I’m putting together another all-abilities, all-ages, slow as molasses, stop & smell the roses bicycle ride over the Golden Gate Bridge on Sunday, June 22.

When:

Sunday, June 22th (next Sunday, not the day after tomorrow). My plan is to start at my house at noon or 1pm. If I’m riding alone, I can probably be at the bridge in 30 minutes, but connecting with people will modify that, and the schedule for this ride is necessarily a bit flexible. I’m also open to other ideas (see below)

Who:

Anyone who has a bike, can manage to stay (mostly) upright on it, and wants to ride across the Golden Gate (C’mon! It’s fun! You should do it at least once!)

What:

Riding a bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge. Also, you might want to consult your doctor about ADHD, and/or cut down on the fine herb clouding your short-term memory.

Where:

At a minimum, the Bridge, but see below

Options on the Near End

1. Ride with me from my house. (Ha!)
2. Ride Caltrain to 22nd St, start from there, taking a flat route around Potrero Hill. Mostly for South Bay denizens.
3. Ride BART to 16th Street, and meet me there. Mostly for inhabitants of the Beast, but South Bay folks who are nervous about traffic might consider riding Caltrain to Milbrae & taking BART. This will avoid all but 5 blocks of 16th St. (Once we turn off onto Sanchez it’s all quiet streets and/or bike lanes)
4. New! Ride Caltrain to 4th/King, or BART to Embarcadero, pick up the Bay Trail a few blocks away. This isn't nearly as nice as the ride through Golden Gate Park & the Presidio (and it's longer), but it's all but completely removed from traffic (Caltrain more than BART)
5. Park in the garage in the Marina (at Pier 39), meet us at the bridge. This may be the best option for folks worried about distance / fitness. (Though the climb from the Marina to the bridge is a lot less gradual than through the park, and you’ll need to find your own way (I can give you directions), unless everyone decides to take one of the Embarcadero options).
6. Miraculously find parking in the parking lot at the bridge, or on the streets surrounding, join us there, ride over the bridge, ride right back, get into the car, go home, secure in the accomplishment of actually riding a bicycle over the bridge. I strongly recommend against this approach, but it is an option.

Options on the Far End

1. Turn around at the Marin end of the bridge, and backtrack. Certainly an option, but take a look at #2 before you settle on this.
2. Continue (almost entirely downhill, with one climb) into Sausalito, have lunch / snacks, or just sit in the park. Take the Ferry back to SF (which lets out close to the garage in the Marina.)
3. Same as above, minus the ferry. (What goes down, must come up. It does, however, feel great to conquer it.)
4. Continue from Sausalito to Tiburon (a gorgeous ride, but it’s another 10-15 miles) I, myself, will only consider doing this on the condition that everyone is going. We can take the ferry back from Tiburon.
5. Or not. Complete the circuit. I might be up for this, but I reserve the right to wimp out. Contingent on more of the same above.

(Added!) Distances Involved

22nd St - 16th St. BART

2.2mi

16th St. BART - Fell & Baker

1.9mi

Fell & Baker - Presidio

2.4mi

Presidio - Bridge

2.2mi

Bridge!

2.1mi

Bridge - Sausalito

2.7mi

Alternate Route Distances

4th/King - Ferry Building

1.6mi

Ferry Building - Blue & Gold Ferry Terminal (Pier 39)

0.9mi

Pier 39 - Bridge

5.8mi

Deviations from these options are highly encouraged! Any questions? ASK!

I need a replacement for Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed:

One with an honest italic (not just slanted romans). One that will contrast as beautifully against my body font (currently a simple Bodoni Book, with both lining and old-style numerals as appropriate) without clashing.

You see, I don’t want the world, I just want your half.

My current front-runner is Agenda Semibold Extra (or Ultra, I haven’t decided yet) Condensed (Italic):

[ I've decided to remove the samples for Agenda, you can find it if you care, but as I said in comments in the cross-post I realized I liked it a lot less once this was posted.]

While it is quite nice in its own right, it's too round, lacks the subtle, oblique stress that (was one of the elements that) drew me to Franklin Gothic, and the lack of a branch terminal on the spine & bowl mating of some forms (“b,” in particular) doesn’t sit well with me. It doesn’t feel as . . . classy. You see, I’m still hoping for a long-lost italic cousin to come out of the woodwork.

I can’t seem to shake that sense. A little help?

The romance began slightly more than 10 years ago. I don’t remember now if it was love at first sight, but it was something close. It definitely led to the awakening of my interest in the arcane world of typography.

Oh, sure, I’d long known about fonts, and I collected as many as I could find. I’d long before hit the 127 face limit in MacOS. But typography still lay just outside my purview. This project would prove to be the first step on that awakening.

It came at a perfect confluence of events, I had just read^[1] Robin Williams’s Non-Designers’ Design Book (it's been through a few revisions since) and just attended a re-employment seminar that charged me to rewrite my résumé from the ground up. Granted, most of the results are now cringe-worthy, but at the time I felt on top of the world.

I was using Times Roman^[2] as my body font (I know, I know, they were baby steps at first), so I wanted a very strong sans serif with a much darker color for my titles. The speed and satisfaction with which I settled on Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed was rather unsusual for me at that time.

I soon realized that I needed to distinguish between employers and job titles, so I applied an italic style to the titles. PageMaker, not finding an italic font dutifully slanted the romans. I can hear the type geeks screaming in pain, and I wish that was the extent of the sins I must confess, but there is more. And I think (in my defense) the ungainly, mildly disturbing width of those letters eventually pushed me in the direction of learning what an italic really was, and started opening the world of typography to me.

When I migrated away from PageMaker into building the PDF from XML source using FOP, I lost my slanted roman “italics.” After casting around for a replacement font, I eventually dug in, learned the PDF file format and figured out how PageMaker transformed the letterforms, and spent far too much effort perpetrating that particular crime. I eventually wrote a Perl script to apply the matrix transformation to the right text in my PDFs, and as I upgraded FOP a few times spent time hacking my script to work again.

With the latest upgrade I finally said, “Enough!” I no longer had an excuse — I know what I was doing was wrong. I must correct myself. My inner type geek can turn a blind eye no more.

And so, here I am, trying to replace my first lover. The one who opened my eyes to a new world, in so many ways. Yes, she’s a troll. But I’ll always have a speical place for her.

...And I just realized that this whole entry could have been condensed down to a pithy, personal ad format. I’m sure anyone still reading to here would have gotten more amusement out of that than this missive. Oh well. Next time.

^[1] (or was about to read, chronology of events has always been a slippery thing for me, and events from this time in my life are particularly elusive)

^[2] It wasn’t until much later that I moved my body font to Bodoni Book, not realizing that in so doing I was using two very different faces by the same designer, Morris Fuller Benton.

After a most delectable Thanksgiving dinner[*], I contemplated the carcass of the bird and said "We can't just throw that out," (You can take the boy out of New England, but you can't take New England out of the boy) "I'll make stock!"

So I gathered up a mirpois, some additional aromatics, and some leftover herbage, and put the bird on to boil.

[Note to future self: wishing either of your 8Q stock pots are large enough to handle 4lbs of carcass doesn't make it so. If you plan to do this again, buy a proper stock pot!]

10 hours of boiling, scumming, and topping off later the bones had given up quite a bit of collagen, but there was still some left. On the other hand, it was 1am and it would take about an hour[**] to cool the stock to the point it could safely be stored in the refrigerator. So I pulled it, strained it through cheese cloth and started the cooling process.

When I finally dealt with it, I found that while it wasn't as gelatinous as it might be, it was most assuredly more than a mere broth! Success![***] I then dutifully broke out the muffin tins and portioned it into 1/2 & 1c amounts, plus a few pints and into the freezer it went.

And now, with Chiara off at a baby shower, I went to the kitchen to contemplate lunch. Once there I was hit with a revelation like a bolt of lightning:

Consommé!

Another mirpois (diced this time), one of my frozen pints, a little salt, a little pepper (ok, a lot of pepper. Probably too much, my nose is still running) and some egg noodles I didn't know we had. (Yes, I threw it all together into the pot at the same time, sue me.) Finished with a squeeze of lemon juice.

In a word, sublime.

[*] I think Chiara's tired of me raving about the carmelized onion & balsamic gravy that she couldn't eat, but really, everything we ate was fantastic. That gravy, however, was a mind-expanding substance.

[**] In the other stock pot, surrounded by ice, with two frozen nalgene bottles full in the middle to speed the process. That's all AB's idea.

[***] Ok,I also found it to be a bit murkier than I might like, probably meaning that I cooked it too high and didn't scum as effectively as I should have. It was also curiously lacking in schmaltz. Oh well, for a first (solo) effort, it wasn't bad.

Sure, I could write it off as simply one artist's appreciation for the craft execution of another. But that would miss an important lesson here: one of the things I admire and respect about Byrne is the gusto with which he tries new things!

As an artist, it benefits him greatly to be able to embace the new. But the same could be said for all of us as human beings.