Earlier this month, the fantastic Mark Simonson put together a lengthy post about the typography present on screen in the AMC show Mad Men. He mostly limits his exposé to showing which fonts are or are not of the period. But he also points out that real props used from the period in the show all have an anachronistic patina to them, as if the Selectrics available in the 60s were already 40 years old!

While this might seem nit-picky, no one can doubt the fantastic job the Mad Men production designers are doing on the show. We can thank Mark, though, for keeping period typography honest.

Mad Men, Mad Props

While we’re on the subject of title cards… I’ve been doing research on a forthcoming project, and I came across Dave Mackey’s Warner Bros. Cartoons Filmography and Title Card Gallery. The Wayback Machine says he’s been working on it for a while, and I’m glad I found it. It’s really an invaluable resource.

keep reading…

Xeni Jardin and the kind folks at BBtv allowed me to contribute some title cards to their fantastic parody, SPAMasterpiece Theater.

I’ll post some more about this later in the week, including what I’m sure will be an overly pedantic analysis of the style and design choices. Now doesn’t that sound like fun?

UPDATE: Ugh, I now see that my WP template isn’t wide enough (at 430) for BBtv’s embeded video (480). I’ve scaled it down to 430 in the embed, but there are some resolution scaling problems with that. Hit FULL SCREEN for the good on the goods. I guess my template needs some fine tuning… and coarse tuning.

John Hodgman in BBtv’s SPAMasterpiece Theater, Vol III: THE STOMATOLOGIST

Newsweek’s cover story last week was a piece by International editor Fareed Zakaria. In it, he details several components of the current economic crisis, laying the blame at the doorsteps of: greed, poor policy, and an overly familiar relationship with debt. Ultimately, he makes the point that the hard times ahead, while undeniably unpleasant, have the spurious capacity to shock us out of our fiscal irresponsibility.

Or, to let Zakaria sum it up:

If there is a lesson to be taken from this crisis, it’s a simple and old rule of economics: there is no free lunch. If you want something, you have to pay for it.

The potential lessons we, as a nation, could begin to grok are many. We need to learn to live within our means, to save more, to carry less debt. Both as individuals and as a nation. The government needs to learn to live within its means, to balance its budgets, and stop running up the deficit; Big Oil/Business politicians need to learn that even corporations need to pay their fair share; and the nation could learn that businesses, or even entire economies, must be allowed to learn lessons when they fail.

Meanwhile, though, a lot of people who weren’t going to benefit much from the greed-driven “up” market are in fear for their well-being and survival in the fear-driven “down” market.

It is admirable to say that, in response to shocking events and troubled times, we can learn hard lessons that will forearm us against future misery. However, the examples seen in our nation’s recent history in energy policy seems to indicate otherwise. The energy crisis we faced during the Carter administration was supposed to wake the American public to the problems facing an energy-hungry populace. The country was supposed to learn hard lessons about energy efficiency and independence. Instead, we produced and lauded vehicles that were grossly inefficient, imported more and more oil from despotic regimes, and exported a foreign policy that ensured a steady flow of cheap oil; policies that have come home to roost in recent years.

In more recent memory, September 11th was supposed to teach us the short-sightedness of those policies. Whether the lessons we needed to learn from 9/11 are “Why they hate us” or that we need to reduce our reliance on foreign oil (and the ways in which those two issues are interrelated), I believe this nation’s tarnished image in the global community shows that we have not learned those lessons.

The real lesson I fear we will learn is this: Once the crisis is over, it will be a return to business as usual. The greed, the cronyism, the wholesale selling of policy to the highest corporate bidder. We will not change, and we will find ourselves in all these messes once again, some years hence.

Even now, the hard lessons we were supposed to begin learning about our energy policy (as a nation) or our fuel usage (as individuals) as the gas prices continued to rise is in danger of crumbling before they even began. Due to the downturn in the economy and the subsequent drops in gas prices, those lessons might be forestalled. Although, admittedly, gas dropping below $3 is of little comfort to people losing their jobs.

We did not learn the lessons about energy, and it appears we have not learned lessons about how to conduct ourselves in the global community. Now we’re supposed to learn the hard lesson of doing without, of delaying gratification rather than incurring more and more debt. We have a poor track record where capitulating to life’s lessons is concerned. Can this nation learn hard lessons?

There Is a Silver Lining