Dreaming of a Wet Christmas

26dec07: Rain-soaked commuters scurry under the Chinatown arch at 7th and H Streets NW in Washington DC.

Not much to report. My mind is being stretched in new and dangerous directions. Suffice it to say that, uh, how shall I put this....

[warning: publishing/design industry-geek rant follows]

Going from the wacky, carefree days of magazine design in Quark to a fully packaged workflow using the InDesign/InCopy/K4 bundle (complete with meta-tagging the shit outta everything for the new CMS to feed the pub's website) is rather like going from an anarchist commune to fascist Italy in one move.

No more flowers for me! I'll have the Browning .50 caliber machine gun instead. With the fixed mount for use on lightweight rigid warships. Thanks! Damned flowers. Quark Xpress....
.......What was I saying?

But then, that's the devil's bargain of database-publishing workflows, yeh? Sure it's efficient (so they say), but at what cost? A designer's mortal soul? Will truly brilliant, last-minute, spontaneous layout solutions be possible in this Brave New World?

To be fair, I'm still learning the evil thing, but the K4 evangelists have yet to prove its worth to me. And honestly, the value seems tremendous to the Managing Editors of the world, for workflow tracking and whatnot. InDesign has its faults but I could learn to love it...on its own terms. It's the full K4/InCopy package that looms over my creative process like some Orwellian vampire robot with killer laser-beam fungus eyeballs.

I mean, jeepers... Mussolini made the trains run on time, right? So maybe fascism isn't all that bad.

They say even Jim Jones' monkey drank the Kool-Aid. I think his name was Mr. Muggs. Poor little bastard. [ed note: alas, it looks like Muggs went out with a bullet. So much for bitter monkey irony.]

[publishing/design industry-geek rant ends]

Don't eat the shiny things

Another slow news week.

Still obsessing over the house hunt: We've received verbal acceptance of Offer no.2, and are currently bumbling about in a void of stagnant waiting. Put that "verbal acceptance" to paper and FAX IT, dadgarn it!

We sneer viciously at the apartment now, and the shadow of "finality" is all over it. It is doomed. We have seen the demise of The Apartment in our lives, and the building reeks of the expectation of death. If all goes well, we shall say FAREWELL to particle-board-and-veneer countertops, to linoleum, to the window-view onto a stale, lifeless parking lot...

In the meantime, the Agents of Weirdness were handing out some strange new specimen of Packaged Breakfast Food to commuters at the chinatown metro station (inset photo). Anything that comes in such shiny packages MUST be carcinogenic. At least mildly so.

Meanwhile, the Untouchable Fembots witness it all from the immaculate safety of the shop windows. Somehow, that shot looked more menacing in grayscale.

Through it all, I found the strength to avoid the gently carcinogenic shiny breakfast samples, and lived another day...

Kung Pao Wow

Quite a week...

Firstly: Purchased a new, heretofore untried brand of shampoo. My head reeked of Fruity Cartoon Goodness all day, resulting in adolescent-insecurity flashbacks and other mental strangeness at work. Perhaps I'm too square, man, but one should NOT be conscious of the smell of one's own head. Bad shampoo. I should've known, based on the COLOR of the stuff -- the viscous fluid was practically neon, like a distillate of cotton candy and volcanic fireballs. Never again the fruity head.

Then came the ultimate train-wreck of deadlines at the Place of Work. Not a fun story. You shall NOT read it here. You wouldn't want to, anyway.

Then came a prematurely aborted visit from friend and ally Perky Pat... Cheers to PP, and happy trails. Hope you got a chance to do some major financial damage at Crooked Beat before leaving town...

Then came Saturday, and the sudden desire to drown my sorrows in a plate of kung pao shrimp. Szechuan Gallery may not be the best Chinese restaurant in town, but it's been my favorite for ages. After lunch, I wandered 7th street in a happy, satiated daze. I finally took a really good look at the Arch. Luckily, the camera was within arm's reach.

Scores of painted dragons stare down from the Chinatown Gateway Arch, as though trying to crawl from the Gallery Place metro to the drugstore while avoiding the traffic on H Street. The dragons seemed to approve of my lunch, and choice of venue (sorry, Tony Cheng, but great food beats overwhelming ambiance)... next time, it'll be the broccoli w/hot & spicy garlic sauce.