slinging job herself.

Later I went into the frame guy's shop and chatted with him a little about the possibility of my designing his sign. He's very into early 20th Century print graphics as well as framing and wishes to call his place "Great Graphix" and have a neon sign in the window as well as a garish painted sign on the pole outside. He and I exchanged addresses, but we didn't really get a chance to talk because of Bakery employee Heliardo. He'd gone in to the frame shop with Jen and was interested in framing (Heliardo does beautiful cubist-influenced oil paintings using muted earth-tones). But Heliardo, despite having little command of English (he's Portuguese), loves to chat and completely dominate conversations. And that's just what he did, never really giving me a chance to negotiate any business while he droned on in mostly incomprehensible Latin vowels. So eventually I headed for home to sleep. It was mid afternoon.

In the morning it had rained a little, but then the skies had cleared and temperatures had soared into the mid seventies. By 1am (when I awoke), the winds had picked up and the temperatures had dropped dramatically. In the far off distance the ski industry could be heard heaving a great sigh.

At Comet tonight, I have perfected the art of JPEG disassembly and reassembly with tables. Now finally I have the first super-cool implementation: An American Flag that turns into a scene from Big Fun! To check it out, go to the Big Fun Introduction page. It's a little distorted and there aren't any stars, but it's quite an achievement since it required very precise selecting in Photoshop to get exactly fourteen-pixel-wide stripes. If any of you guys are lucky enough to have really slow modems, it will probably look amazing as it loads. You guys who don't have at least Netscape 3.0x or Microsoft Internet Exploiter won't get the colours.

I'll probably have to move the page to a Dutch server when the enormously popular anti-flag-desecration amendment is added to our American constitution (every day it seems we discover another dreadful right that it has granted to us unfortunate citizens).

appropriate here beside my smug gloating:
MY FAVERET WALTER MILLER WORD: poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage poorselfimage


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?970105

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