Hey, everyone! Longtime readers (and if this is still popping up in your RSS feed, I’m not sure there’s any other kind) will remember that I used to run a side project called SundayMagazine.org, where each week I posted the most interesting articles from the New York Times Sunday Magazine exactly 100 years ago that week, usually with some commentary about its relevancy to today. I even wrote an article about it for Slate.

Well, when I had kids, I lost time for those sorts of side projects, and I put SundayMagazine on hiatus. In the meantime, I’ve had occasional requests from people who wanted to pick up the mantle, and I’ve considered handing over the reigns. But it never worked out. Until now.

SundayMagazine is now being run by Jesse Rifkin, a DC-based journalist. I’m sure his taste in articles to highlight will differ from mine, as will his writing style. (He’s probably a much better writer than I am). I look forward to seeing where he takes things. Check out his first post, introducing himself to readers. And then add (or re-add) SundayMagazine to your reading habits.

The website: www.sundaymagazine.org
The twitter: @sundaymagazine
The Facebook: facebook.com/sundaymagazine

(Please note that SundayMagazine has been dormant for nearly five years, and is in serious need of updating. Some things may be broken. We’ll fix things as we go.)

Posted by David at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under: General

I’m the guest on this week’s episode of Unprofessional, the podcast where Dave Wiskus and Lex Friedman have conversations with people about anything other than their profession.

Okay, we talk about my profession a little bit. But we also talk about ideas, hotel service (perhaps a little too much), and John Turturro’s daily routine, so if any of these things sound remotely interesting, give a listen below or check out their website where you can also hear previous episodes.

Thanks for having me on!

Posted by David at 2:36 PM | Permalink
Filed under: General

For a whole bunch of reasons, I don’t write on Ironic Sans as much as I used to. But there was a time that (I hope) you remember as fondly as I do, when I wrote once a week, usually a creative idea complete with illustrations and half-baked implementations. Ironic Sans was sometimes described as an “Idea Blog.”

I don’t write as frequently, but I still have a huge list of “idea” posts I never got around to, sometimes because I thought a post needed a proper illustration or something, and I just didn’t have time. Well, I’m tired of that list just sitting there, so I’m going to do a big idea dump.

The difference between an Idea Dump post and a proper Idea post, I guess, is that I’m not going to even try to implement them, illustrate them, etc. I’m just going to type it up and cross it off the list. I may do a few at a time, or just one now and then. It depends on how much time I have.

Okay. The first one is coming up shortly.

Posted by David at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under: General | Ideas

I’m very excited to announce that my occasional series of inventor portrait videos is about to get a lot less occasional, as it’s now part of PBS Digital Studios. I will be releasing a new video every two weeks and you can find them at the new Inventors Series YouTube channel.

Here’s the first episode:

[Note to self: I’ve really got to redesign this website to allow for embedding larger video.]

Going forward, a new episode will go up every other Tuesday. They will mostly be new episodes you haven’t seen, but I’ll throw in a few that I’ve posted here in the past, perhaps with some slight changes. They’ll be new to most people.

Oh, also: one of the best things you could do for me today is share the video — here’s the direct link — and/or subscribe to the YouTube channel. Thanks so much.

I hope you like what I’ve got planned!

Posted by David at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under: Business | Design | Entertainment | Favorites | General | Photography

I wrote an article for Slate.com that just went up. It’s about the New York Times Magazine of 100 years ago. Go read it!

Posted by David at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Filed under: Favorites | General

My analytics tell me that the majority of Ironic Sans readers don’t follow my side project SundayMagazine.org so I thought I’d do a little roundup here of some of the articles you’re missing out on if you’re not a SundayMagazine.org reader:

[Reminder: SundayMagazine.org is where I reprint the most interesting articles from the New York Times Sunday Magazine from 100 years ago each weekend with some notes for historic context or commentary]

• The night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre, there was another couple in the private box with Abe and his wife. They were young and in love, invited guests of the Lincolns. Imagine how that night affected them, and guess how their story ends. It is perhaps even more tragic and gruesome than the Lincolns’ story. Read it here.

• There was an international conference in 1910 to consider revising the calendar so that it doesn’t change from year to year. One of the proposals actually makes pretty good sense to me. Read it here.

• A look at 1910s state-of-the-art motion picture special effects and how they were done. Read it here.

• A fascinating description, complete with illustrations, of how to fly an airplane. Read it here.

• The details of a murder that was overshadowed by a more prominent murder. To this day, the case remains unsolved. Read it here.

• An anecdote about a case of mistaken identity at the theater that tells us something about class differences in 1910. Read it here.

• Leonid Andreyev was considered Russia’s answer to Edgar Allen Poe. The Sunday Magazine serialized one of his stories, The Man Who Found The Truth over four weeks. I posted the entire story complete with illustrations as a PDF, and also linked to the free ebook edition. Read it here.

• As an aside during an otherwise slow week, I published an 1890 article about telegraph operators. They got to know each other so well that they could identify each other based on Morse code tapping style, and could even determine the gender of an operator by how he or she taps. Plus, they used abbreviations that share a lot in common with today’s text-messaging. Read it here.

• As air travel became popular, people came up with all sorts of related patents. This article is about some of the more absurd patents, including illustrations. I’m a fan of the airship powered by eagles. Read it here.

• A study sought to determine whether or not you can predict a person’s musicality based on the shape of the ear. Read it here.

• One man had a license to hunt in Central Park. In fact, it was his job. And he tried to get his work done without bothering tourists. Read it here.

• I had no idea that the first ascent of Mt. McKinley was filled with such drama. The first person to claim victory turned out to be a liar. And the first party to really reach the top had no climbing experience. So how could they have done it? Were they lying, too? Read it here.

• Circus clowns are serious people out of the ring, but nobody treats them with any humanity. This article tells a clown’s sad tale, and I follow up by describing the tragic turn his life took after the article was written. Read it here.

• A 14-year-old kid was the president of the first amateur radio club in America. When Congress was considering regulating the airwaves, he went and testified before Congress. He had a lot of smart things to say, and I saw a lot of parallels between his 1910 radio club and the computer clubs of the 1970s. Read it here.

Those are just a handful of examples. I usually put up 5 articles each week, give or take. If you like what you see, check out the SundayMagazine.org archives, and subscribe to the RSS.

Posted by David at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Filed under: General | Lists | Long | New York

Short version:
I’ve launched a spinoff blog from Ironic Sans called Sunday Magazine. Every Friday I post the most interesting articles from the New York Times Sunday Magazine that was published exactly 100 years ago that weekend. You can get each week’s articles (probably one to six per week) by subscribing to the RSS feed, or following @sundaymagazine on Twitter, or by becoming a fan on Facebook.

It is not in any way affiliated with the New York Times. All of the Times articles I post are from before 1923, which means they are in the public domain.

Long version:
The New York Times Sunday Magazine is full of interesting articles about politics, science, crime, life, language, and human interest. It features fantastic writing and photography. It’s my favorite section in the paper.

It turns out that no matter how far back you go towards the supplement’s 1896 debut, the Magazine Section (as it was called back then) was always filled with amazing long-form articles, including many that are as interesting today as they were then. Some even more so. I stumbled upon this fact on April 1, when I began to get annoyed with every website’s need to pull some sort of prank. I wondered if companies did this sort of thing back at the turn of the last century. Searching for old articles about April Fool’s Day, I found this great article published in the Times on March 31, 1912:

(Note: All images of articles in this post can be clicked to enlarge; even bigger PDFs available via links below each image)

HOW “APRIL FOOL” ORIGINATED AND SOME FAMOUS PRANKS (PDF)

Everything about that article is wonderful. The writing style, the stories, and the illustrations are all quaint by today’s standards, but that makes it all so charming. It’s worth downloading the PDF to read it all, or any portion of it. Here is one of my favorite passages:

A hundred years ago [children] used to say, “Sir, your shoe’s unbuckled.” Today, their successors cry out, “Mister, your shoe’s untied!” A more elaborate piece of waggery has endured up to the present time practically its original form.

“Sir, there’s something out of your pocket.”
“Where?”
“There!”
“What?”
“Your hand, sir!”

Or again a boy and a lady enter into this dialogue.
“Ma’am, you have something on your face.”
“Indeed! What is it?”
“Your nose, ma’am.”

In all cases the ultimate rejoinder is accompanied with a burst of laughter and the shout of “April fool!”

Another passage describes a prank pulled by the Evening Star newspaper in London, which comes closer to the kind of corporate pranks we see today, although a bit more mean-spirited:

On March 31, 1846, that paper solemnly informed its readers that a magnificent collection of asses would be exhibited in the Hall of Agriculture at Islington. A great crowd of staring and struggling human being filled up the hall long before noon, and not for some time did it dawn upon anybody that they themselves were forming the collection that had been advertised.

Could you even fill a room today by advertising a donkey exhibit? The article is full of stories like this, pranks and characters long forgotten. I thought I might sit on it for a year, and post it next April Fool’s Day. But I wanted to learn more about the article so I could post it with context. I needed to research the various background characters and then-famous pranksters mentioned in the article to provide annotation. And the more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder: could I find other interesting articles in the Times from around the same period?

I originally found the article on the NYTimes website, where all of their content pre-1923 is freely available, having fallen into the public domain. But their online archives are difficult to browse unless you have specific keywords you’re searching for. I noticed that this article was published on a Sunday, but I didn’t know what section it was in. I didn’t know if the Times even had a magazine back then. To find out, I went to the Microforms Room of the main branch of the New York Public Library.

Sure enough, the article was in the “Magazine Section” of the newspaper. I wondered what other interesting articles I could find the in the Magazine Section. So I rewound the microfilm one week and found the Magazine Section for March 24, 1912.

I think my jaw actually dropped when I saw this:

FRENCH SAVANT TELLS OF LIFE ON VENUS AND MARS: Conditions Resemble Those on the Earth (PDF)

What the hey-now? Check out those awesome drawings. They depict the zoologist Edmond Perrier’s descriptions of “frogs as big as cows” on Venus and “beautiful plumage” of birds on Mars. It’s almost like he imagined the world of Avatar 98 years ago, a bit closer to home. And look at those large-chested Martians with headlights on their fingertips!

Here’s how Perrier described Venus:

The dampness of the atmosphere on Venus favors the growth of ferns. The development of flowers from the more primitive forms of plants must be slow and probably has not yet been accomplished on Venus. This lack means the absence also of bees, butterflies, perhaps of ants and of other insects which depend partly or entirely on flowers for their food.

Venus, then, is the home of insects like grasshoppers, or dragon-flies, or roaches, grown to an enormous size; of large batrachians, frogs as big as our cows, of innumerable and gigantic reptiles like those which once filled our earth, ichthyosauri, pterodactyls, iguanodons. Man is absent; indeed the race of mammals may not yet have appeared, in even the humblest form.

That’s not the case on Mars, where people evolved similarly to Earthlings:

[The Martian] is very tall, because the force of gravity is so feeble; he is very fair, with blue eyes, because there is so little light or heat; his jaws are narrow and the top of his head is large, because he has been evolving away from the animals for a much longer period than we. The Martian noses would be long and the ears large. The Martian’s lungs and consequently his chest would be enormous, on account of the thin atmosphere, and his legs would be very slender, because little effort is needed to walk.

What a find.

This fantastic article seems like something out of Amazing Stories, and it’s just been sitting there in the New York Times Magazine archives for the past 98 years. As far as I can tell, nobody has written about it. A Google Search for the article brings up only one result: the PDF buried in the nytimes.com archive. It hasn’t been mentioned anywhere else that Google indexes, although a little more information is available about the French scientist. (I’ll have more to say about that on the new blog on March 24, 2012.)

I was eager to find other gems like this. But with so many years of archives available, where would I begin? I decided to start with the New York Times Sunday Magazine from exactly 100 years ago, and make my way forward. So I found the microfilm reel for April, 1910. In just the first week’s issue, I found several interesting articles. Zooming ahead, I found several more. Every week there were articles that made me think I just had to write a blog post about this treasure trove of fascinating reading material.

I started working on a post featuring some of the articles I found covering a two month period of Sunday Magazines. Omitting all but the ones I found most interesting, I was able to pare it down to just 30 articles. But that’s still too many to reasonably expect any of you to read at once. That’s 30 articles stuffed into one blog post.

And so I decided the best way to share my findings is to dole out a few of my favorite articles from each week on a new blog: SundayMagazine.org. I have a couple weeks’ worth of posts up, and the next two months’ worth already in the hopper. They range from historically interesting to downright bizarre. I hope that you’ll see it as a new source of reading material. You can find out about new articles, posted every Friday, by subscribing to the RSS feed, or following @sundaymagazine on Twitter, or by becoming a fan on Facebook.

Posted by David at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Filed under: Favorites | General | Ideas | New York

I started Ironic Sans as a place for me to write all the creative ideas I have that don’t relate to my career as a photographer. The topics I write about here run the gamut, but I primarily express myself through photography, and I figure that some of you might like the projects I’m working on. So I’ve decided that it’s about time I start a blog about my photography.

The new blog is called DFP:BLOG, and its launch coincides with the redesign of my photography portfolio site.

Currently on the blog, you can see some of the people I’ve photographed for my ongoing series of inventor portraits, like Tony Pagoto, seen below in his living room, who invented a gadget for keeping the wires under your desk tidy.

And, from my archives, I’ve posted a seldom seen photo essay I shot in a denim factory in Kentucky. If you’ve ever wondered who the people are who put the holes in pre-distressed jeans, this will answer the question.

I haven’t yet figured out what the frequency of posts will be at DFP:BLOG, but when I do, expect to see more work along these lines, as well as occasional one-offs, and links to other work that inspires me.

(And don’t worry — Ironic Sans isn’t going anywhere).

Posted by David at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Filed under: General | Photography

Thank You to the New York Sun for the very nice article about my 60 Second Films in yesterday’s edition.

Posted by David at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under: General

I’m not one of those bloggers that just links to stuff I like on other blogs, but after 2+ years of relying on exactly those kinds of sites for traffic, I figure it’s about time I return some love. So I’ve finally added a blogroll in the sidebar of the home page, listing some of my favorite blogs. I thought a blogroll would be a good opportunity to highlight some underrated bloggers, but then I realized that most of the sites I read are already pretty popular. So I tried to order them roughly from least-to-most likely that you’re already reading them.

So what are the most underrated blogs that you read? Who are the bloggers whose blogs most reflect their personal creative vision? I call those people blogeurs, after the auteur theory of film, which holds that a movie reflects the director’s personal vision as though he or she were the primary author. Make a recommendation in the comments, but keep it to one link only — any more and you risk triggering my comment spam filter.

Here are some lesser-known highlights from my new blogroll. They aren’t all necessarily everyday must reads, but I like them:

Animation Backgrounds:
Musician Rob Richards has a hobby. He digitally removes the animation cells from cartoons, revealing the background art beneath. The result is an often surreal empty house, forest, construction site, etc. He also stitches together frames from panned shots, showing the entire panoramic painted background in its entirety. Animation fans may also like Rob’s other blogs which focus just as much on the cels as the backgrounds.

The New York Public Library:
Yes, the library has a blog. It’s a group blog, actually, by several of the library’s curators, highlighting items from the library’s collection as they relate to contemporary topics. I think each blogger is meant to be covering a specific subject, but I find some overlap. There’s also an interesting blog at the NYPL Labs, which “provides a window into the overall digital experience of The New York Public Library.” It’s as easy to lose time browsing through the archives of these sites as it is browsing the library itself.

Ponoko Blog:
I first read about the Ponoko Store in Wired magazine. It’s a fabrication-on-demand service that will laser-cut your design in a variety of flat materials (wood, plastic, etc) and send you the pieces for assembly. I’ve been trying to come up with a good design for a product that could be made out of flat pieces, and I have something in mind that I may work on soon. In the meantime, I’ve been reading their blog for inspiration, which is all about laser-cutting, fabrication-on-demand, and anything that can be made out of flat pieces of material. It seems that a lot of people are making 3-D art from 2-D pieces.

The Everywhere Girl:
Several years ago, this girl who is not a professional model participated in a photo shoot. The photographer Douglas Menuez licensed the photos as “Royalty Free” stock, meaning that once a person pays to use it, they are allowed to use it as much as they want without paying further royalties (a business model I don’t recommend, incidentally). As a result, this girl’s face has been widely used wherever a “hip college girl” was needed. People noticed. Now she has a blog that’s partly an ongoing documentation of places people have spotted her face (most recently on the wall at a restaurant in Phoenix) and partly a look into her life.

David Horvitz:
I like the way David Horvitz thinks. He’s some combination of photographer, performance artist, conceptual artist, and something I can’t quite put my finger on. His series Things For Sale I Will Mail You is a good place to start in exploring his site. I think this is a guy to keep an eye on.

As long as I’m linking to things, here are a couple sites that aren’t blogs but deserve appreciation. They’re both apparel sites by people I know and I think they deserve a plug. It’s t-shirt season, so maybe you’ll find something you like:

Unhappy Animals:
If I were ten years younger and female, I would totally be wearing these shirts. Since I’m not, I simply admire their creativity. They feature unhappy animals like the lactose-intolerant mouse (“The heart wants what the heart wants, even if it’s going to leave you clutching your tummy curled in pain”) and the fish who swims in a bowl of its own tears, its sadness the only thing keeping it alive. Nice.

Ciara Elend:
Ciara block-prints by hand every one of her high-end t-shirts, using linoleum blocks that she hand-carves, and the results are fantastic. She also sells more moderately-priced shirts, but I think it’s her “couture” line that really shines (I don’t know where she gets the shirt material, but they seriously feel great). I especially like the “Bad Apples” design. A lot of work has gone into making sure these are high quality products.

And that’s it for the outbound links. Let me know what underrated blogeurs you like that I should be reading (reminder: one link per comment please). I’ll occasionally update the blogroll as my own list changes.

Posted by David at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Filed under: General

If you’re one of the thousands of people attending SXSW Interactive this weekend, you can come see me pitch one of my ideas live on a panel called Worst Website Ever: That’s So Crazy It Just Might Work.

Andy Baio will serve as moderator, as eight creative people each take turns pitching their worst possible website ideas to venture capitalist David Hornik, who would probably be crazy to provide funding for any of our proposals. But who knows? Maybe he’ll decide that one idea is so crazy that it just might work.

I’m sure the competition will be tough, as the full panel also includes Lane Becker, Jeffery Bennett, Ben Brown, Katie Spence, Michael Buffington, Lia Bulaong, and Merlin Mann. All are smart people with smart ideas. But whose smart idea will be the worst?

Find out this Saturday at 5:00 in Room 9, wherever that is.

More info here.

Posted by David at 5:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Filed under: General

When I started this blog, I never imagined that the silly things I post here might one day end up in a printed anthology alongside writing by Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, federal judge Richard Posner, and the New Yorker’s Alex Ross. But we all have blogs which, along with 24 others, have been anthologized in a new book out this week called Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web compiled by former New York Times reporter Sarah Boxer. I’m flattered!

The printed page might seem like an odd way to read blogs, but the compilation actually makes for good reading. And the fact that the book features relatively short entries that can be read in any order makes it an excellent bathroom book. (I mean that in a good way.)

You can read reviews of the book on-line for a better idea of what the book is like and what’s included. Here are a couple of them: LA Times, Newsweek.

Note: Sarah Boxer selected the posts that she feels work best in her compilation. But they aren’t necessarily my favorite posts from my blog. I do maintain a “Favorites” list that can be found among the Categories list in the sidebar, or by clicking here.

Posted by David at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Filed under: General

New to the Ironic Sans shop are T-Shirts emblazoned with the NYC Skyline Histogram from this post I wrote a few weeks back. The design is available in a range of attractive products and sizes.

All your old favorite items are still available, too, including T-shirts From Conventions That Never Really Happened, the “Hello My Name Is John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” shirts, the Ascent-of-Man Crossing Abby Road items, an Orange Clockwork, and of course the Pre-Pixelated Clothes For Reality TV Shows (featuring the return of the Pixmas design) as well as a few other items.

They make excellent gifts!

Posted by David at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under: General

PC Magazine has just named Ironic Sans one of their Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites for 2007. Thanks, PC Magazine! If you’re visiting for the first time by way of the article, welcome to the site. You can click the “Favorites” link (which can also be found among the categories in the sidebar) to get a good sense of what this site’s all about, or just keep reading the front page to see what’s been on my mind lately.

Posted by David at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Filed under: General

I don’t usually write about things going on elsewhere on other blogs. I pretty much just write original stuff and let other people link to me. Well, this week has been extremely busy and I haven’t had much time to write anything, so I figured I’d take a moment this morning to acknowledge and thank some of the websites out there that have linked to entries I’ve written on more than one occasion. Thanks goes to the following blogs, which you should check out if you don’t already. In no particular order:

Design Observer • Gawker • Gothamist • Adrants • BoingBoing • Metafilter • Jason Kottke • The Nine at Yahoo! • USA Today’s Pop Candy • Waxy.org • TVGasm • Mental Floss • Cynical-C Blog • Washington Post’s Celebritology • Wired’s Table of Malcontents • Growabrain • Coudal Partners • Consumerist

Apologies to those who I’ve overlooked.

Hmm. Now that I look at the list, those are all pretty popular websites anyway. They probably won’t benefit that much by my listing them here. Well, since I’m taking this rare moment to link to other blogs, here are three lesser-known blogs I enjoy and recommend:

• You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice - A website trying to call out those who are ripping off other people’s designs.

• News From Me - Mark Evenier’s blog could be described accurately as being a great site for finding entertaining video from yesteryear. It could also be described as a site that keeps you updated on animation industry greats as they pass away, including illustrators, voice actors, and others. It could also be described as a place to find occasional insightful political commentary. It’s all these things and more.

• Dave Greten’s Blog - His reviews of movies he hasn’t seen are highly entertaining, and his description of his hike up Mount Kilimanjaro had me ready to tie on my hiking boots and book a flight to Tanzania.

Posted by David at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Filed under: General | Lists

I feel kinda cheap pointing out that the 2007 Weblog Awards are open for nominations until January 10, and humbly noting that Ironic Sans would make an excellent nominee for the Best New Weblog or Best-Kept Secret Weblog categories. But it does give me a good excuse to review some of the highlights of the past year, as Ironic Sans approaches its first anniversary. It all started with one little idea and has grown so much from there.

A particularly nice accolade came recently when Gawker Media’s founder Nick Denton e-mailed me. He wrote, “Can’t believe I’d never seen your site before… spent half an hour browsing around. Thanks for wasting my morning!” A comment like that from Nick Denton made my day almost as much as the post I saw on one reader’s livejournal page. She wrote, “I went to the site to dip my toes in, and came out an hour later soaking wet.”

Ironic Sans was put on the map when I posted my idea for pre-pixelated clothes for reality TV. I thought it was a funny idea, but I didn’t expect all the attention it received. I was taken completely by surprise when it got mentions by MSNBC, USA Today, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Defamer, Fark, Digg, Kottke, Consumerist, the Morning News, Boston.com, C|Net, New York Magazine, and even Stuff Magazine, which recently asked for photos of the shirts for an upcoming issue. And next month, the shirts will be seen in a new book called The Big Book of Irony by Jon Winokur.

Here are some of this year’s other entries of note:

The ones that got the most attention

• Overview of celebrity patents
  
• Idea for a building shaped like Godzilla
  
• The Ant Desk
  
• The Google Maps Guide to Ghostbusters
  
• The Mr. T Virtual Playset
  
• Logos with Pictures as Letters
  
• The Art of 1010 WINS
  
• New York City in Animation (an ongoing series)
  
• Interview with Louis Klein, the man who has seen almost every episode of Saturday Night Live in person
  
• Interview with Seetharaman Narayanan, whose name I’d been staring at for years on the Photoshop splash screen
  
• Agassi vs. Pavel vs. Agassi vs. Pavel
  
• A parallel istaverse
  
• Lexidiem, the word of the day
  
• 60 Seconds in the Life of a Staircase
  
• 60 Seconds in the Life of Landing Gear

A few that I thought deserved more attention

• Idea for a World Trade Center monument
  
• The Ishihara Triptych
  
• Michaelangelo’s “David” meets David’s “George Bush”
  
• The Pacifist Chess Set
  
• 60 Seconds in the Life of Steam
  
• 60 Seconds in the Life of the Apple Store Stairs
  
• Boris Vallejo’s Palette
  
• A Remake of “Fred Ott’s Sneeze” (one of the first movies ever made)
  
• Commemorative t-shirts for fictional events
  
• Interview with Adam Rex, author, illustrator, and generally funny guy with a great book out.
  
• How Ironic Sans got shut down by one man who sent one e-mail (this will always deserve more attention because I want everyone to know how awful Doteasy is for web hosting before giving them a dime).
  

In all, it’s been a good first year. I try to periodically feature some of my favorite entries in a Favorites page, so if you’re new to Ironic Sans you can check there for more highlights. And you can browse the complete archive for the rest of this year’s 150-or-so entries.

When I started this site, I had to figure out what exactly I want it to be. I thought about all the blogs that already exist. There is no shortage of excellent sites that just point to all sorts of interesting things on the web. The world doesn’t need any more of those. Instead, I aim to be one of those interesting things on the web that all of those sites can point to. So far, I hope I’m off to a good start.

Posted by David at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Filed under: General | Lists

Today, Ironic Sans had its 100,000th visit, to be commemorated in this post, reflecting a long-standing tradition of posting about your 100,000th hit.

I consider the site as having gone live on March 11, 2006, even though the archive has a few earlier posts, which I needed to have so I could figure out the site’s design. But March 11 was the first day I considered the site finished and posted something that I thought might attract people to my site. The next day, March 12, I started using SiteMeter to keep track of my visits. And according to SiteMeter, I had my 100,000th visit at 4:29:17 PM today.

So that’s 100,000 visits in 43 days. Not bad!

The top three pages in the first 100,000 hits:

1) Pre-pixelated clothes for Reality TV Shows

2) The Google Maps Guide to Ghostbusters

3) 60 Seconds in the Life of Landing Gear

Thanks for helping me hit this milestone, everyone!

Posted by David at 4:58 PM | Permalink
Filed under: General | Technology

My entry about Pre-Pixelated Clothes generated a lot of traffic this week, thanks especially to links from the following websites: TVGasm, Defamer, MSNBC, USA Today, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Fark, Digg, Kottke, Consumerist, the Morning News, and about a hundred other blogs.

I didn’t really expect that much attention. Thanks for putting my little blog on the map!

Posted by David at 9:05 AM | Permalink
Filed under: General

Announcing the first inductees to the Hall of Fame Hall of Fame:

Rock and Roll • Inventors • Women • Country Music • Cowboys • College Football • Cowgirls • Rockabilly • Volleyball • Science Fiction • Bowling • Aviation • American Police • Robots • Texas Rangers • Automotive • Ecology • Thoroughbred Racing • Motorsports • Radio • Songwriters • Gymnastics • Amateur Softball • Agriculture • Wrestling • Bicycling • Clowns • Hockey • Fresh Water Fishing • Hackers • Ukelele • Toys • Pirate Radio • Anagrams • Computers • Teachers • Mining • Figure Skating • Ad Slogans • Explorers • Motorcycles • Astronauts • Quilters • Dance • Snowmobiles • Polka • Flight Simulator Scenery • Hawaiian Music • Kites

Posted by David at 12:37 AM | Permalink
Filed under: General | Lists

Thinking about different fonts one day, I decided that “Ironic Sans” would be a good name for a serif font. Maybe one day I’ll get around to designing it. In the mean time, I think it makes a good name for my blog.

“Ironic Sans,” the blog, is a place for me to write about art, culture, technology, law, politics, current events, critical thinking, and other topics that appeal to me. I will have a number of regular features on this site, and various articles long and short as they come to me. I hope you enjoy.

Posted by David at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)
Filed under: General | Ideas