Remember that spoof cover of Parents magazine I created last year to illustrate the hazards of sloppy cover design? A few months ago, one designer ignored my warning. Here’s the cover of Butterick’s Winter/Holiday 2005 catalog:

The cover is totally real. It was first noticed by a Canadian graphic designer named Nick Frühling (whose blog is excellent, by the way), and then was picked up last month by Veer’s blog, The Skinny.

(Thanks to my former Book colleague Steven McClenning for the tip!)

A couple of weeks ago I bought the new four-DVD Electric Company box set. The Electric Company originally ran on PBS from 1971 to 1977, and then a small handful of the episodes were broadcast in reruns until 1985. By the time I was seven or eight, in the mid-’70s, I thought The Electric Company was way more entertaining than Sesame Street. The two shows were similar in a lot of ways—they both used songs, comedy skits, animation, and wordplay to get kids excited about reading and learning—but The Electric Company was so much cooler. (It was intentionally aimed at a slightly older audience than Sesame Street was.) How could The Electric Company not be cooler, with Morgan Freeman in the cast? No one was cooler than Easy Reader:

One of the best segments was, of course, The Adventures of Letterman, a series of animated shorts about a burly but nebbishy superhero who saves people from a villain called Spellbinder, who possesses the evil ability to transform reality by transforming words. Until I started watching the DVDs, I hadn’t seen an episode of Letterman in at least 20 years. So imagine my surprise yesterday when I discovered on Wikipedia that the three main voices were provided by Zero Mostel (Spellbinder), Gene Wilder (Letterman), and Joan Rivers (the narrator). I had NO IDEA.

The box set was produced by the brilliant people at Shout! Factory, the company responsible for the best DVD collection ever. I’ve only watched a small amount of what’s on the discs, but I’ve already encountered a bunch of gems. Check out all the amazing signage displayed in this singalong:

As I watch these discs, I’m constantly struck by the overt fetishization not just of letters, but of the letterforms themselves. I imagine at least one or two typography careers owe something to the childhood sight of gigantic letterforms on The Electric Company. Look, next to Spidey, it’s 10,000-point Franklin Gothic Condensed:

There are some cool design-geek T-shirts over at Typotheque, and I’m so going to order this one. Strč prst skrz krk is a famously vowel-less Czech tongue twister that translates, more or less, as “Stick your finger down your throat”:

Also available on the site: the designer Johanna Balušíková’s seven-shirt Colour of the Day collection:

According to Typotheque, the shirt collection was the result of “an investigation into colour associations and their relationships to specific days of the week”:

A survey was conducted where the following question was posed to 75 creative field workers from 20 different countries: what colour do you associate with each day of the week? The result is a series of t-shirts, one for each day of the week, the colour of each having been selected by majority vote. The shirts could either be worn according to the calendar days, or more intuitively, according to the actual mood of the wearer.

I don’t associate specific colors with specific days. But I’d love to wear each of these shirts on the appropriate day for a solid week, just to freak people out. It would be like labeling one’s underwear, only much more public.

Check out this totally gratuitous and inexplicable pop-culture reference buried in a mostly sober article by Melanie Warner in today’s New York Times. The article is about one Rick Berman, an amoral jackass who propagandizes for food-industry interests through a well-funded front group.

About a third of the way into the piece, Warner refers to Michael Jacobson, the head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, as “a tenacious Ph.D. in microbiology.” I’m sure Jacobson is both tenacious and a Ph.D., but it seems likely that the two-word phrase is a punning reference to a certain Jack Black side project. It’s possible that the reference is to the traditional meaning of the phrase, but that’s not as amusing to contemplate. Regardless, the phrase is clearly a pun, and it’s totally gratuitous. What the hell is that pun doing in there? Is Melanie Warner a Jack Black fan? Was the pun inserted by a rogue D-ciple on the Times copy desk? When did the paper start allowing Entertainment Weekly-style wordplay into news copy?

I think I was about 15 when a family friend turned me on to Luis d’Antin Van Rooten’s extremely clever and hilarious 1967 book Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames—The d’Antin Manuscript. The conceit of the book is that it’s an annotated version of an obscure collection of medieval French verse. But it’s actually a homophonic translation of Mother Goose rhymes from English to French. What that means is that Van Rooten translated the sounds of the words, not the words themselves. The resulting “French” versions only make sense as French-accented English. So “Mother Goose Rhymes” becomes “Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames”; “Jack and Jill” becomes “Chacun Gille”; and “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater” becomes “Pis-terre, Pis-terre / Pomme qui n’y terre.” D’Antin’s “translations” use real French words but are utterly nonsensical in French. You don’t have to understand actual French to read d’Antin’s rhymes; you just need a fairly good grasp of French pronunciation rules and an ability to recall Mother Goose. D’Antin’s elaborate, deadpan annotations, in which he purports to extract meaning from the incoherent French, are great parodies of academic pretentiousness. The annotations are amusing even if you don’t know French (I don’t, not really), and I’m sure they’re even funnier if you do.

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