Delta Tango Bravo

I've been a big fan of Sam Brown's beautiful drawings at Exploding Dog for a long time. If you haven't visited before, you must be the last person on the internet and you should head over there right now.

However, almost as impressive as his drawings is Sam's prolific and steady additions to the collection. I draw most of silverorange's dinky slices of the month, so I can somewhat attest to the difficulty in maintaining momentum when regularly drawing for the web. It's difficult to keep up a regular contribution and to come up with fresh creative ideas on a regular basis. Congratulations to Sam for his tenacity as well as his ability.

The last top five list I tried was very entertaining, so I'll try another. These are my choices for top five flags from around the world. Flags are some of the finest and oldest examples of 'branding' to be found and there are some truly wonderful examples. Simplicity and originality are the most important criteria I give points for. And, entirely by coincidence I think, most of them are primarily red.

1. Hong Kong, see the flag
2. Switzerland, see the flag
3. Bhutan, see the flag
4. Tunisia, see the flag
5. The Isle of Man, see the flag

My flag vocabulary isn't as strong as some people, so I hope you can trump my top five list with your own suggestions.

Just to be absolutely clear, I can't stand the band Nickelback and you won't be able to convince me otherwise. However, my twin brother recently pointed out the uncanny resemblance between Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger (see photo) and 15th-century German artist Albrecht Dürer (see photo). Coincidence? You tell me.

A news headline yesterday raised a question that's been nagging me for quite some time. Several news services reported on Tuesday that Exxon has been fined ten million dollars by Nigeria for spilling between 40,000 and 100,000 barrels of crude into a river there. A company spokesman responded that they would contest the ruling and was quoted saying, "There was no discernible adverse effect on the people and the environment." (CNN)

Now, I'm not that naive. I know that most of the world's oil companies have done similar things. However, I still use my car occasionally and I need to fill the tank. Is there such a thing as a responsible company in the gasoline business? Is there one that is less evil than the others? And, please don't tell me to ride my bike through the snow to the grocery store four kilometers away.

Before Air Canada swallowed it several years ago, Canadian Airlines had one of the most beautiful logos in the skies. The company's goose was an absolutely elegant logo that looked striking at its tickting booths, on its print materials, and most especially on its planes. Kudos to its designer and may we lament a beautiful logo mergered out of existence.

A while ago I was happily chomping down on a spring roll while absentmindedly reading the back of a container of so-called plum sauce when I discovered that plum sauce is actually made up primarily of pumpkins! Now I’m not sure if this has always been the case but since this first discovery I’ve checked several brands and all seem to be made of pumpkins with plums way down on the list of ingredients. Makes you wonder what other misnomer foods are out there.

I reached an exciting pinnacle in my battle against spam today as I received my ten thousandth junk email since I began using email filtering at the end of May. That's an average of about 55 pieces of junk mail per day, which isn't as bad as many people, but is still incredible. I nominate all junk emailers to Steven's "Punch in the Face Tour 2003".

I still love this story about how Slashdotters found the address for one of the big spam senders and signed him up for every mail-order catalogue on earth. And then he had the gall to be upset about it...

I was made aware today of a great site called Web Design Practices developed by Heidi Adkisson. As she explains:

Surprisingly, I found very little research documenting the frequency of seemingly common (perhaps even standard) design practices such as the left-hand navigation bar, blue underlined links, and top-of-the-page global navigation. I was surprised because as a consultant working with clients, every project seemed to bump up against strongly held beliefs about what was "standard" on the web. I had my suspicions, but no data, that solutions being put forth as standard were common but by no means employed by all (or nearly all) sites. I wondered: Are de facto standards on the web myth or reality? I decided to investigate.

Her site contains simple statistics on the interface practices of popular websites with almost no comments or suggestions. It's up to the designer to interpret her numbers and decide how they'll affect decisions. A very helpful and informative site I'll be keeping my eye on. She has also written an article at Boxes and Arrows on the subject.

A few months ago a friend lent me a fantastic book called Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis. The author does a fantastic job of describing the intoxication of the game as he becomes more and more deeply involved in the competitive Scrabble world. The history of the game and the current debates over dictionaries are fascinating even to the amateur player. Highly recommended reading to anyone who plays Scrabble and it will actually change the way you play your rack. Anyhow, enough coffee-housing.¹

Also of interest to the Scrabble aficionado, there's a weblog called PuzzleBlog that has word and number games. A neat adaptation of the weblogging format. So, here's a challenge for you, what's the highest score you can get from the following rack?

¹ Speaking unnecessarily (i.e., social banter) during an organized Scrabble game. Coffee-housing is frowned on at organized Scrabble clubs and is against the rules at Scrabble tournaments. [definition from Tuscon Scrabble]