God, I used to love using arpeggiators (MP3), didn’t I?

Whenever I get sick of website development, I roll-up my sleeves and fudge around with Cascading Style Sheets. There’s something satisfying about seeing the layout and content change with each reload of the hacked-up code — “it’s a kind of magic!” That is, until I remember all the cross-browser bugs and incompatibilities which break it all quite nicely.

The quarterly magazine I design at work, Lincoln Lore, was named today by the Chicago Tribune as one of the 50 best magazines in the United States (#47, actually). It is listed among such greats as Wired, Time, The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Atlantic Monthly and many more. I have been doing its design and layout since shortly after I took my current job (five years ago this month). More than a year ago, I converted Lore from using Quark 4 (yuck!) to Adobe InDesign CS (yeah!) and updated the style sheet (yes!). It’s a treat to produce each issue, so I’m excited to be recognized among such publications — especially since producing it is largely the work of a few people: myself, the editor at The Lincoln Museum (we designed their website and online store as well) and a few others (not including the various writers). Yay!

I read recently that the effectiveness of a metaphor resides in the gap between what it says (the literal) and what it means (the figurative). I’ve long thought of this as the place where poetry resides — not poems per se, but the poetic element in language and thought.

The Power of Nightmares is an astounding and intelligent BBC documentary on the history of modern American Neoconservatism and radical Islamist Fundamentalism. It traces the progression of these conflicted yet strikingly similar philosophies from their origins to the current ‘War on Terrorism’. I highly recommend all three episodes.