Singing along

The Proclaimers, singing:

“My heart was broken / My heart was broken / Sorrow / Sorrow …”

Samuel: “My heart isn’t broken.”

John-Paul: “Oh, no? Why not?”

Samuel: “Because I always follow the rules of the road.”

Some of his interpretations are rather literal.

(The Proclaimers are wearing good pants.)

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Samuel has finished reading the Babar omnibus and is halfway through Little House in the Big Woods (which I first read only last year). Some days, he reads more than the required amount. He has caught the fire. His abuelo pays him $2 per completion.

He’s a good little (mercenary) book reader, but he’s too hard on the spines.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Abel now stands.

Daniel sings along with my Spotify favorites. Most are wordless, so he has to sing the violin parts (for instance). He has a favorite Beethoven piece: the “Turkish March” from The Ruins of Athens. I’ve known it all my life but only just realized it was Beethoven’s.

Body-text fonts, pt. 21: Plantin

Karin bought a babies’ bilingual board book with pictures of the characters from El Chavo del Ocho.

I read it often to Daniel, four or five times in a row. I read it in Spanish and in English and say all the characters’ names.

Tonight, poor Karin tried to read it to Daniel, and she didn’t know all the names and Daniel threw a fit.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This early-20th-century typeface is my all-time favorite for body text. A stone-cold classic of hot metal type. Look at that glorious x-height. Excellent for printing on lousy paper (mass-market paperbacks, newspaper, etc.). Beats the pants off Times and its ilk. My favorite letter is the uppercase “R,” and the uppercase “K” has the same badass tail. Kudos to “E,” “M,” “N,” “T,” and “W” also. Weight-wise, I prefer the light/semibold pairing to the regular/bold pairing, at least in the larger sizes.

The text sample, from Jane Eyre, describes why we didn’t go trick-or-treating this Halloween.

It used to be normal for Puffin Classics to be set in Plantin, but lately they’ve been boringly set in Minion.

42 days of darkness

Here’s somewhere you don’t often see on TV: the affluent, beautiful, dismal Los Lagos region of southern Chile. It’s where Netflix’s 42 Days of Darkness is set. I enjoy cloudy weather, or I believed I did; I once thought it’d be nice to live in Puerto Montt. But natural beauty never looked so dreary as in this show.

More precisely, the setting is Puerto Varas, on Lago Llanquihue. A housewife disappears from a gated community. Has she been kidnapped, as her husband claims? Has she been murdered? Has she simply abandoned her family? The police investigate at a snail’s pace. Brisker progress is made by a hustling lawyer and his associates, who are moved as much by the compulsion to snoop as by the prospect of helping the family (and receiving payment). The story is modeled after a true one – I don’t know how closely. Stories of missing persons are the most wrenching to watch. I dread putting each episode on; and then I quickly get carried along, buoyed by the energy of the desperate, shabby lawyer as he struggles against the complacency of other lawyers and the police. It’s as if Ramón Valdés from El Chavo del Ocho set out to solve a crime.