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Gotta say, this is purrty well done. More like this over at Bombi(llo).

You find some funny things in your gmail spam folder sometimes. Google seems to think this e-mail is spam.

Kim Neill at kimcreativestar.com tells you how to bake them.

This strikes me as quintessential Wikipedia. I love that someone thought that a reader interested in the Russian tsar Boris Gudunov (1551-1605) would want to know about a character in the animated cartoon Bullwinkle, and that a moderator would challenge this information with a request for a citation. Wonderful!

A play on the name Boris Gudunov was Boris Badenov, an antagonist of Rocky and Bullwinkle.^{[citation needed]}

Commenter Ajay on the Making Light Forum has deconstructed the genre:

I. Exordium. The narrator introduces himself, establishes his experience in computing (ethos) and exhorts the listeners to gather round.
II. Prolegomenon. Customarily, the hardware spec of the machine is outlined here.
III. Praeinstallatio. The narrator describes his initial attempt to install Windows.
IV. Contrainstallatio. The installation goes wrong.
V. Descendo. The narrator describes his increasingly desperate attempts to get things to go right.
VI. Depilatio. The narrator is reduced to despair and frustration.
VII. Inertio. The narrator sinks into a horrified stupor as his machine gurgles and clunks to itself for anything up to three days.
VIII. Peroratio. The narrator rises into fury as he describes how long and painful an experience the install was; which may be followed by
IX. Aptenodytes forsteri, the narrator switches to Linux.

via Boing Boing

Right Reading was pleased to receive the following news brief via inter office mail from bittermelon:

Extra-Slanty Italics Introduced for Extremely Important Words

NEW HOPE, MN—In an attempt to address writers’ ever-growing word-emphasis needs, Minnesota-based Pica Foundry has developed a new, extra-slanty italic font, design director Jordan Soderblum announced Monday.

“When writing important words, authors too often bypass regular italics in favor of all capital letters, which not only look awkward but also disrupt the flow of the text,” said Soderblum, whose new italics design is slanted at a more acute 60-degree angle instead of the normal 75. “We believe that the additional 15 degrees of slant will allow authors to create a much more intense and immediate reading experience.”

Soderblum said that his design team is currently developing a demi-semibold typeface for writers who “kind of, but not really” want to accentuate subheadings.

— The Onion, June 16, 2009

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Ineachday put up some old family photos. Can this blurry fellow really have been me once?

(Yes, this is a rare personal post on Right Reading.)

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via Edward Champion

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