Baaaaad.

Fulminating about poor typography a couple of posts ago, and throwing in a reference to blackletter, reminded me of a quote from the great American type designer Frederic Goudy.

("Blackletter" is a generic term for those Old English or Germanic typefaces that seem inspired by the handwriting of monks in illuminated manuscripts. Like lower case fonts, it looks better when the letters are set without too much air between them.)

The apocryphal story is that Goudy's comment was inspired by an award he had received for his contributions to typography. He was honored by the recognition, but glancing critically at the specially made certificate, he added in an aside: "Anyone who'd letterspace blackletter would f*ck a sheep."

This fairly famous quote has been cleaned up in other versions, but trust me, this is what he meant.

Blackletter is almost unreadable set in all caps, too, but fortunately, she doesn't have to look at it. How long did it take you to decipher?

All we are saying . . .

 . . . is happy 70th, John.

"They killed him you know, at least he didn't die alone did he? Merry Churstchove,  . . . old pal buddy."

Out with the old, in with the old.

A long-lost favorite haunt in Manhattan was a diner just south of Columbus Circle, whose name was an odd combination of past, present, and future: The Cosmic Coffee Shoppe.

You picture thatched tea-rooms on ye olde Planet Mars, with mylar cozies, freeze-dried tang-flavored scones, and a fat marmalade cat in a space helmet.

Reminded of this retro-futurism because, across the street from my new abode, is the hideously named Rye ExecuPlaza.*

Only it doesn't say "rye execuplaza" on the untrendy all-lower-case sign. (In the Avant Garde typeface? In the twenty-first century? Give me a break, you might as well put it in blackletter. Or entirely in upper case Old English.)

The r in "rye" is missing.

So imagine a medieval wandering knight, seeking damsels to slay and dragons to woo, trotting up to a bleak castle and demanding to know of the castellan if he's seen a flock of grails go by.

"Alack, good Sir Knighte," sighs the head guard, after the required banter about swallows carrying coconuts. "Thou hast just missed his nibbes. But hist, dogge! Thee might find him at his counting-house. Down yon lane, in Ye Execuplaza.**"

*Or Execuplaza or Execu-plaza or execuplaza, depending on where it's listed. Honestly, the tin-eared property development Philistines who came up with this monstrosity -- and no doubt thought it justified their fees -- might at least be consistent in the way they're effing up the English language. How about bringing a poet to one of those meetings?

**Mentioning only that the "ye" as in "Ye Olde iPadde Shoppe" should be pronounced "the," and not like the old form of "you," which is a different word. In the "Ye Olde . . ." case, the Y is not our modern letter y, but a representation of a symbol called a "thorn," which made the "th" sound in Old and Middle English. It had largely died out by the time of Caxton, so when the early printers needed to include it, they used a y instead. So it's their fault, the lazy bastards.

The "curse" on Shakespeare's tomb, which he didn't write and which was pretty standard practice for the time, so that well-off ex-parishioners could hold on to their prime spots inside the church and not have their remains dug up by venal vicars and dumped in the charnel house as soon as another cash-paying stiff came along demanding altar-front property to decompose in. It includes several Y's representing the "th" sound. (That Y with a little T over it stands for Yat, meaning "that," pronounced "that.") For more about this inscription, see Alan Beechey's novel This Private Plot. Oh, wait, I forgot to finish it.

Dumb things overheard in bookstores.

I parked today in a White Plains car park in space number 2001, and this reminded me that, nearly a decade after Kubrik's movie took place, we still don't have any PanAm flights to the moon. Don't have any PanAm, for that matter. On the other hand, my computer does call me Dave. Even when it's switched off.

It also reminded me of another iconic year that passed without incident, 1984, and since nothing funny has happened to me in the last 24 hours that I can write about, here are a couple of real things heard in bookstores over the years.

_____

So back in 1984, I'm in a small Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side -- they were mainly small in those simpler, gentler times -- and somebody asked the sales assistant for a copy of, yes, 1984.

"Who's it by?" asked the assistant. Six customers in the store simultaneously looked up and chorused "George Orwell!"

_____

To be equaled by an even earlier overhearing, back in my local bookshop in Wimbledon, England, in 1979.

"Do you have Clive James's autobiography?" asked a customer.

"I don't know," answered the assistant. "Who's it by?"

There's a point where these stories stop being funny and start being, well, kind of sad, at least when you consider the longer term job prospects of the employees concerned. In the first case, the young woman assistant followed up her customers' prompting of the year's most famous classic by beaming around the store and merrily announcing "I never heard of it." And in the second case, James's book about his Australian childhood Unreliable Memoirs, with which the assistant was unfamiliar, was currently the at top of the British bestsellers list.

If you're reading this, get out your checkbook.

Sublime jazz guitarist Pat Metheny's current Orchestrion tour is stopping off at the Calhoun School on the Upper West Side on October 26 to play a benefit for the school. A generous gesture, a great cause, and because it's a benefit, the tickets are $200 each. But $500 will get you a backstage pass, where, presumably, West Side private-school parents can mix with the performers over a glass of Pinot Noir and some nibbles. (Rock and roll!)

Pat Metheny, by Latifa Metheny

A few years ago, Primus was in the same class as Pat's older son at the West Side YMCA's Co-op Nursery School, and I often ran into Pat when his schedule gave him time to do the drop-offs and pick-ups. I was always pleased to see him -- not because of his musical celebrity, but because it reminded me that there was one class father who was not only older than me but also generally untidier. (Although I was always more pleased to see his stunning and charming wife, Latifa, also a photographer.)

But I had no inkling he could have charged me for the encounter! Now I know that I was getting all those freebies, I wish we'd covered more than just the kids' snack schedules and the viscosity of homemade Playdough. Doh.

And this gives me an idea. I don't match up to Pat Metheny's multi-Grammy-award-winning fame, but there is a tiny sliver of the mystery-reading community that may still have a copy of An Embarrassment of Corpses on their bookshelves, so I'm not a complete unknown.

Anyway, that woman who called me over yesterday while I was struggling with half a dozen heavy Stop & Shop bags to ask directions to the place she was already parked beside: you owe me $27.50.

Anyone who stops me on the street to inquire what breed of dog Leila is, $20 for the first terse "mutt" and a further $15 if you want me to specify that DNA testing suggests she has a lot of Japanese akita in her. (20% discount if your motivation is to tell me she's beautiful.)

And that a**hole who called me on my cellphone at 9:00 p.m. on Saturday night while I was standing under the stars beside a boy scouts campfire and assured me he was entitled to ignore my listing on the "do not call" register because he wasn't trying to sell me the home insurance he was so clearly touting, $499.99 plus tax, you bastard.

In the way of these things, I get to hear about this event taking place 25 miles south of my current location via my friend and former Calhoun mother, Gina, who lives in Australia but sent me the email from Cambodia.

About eight years ago, when we were all in Manhattan, Gina took her son, Jack, then a young teenager, to a Pat Metheny concert, his first grown-up concert-going experience. Jack really enjoyed it, and I had the chance in the next day or so to tell Pat that he'd just played a significant role in a new fan's life. Pat sent greetings, I passed them on, and "Uncle Alan's" coefficient of cool was, all too briefly, stratospheric. Jack just celebrated his twenty-first birthday, and I don't want to know how.

Dadding for fun and profit.

Fall campout last night for the scouts of Rye, at the reservation in Putnam County. Not too wet, despite torrential rain over the last two days. Overnight temperature a surprising low-40s, but Secundus and I are snug in our sleeping bags and two-person tent. (He should be. I woke in the middle of the night to find him lying sideways, using my stomach as a pillow.) He's very happy, having caught the biggest fish of the afternoon.

But who drives a Porsche to a campout?*

Back home, later in the day, Secundus volunteers to work the self-service scanner at the Stop & Shop checkout, while Tertius insists he needs no help with the bagging. I step back and relax, luxuriating in a rare bit of successful dadding.

The checkout computer voices the price as items are scanned, and for produce without a bar code, names the food, so you can be sure you pushed the right button. It does so using that vocal ransom-note technique that pieces the sentence out of separately recorded snippets: "Place your . . . [apples] . . . on the belt.

Excuse the vulgar duplication of end-stops, but I swear that I heard this intonation when the moment came: "Place your . . . broccoli??!!  . . . on the belt."

*Not me, I had the minivan. Another dad. This is Rye.

Bad day, part 2

(Still Thursday.)

Later, I go to the optician to get new reading glasses. For books and newspapers, a foot away, I need a 2.25 diopter. But for the computer screen, about two feet ahead of me, a weaker 1.75 diopter provides a crisper focus. (I don't need distance lenses -- I peer over the top. See the picture.) Fed up with swapping my over-the-counter spectacles every time I change close-up tasks, I've decided to invest in some progressive lenses that range over both these strengths.

(I have my eye on a pair of round Armani frames, even though the boys told me I looked like a middle-aged Harry Potter* when I tried them on.)

The young lady assistant in the store is very pleasant throughout, but warmly recommends an eye test before buying new glasses. I tell her my last test was only last December, at that very establishment, and these were the strengths recommended by the eye-doctor -- her employer -- at the time, as she can see from my records. I'm not due for another test yet, and I can vouch from the inside that my eyesight hasn't significantly deteriorated.

She makes the case for a test a second time, as if I failed to understand her point. I repeat that I take that point, oh I do, but my needs are clear and simple.

Ah, but now I have defied her expert advice. The horror. She's still pleasant, but the smile has vanished and her attitude suggests that I'm pegged as the village idiot. Sorry, city idiot.**

"But your last test was in December 2009," she keeps saying imperiously. "Since so much time as passed, I do strongly recommend an eye exam before spending money on lenses." "You dummy," is now clearly the unspoken addendum.

"But I know my needs haven't changed in the last nine months," I say, as calmly as I can.

"Nine months?" she echoes. "You haven't had an eye-test since December 2009!"

"Which was nine months ago," I say slowly. "This is still September 2010." She frowns, and I watch as a mental calendar passes behind her eyes.

But by now I'm too irritated to stay and try on glasses. Muttering that I'll call for an appointment, I leave the store, and I'll probably go somewhere else. Because what was so infuriating was that even after it dawned on this supercilious female that she had screwed up the fairly elementary task of remembering what year we're in, she neither apologized nor lowered the attitude a millimeter. She was the professional, I was the civilian; I couldn't possibly know what I was talking about. My opinions, since they defied her well-practiced script, must therefore be the worthless rantings of a dimwit, albeit one with an English accent and a nice new haircut.

But what can you expect from a day when we lost the immortal Tony Curtis and, lest the news be eclipsed by Jamie Lee's dad, the far too mortal Greg Giraldo?

*Remember the days when any vaguely round, wire-framed spectacles were immediately called "John Lennon" glasses? Good times.
 

**See yesterday's footnote.

Bad day.

And I always used to like Thursdays . . .

I'm approaching the traffic signals on Rye's narrow Elm Place in the Starship Minnie, planning a right turn onto our main street.* A car is coming toward me, having made the turn from the main street.

Suddenly, the driver spots an open parking space, just ahead of me on my side of the road. She swerves across my path and noses into the space, but the road is way too narrow for a complete U-turn, even for a Prius (and even if it were legal). In fact, she's still mostly pointing in my direction, angled across the road and blocking both lanes. And so begins the long, laborious back-and-forth, a turning maneuver that has more points than the Star of David. I wait.

Eventually, she's completed the one-eighty, and pulls forward ahead of me to parallel park in the empty space. I wait. Unfortunately, the man in the space behind the empty one wants to leave, but I've been blocking him while observing this irritating but admittedly eco-friendly ballet. He doesn't realize she's about to reverse and edges forward to try to get around me on the right. La Prius stops in time, but she's now stuck, half in, half out of the space. He doesn't seem to want to back up and give her room.

But I now have space to get around the stalled Prius, so I bugger off and leave them to their Seinfeld re-enactment. I'm a man on a mission -- a forgotten trumpet must get to the elementary school before band period.

*It's called Purchase Street. At first, I was impressed by the unpretentious directness of the name of the city's shopping drag. (Although Rye is little more than a village in size, technically we're a city, the smallest in the county and the newest in the state.) Then I was disappointed to discover that the street got its name merely because it leads to the neighboring village of Purchase. I'm starting a petition to rename it Mammon Avenue.

Once upun a time.

Following on from my post "You had to be there" on September 19, I just remembered one other time when I may possibly have said something funny without taking half an hour to think of it and another four edits to hone it.

Come back with me through the mists of time to the early 1980s, and I am a callow youth working in Citibank's London office. A new medical officer has been appointed, whose previous job was in the services.

"He was a naval doctor," reported my boss, Paul.

"Boy, they certainly specialize these days," I responded insouciantly.

(It only works if you read it out loud. Am I too hip for the room?)

Deadline.

Paid consulting work and especially LIFE (no, not the magazine, don't get me started) have been holding up completion of This Private Plot, my third novel in the Oliver Swithin series. So it's clearly time to reconsider my priorities.

How do I know? Many kind friends (some of whom have actually read my stuff, and yet they're still friends) ask me constantly how the book is progressing. My reaction has just switched from delight at their interest to guilty irritation. This is a sign. There's only a week or two of editing to be done, the boys are back and settled in school, I have more available time on my calendar anyway, and no social life whatsoever.

So if I don't get the book shipped off to my agent by, oh, Halloween, you may come to my house dressed as a character from Harry Potter and kick me in the organ of your choice. (Just don't turn up empty handed. I like Grey Goose.)

Do I know how to set a deadline or what? And this, from a man whose distractibility is legend; a man indeed who was once described as a "productivity vacuum" -- and this was by somebody who liked me -- although I plead special circumstances at the time.