Ten Most Wanted

The Director told all the staffers to make a promotional piece/advertisement for themselves. For many years I'd thought that my department should have made trading cards made for the staff or the student assistants.

I tried to make a trading card, but, in my sleep deficit induced dehabilitation, I'd never be able to do a reasonable job with Illustrator or PhotoShop. I settled for imitating a wanted poster.

The first poster I used for a model was a US Postal Inspection Service poster for Sy Hien Nguyen. Nguyen ran a multi-million dollar identity theft ring along with bad check and credit card fraud. The wanted poster is interesting for two reasons:

• The two bands of blue are slightly different shades (0:0:153 or #000099) for the reward band and slightly darker for the bottom band (1:1:154 or #01019A).
  


• None of the sans serif fonts seemed to match the lowercase "n" the poster's fonts.
  

The color difference might just be an artifact. When I went back to check on the n's, the difference I remember wasn't as obvious. What I remember was that the width of the curve of the n as it connected to the vertical stroke was far wider than for any of the fonts I had. (I should really look into the effects of sleep deficit.)

I looked for an FBI poster in the hope that it might be different. Surprise - it was. The very first FBI poster I found was Usama Bin Laden's. The FBI poster uses serifed fonts one of which looks like Times New Roman. I don't know why design people despise Times New Roman, but if it is good enough for the FBI I wasn't going to quibble. Using only MS Word 2003 and PhotoFiltre (a freeware graphics program to resize images and adjust the color) I knocked out the poster. In this poster also the blue colors are different, with the top banner being lighter (0:0:205 or #0000CC) than the color of the text (0:0:255 or #0000FF).

The scary part was looking at pictures of myself: I looked haggard. (Note to self: get some sleep.) Can someone tell me why haggard in black and white is less upsetting than haggard in color? The best I could do for humor was to describe my eyes as "Penetrating, but kind" and for "Scars and marks" enter "Displayed on request." I listed the charges against me as providing solutions and sound advice. (It was late and the muse had already left to get a beauty rest.)

The next day, the boss said she like it. Mine was different. That seems appropriate. We never got around to discussing the advertisements. Somehow that too seems appropriate. We're scheduled to go over them again at the next staff meeting. (Given that my department is supposed to be a technology department I would have thought that we should have posted the adverts to a web page to save paper, but nobody asked me. As it is other staffers cranked off a lot of colored printing.)

(Maybe I can use the extra time to make a trading card for myself. What I'd really like to do is make something with a foldout. Many from my background will cite Jethro Tull's Stand-Up album as cool, if only for the pop-up of the band when the album gatefold opened.)

Just today the head of a different department sent an e-mail with the words "Promotion" and "permanently" in the subject line. I got a sinking feeling that the poster was going into my employee file.

What a relief to find that message concerned Adobe software licensing.

Sleepless in PA/Sex Scandal

I had to go for training in rural PA this week. There were better times for training, but intervening events intervened. (I was intending to write that "The turn of events turned into this", but considering that this is dairy country and "turning" connotes souring I'll leave it as a parenthetical phrase.) I left NY very late on Sunday, survived two near collisions (the first the fault of the other guy, the other mine) to arrive at my motel about 2:30 AM.

On 4 hours sleep I staggered over to the training site. (I was smart enough to have booked a motel within walking distance of the training site - the only plus I'll give myself for this excursion.) I was surprised to find that the training I'd signed up for was not the one I expected, but what the heck, I could put it to good use anyway. (I have the feeling that I'm an observer in my own life. Hmmm I wonder what I'm going to do next. Thought balloons would be helpful, but there's no guarantee that I'd do what I think I'd do.)

Back at the motel, I couldn't find an NPR station. I was too tired to get the shakes. (It's an extension of my family's joke that my father gets withdrawal symptoms if he's without the NY Times too long.)

As a poor substitute I watched TV - a rare and mystifying event. The camera work confuses me. Why the cuts? If the producers want to show something why not run continuous footage with voice over commentary? The flashy graphics seem to be a keeping-up-with-the-Jones phenomenon. So it was on TV that I learned that Elliot Spitzer, an ostensibly respectable guy, former US attorney with a well deserved reputation for prosecuting despicable Wall Street types, now Governor of the great state of New York, was caught in a prostitution sting. Say what?

Now I'm willing to be as venial as the next guy (if it doesn't take too much effort), but I was naive enough to believe that politicians these days care too much about their ambition to do something as incredibly stupid as get involved in something like this. People delight in pointing out that I clearly overlooked the obvious: many successful people believe they can play by a different set of rules without paying the consequences. I'm so lacking in self confidence that I'm absolutely certain that any misstep I make would be caught on video cameras with unimpeachable witnesses providing color commentary.

So again I don't understand. Spitzer is the bleeping governor. Was the lack of judgment due to something less obvious than hubris? Is this a Wilbur Mills/Tidal Basin Bombshell event? (Wilbur Mills, a Congressional representative from Arkansas was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in the 1960's and acknowledged as one of the most powerful men in Washington, fell from grace after a series of events involving a stripper and alcoholism.) I add this only because I can testify to how impaired judgment can be by things as mundane as a sleep deficit.

So we bid tearful farewell to Elliot's national political ambitions and turn to the best Unreality Show in the World: the US presidential contest.

Sweet Old World/Emmylou Harris

She said, "I've got the lyrics from one of your damn whiny woman singers stuck in my head:

Together with another one
Didn't you think anyone loved you?
See what you lost when you left this world.

"It's Lucinda William's song, 'Sweet Old World' sung by Emmylou Harris on her 'Wrecking Ball' album." I said. (I didn't add that Emmylou doesn't qualify as one of the whiny woman singers whose voices twist my heart, but that's another story or that I was surprised that I could identify the lyrics provenance like the old days. In the old days I might have been able to supply the track listing.)

This post is to document the fact that my memory sometimes works and gives me a chance to say that Emmylou Harris deserves her accolades and respect.