One of those perfunctory blog entries I warned about

Indifferent to the NFL draft, I still couldn’t help wondering: Where does the name “Shedeur” come from? (As in: Shedeur Sanders, Deion’s son.)

By coincidence, I found out. It’s a Hebrew name. Numbers 1:5 identifies Shedeur as the father of Elizur, who was a leader of the Reubenites.

Now I know.

A chilly death

A snowy week. Some days have been frigid. But in the “Little House” books the prairie settlers do just fine at 20-below (°F). It’s at 40-below that they have trouble. Today I wore shorts to take Samuel to his bus stop. It was 5 °F. The bus was 10 minutes late. I barely felt the cold (there wasn’t much wind). Samuel and I joked around: I sang, he punched. On the way back to the house I passed the cardboard box containing the frozen cat I’d put out by the curb, on Monday. Karin found the corpse in our shed. The Animal Resource Center promised to pick it up but never did. It’s no longer so distressing. The cat is under a blanket of snow. I know to look for a single paw that sticks out of the box; that’s how I can tell the cat is still there. Children pass it trudging to and from school. Sorry about this bummer of an entry.

A World Cup venue

British tabloids have reported – although, as far as I know, FIFA hasn’t confirmed – that the 2026 World Cup final will be played in Arlington, Texas.

Well, why not. A bloated stadium to cap off a bloated World Cup.

“Is Arlington, Texas, the largest city in the US without mass public transit?

“Yes. …

“Voters have rejected proposals to create public transit three times since 1980.”

Too bad. I guess I’ll have to ride an Uber to the game.

It turns out that, spiritually, I am Berkeleyan

We received our annual taste reports from Spotify (“Your 2023 Wrapped”). My listening habits were likened to those of the people of Berkeley, California; Karin’s, to those of the residents of Provo, Utah.

So, what do they listen to at BYU? Broadway tunes and Disney.

What do the liberal kids at UC Berkeley listen to? Evidently, Joe Hisaishi’s cartoon music. (Not so different from the Mormons, then.)

Other musicians who got lots of Spotify play from me in 2023: Boards of Canada, Stelvio Cipriani, Vangelis, Silver Convention, and Aphex Twin. And, too late to make the list, Enigma. I should note that it’s Samuel who asks to listen to much of this. “I want to hear Mix-Mad by Enigma,” he says (the album is MCXMD a.D.).

Body-text fonts, pt. 11: Vendôme

His departure is old news, but I’d like to record my gratitude to the Argentinian Gustavo Alfaro, Ecuador’s manager during this last World Cup cycle. An astute tactician and a careful mentor to young pros; by most accounts, a good person.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This month I exhibit a bizarre typeface. It appears as body text in just one of my volumes, a Random House Value Publishing omnibus of E. M. Forster’s novels (obtained last weekend at Goodwill).

The italics are severely slanted.

That’s how they were designed to look.

[Update, 27 January: I now believe this isn’t a sample of true italics. Here’s a website where you can buy cheap font files of Vendôme. Images of body text are provided. Roman text looks like this; italics look like this.

You can see the italics aren’t just slanted versions of the romans. Compare the roman and italic uppercase “A,” as well as the roman and italic lowercase “b”: the romans have more serifs. And in the italic lowercase “g,” the lower and upper storeys are farther apart than in the roman “g.” On the other hand, all these differences are absent from the text sample taken from the Forster omnibus.

Of course, not every genuine Vendôme will look exactly like Fontsite’s Vendôme.]

Karin didn’t bother with the typesetting. She listened to a recording of the book. Cecil Vyse and Cousin Charlotte irked her equally.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Daniel sleeps; I type.

He often goes to bed like this. I put on soothing Italian soundtrack music and lie with him. He rolls and jumps on me; then, declining suddenly, he “gives up the ghost.”