|
|
|
fake wine label
Sunday, March 12 2017
Neither of us were aware of the change to daylight savings time, so when Gretchen arrived at the Woodstock bookstore for her shift of selling books, she was an hour late. But it didn't matter. It was yet another unseasonably cold day and nobody came by to browse the stacks until 20 minutes after she opened the store.
[REDACTED]
In the past I've been able, on one occasion, to get Adobe Photoshop to make text follow a bézier curve, but then on another occasion I tried and gave up. Today I needed curved text to make a fake wine bottle label. Tonight we'd be celebrating Nancy's 50th birthday (which will actually be on the 16th), and as a gag present I wanted to give her a bottle of her favorite kind of wine (pinot grigio) with a label referring to an oft-referred-to segment of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! featuring the fictional Dr. Steven Brule getting drunk on wine somewhere "in wine country." And to do this, I needed an arch of text over Dr. Brule's head. I'd make a curve and start typing in the text and it would end up jumbled or backwards. I finally figured out that I had to make the initial bézier curve from right to left, and then the text (starting from the left side of the curve) did the right thing. It's possible I was working under the handicap of several bugs that have been fixed for many years; the version of Photoshop I use is 8.0, which dates to October, 2003. Here was the result of my work:
I didn't actually have a bottle of pinot to put the label on, so I set off (with the dogs) for the little strip mall in West Hurley having the Hurley Ridge Market and a liquor store (among other things). I went into Hurley Ridge in hopes that they'd have an adhesive suitable for attaching a paper label to a wine bottle. While there, I also got a big bag of Garden of Eatin' brand white corn chips, a tray of vegan sushi, and a six pack of a new Lagunitas ale called Aunt Sally. For adhesive, I was thinking rubber cement, which is what I would've used as a kid or in my 20s. They didn't have that, but they had something that turned out to be similar but better called Helping Hand Household Contact Cement.
As for wine, I went into the liquor store and bought a $10 bottle of something called Villa Pozzi from Sicily.
Back at the house, I used a knife and paint thinner to remove the bottle's two existing labels and attached the new label. Gretchen returned home unexpectedly early, and it was at that point I learned we were on daylight savings time and already running late for Nancy's get-together. The final touch for my customized wine bottle was to use black paint to blot out all the text on the black lead (or plastic) material around the cork. By the time I was done, my bottle looked like a legitimate new brand of wine, at least if one didn't look too closely.
The get-together was happening down at Ray & Nancy's place in Old Hurley. We brought the dogs, of course, because it was partly a dog party. Jack would be there, as well as Maggie, the dog belonging to Ray & Nancy's long-time friend Weirdo Mary. In addition to Ray, Nancy, Mary, and Sarah the Vegan, Rick the pottery guy was there as well. Though he started us off with big fat spring rolls, he had made a mostly-Indian meal featuring rice and two kinds of curry: one with chick peas and the other with spinach. Strangely, the entire meal tasted low-sodium, something that had never in the past been characteristic of Ray's cooking. Perhaps he got a bad blood pressure reading recently. As for beverages, after an initial cocktail containing gin and ginger beer, mostly all I drank was prosecco.
Nancy was so delighted with her customized wine bottle that she declared she would never drink it, and put it on a shelf in the dining room. This is how it looked there:
There was a little tension between Maggie and Ramona, though the two never fought. Maggie is something of a "gentle alpha" and Ramona had a habit of picking fights with other female dogs. To keep bad things from happening, Mary put Maggie in a bedroom for awhile. I was shocked at how old Maggie was looking. The last time I'd seen her she'd looked like a middle-aged dog but now she was all grey around her mouth, her eyes were cloudy with cataracts, and there was a hairless pink peanut-sized growth on her face.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170312 feedback
previous | next |
