I was trying to find this lifehacker article I read a few months ago, and I typed “so you want to be” in Google, and this is what I Google suggested:

I just wanted to throw up a quick book post.

I finished The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson. 

It’s the 29th book I’ve read this year.  And I’ll just briefly say that I really disliked it.  I think that Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas was such a significant piece of literature for me, that it kind of ruined anything else that I read by Thompson.  “Can anything ever live up to Fear and Loathing?”

So 2010 is officially half over.  Do you think I could get to 50 books before the end of the year?

I kind of hate fireworks.  They just seem like a good excuse for stupid people to blow their limbs off.

It seems like every year I write about fireworks.  And I don’t know why it bothers me so much that people get off on such a stupid thing.  Maybe it’s because my personal safety is kind of put at risk because of them.

What makes this entire peeve of mine so stupid is that fireworks are illegal in Arizona.  So I don’t have much to worry about, really.

When I lived in California, fireworks were a big issue because the city I lived in was one of three in the area that allowed fireworks.  And I lived close to the border of the city, so people would just walk over and set off fireworks in front of my apartment.  It was dreadful.

Here’s a cartoon I drew about five years ago:

In the past couple of months I’ve been invited to a couple of board game nights at different people’s homes and I’ve come to realize that there are specific ingredients and rules one must follow to have a successful board game night.  I’ve outlined those rules for you here:

1. Diverse Set Of Games – You need word games.  Strategy games.  Card games.  Fast games.  Slow games.  You can’t have too many games.  You don’t have to play all the games, but having a very diverse selection to choose from will be helpful once you get all the different personalities in a room.
2. Diverse Set Of Players - You’ll have a lot more fun if you have people in the room that have never met.  It’s enjoyable to get to know someone as they’re arguing his case in Apples to Apples.  And it’s fun to trash talk a stranger’s responses in Scattegories.
3. No Children/Annoying Pets – Your kids are cute, and your dogs are cuter.  But do we really need to stop the timer because you have to change a diaper or take your dogs out?  Seriously?  How do you live like this?!
4. Snacks – Of course you must have snacks…but the snacks you choose are important.  Think of your friends handling your board games.  How dirty do you want their hands?  Then think of your friends playing board games with forks in their hands.  There is a middle point.  Find it.
5. Boozy Games - Toward the end of the evening all of your prudish friends will have left, and the only ones left will be the drunks.  Make sure you have a game or two that allows all the wasted people to enjoy their drunkenness.  For the record RISK or MONOPOLY are not good games to start past 10pm. 

What am I missing?

I was driving in Tempe this week and came across this vandalized political sign:

I get a really big kick out of people vandalizing political signs.  I have never actually vandalized a sign myself.  But something about people being so passionate that they ADD to a sign, instead of just destroy or remove it, is powerful.  I’m not advocating anyone to go out and destroy a political sign.  Those things cost money.  I get that.

But let me tell you a fun tale from a few years ago when I was in Orange County writing for a political blog.

It all started when this guy named Tan Nguyen won the Republican primary for the 47th Congressional District.  His campaign focused solely on the issue of illegal immigration…which was odd since the 47th is pretty heavy Democratic and pretty heavy Latino.  But whatever…

One of Nguyen’s strategies was to cover the district with his bright green signs.  It was impossible to drive through the district without seeing one of these things.  And I started noticing that people were vandalizing them.  And since I worked for a political blog called The Liberal OC, and he was a Republican candidate, I stopped and documented the vandalized signs when I saw them.

People started enjoying the pictures I kept finding.

And eventually people started emailing me locations of tagged up signs.

As the posts got more and more popular, the Tan Nguyen supporters started attacking me.  For example, this is one comment I received:

When you work for ten plus hours with the same group of 100 kids, you start to create different ways to entertain yourself.

One of my primary sources of daily entertainment includes getting kids to sing for me.  I do this two ways.  The first is a tit-for-tat sort of thing.  I say “do you want to do activity X?  Then someone in here needs to sing me a song that I like or tell me a joke that makes me literally laugh out loud (LLOL).”  Kids get up and I audition their talents.  It’s funny because the kids have started to figure out that I really like songs from commercials, and they’ve been testing out any commercial song they can think of.  Right now just about every kid in the Club sings “London Gold…it’s the best” subconsciously.  That stupid jingle is stuck in EVERYONE’s head.
I’ve also been teaching kids songs that they’d probably normally never know…like Manic Monday by the Bangles.  I just randomly yell “It’s just another Manic Monday” and the kids respond with the Woo-woo-woo part.  Here’s an audio sample of our greatness:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Crap, it’s going to be a long summer.

I really don’t know why, but cursive writing reminds me of pubic hair.  I seriously think of pubes every time I use cursive (which is not often) or when I’m helping a kid write in cursive.

Gross, right?

And my cursive writing is so ugly (see above).  Why did we waste so many hours in elementary school on a skill we’ll never use in our adult lives?  I think it’s time for us to slowly phase out the use of this sickening form of writing.

This has kind of been driving me nuts the past few weeks.  Every morning I pass a plant nursery that has a rather large sign out front that says “HUGE TREE SALE.”  And every morning I’m disturbed by the ambiguity of it.  What is huge?  The trees?  The sale?

I guess it’s more funny that disturbing.

I really doubt that anyone is walking into the nursery and is disappointed when he finds that the sale is large and the trees are just normal-sized. But I really get a kick out of syntactically ambiguous statements.

I listen to The Savage Love Podcast, and too often callers call in and state that they have a “big [FILL IN THE BODY PART] fetish” and I laugh because I imagine some guy getting his rocks off on extremely large feet.

I really like in the evening news when the talking heads are reporting on stolen items getting recovered and say something like, “the stolen vehicle was found by the 101 in Scottsdale.”  It makes me think, “good job, 101 for doing your civic duty and finding a stolen car!”

And newspaper headlines are notorious for this…basically because they omit qualifying information that makes the headline sensible.  I read The Columbia Journalism Review’s “The Lower Case” column and they collect funny ambiguous headlines (like Squad helps dog bite victim or my favorite Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge).

When I was telling my buddy Drew about the “Huge Tree Sale” sign he made a good point.  He said, “I don’t really think that “Extremely Large Sale on Ordinary Sized Trees’ would fit on a sign.”  Touché.  I guess I just have to let this one go.

You know how songs can totally bring you back?  Would it be strange to say that when I use particular fonts, or just scroll past them when putting together a flyer, I kind of get transported back in the same way?
I’m serious.

Some fonts, pardon the nerdy pun, carry more weight than others.  But just like particular perfume, sometimes just seeing a font means more to me than anyone could ever guess.  Here are a few examples:

In the early 2000s (damn that makes me feel old), I was working for a newspaper covering city politics.  And said newspaper was struggling to put content on the web – instead of having searchable, dynamic content they were just uploading a .pdf of their paper to the web.

So I was contracted to create a simple site that used a CMS – and my design used Bell Gothic.

This was also the font that I started creatively adjusting the tracking in.  Back in the day.

Over a year ago I loved this font.  I used it everywhere but the two places that stick out are here on this site (notice it’s gone, btw) and I also created a Power Point and manual for a training we did at work on Effective Guidance and Discipline.

To be honest, the font and design were the only things that were enjoyable in that entire thing.  But it was one of the few times since being in Arizona that I’ve been able to get super creative and put on my novice graphic designer hat.

I hate this font.  I really hope my old boss isn’t reading this.

In California when I was a literacy coordinator for a Club, my boss was a girl named Kristen that used this font like crazy.  I guess if I had a font named “Mike Lawson” I’d use it a lot too…oh wait, look at the header of this blog and all the headers on the right.

I get it.  She liked it.  She thought it was cute.  But entire meeting agendas in the Kristen font were just too much.

Hate.

This is another stupid font, but it totally brings me back.  Back in the early 2000s (again?!) I created a website to host my resumé and my first official blog (even though I’d been doing Internet Journals since high school…the title of “blog” was new).  I used the font Grinched in the design.  If you click here you can kind of see the design on the Internet Way Back Machine even though the website is gone now.

P.S. Unless you want people to think you know nothing about design, don’t use this font.

This is my absolute favorite free font.

The love affair started back in my Princeton Review Days.  Julie used to always call this font the “Mike Lawson Font” and she knew if I made flyers because I would ALWAYS use the font.

It’s a wonderful headline font.  It looks good spaced out or scrunched together.  It’s just beautiful.  Additionally, The Boys & Girls Club’s current “Be Great” campaign uses the font:

It’s so versatile.  It’s simple.  It’s sexy.  I love it.

Another font that I don’t LOVE, but have used.  Again, when I was a literacy coordinator one of my duties was to create and run activities that disguised the learning components to engage non-traditional readers in literacy-related activities.

I did a lot of random things…”Don’t you like Family Guy and The Simpsons?” I’d say.  “Then come to my fun club where we’re going to watch TV.”  And then I’d make them read scripts and act out scenes before we could watch them.

And then one Halloween season I created a book of scary stories using the Chiller font.  “I’ve got some really creepy stories…but you can only come if you don’t get scared,” I told them.  And we’d turn the lights off and read with a flashlight.

What about you, what font brings you to a place?

I blame Alanis Morissette.

Maybe I was sick the day we learned this in 9th grade English, but I’ve never really completely understood “irony.”  Well, I do get it.  But I’m not exactly comfortable saying “that is ironic” versus “that is a funny coincidence.”  I do know that a traffic jam when you’re already late isn’t ironic, but actually just poor-planning on your part.

So on Sunday I was eating lunch with my buddy Jeremy and our conversation included, among other things, two things that would seem unrelated: my previous job working for a test-prep company and people who climb Mount Kilmanjaro.

When I was talking about my job as an SAT tutor, I was saying how miserable my life was.  I hated walking into expensive houses and tutoring kids that drove cars nicer than my own.  And I especially disliked that the services we offered were inaccessible to children that couldn’t afford the hefty $100/hour price tag.

Jeremy pointed out that the kids were doing the work.  It wasn’t like they paid me to take the test for them.  True.

Our conversation moved on to other things…including a brief discussion on a man who liked to throw pies in the faces of the women he is copulating and how it’s a difficult fetish to live out.

And we eventually moved on to Mount Kilmanjaro.  Jeremy has a friend that climbed it, and my old boss from the test-prep company took a month off and went to Africa to climb it.

And here’s what may or may not be irony: my boss had to, as most people do, pay a group of guides to get him safely to the summit.  He paid a lot.  The guy who ran a company that charged a lot to get kids to reach a high score on a test had to pay a lot to get himself to a high point on a mountain.

Again, Jeremy pointed out that the hikers in most cases were doing the actually work.  Most people don’t pay to get dragged up the mountain.  But that’s ironic, right?  Right?

But a “no smoking” sign on your cigarette break?  Come on…how long have you worked there?  Shouldn’t you know where the designated smoking areas are?