lrawles.com Blog

Being a fast reader definitely has its advantages. But a big disadvantage is that I run through books like crazy, and to be honest, I can’t afford the bookstore tab.

I’m on vacation right now, and since Monday night I’ve read the following books, in order:

• “Big Boned,” by Meg Cabot
• “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” by Alexander McCall Smith
• “The Book of Lost Things,” by John Connolly
• “Pearls of Lutra,” by Brian Jacques
• “Tears of the Giraffe,” by Alexander McCall Smith
• “Make Him Look Good,” by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
• “The Gun Seller,” by Hugh Laurie (Okay, this one is only partially finished; I’m trying to stretch it out for the plane ride home.)

So I was just in Washington, D.C., with many of the women in my family. We took a tour of the White House, which was pretty cool, but kind of underwhelming. I’d heard that one of the British royals once refered to it as a “charming little cottage,” and I can’t disagree. It’s rather small and ever-so-slightly dingy.

But I suppose it befits a democratic nation for our leader’s house to be fairly humble. When I visited the Tower of London a few years ago, the crown jewels made me feel kind of ill. The sprinkling of gold trimmings in the White House were in the amateur leagues, like, “Awww! Look who’s trying to be a big powerful country!”

I couldn’t help thinking back to a cathedral in Prague, whose decorations can best be described as gold-plated gold dipped in gold with gold underpinnings in a gold wash. There were cherubs in there that were the art equivalent of a crime against humanity.

I should be writing this from Sorrento, Italy, but the State Department sent me my passport the day after I was scheduled to leave. I shall work tirelessly towards their destruction.
(To the good folks in our intelligence services: I’m mostly kidding.)

So instead, I’m in Boston with my mother, and we leave tomorrow for Cape Cod. It’s still better than a kick in the teeth.

I haven’t written in a while, and I wanted to bring a new cause to everyone’s attention. It’s a movement called “Ban Comic Sans,” and it deserves our wholehearted support:

In 1995 Microsoft released the font Comic Sans originally designed for comic book style talk bubbles containing informational help text. Since that time the typeface has been used in countless contexts from restaurant signage to college exams to medical information. These widespread abuses of printed type threaten to erode the very foundations upon which centuries of typographic history are built. While we recognize the font may be appropriate in a few specific instances, our position is that the only effective means of ending this epidemic of abuse is to completely ban Comic Sans.

They make an excellent point. I myself have a passionate dislike for Times New Roman, but very few people will be willing to jump on that bandwagon with me. The least I can do for the cause is to support the ban of Comic Sans.

In related news, I saw an exhibit devoted to Helvetica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York two days ago. A very, very small exhibit. Check out this article about how Helvetica conquered the world.

Well, I’m in the Greensboro airport, on my way to a 3-day conference in Reston, Va. It’s called “Interactive Community News,” and it’s hosted by the American Press Institute.

What I’m hoping to get out of it is a bunch of concrete suggestions on how to get the people in our region more involved with our website. Since that’s the title of the conference, isn’t this a no-brainer? Not necessarily.

This crusade for community journalism is an old and venerable one, pre-dating the creation of the internet. By now everyone’s on board with the theory (barring some nervous corporate attorneys). But I don’t think we’ve found the ultimate venue to provide it yet. It’s like we’ve answered the “What?” question, now we need to tackle the “How?”

I’m hoping that this conference will be focused on the how, not the what. There’s something very dreary about a room full of people agreeing with each other.

Since the conference isn’t about my company’s internal workings, I consider it a loophole in my no-writing-about-work rule. I’ll keep you posted on what happens…