Percolator: July 2009 Archives

Wonder full.

By Elliott Smith on July 27, 2009 8:41 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

I wonder how Campbell and Leighton are doing? I've been thinking about them all afternoon, wondering if how their night went, if Leighton fell out of the top bunk, if Campbell got enough sleep with all the excitement and if they're having fun.

Oh crap, I've become one of THOSE parents.

I'm sure they're fine. Get back to work you.

Happy Campers... we hope.

By Elliott Smith on July 27, 2009 3:45 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Campbell and Leighton went off to their first "overnight camp" yesterday, at Forest Cliff, near Lake Huron. We drove them up yesterday, through both beautiful sun and raging thunderstorms, arriving at around 4pm. It's a beautiful spot, exactly how you picture a kids' camp (and much like the ones I went to so many years ago) with a main eating building and then a series of small cabins all around it. It sits on the edge of a bluff, which you can walk down to a fantastic beach below.

They were both very excited by the prospect of going -- especially as their friend Lucas is going as well -- although Leighton was getting nervous about being homesick as we walked around the place. I think once he gets going there, the days are so packed with activities that he won't have time to be homesick. Or at least, not much.

The funny part of the story is that it is actually a "Christian camp", although open to all denominations. We are so not religious (and in fact, in response to her Catholic upbringing, Carol is quite anti-religion in an organized sense), but it was recommended by Lucas's mom (who is not at all religious either) as a fun experience with minimal God-talk. As it happened, she had gone there as a child as well, and as I told Carol, "Well, if Michelle came out of it like she has, the boys should be fine."

In the end, Carol's view was given there were no actual bible-study sessions and the like she could live with it. I'm not even sure the boys understand what religion is, so it'll be a great educational experience about one of the major influences of the society they are about to grow up in. And if you get past the "church" part of Christ, his teachings are all positive in terms of being humanistic, tolerant and caring towards others. So that, mixed in with beach time and some horseback riding seems fairly safe to me.

On the other hand, if Leighton grows up to become a Catholic priest I'll never hear the end of it.

Bake at 350º for 20 years

By Elliott Smith on July 24, 2009 3:38 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

I did something the other night I haven't done for a couple of decades: I baked chocolate chip cookies.

Carol doesn't buy that much that she can't eat anymore, so the supply of cookies and crackers are getting thin. Rather than walk to the store, at Carol's suggestion I thought for a change I'd try to bake some cookies, something I used to do quite regularly as a teenager (no, it had nothing to do with pot. I just liked cookies, okay?).

I was surprised that it all came back fairly easily, although let's face it, following a cookie recipe isn't exactly rocket science. (Then again, I did misjudge the timing and slightly overcooked them.) Overall, there was great pleasure in the newness of it all combined with a distant familiarity, a bit like visiting a place that you used to know well.

There were some things about making cookies as a young man that have not survived the years:

1) I used to make them often enough that I knew the recipe by heart

2) Two spoonfuls of batter did not make me feel a bit queasy

3) Never once did the caloric value of said batter enter my mind

4) I did not require reading glasses to read the measurement markings on the butter

5) I did not consider the idea that I should save some of the cookies for others... say, children.

Thank goodness, the pure ecstasy of warm chocolate chips with a glass of cold milk has not dissipated one bit.

Just when you thought it was safe to go buy water

By Elliott Smith on July 21, 2009 9:22 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

At work, someone sent around this Discovery Shark Week campaign by the amazing Digital Kitchen. Holy crap, I couldn't even watch more than two, I mean, I actually would like to go swimming at some point this summer.

It was pointed out that their tagline "Reinforcing irrational fears" was entirely accurate, as apparently (in 1995 at least) more people died in the US from vending machine accidents than shark attacks.

Hm. I see an opportunity here...

---------------------
OPEN ON (POV Seen from the INSIDE of a vending machine, candy and chips in the foreground): We hear a group of high school teens talking off camera.

(Off camera)
TEEN 1: ...Dude like that was like so not cool...
TEEN 2: What? She laughed man, chill out... See, she wrote LOL..
TEEN 3: Whatever. Wait up a sec I'm hungry.

TEEN 1 comes into frame. He's kind of pimply and has a hat on sideways. He puts some money in the machine and we see one of the items moves forward.

(Off camera the other teens are still laughing and talking).

The item gets stuck.

TEEN 3: Awwwwwww come on.... (smacks machine hard and shakes it a bit)

TEEN 3: (Turns to friends) Ah man I cannot believe this piece of f---

From inside the machine we feel it tilting over. Go to black as machine falls on him and crushes him.

SUPER:
Vending Machine Week.
Starts after Labour Day.

----------------------

Don't even think of stealing this idea.

Remicade Redux

By Elliott Smith on July 16, 2009 6:00 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

I like that word, redux. Short, useful and sounds intelligent, so I use it a lot in my post titles. Hope that's alright.

Anyway, Carol went in on Tuesday for her Remicade infusion (that sounds so luxurious doesn't it? Like an herbal tea or something). It seemed to go well on the day, but she's been feeling worse and worse over the last two days. There's a stomach bug going around, so hopefully that is what she's battling and not a side effect.

The main side effect of this whole process is that every little thing that goes wrong makes you so nervous.

Brand This

By Elliott Smith on July 16, 2009 5:04 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Whether it's the tons of books on the subject, or simply myriad online articles and self help blogs, the subject of "Personal Branding" (ie you as an individual are a brand that you should manage with the same discipline as a corporation manages theirs) has never been hotter.

On the other hand, as someone who has had to navigate their way through many an earnest and slightly fascistic corporate brand guideline document, I can tell you that no one has expressed it better than this guy, Christopher Doyle.. (PDF)

"Everybody needs their own space. I'm no different. A defined clearance space or 'personal' space for my identity must be adhered to at all times. The preferred distance is based on the width of my identity and should be maintained on all sides."

File under "I wish I'd done that."

(Thanks to my colleague Craig Ritchie.)

Philosophical Family

By Elliott Smith on July 15, 2009 9:23 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

What I love about this is how you can pair the most banal comic ever with the quotes of one of the great philosophical minds in history... and it makes some kind of sense.

http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/

They might be aliens. Or bunnies. Or alien bunnies.

By Elliott Smith on July 9, 2009 8:55 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

As I sat at my desk today, gazing out my window at the cloudless sky and wondering how I got myself into this mess, I noticed some little white objects floating up and over the building tops from downtown, drifting westward with the breeze.

At first I thought they were plastic bags caught in an updraft, but they didn't quite have the same shape, and there were too many of them (especially now that we have a 5¢ charge for plastic shopping bags in Toronto. Who would throw them away?)

The ones that flew close enough looked like little bunnies, but it was hard to tell. A few dozen of them floated by over the course of an hour or so.So odd. Was I losing it? Was the stress getting to me? Were they aliens? They certainly looked peaceful anyway.

So I sent out the question to our inter-office "Noise" thread (reserved for items of non-project or humourous nature etc), and luckily a few of the more obsessive types here at work started trying to figure it out.

The short story (aside from the very short one hashmarked on Twitter #TorontoFloatingBunnies) is that they were, in fact, floating foam bunnies, created by this company.

Cute! I gather it's a promotion for Lindt chocolates... although they might be aliens and this is just what they WANT you to think.

http://twitpic.com/9spfq

Where were you when:

By Elliott Smith on July 6, 2009 5:36 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

When Elvis died, I first heard it on the radio as I sat in my friend Ron's little Fiat sports car in his driveway. I can picture everything about it, a gorgeous sunny day in August, us about to go to the beach.

When Princess Di was announced dead, I first saw it on a news ticker as I flipped channels on the TV. Late night in summer. I phoned my mother and left a shaky message.

On 9/11, I watched in on TV as it unfolded in front of me... in my New York City hotel room. I phoned Carol to tell her there was this plane that had hit a building wasn't that odd, and as we spoke we watched the second one hit. As the buildings fell, I saw it on on the hotel lobby TV with my colleagues Mike and Coco, and a group of strangers. Then I walked around a deserted New York while the F18s circled overhead.

When Michael Jackson died, I found out here at my desk, with the words "Michael Jackson RIP" showing up in my Twitter feed out of nowhere. That's it. I think I will forever associate that startling moment with the pale blue text that Twitterific uses.

So where was I when I found out Michael Jackon died? Um, online.

I'm sure there's some insight to be gleaned here about the insular nature of the web and how it isolates our experience from the real world. Or maybe that was just it.

I'll be back... in 2009.

By Elliott Smith on July 3, 2009 5:27 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

One of my very first design projects (or at least, one of the first that I got paid for) was designing a poster for a wildly successful play called "I'll Be Back Before Midnight" which was running at the Blyth Festival in around 1992. I got the gig because my friend Greg was the Associate AD there at the time.

The play, a thriller, is set in an isolated farmhouse if I recall, with all the "edge of your seat" devices you'd expect from a play of this genre. It has, I'm sure, made its playwright Peter Colley an awful lot of money. Me, less so, but I think I was pleased with the $500 or whatever at the time, as I was a pretty broke actor for the most part.

I was also pleased at the time with how it came out, especially because it was the first poster I'd ever done assembled and output on a computer -- a COMPUTER! My friend Mark Brownell and a colleague of his worked in a computer lab at U of T, and I brought in all the elements (I think I drew the house by hand, but I have no idea where I got the clock or tree from) which we scanned and assemble in CorelDraw 2 or 3.

I remember the gradient took forever to redraw on the screen, and the when we tried to output it we got a Postscript error -- which was CorelDraw's big issue at the time, plus we were pushing the limits with that clock overlay effect. So we took it over to the output place where a "Postscript jockey" actually read the Postscript and identified the issue, then fixed it. We output it to film, then took it to a print shop for printing.

I will say that for all its beginner mistakes (I didn't get the overprinting right so the black is darker in some places than others; the typeface is just a stretched version of Times which is pretty embarrassing to see now, and I can't believe I didn't use a proper apostrophe!), it's quite an effective concept that illustrates the play well and I still like it for that.

Apparently so did the playwright and a few others, as Mark pointed out to me recently that as the show had been translated and performed around the world, they also used variations of my original concept. Here's my original (all the show info has been removed):

Then one from Italy

And one from Denmark:

Apparently the Carrollwood players just liked the original.

I'm chuffed to see that the design, as crude as it is in some ways, has lived on. Although there's no money in this, I thought it would be nice to at least be credited, so I wrote to Peter Colley and introduced myself as the designer and asked if he could assign a credit in future.

I got a lovely reply from him, "How wonderful to hear from you. It's a fantastic design, my favourite of all the Midnight posters. I'd be more than happy to credit it. I never did know who did it when I got it from Blyth. Do keep me posted on any new posters you are doing, it would be great if you could design a poster for a new play of mine one day..."

I should take him up on it. Of all the posters that I've worked on over the years, his is the only one still in the public eye 15 years later.

July 2009 Archives

Wonder full.

Happy Campers... we hope.

Bake at 350º for 20 years

Just when you thought it was safe to go buy water

Remicade Redux

Brand This

Philosophical Family

They might be aliens. Or bunnies. Or alien bunnies.

Where were you when:

I'll be back... in 2009.

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