Moving Day and Blank Vintage Postcards

Once again I'm moving from apartment to apartment. It seems I can't stay anywhere longer than two years. But here are a few things that have come out of my semimigratory condition.

I now have a full list of everywhere I've lived since 1996, when I moved from St. Cloud State Unversity campus to Minneapolis. This is important because occasionally some stupid insurance form or credit card or whatever else needs an excruciatingly complete background of all the places I've lived. In the course of moving I tend to discover heaps of paper that have not been touched in years, and these may include junk mail or official mail that it turns out I don't need to save. On these, of course, are all my old addresses, so in the last three or four pages of my Moleskine address book I have recorded all of my past addresses in chronological order, for my own reference. This has proven to be handy on several occasions.

As well, among the long-neglected property I'm turning up are boxes and envelopes of antique documentation and photos. These are material my mother asked if I would scan and preserve digitally, as once upon a time I attempted to break into genealogy and that's who she thinks I am now (which is cool, because now I have a lot of military certificates from the Civil War). Also, I salvaged a box of old photos my wife's family was going to throw away, when we moved her parents out of their Wisconsin home and emptied the house for resale. In this lot I'm finding amazing old photographs of Russian and Polish immigrants, mounted on dense cardboard or particle board squares. I can't understand how her family would be so cavalier about these treasures!

This latter thing has turned into a small project, into which I've plunged all my energy as a time-killer and a distraction from packing. I'm terrible, but at the same time, observe: blank postcard backs. Through the miracle of Picasa I've digitally removed any writing and produced an empty postcard, upon which anyone who cares to may write over through their own graphics program, for purposes of novelty over social media. I'm not explaining myself very well, so here: when you upload an image of writing to Twitter, you can use way more than 140 characters:

Scanning in vintage postcards means I get to screw around with new tweets/status updates, &c. pic.twitter.com/WQncqWk4eM
— Christian Wilkie (@CWWilkie) May 11, 2014

 Alton Brown turned to this format when fans criticized his typos, and he instead hand-wrote notes on Post-Its®.

So if you'd like, here are five blank postcard backs from vintage postcards, from (as far as I can tell) three different nations. Fun, eh? I hope so.

Processing, Processing...

Intel billboard, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Yeah, it should've been easier for me to find work overseas, red tape regardless.

Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Quiz

Just a little blurb between breaking news stories and startling events in the worlds of Language and Postal Services:

If you're reading this blog, you'll find it worthwhile to haunt Merriam-Webster's games section. Lovely crosswords and other games, usually gadgets retooled to center around words instead of garden creatures or gems. You know what I mean.

But what's really cool, what I really enjoy, is their Vocabulary Quiz! You get ten words that pop up sequentially, and each one has four attendant words: you race against the clock to select the best synonym. It's a real test of vocabulary--many of the words are easy or medium, but once in a while they throw in hard or genuinely obscure words.

On the other hand, if you have a good vocabulary, it's simply a physical test of hand-eye coordination and response times. My first score was 3200 points, pretty good for my age bracket (oh yes, they show you how other people your age did!), the average score being 2730. I improved that to 3800 points, and yesterday I scored 3940, after three tries. A lot of that is luck, of course, when the obscure word happens to be one I know.

That leads me to believe a perfect score would be 4000 points, and the only thing that holds me back is my response time. I'll have to be satisfied with that.

The Subtleties of Font

How many of you have ever practiced calligraphy? Many people think this means one specific style of writing, usually some form of italic or maybe even a German fraktur. In actuality, calligraphy is much more general than that: it's the discipline of very neat handwriting.

That handwriting can come in a variety of forms, which people call fonts, typefaces, or "hands" in casual conversation with other calligraphers. The accouterments that come with rigorous calligraphic execution are numerous and intimidating, and the thousands of hours of practice it requires may be off-putting. Yet at one time, penmanship was considered so essential for a civilized society, especially for anyone intending to do any kind of business, that the Palmer method of handwriting was mandatory in a young student's courseload.

Calligraphy really isn't as intimidating as all that. Once you reconcile yourself with the meditative discipline it requires--an increasing awareness of your own slight muscle movements, a calming focus in your mind--you may begin to understand and appreciate it as a world entirely of its own. And it's not difficult at all to practice, once you realize that handwriting actually comes up often in your life. Any time you're putting pen or pencil to paper, exploit that as a few more seconds for disciplined practice: addresses on bills, shopping lists, postcards, Post-It notes to coworkers, &c.

Image: The Atlantic

When I began teaching myself calligraphy (I had a miserable desk job with lots of downtime, so I started practicing drawing evenly spaced loops across a pad of paper), I tried to plunge into an "advanced" font, a very elaborate one that came much later down the timeline. But as I blundered through it, got control of it and then too familiar with it, my "hand" started slipping backward through time and I saw its predecessor fonts appearing on my page. This was a fascinating and magical process for me! Not only was I personally touched by the history of handwriting, I was able to begin to develop my own personal font--not one I'd use for writing checks, but something that would look nice on parchment and with certain acrylic inks.

Oh yes, you develop your own tastes for writing implements, inks, and papers as well.

Now it seems there's an iPad app, Typography Insight, designed to help people who work with fonts appreciate the subtle differences between fonts. I have no fear of technological culture, and I think an app like this only stands to reinforce this hobby of mine (if tidy handwriting is only a "hobby").

Typography Insight: iPad App Teaches Fonts Like Never Before

One Acceptable Replacement for Mail

I have to say, I'm a little impressed. Wasn't I just ranting about hating all the crap mail my mail slot fills up with on a weekly basis?

This isn't the total solution to this problem but it's a step in the right direction. My city government is working with Zumbox to transition from physical, analog postal mail to digital e-mail distribution! That's kinda cool. So anything that my local government would mail to me will instead go to my Inbox, where my Gmail will reckon with it handily. They're also pushing other big mailers (AT&T, Verizon, State Farm, &c.) to convert as well--that's less paper being printed and less fuel burned to produce and transport it.

I'm all in favor of this. I still want hand-written letters and postcards, but my junk mail and bills would serve me better as e-mail alerts rather than physical clutter.

Searching for Mailboxes!

Now that I'm back into my postcard exchange program, I had to get my mail forwarded from where it was being collected (my mom's house) to my apartment. No problem, except I wrote "St" instead of "Ave." Mail still gets to me, but with angry addendum scrawled around the destination address.

Easily fixed: I submitted new address change cards using (at the postal clerk's advisory) the address I'd been using for the last six months and my corrected address. Didn't need to make a note of the mistaken address at all.

Fine and good, but Postcrossing isn't just about receiving mail--it's about sending, too, obviously. There's a mail slot in my apartment building's bank of mailboxes, a slot crudely gouged out of the slender aluminum door, captioned with the taped note "OUTGOING." But this slot is barely big enough for a business envelope and can in no way accommodate a postcard without folding or mutilation. Spindling's not necessary.

Image: LifeHacker

So where do I send my mail? Where, indeed: more USPS mailboxes are being dismantled and removed all the time. In my leisurely perambulations about my neighborhood I've seen nary a one. This means all my outgoing mail has to accumulate in a pile until I have an errand that brings me downtown--if I can find a mailbox downtown, of course.

If I visit my in-laws at their senior living apartments, they have a perfectly adequate mail slot in their postal foyer. That's not always convenient, though, since my wife and I are against owning a car. It would be cheap to rent an Hourcar and visit them for a couple hours, and cheaper still to catch a bus (though the trip down there takes nearly an hour, and an hour back... if we leave while the buses are still running), but seriously?

Seriously? That's the best I can do if I want to send a letter?

Actually, no, I can do better. A very casual Google search turned up two mailbox locators, where you type in your city/state or your ZIP code, and they turn up results for mailboxes in your area.

LifeHacker found this Mailbox Locator program being hosted by Payphone Project (obviously, someone needed to find payphones). It's... okay... It seems to rely on anecdotal evidence for updating its database. People report in and note "this one's no longer here" or "got taken away a couple days ago or so." Maybe that's the best we can go on. Whose responsibility, really, is it to notify us where the mailboxes are? ...Arguably, that of the USPS, would be the first guess I'd hazard. But there's nothing wrong with the citizens rising up and contributing this information, answering a real need.

The responses are entirely text-based, there's no image or pictures here. It would be difficult for me to picture the address locations of each box and I'd end up typing them into Google Maps anyway. Additional confusion ensued when I wasn't keeping track of which search bar I entered my information into. Type it into the one on top for the results you want. Entering it into the search bar just below it (the more obvious one, I think) and you get a bunch of Google results that come up in the Mailbox Locator display window. They don't look like the list of addresses you'd get ordinarily, but both kinds of results do show up after a full window of ads.

But the one I like is Mailbox Map, which uses Google Maps as part of its function. Again, type in your city/state or ZIP code, and it actually provides a graphic illustration of mailboxes (including UPS and USPS offices proper).

I love Google Maps, and I love data aggregators, so this will be the application for me.

Now, the only thing to see is how accurate this tool is. It looks great, but it won't mean anything if the mailboxes aren't where it says they are. And I'd go out and check now, only we're currently experiencing a two-day torrential downpour, so... I guess my postcards will just have to hang out with me a while longer.

UPDATE: I went out looking for the mailboxes in my area when the rain let up. Mailbox Map listed three mailboxes within a three-block area of my apartment. Walking to each site, I confirmed that none of these exist anymore. I suspect the same is true for those mailboxes a few blocks further out in any direction. I tried to look up mailboxes in Mailbox Locator and it simply did not have anything listed for my area at all.

Further UPDATE: Duh. USPS has its own collection box locator. I didn't even think of that. I'm not sure how accurate it is: I found three mailboxes through Mailbox Map and the USPS site doesn't one of the ones I found (again, by walking out to each location). It did list five in my area, however, and I can confirm the location of one of these.

The Bushido of Editing: Serving a Corrupt Lord

All right, cats and kitties, this is the real word as it has come down from the mountain.

According to AP style, "e-mail" is now written as "email." The Associated Press issued a wire advisory on March 18, 2011 (yes, I know this is three months later, but I was out of the country, and none of my friends care enough about such things to give me a heads-up).

How do I feel about this? Not happy. Up to this point, I was the keen-edged sword held to the throat of every lazy, uneducated lummox who tried to remove the hyphen from "e-mail." After all, "email" is already a word: a type of pottery design, from 12th century French email, etymologically linked to enamel.


The only reason they're permitting this, this... this damned typographic elision is for the worst reason of all, and it is the reason language changes all over the world, all up and down the timeline. So many people have so consistently gotten it so wrong, the educated bastion of sanity has finally slumped to its desk in defeat and permitted--nay, endorsed, by a cadre of quisling nabobs--this oversight's passage into law. That's all it takes! Language was formed by reason and logic, and it "evolves" because people are too lazy to learn/practice it correctly, so the errors are recorded for posterity!

Madness!

Imagine you went to buy a car and drove it home, and it fell apart on the highway while you're booting along (at ten miles over the speed limit, in all likelihood. Be honest). Not pretty, right? How could this have happened? It seems a number of workers on the auto assembly line stopped tightening certain bolts. "You know what I meant," they groused. "It looks like a car. There's no breakdown in communication." Factory admin were upset at first, but the workers were so unified and persistent in the remission of their duties, the factory rolled over and made it a rule that no bolt should be tightened.


That's what happened to the hyphen in "electronic mail." Thanks, lunkheads and rubes, you've bludgeoned your way into yet another "evolution" of the language. I accepted "Web site" transitioning to "website," enforced last year. I adjusted to how badly the marketing industry reapplies the word "creative" to mean nearly anything, to the point where this is an acceptable sentence: "The creative creative created a creative creative," when at some point in the past we might've said, "One of our graphic designers produced some illustrations." Oh, corporate speak, don't even get me started on corporate speak! There are some lines in the sand I will not only draw but fortify... but, as an editor, when the new commandment comes down, I have to enforce the misguided doggerel like "email."

But only in AP. Step to me in Chicago or AMA, and I'll speak respectfully of your travails to your next of kin.

Cigars and Pens, All in One

Sorry about the prolonged absence from this place. I've run into a string of technical errors--not the least of which has been my laptop literally burning out (you'd call burning plastic and ozone a "warning flag," neh?) and developing workarounds for it (it will accept an external monitor, for one thing).

And now Blogger (or Blogger in Draft) won't let me upload photos! Each attempt yields a "Server Rejected": errormsg, so I'm not trying anymore. Workaround: I can upload images directly from Picasa on my hard drive to Picasaweb online, and then link to the photos from there.

That's what I've done. I'm listening to All Irish Radio (few things gladden and inflame my heart like Internet radio access) and backing up another blog with a separate online album--I truly enjoy online/computer geek-out campaigns like this one. But now I'm going to update this blog because I've been so remiss in my duties.

This is a pen case that was salvaged from my in-laws' former house. Rebecca's sister Rachel found it and asked me if I wanted it. When my face lit up and my voice failed, Rebecca said, "I told you, you should've saved it for his birthday." What is it? It's a nice brass letter opener with a wood handle, but the really cunning thing is the ballpoint pen disguised as a cigar. It has a great textural feel and the coloration is superb. The ink? Well, maybe I can modify a Mont Blanc refill to go in there or something, but it is a great-looking pen. Rachel associated it with me not just because of my predilection for stationery but my interest in cigars as well.