I searched high and low for sketchbooks that met my needs as a web designer. I wanted something with pale lines that wouldn’t bugger my drawing, maybe even with a 12-column grid that would make designing on the grid a breeze.

I couldn’t find anything like that, so I designed it myself and approached a local, sustainably-minded printer, and I’m not ashamed to say they came out frakkin’ awesome.

They’re available for purchase now, at http://shop.numerosign.com/, for the paltry price of six bucks and change.

Details below.

Web Design Sketchbooks designed by a web designer for web designers.

• 5 x 7 inches
• 48pp, printed double-sided
• 70lb. paper [sketch in ink!]
• 12-column grid
• Blank browser frame
• Pale grid lets you see your work
• Printed with 100% recycled paper and soy ink

Ships via the U.S.P.S. from Portland, Oregon. Bulk discount available.

It’s because times are hard. All kinds of people know that. People buy less cheese; more flour. Fewer beds; more blankets. Less meat; more liquor. In the spring, the young women are pregnant and they walk around woozy, afflicted, charmed.

Hours go by. Their breasts swell. They talk to their mothers in a birdlike tongue: they twitter and ululate. Their mothers puff out their own breasts, they pluck at the straps on their jackets. Young men are in the dark streets between shops, standing next to stacks of empty packaging and washtubs. The mothers call, the young women practice careful breathing, and the young men step out, satisfied, shamed, and lithe as opiated cats.

Inside an exhilarated young woman, the temperature rises. The blastocyst struggles to right itself. It finally finds purchase on a ledge or crease or tiny fold, and there it snuggles in. Long before limbs or eyes or lungs form, tiny sweat glands begin the work of generating the amniotic fluid. In the coming days, the fluid will fill the woman’s abdomen and dilute her blood to consistency of tart red wine.

All too soon, the baby grows. Now, the baby swims among the mother’s organs like a pearl diver among anemones. Now the baby is like a tradesman trudging through a crowd. Now, like an olive in a jar. Now the woman’s abdomen stretches like a baking loaf. She leans back, eyes tight, and laughs like a prevailing general.

The young man comes to put an ear to her browning belly skin. He thumps her belly with his middle finger twice, looks at his mother-in-law, and nods. The mother-in-law clucks, smiles, and goes away to find her husband. When she brings him back, Grandpa-to-be, she’s also brought along a salami and a bottle of wine. They eat, and drink, and watch the barges on the river.

A stranger approaches, cries out, squats, and touches the young woman on the belly. The baby inside sees the impressions of two turkeys, two tarantulas, two bursts of tentacles, a headdress and a rising sun. The baby reaches out to touch them, but they’re gone too soon.

There is no more air in the abdomen, and the baby is exhausted from holding its breath. Because of this it sleeps a lot–sometimes 27, 29 hours a day. When not asleep, it plays with the kidneys, becomes tangled in intestines, and consoles the tiny, terrified ovaries. Aside from this there is nothing to do inside the abdomen; no daily paper, no gossip, no work, no vice; so the baby focuses on growing and eats half of what the mother swallows before it hits her stomach.

This, in every porch, at every sitting room, in the evening of the pregnancy: Mothers and fathers gather a pot, stack of blankets, a forceps and a set of candles. Mothers and fathers count up to 42, then down to 37. Mothers and fathers wait as their baby grows; watch their daughter’s stomachs swell; think selfish thoughts; break the glasses; call to birds; eat and drink and listen to a sound like stretching leather.

When it’s all over, we brush the popcorn detritus from our laps, leave our soda cups in the garbage can, and go home, feeling somehow better for all the ruin which we’ve witnessed. “Gawddamn, that was awesome.”

It was awesome. But why are there so many movies that destroy the earth? It can’t simply be the fetish of spectacle when there are so many other varieties of spectacle, ones less prone to schlock, sentimentality and overrun budgets. What particular joy is there in watching the destruction of the earth?

There are corrupted pleasures, sure. Millions of the sweaty-palmed cruelies that have incubated slice-n-dice flicks into today’s thriving gore-porn industry turn up for disaster movies, they may even compose the majority of an average disaster movie’s audience. Indeed, it’s difficult to argue that there’s not something prurient about seeing the side of the Grand Canyon collapse onto a group of hikers or a hot spring that becomes so hot so fast that the couple of nubile (and naked, naturally,) hikers sitting in it are boiled like lobsters.

So what then?

Still, I have to argue, even if it’s only to preserve my respect for my own love of the genre, that there is something more to disaster movies than the satisfaction of sick jollies. There’s something of penitence in a good disaster movie. Something practically holy.

I say, then, it must be catharsis. When New Orleans melts like wax beneath a wall of nuclear flame, well, it makes it easier to forget about Katrina. When New York is leveled the craters that lay where the towers stood are harder to distinguish.

But it’s more than that. Vicarious catastrophe doesn’t only absolve other catastrophes. When we see the sea wash over what remains of the Great Sphinx, it makes it somehow okay that Napoleon’s army used it for target practice in 1798. When gravitational stress opens fissures across North America, we can be forgiven if we forget the Trail of Tears. If the Earth crosses a comet’s tail and the homeless are microwaved wholesale in the streets, it won’t matter that we failed them so badly. If there is no new generation of youth, we don’t need to worry about how to raise them. If there are no people, there are no people hungry, and it’s not anyone’s fault.

Included in the End of Everything, then, is the end of guilt, the end of failure, the end of missed opportunities, the end of consequence.

The end of consequence.

In “Decadence” from Writing in Restaurants, David Mamet postulated that most disaster movies express our

“collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly-veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious. [emphasis his]”

To this I’d like to offer a counterpoint. The purpose of a disaster movie is the fuckin’ disaster, the release of it, not the avoidance of it. Despite the fact that disaster movies are by their nature blockbuster-type fare, and the good guy must prevail (or at least die nobly), and somebody better be there to smooch (or comfort) the leading lady. It’s the whole goddamned point, frankly: to destroy shit. This isn’t for the sake of spectacle or sicko urges (though, certainly, those aspects put butts in seats). It’s because whatever is left must be rebuilt. Whatever injustices persist we remain responsible for. The actions of warlords, true believers, and governments–even those that occurred before the disaster–may need to be contended with. We’ll no longer be able to submit ourselves to the lazy whim of the heartless universe. It will be blindingly (and for once) clear that the future is up to us.

Survivors must have equal rights, as it turns out. They’ll want to vote, and maybe not “our” way. If there are gay couples left, they’ll want to marry.

And they’ll need health care. And who can stomach that?

Now available at lettersfromunderground.com.

Now available at lettersfromunderground.com.

Just so I get this straight: One man lies, dissembles, cheats, connives and conspires to mislead his country into war. Nevermind the military targets, this war costs the lives of tens of thousands of civilians in that country. For his service, he will be given a “pension” of right about a million dollars of taxpayer money a year.

Another man, a citizen of the beaten and invaded country, beset with sorrow for “the widows, the orphans and those who were killed,” takes off his shoes and throws them, one by one, at the warmonger. Doesn’t even fucking hit him. Misses by a meter. For this he is given three years in prison. Paid for, of course, by his own war-ravaged country.

Did I get that right? Just checkin’.

Frum describes Limbaugh as

A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence [...]

Of the GOP’s position at the moment, he says

At the peak of the Bush boom in 2007, the typical American worker was earning barely more after inflation than the typical American worker had earned in 2000. Out of those flat earnings, that worker was paying more for food, energy and out-of-pocket costs of health care. Political parties that do not deliver economic improvement for the typical person do not get reelected. We Republicans and conservatives were not delivering. The reasons for our failure are complex and controversial, but the consequences are not.

It’s a shame that more Republicans aren’t like Frum. He seems to be an entirely level-headed, contemplative and reasonable guy. Unlike virtually every other modern conservative of which I am aware, he went on for four pages without saying anything extreme, obscene, insane, or even objectionable. Of course, he’s dead wrong here and there, (particularly toward the end, where he dismisses the severity of the climate crisis and lets it slip that he harbors some delusions about the perceptions of the average voter) but overall, he’s, well, absofuckinglutely sensible.

After reading this bit of praise you might be surprised to learn that I found reading this essay almost unbearable. I arrived at the end of the essay despondent; here is a Republican with whom collaboration, compromise, and yes, even consensus are possible. But, seemingly, Frum one of very few.

Those are not the elements of a Joke

Bill Gates did something this week that’s a far sight more endearing than shaking his tuckus in a parking lot with Jerry Seinfeld. He was giving a talk at the TED Conference about the persistent threat of Malaria in the third world. Speaking of the lack of interest and funding available to fight the disease, he said:

“There is more money put into baldness drugs than into malaria. Now, baldness is a terrible thing and rich men are afflicted. That is why that priority has been set.”

Then, the awesomeness happened

He took out a jar, removed the lid, shook its contents out over the front rows of the audience, and said:

“Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. I brought some here. I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.“

Despite the fact that he hastened to add that the mosquitoes in question were Malaria-free, this might well be the coolest, and, well, most egalitarian, goddamned thing he’s done in, like, a decade. Almost makes up for leaving a baboon in charge of Microsoft.

Source

Because he’s still Sam

As is always the case with scandals of this sort, Sam Adams is still the man Portland elected. Whether or not a relationship he had in the past was a sexual one matters not one whit, so long as it was legal, which, by all accounts, it was.

Because he lied.

And we’re all disappointed. But the fact that he chose to lie says a great deal about his percipiency. He was quite right, after all, in his estimation that many people would not have believed him when he said that his relationship with Beau Breedlove was not sexual until after Breedlove reached the age of consent. Had Sam acknowledged the relationship during the election he would have been subject to the court of public opinion. Portland is progressive enough to elect an innovative and capable gay man to office, but that does not mean that blood in the water will not bring sharks.
Sam did exactly the right thing.

Because he told the truth.

Of his own volition Sam came forth with the truth. Fully cognizant, I hasten to add, of the shitstorm that would follow, as evidenced by time he chose to do so: amid the brouhaha of Obama’s election. Shrewd timing not withstanding, it shows that the truth is important to Sam, and that he understands that it is always better to come forth on your own that to be found out. Further, the official “investigation” that has begun will discover the truth, the empirical truth, and Sam will only have to content with what Portland thinks of what he did, not what Portland thinks he did.

Now available at Letters From Underground.