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.

This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she’s laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.

(Yes, I made this. Go here for more stuff like it.)

From Flesh Gordon to The Sperminator, spoofs of mainstream cultural offerings have long been a staple of the porn industry. Shakespeare porn in particular is surprisingly common, as I found in 2001 when writing an article for Lingua Franca, “The Pound of Flesh.” But here’s something I hadn’t actually seen before: Kubrick porn. In The Sexxxing, a 2005 quickie from Danni.com, a young woman named Miss Torrent applies to be the winter manager of a porn company’s offices—and the place turns out to be haunted by horny, fake-breasted lesbians. Orgasms ensue.

The two clips in the video below are pretty tame, because I edited them that way. But be careful if you’re at work, because there’s a bare breast or two and a few seconds of moaning. The opening titles, in Futura Extra Bold, Kubrick’s favorite typeface, are mine. As is often the case with porn spoofs, this one is an adaptation only in the loosest sense (double entendre alert!), and it was probably filmed in a single afternoon.

There have been several other porn films inspired by Kubrick’s oeuvre, including Spermacus, 2002: A Sex Odyssey, Thighs Wide Shut, and A Clockwork Orgy. I found copies of the last two, but I won’t be posting clips, as they appear to be pretty hardcore all the way through. You’re in luck, though, because I just found the work-safe trailer for A Clockwork Orgy on YouTube. This was made in 1995:

The website Adult DVD Empire has a page for The Sexxxing that isn’t quite safe for work.

And this fake Shining trailer from 2005 is still the funniest thing ever.

Mad Men is a terrific show for lots of reasons, and it’s rightly been praised for its obsessive re-creation of the fashions, values, and emotional landscape of the early 1960s, a transitional period between the dull, ordered Eisenhower years and the cultural chaos that would soon follow. Part of the fun of watching Mad Men is knowing that we’re watching the tail end of an era—and knowing that few of the characters have any idea what’s about to happen. The show occasionally hints at the deepening cracks in the American order of things, and I’m convinced this will be a bigger and bigger aspect of Mad Men in the episodes and seasons to come.

The show’s fixation on the seemingly superficial details of a bygone era could have overwhelmed a series with second-rate writing or a weak cast. In the hands of less talented people, it might have been nothing more than That Show With the Amazing Production Design. Instead, everything is of a piece: The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.

Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers—okay, just the font freaks—will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica. The main giveaways are the “R”s and the “G”s:

Thanks mainly to Microsoft, which has bundled Arial with every version of Windows since version 3.1, this “shameless impostor” has become one of the most widely used fonts in the world, if not the most widely used. No respectable designer would ever choose to use Arial, except in small sizes on the web, where its ubiquity must be catered to. The use of Arial indicates that Mad Men’s designers, so fussy about everything else, don’t consider the closing credits to be worthy of their oversight. (You’ll also notice that the single and double quotes in the screenshot above are straight, not curly—another indication that the design staff is not involved. And jeez, I just noticed that the “r” in “Dr. Oliver” is inadvertently non-italic.)

Of course this raises a conceptual issue: Do a show’s closing credits take place outside the world of the show? If so—and it ain’t hard to make that argument—then who cares if the credits are set in a shitty font? Well, then, why are opening credits usually so carefully art directed? They usually don’t exist within the world of the show either. It’s partly because an effective opening credits sequence helps set a tone and a style. So why not sustain the tone and the style all the way to the end of the closing credits?

No one would argue that Mad Men’s producers should spend as much time or money on the closing credits as they did on the opening credits. And it’s not like they necessarily had to choose a font that existed by 1962. (The font in the opening credits looks like Trade Gothic Condensed or a similar classic gothic, but it may well be a modern cut.) My point is, it wouldn’t be hard to choose Helvetica or Futura or even EF Windsor Light Condensed from the drop-down font list in whatever program is used to create the closing credits.

This is obviously a small detail. But Mad Men is a show that matches small details as well as any series that’s ever been on the air. Why does such a pitch-perfect show end with such a jarring anachronism?

Related articles: “The Scourge of Arial” and “How to Spot Arial.”

From Vanity Fair’s website, an amazing slide show of lobby cards—”the gorgeous promotional posters that were a common sight in movie theaters from the early 20th century through the 1960s.” They’re from the collection of the late screenwriter Leonard Schrader, the brother of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader.

The slide show itself is here; Peter Biskind’s introductory essay is here.

To read more about this incredible trove of Hollywood ephemera, visit the collection’s official site.