The Local Yarn 
Minneapolis and St. Paul now have their own unique font, Twin. The typeface contains over 300 characters and is intended to vary with weather conditions in the twin cities area, becoming more formal as the temperature drops, or more whimsical as temperatures rise. It would be nice to see this typeface used in some real-world applications here in the cities, but realistically, I doubt whether it will ever be more than an online curiosity.
Mr. Andrew David Chamberlain, a capital fellow (pun intended) whom I have come to appreciate, asked me awhile back if I ever write about building. Of course, I don’t, usually. I’ve thought that maybe I should wait until I’m an old man with some authority on the subject. Well, I’ve decided that as long as I’ve chucked my computer career out the window and waded out into construction, I may as well get some material out of it.
For awhile, I worked in downtown Minneapolis. I wore slacks and sat at a desk. It was one of those jobs that qualify you for a free subscription to InfoWorld or eWeek. I was pretty sure computers would be my bread and butter; I had been programming for fun since I was twelve. All my aptitudes lay along that line. You can imagine what a difference it was to find myself outside in the wind & the rain, holding a hammer and attempting to read a blueprint.
No more emails, no more spreadsheets. Suddenly the results of your work are painfully and gloriously tangible. When you finally learn to think ahead and remember every step, you save a lot of time. Miss a detail, and you’ll strain your body to fix it.
In the building trades, your use of motion is at least as important as your knowledge of the process. The best, most efficient carpenters spend sixty percent of their time simply walking from one place to another. You have to make all that walking useful for something, and that means thinking ahead all the time. Until you hit a rhythm and get a system down, your productivity suffers like a roll of toilet paper in a rainstorm…whatever that may mean to you. But when the rhythm does come, it makes the monumental into the casual. “Build a house? No problem. Hand me that piano.”
Sometimes I wish I were still in that office building downtown. But at lunchtime on a nice day, I sit down on the grass and eat my sandwich and think, no: this is good. At the end of the day, you drive away and leave behind the form of a house. A building. For some reason it always looks great no matter how big or small it is.
—JD
“Vulnerant omnia, ultima necat.”
Every [hour] injures, the last one kills.
—Inscription on a Roman sundial
As I was writing a letter recently, it occurred to me that I have been working for the local Amoco for the past two weeks. I brought my car in there on Thursday evening. The shocks are so bad that the car sails in continual sine wave of undulation at every bump and turn. The automatic windows do not work, which leaves me free to harassment by the wind and the rain, and with winter coming on, this is a necessary repair. Furthermore, the exhaust system is in need of replacement. So there go two weeks’ wages.
But I figured, as long as I’m spending money, I may as well catch up. I spring for some new Red Wing work boots, wool socks, insulated leather gloves and a new Nextel phone. Bring it on, I say.
Related to the topic of spending money, I recommend this essay by Paul Ford.
Whenever two or more people are interacting, behaviour tends to drop to the lowest common denominator of civility and intelligence. This is merely a result of human nature, and as such it is very hard to resist. Rules of etiquette are essentially social conventions for minimizing this effect. But still the effect is there, and it follows that large gatherings are inherently inferior to small groups. When the group becomes very large you have what we call the Mob, or the Herd Mentality. In large churches, conventions, carnivals and sports events — and there is less difference among those than you think — people mill around in a sea of humanity, free of any personal connections, lost in effective anonymity.
Consider the tabernacle of ancient Israel. Israel numbered more than six hundred thousand males around the time of the Exodus, yet the tabernacle designed as the central place of worship measured only 75 by 100 feet. Much too small to hold even a tenth of just the men. By the law they were forced to a central location for sacrifice; but in the small size of the tabernacle (and the temple after it) we see God’s reservations about centrality. The people were not meant to come as one giant congregation before God for their regular instruction. Why do people today believe differently?
There ought to be a strictly followed practice among churches, that when they grow large enough, they split into separate entities. A church that has grown to the size of four thousand people may have a lot of financial clout, but in terms of personal growth it is an agent of stagnation. Most people refuse to accept this until they spend a Sunday in a room of only twelve people instead of twelve hundred; then it becomes apparent how much their spirituality is dependant on the emotion of the crowd.
Then, too, where do crime, vice, and ill-feeling breed? Where are the most complex social difficulties? In the big city. In colleges and large schools. In places where large numbers of people are clustered. If people would only dissipate, many social conundrums would be greatly simplfied, if not actually solved. It was only towards the middle of the 1900s that city-dwellers came to outnumber rural citizens in America. A casual observer of history would have to admit that it was about the same time our moral fiber really began to dissolve. It would be simplistic to claim that the former phenomenon precipitated the latter, but the fact of their close timing ought not to go unnoticed. They would seem to coincide, and that is enough. The signal effort of every family unit ought to be this: if you can, get your brood away from the city.
— JD
“Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
I must take a moment and address all the current stupidity surrounding Mel Gibson’s The Passion. Mr. Metzler and Mr. D’Arcy have both recently brought the matter to my attention.
The Passion is a movie, funded, co-written and directed by Mel Gibson, about the death of Jesus Christ, performed entirely in Aramaic with English subtitles. Gibson is looking to have the film shown in major theatres around Easter 2004, but is having difficulty locating a distributor for the film. The problem is that many misguided people fear it promotes antisemitism by depicting the Jews as responsible for Christ’s death.
As an example, in the NPR report cited above, a Catholic nun named Mary Boyce describes a specific scene in the film:
“…as the guard drags him [Jesus] down the steps, his head bangs against a stone—it’s very gruesome—and one of the directions says Jesus is reduced to kind of a bloody mass, and Caiaphas, the high priest, his eyes are described as being shiny with breathless excitement.”
Well now, that’s not entirely unreasonable. Here’s a fellow who has publicly called you a whitewashed grave, has said that you prey upon widows’ houses, and whom you sincerely believe is a sorcerer leading the nation to destruction. Wouldn’t you be glad to see him dead?
For my own good I’d better say that I personally have nothing against Jews. I have a bone to pick with people on both sides who fail to see the obvious. The question is not whether the film promotes antisemitism. The question is whether the film depicts the events of history as they actually happened. Did the Romans just decide to throw in another execution that day? Not according to Josephus.
“…Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross…”
Of course, whether deicide is a justification for genocide is a totally seperate matter. But don’t scuttle the film because it is historically accurate.
I’m not sure which is more depressing, the fact that critics deplore the film because the actual events of history may fuel antisemitism, or the fact that Icon Productions defends it by claiming that “in no way does [Gibson’s] faith…blame the Jews for the death of Christ.” Where is their spine? It’s not a question of blame. It happened. Get over it.
And, why should non-Christians care whether the Jews killed Jesus? What is Jesus to them but a teacher like Ghandi or Confucius? The non-Christians have no stake in this debate. But then, neither do Christians, who purport to believe that the sins of mankind necessitated the sacrificial killing of the Messiah. Doesn’t that make us all guilty? Wouldn’t it also make the Jews, in a sense, the agents of our salvation? No one has any rational basis for antisemitism on the basis of so-called deicide. But that doesn’t mean we should attempt to rewrite history. You must admit that, even in the blandest, most secular sense, the Jews were the villians in this episode, just as the British were in executing William Wallace. Leave the film alone.
A history of the Jews in Europe. Where most books of this kind start in the 1920s, this one begins in the 1740s. Excellent reading, if you have the time, and only marginally related to the central topic of this article.
While we are on the topic of things sacred, I have to get something off my chest regarding the modern spelling of divine references. It has become popular to spell anything referring to God with a capital letter, including pronouns “Him,” “the One Who,” etc. Now, I write “God” and “Lord” with capitals, but this additional capitalization of pronouns I dismiss as a fad.
Miss Blair, our revered communications teacher at the Academy, adjured us always to capitalize anything referring to God, and also admitted she had no idea why the translators of the King James Bible did not do so. Well, I should think the answer is obvious: the translators didn’t do it because it wasn’t in the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. Both languages’ alphabets have ways of distinguishing case, and the original authors of the Bible obviously did not choose to use them except when naming God directly. When our contemporaries invent faddish new spelling conventions beyond what the original authors felt necessary, what they are really saying is, “Look at me, how very reverent I am.” It’s almost the typographical equivalent of the hand-washing traditions of the Pharisees.
— JD
“Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.”
[Confound those who have said our bright remarks before us.]
—Aelius Donatus
I had five measly walls to frame inside a basement today, three energy walls in an addition and two partition walls for a laundry room. Somehow, in eight hours, Barnabas and I only managed to finish four, and it turned out I made mistakes in two of them. Yes, the lighting was bad, and yes, we had to spend time moving things around because space was tight; but when my stressed-out boss arrived late in the day, I could see the disappointment in his face, and I hated myself more than I have in a long time. Where does time go? Why can’t I do better than this? I can’t figure it out and I can’t stop thinking about it. Whether roofing, trimming, framing, or siding, it’s all the same story: I can never get as much done as I think I ought.
A year ago in Michigan, Mr. N. informed me that in his opinion I would never be a framer. At the time I admitted to myself he was probably right. So why have I spent the past year trying to prove him wrong? And my back muscles screaming bloody murder at me every night—is that normal too? I know I must be missing something. Maybe I’m one of those gifted people who fails at everything he tries.
The scene: a newly drywalled basement in a newly built home in a newly created development in upscale Woodbury. Outside, it is sunny, humid, and breezy. Neighborhood children play on the brand-new lawns. Here in the basement, it is cool and dark and quiet. Total silence; no ambient sound. Except for…
Brush, brush, brush.
I am staining oak trim, together with my two co-workers, who I will call Barnabas and Luigi. We have a lot to do before four o’clock.
Barnabas really seems to wish we had a radio on to break the silence. I am glad we do not. Luigi doesn’t seem to care one way or the other.
There is no time down here. It seems as though it is always two o’clock in the afternoon, no matter how many hundreds of feet of oak baseboard and casing we go through.
Brush, brush, brush.
Today, at noon I attended my sister’s friend’s wedding, along with the rest of my family. Although admittedly happy for the new couple, it was very noisy, I didn’t know most of the people, and I am always afraid some drastic and embarrasing error will be committed during the ceremony. Then, at seven-thirty, my sisters and I went out to see the play Seven Brides For Seven Brothers. I think have had more matrimony in one day than I can handle.
Twenty years ago, when your computer had a problem, it would notify you with ?SN ERROR IN LINE 5740. The World Wide Web has improved little in this respect.
Page Not Found (HTTP 404)
The page you are trying to access does not exist.`Some have whimsically described HTTP 404 as a kind of signal that you have dropped off the edge of the world; in reality, the 404 is actually more like an “access denied.” It is a signpost signifying the boundary of the real universe, forbidding passage. Additionally, the HTTP 1.1 specification states:
“This status code [404] is commonly used when the server does not wish to reveal exactly why the request has been refused, or when no other response is applicable.”
So the server does not wish to reveal why it returned the error; that would explain the rude brevity. But as to Reasons Why, there are several possibilities, each of them intriguing and philosophically revealing.
What we have here is a genuine, undeniable attempt at Creatio Ex Nihilo, an unsatisfiable demand for a piece of information which does not exist. Although, technically, it may actually exist in some alternate location, you did not request it from that location; you requested it from here, and it does not exist here.
Short of actual thought, bits of magnetic polarization on a hard disk platter may be the most pliable, easily manipulated information medium known to man; but even using such a lightweight ether, it is unreasonable to expect a missing page to be spontaneously created from nothing.
If you suspect that this is the case, you are probably in the midst of a silent struggle against Fate. The scent is warm; you know the information you seek exists and is somewhere nearby; but in your search you have come up against a wall. Fate is unaccountably fond of allowing you within a hair-breadth of success, sometimes without your realizing it…and then turning you aside at the last instant. I really should not aid you in a struggle against Fate, as it may adversely affect the outcome of some of my own similar grapplings; but as a gentleman, I should at least point you to some point of reference, from whence you will be able to continue your search.
If you arrived from a link on another site, however, the cause is most likely…
In which case we can only say, Requiescat In Pace, and wishfully surmise that it probably wasn’t worth seeing anyway. The extinction of information through obsolescence is a natural part of life just as much as the physical degradation of leaves, people and stars—the difference being that the dead information does not actually provide nourishment to the information that comes in its place, merely a little extra space for storage.
We should in fact, be grateful that although the link that led here is now useless, someone responsible for the page that was supposed to be here has noticed its irrelevance and cleaned it up. So in one sense entropy has increased and in another sense it has been, in some measure, controlled. The second law of thermodynamics is an inscrutable beast…in any case, we are now one step closer to the heat death of the universe.
The probability of this being the case is admittedly infinitesimal, but there are people in these times who do such things. And if true, it reveals something about you, namely that your skin is yellowing under the influence of your flourescent lighting and your computer screen, and you have a need of fresh air. Do you realize that even the possibility of your being able to waste your time in such ways without starving to death is a historical anomaly? It is against nature, and it will take its toll.
Perhaps the next time a terse error code is flung your way by a miserly machine, you will pause to contemplate the dim mythos of modern communication, the transience of life, and how they may affect your own traipsings upon the boundary between the physical and the intangible. But for now you’d probably better be going. You have wasted enough time already.
—JD
“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
— Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892
When it comes right down to it, Mr. Alexander is a nut.
