John McCain and Sarah Palin have been drowning themselves in the toilet for the last several weeks, and it appears that their noses will barely be above water by November 4. But at least they’re starting to be upfront about their only remaining strategy for getting into the White House. Check out this poster from the surprisingly honest ad campaign they launched this morning:

More stuff like this is here.

I have a spy at The Weekly Standard—let’s call him Z.—and he emailed me earlier today to say that Bill Kristol locked himself in his office first thing this morning so he could go into InDesign and crank out his latest Standard column about Sarah Palin. Kristol’s been writing about Palin for both the Standard and The New York Times, so he’s having trouble coming up with fresh justifications for her candidacy. It’s pretty thin gruel at this point, and he’s getting frustrated. Apparently his cursing has been audible throughout the floor all morning. Kristol stepped out for lunch a few minutes ago, and Z. went into the publishing system and printed up a copy of Kristol’s work-in-progress. Z. just emailed me a scan of the page:

(Visit the magazine covers tag for more exclusive Panopticist scoops.)

The scan might be hard to read at this size, so I’ve retyped the text and posted it after the jump.

[Continue reading "Exclusive: William Kristol Is Having Trouble Writing His Next Column About Sarah Palin"...]

This week’s issue just arrived in the mail, and it’s a keeper:

(Yes, I made this. For more stuff like it, see the magazine covers tag. The two primary fonts are Knockout and Mercury, both from the geniuses at Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)

More Potus info is here.

I swear I’m interested in things other than text and numerals that appear onscreen during television shows, but this is so interesting I have to share.

Fringe, the new Fox show co-created by Lost visionary J.J. Abrams, debuts tomorrow night at 8 p.m. I found a leaked version of the pilot a couple of months ago, but I didn’t get around to watching it until last night. Judging from the pilot, it’s basically a mediocre X-Files retread: federal agents + paranormal investigations + sinister bureaucracy + rampant paranoia. The cast includes Lance Reddick, late of The Wire and recently of Lost, and I love him. But otherwise the whole operation seems a bit contrived.

I was, however, struck by the very unusual way that the show identifies locations onscreen. The X-Files, for instance, handled these in the typical, longstanding way. If Mulder and Scully were in, say, Virginia, a location-and-time stamp would be displayed at the bottom of the opening shot of the sequence:

Arlington, Virginia
4:32 a.m.

Fringe handles location IDs in a way I’ve never seen before, at least on television: Each one is placed into the actual scene as a physical element that the characters pass by or the camera swoops through. I find this approach to be really jarring and show-offy. Have you ever seen anything like this before? (This series of clips includes one ID of a foreign location, but that information doesn’t really spoil anything.)

It’s possible that these will have been changed in the version that will be broadcast tomorrow night, but this is how things looked in the pilot I acquired in late June.

All Macs come bundled with a handful of dingbat fonts that most people never use, including Apple Symbols, Webdings, and Wingdings 1, 2, and 3. These collections contain a lot of versatile glyphs that are useful in all kinds of everyday graphical situations. But they also include dozens of mystifying icons whose origins and meaning are totally opaque. Like the one at left: What the hell does it signify? Is it a bulb-rest for a tired apostrophe? A whistle seat? A logo for a secret society? I bet Jonathan Hoefler would know.