The total area of the coral reefs off Australia is greater than the country of Singapore.
Helvetica (1957)
In 1957 Swiss typographers Max Miedinger and Edüard Hoffmann set out to create a typeface that was simple, elegant, and modern. Based on a German sans serif font called Akzidenz-Grotesks, they called their design Neue Haas Grotesk (it was created and formed at the famous Haas foundry in Switzerland). In 1960 the typeface was refined and renamed Helvetica, based on the Latin Helvetia, which means “Swiss.” Helvetica was an instant hit: Corporations liked it for its neutral tone; advertisers, for its readability. It became one of the most popular fonts of the 20th century, especially for transportation: New York City Subway signs, the logos for Jeep and TOYOTA, and millions of road signs.
Arial (1982)
You don’t see Helvetica used on most computers. Instead, you see its look-alike, Arial. Why are these two typefaces almost identical? In the 1980s, Helvetica became a standard system font in Apple Macintosh computers, but a battle (that’s still being waged today) was brewing: Adobe Software Systems purchased the Helvetica family of typefaces directly from Haas for use in its TrueType system. Result: Adobe won the respect of the typography industry by purchasing the rights directly from Haas, as opposed to going with some cheap knockoff...but only Adobe had the coding required to display it clearly on a computer screen. When it came time for Microsoft to choose its own default system font, instead of using Helvetica and being at the mercy of Adobe’s software, the computer giant went with a cheap knockoff, Arial, designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype. (Want to know how close they are? Look at the subtle difference in the tails on Helvetica’s “a” and Arial’s “a”.)
Knitted socks from A.D. 200 have been discovered in Egyptian tombs.
Century Gothic (1991)
Why is this typeface—based on Twentieth Century, a 1930s design by Sol Hess for Monotype—called Century Gothic, when it seemingly has little in common with Germanic texts still referred to as Gothic Blackletter? Because “gothic” is an outmoded typographic term for sans-serif, so named because the type color of early sans-serif typefaces was similar to that of blackletter script. Also, unlike roman typefaces like Garamond or Goudy, both are sans serif (the spikes and adornments on old gothic faces aren’t considered true serifs). This script kept the strength of gothic-style letters, but featured a large x-height (a typographer term, referring to the height of a lowercase “x” in any particular font). Century Gothic proved great for advertisements, which is where you’ll see it used the most.
Film note: A similar typeface called News Gothic (designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1908) is familiar to any movie buff:
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
TR AJ AN (
In 113 A.D., a 100-foot-tall column was erected in Rome to celebrate Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars. Etched into the base is a dedication set in classic Roman script. Ever since the Renaissance, typographers have attempted to create typefaces based on this script, including Frederic Goudy and Hermann Zapf. In 1989 a modern version of Trajan was created by Carol Twomby, a type designer working for Adobe. Like the true Roman alphabet, Trajan has no lowercase letters. As was the case with Helvetica and Times New Roman before it, many graphic designers condemn Trajan for committing the greatest sin of any typeface: overuse. Who overuses it? Hollywood movie poster designers, as evidenced by the posters for AP OL L O 13, TI TANI C, THE DA VI NCI CODE, SEX AND THE CI TY, B L ACK SWAN... and so on.
Comic Sans (1994)
In 1994 Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare opened a test version of a welcome screen for kids that featured a cartoon dog speaking with a text bubble. Connare immediately saw that the words were set in Times New Roman. “That’s not a good font for kids,” he told his bosses. So they told him to create one that would be. Connare drew inspiration from 1980s Batman and Watchmen comic books and came up with Comic Sans. It has since become one of the typefaces most reviled by designers. Why? Although Comic Sans was designed for kids, Microsoft added it to its font menu on home computers. And within a few years, Comic Sans was showing up all over the place. From church bulletins to restaurant signs, amateur designers frequently chose Comic Sans for their projects. It grew even more common when it became the default font in many instant-messaging programs. It’s become so hated that there’s a “Ban Comic Sans” movement online, initiated by designers Holly and David Combs in 1999. Their manifesto reads in part:
More land, but no Pope: The Mall in Washington, D.C. is 1.4 times larger than Vatican City.
Like the tone of a spoken voice, the characteristics of a typeface convey meaning. The design of the typeface is, in itself, its voice. Often this voice speaks louder than the text itself. Thus when designing a Do Not Enter sign, the use of a heavy-stroked, attention-commanding font such as Impact is appropriate. Typesetting such a message in Comic Sans—Do Not Enter—would be ludicrous.
So far, they’ve gathered about 5,000 signatures for a petition to “eradicate” the font. They even have a favorite joke: “Comic Sans walks into a bar, the bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your type!’”
THEIR FAVORITE BOOKS
Groucho Marx: Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White
Madonna: Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
Stephen King: Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
James Dean: The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Barack Obama: Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
Joe DiMaggio: Superman comic books
Lily Tomlin: The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx
Angelina Jolie: In Search of the Real Dracula, by M.J. Trow
Will Smith: The Alchemist, by Paulo Coehlo
Uncle John: Drop City, by T.C. Boyle (this week, anyway)
There are more pet fish in America than there are dogs and cats combined.
A THOUSAND CRANES
Sending a sick person a thousand paper cranes, each one folded from a single square of paper, is a tradition that originated in Japan and has spread all over the world. Here’s the story of a little girl who helped turn it into an international phenomenon.
CHILDHOOD, INTERRUPTED
In the fall of 1954, an 11-year-old Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki came down with what her family thought was a cold...until they found large lumps on her neck and behind her ears. That was enough to terrify any parent, but Sadako’s family had a special reason to worry: They lived in Hiroshima, and were just a mile from ground zero on August 6, 1945, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city in the closing days of World War II.
Sadako, two years old at the time of the bombing, had escaped the blast with only minor injuries. But she and her family were caught in a shower of “black rain”—radioactive fallout—as they fled the city. Now, nearly a decade later, as Sadako’s condition worsened her parents’ thoughts turned to “A-bomb disease,” the catchall name that many Japanese gave to radiation-caused illnesses. In early 1955, doctors confirmed the Sasakis’ worst fears: Sadako had leukemia, most likely caused by exposure to atomic radiation. She had less than a year to live and needed to be hospitalized right away.
THE GIFT
Sadako’s parents could not bring themselves to tell her what was wrong or what her prognosis was. They just told her that she would have to stay in the hospital until her lumps went away.
While Sadako was living at the hospital, a group of high-school students from Nagoya sent the patients there a gift of senbazuru—a thousand folded origami paper cranes, strung together like beads on a necklace. In Japan and other Asian cultures, the crane is a symbol of long life, and it is common to give paper cranes as gifts to newlyweds, to children, and to the sick. The high-school students intended the cranes as a gift to the hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”) at the hospital, to give them strength.
Eew! What is heliculture? The science of growing snails for food.
A WISH UPON A CRANE
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br /> Tradition also has it that when a person folds a thousand paper cranes, the mythical crane of Japanese folklore will grant a wish. Inspired by the gift, Sadako began folding her own paper cranes in the hope that the crane would grant her wish for a cure.
Paper was scarce in postwar Japan, so Sadako used whatever she could get her hands on: wrapping paper from the gifts she received, envelopes from get-well cards, notebook paper that her classmates brought when they came to visit, and even the tiny pieces of waxed paper that many of her pills were wrapped in. She cut everything into squares and folded the squares into cranes. When the squares of paper were too tiny for her to fold with her fingers, she made the folds using a straight pin.
In the eight months that Sadako lived in the hospital, she folded more than 1,300 cranes in all. She went on folding them until the middle of October 1955, when she became too ill to continue. She passed away on October 25 at the age of 12.
JOURNEY’S END
Sadako’s death was expected, but it was still a shock to her classmates, a third of whom were also survivors of the Hiroshima blast. They wanted to remember Sadako in some meaningful way, and decided to raise funds for a monument that would memorialize not just her but every child who’d been killed by the atom bombs. When they passed out leaflets at an annual meeting of junior high school principals, their local campaign grew into a national one. Many of the principals brought the idea back to their own schools and encouraged their students to get involved. Japanese newspapers and radio stations got behind the effort, and soon Sadako’s classmates had more than enough money to pay for the memorial. On May 5, 1958, just two and a half years after Sadako’s death, the Children’s Peace Monument—a bronze statue of Sadako atop a giant pedestal, her outstretched arms and holding a giant folded paper crane—was dedicated in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park.
After the Children’s Peace Monument was dedicated, Sadako’s story began to spread beyond Japan. Over the years it has been the subject of numerous children’s books, songs, plays, and musicals, as well as films and television shows. Her story is taught in schools all over the world. Many include paper crane folding as part of the instruction, and the schools send the completed senbazuru to the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima, where they are put on display. Today, more than half a century after the statue was dedicated, the monument still receives more than 10 tons of folded paper cranes each year from children (and adults) all over the world.
Space shuttle tires were good for only one trip (and cost $70,000 apiece).
CRANES FOR KUWAIT
After the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991, Sadako’s story was taught in Kuwaiti schools, and the children there learned to fold paper cranes as a means of helping them deal with the trauma they experienced during the occupation. Following the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, many strands of senbazuru were left on the fence surrounding ground zero in a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy for the victims of the tragedy.
Today Sadako Sasaki’s older brother Masahiro, now in his late sixties, travels the world telling his sister’s story as a means of furthering the cause of peace. The Sasaki family long ago donated all but five of Sadako’s original cranes to the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima. On the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Masahiro Sasaki presented one of the family’s five remaining cranes, folded by Sadako out of the wax paper from one of her pills, to the WTC Visitors Center in New York. Small enough to fit on a thumbnail, the tiny red crane is on permanent display along with the senbazuru collected from the fence at ground zero. “I hope that by talking about the small wish for peace, the small ripple will become bigger and bigger,” Sasaki says.
IN PERSON
If you ever visit Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, be sure to visit the Children’s Peace Monument and see the thousands of folded paper cranes on display there. Ring the Peace Bell, another popular memorial, and visit the Peace Flame. Unlike many memorial flames, this one is not eternal: It will be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon has disappeared from Earth.
The average European walks 237 miles a year. Average American: 87 miles.
ANSWER PAGES
CALCULATOR WORDS
(Answers for page 98)
1. Sizzle
2. Eggshells
3. Belize
4. Zoo
5. Shell
6. Igloo
7. Oslo
8. Hobo
9. Oboe
10. Bolo
11. Boise
12. Glee
13. Google
14. Ebbs
15. Ellis
16. Gigolo
17. Hills
18. Oil
19. Oozes
20. LEGO
21. Hell
22. Boggle
23. Hobbies
24. Bolshoi
25. Illegible
GRANDMA CELIA, CARD SHARK
(Answers for page 168)
Insta-matic: Grandma Celia didn’t memorize all the cards when she shuffled; she just memorized the card at the top of the deck, which happened to be the Seven of Clubs. (At the end of the shuffle she slowed down just enough to get a look at the card.) When she cut the deck into three piles, she made the pile with the Seven of Clubs the third pile—the one on the right—so that she’d draw that card last. But she called out “Seven of Clubs” first, because that was the only card she knew. Then, after she drew what turned out to be the Jack of Hearts from the top of the first pile, she called out “Jack of Hearts” as she drew the card from the top of the second pile. That card was actually the Three of Spades. So she called out, “Three of Spades,” when she drew the top card from the third pile, which she already knew was the Seven of Clubs. (That’s why she didn’t let me see any of the cards until she was done.)
Longest field goal in NFL history: Tom Dempsey, for 66 yards in 1970 Even more impressive, Dempsey was born without half of his kicking foot.
Seeing Is Believing: Grandma Celia planned this trick in advance, so before I came over she took the Ten of Diamonds out of the deck and put it in her purse. Then when she wrote the note, put it in her wallet, and put the wallet back in her purse, she made sure to put it right next to the Ten of Diamonds.
Later, when she said “Stop!” and took her wallet out of her purse, she pressed the Ten of Diamonds against the outside of the wallet with her fingers and lifted it out of the purse with the wallet, taking care not to let me see the card. When she laid the wallet on top of the cards, she laid the Ten of Diamonds face down on the top of the pile. (That’s why she told me a messy pile was OK—to make it harder for me to spot the new card on top.)
Flip-Flop: Before she did this trick, Grandma Celia turned the card on the bottom of the deck face up, without me noticing. When she fanned out the cards in her hand and told me to pick one, she was careful to make sure the bottom card wasn’t showing, so I couldn’t tell that it was face up. After I picked my card (and while I was momentarily distracted reading it), she closed the fan, squared the deck, and casually turned the deck over without my realizing it. All the cards in the deck were now face up, except for the card on top, which was face down. I assumed that the entire deck was face down, which is exactly what she wanted me to think. When I put my card back in the deck, it and the top card were the only two cards that were face down—the rest of the deck was face up. When Celia put the cards behind her back, she turned the top card face up and turned the entire deck over, so that now all of the cards were face down...except mine, which was face up.
A Stand-up Guy: This was the simplest trick of all: When Celia held up the Joker she kept her fourth finger—her index finger—hidden behind the card. Then when she set the cup on top of the card, she raised the finger up just enough to allow the cup to sit on the card and her finger.
MOVIE QUOTE QUIZ #1
(Answers for page 201)
1. Kindergarten Cop (1990)
2. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
3. Bla
zing Saddles (1974)
4. Rocky IV (1985)
5. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
6. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
7. Psycho (1960)
8. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
9. The King and I (1956)
10. Batman (1989)
11. The Exorcist (1973)
12. Air Force One (1997)
13. Return of the Jedi (1983)
14. Moonstruck (1987)
15. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
16. Old School (2003)
17. Oliver! (1968)
18. Finding Nemo (2003)
19. Patton (1970)
20. The Jerk (1979)
21. The Outsiders (1983)
22. The Godfather, Part II (1974)
23. The Usual Suspects (1995)
24. Body Heat (1981)
MOVIE QUOTE QUIZ #2
(Answers for page 303)
1. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
2. Gone With the Wind (1939)
3. Back to the Future, Part II (1989)
4. The Lost Weekend (1945)
5. Mary Poppins (1964)
6. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
7. Animal House (1978)
8. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
9. Shrek (2001)
10. Saturday Night Fever (1977)
11. Caddyshack (1980)
12. Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
13. Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
14. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
15. Working Girl (1988)
16. All the President’s Men (1976)
17. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
18. Predator (1987)
19. Pirates of the Caribbean (2003)
20. Deliverance (1972)
21. Black Swan (2010)
Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® Page 60
