Other Writing – Page 2 – Snip, Burn, Solder Blog

Highway Gothic (and its “Eldritch Serif” variant)

“Highway Gothic” is the informal name of the sans-serif typeface you see on American road signs:

Ice street signs showing the corner of Buckingham and Manchester

It’s formally known as the Standard Alphabets For Traffic Control Devices or the FHWA Series fonts. It was originally designed just after WWII, and optimized over time for legibility at a distance while traveling at high speeds.

I sorta love Highway Gothic. In part, that’s because I sort of love basic, sturdy industrial design; I’m the one guy who sorta loves the low-rent Brutalism of poured-concrete parking structures. But a big part of my love of that arises from the unintentional aesthetics that arise, for example, from the decay of that concrete smoothing to nubby rubble and rebar, or the way you can often see the grain of the plywood forms used to pour those Brutalist slabs.

Which brings us to why I have an especially tender spot for Highway Gothic:

I live in Michigan, where harsh weather and a poorly funded road maintenance program conspire to create an organically emergent “Eldritch Serif” variant of this sans-serif typeface. Here are a few choice examples from around town, where nature chose to add spidery tails and flourishes where man had specifically shaved them away, giving the letters subtle little horns and roots. The remind me of the tagin—little decorative flourishes or “crowns”—added to Hebrew letters in sacred texts, and signs of unrevealed truths; they are letters that are written, but we don’t yet know how to read.

We put up street signs; enthalpy and entropy add further signs of unrevealed truths buried in them. It takes brutal corners and straight lines, and grows roots and branches and tentacles from them.

The “Eldritch serif” variant of Highway Gothic is sort of my favorite thing, especially in the cold and gloom of Michigan winter.

Weathered street sign for Eisenhower street.

This is an especially gnarly one:

Weathered street sign show S. Main street to the right, and Ann Arbor-Saline road to the left

Merry Xmas! Please beware of “suicide cables”!🎄🔌🙅‍♀️

ANNUAL REMINDER:

‘Tis the season to hang your Xmas lights—and, for many people, to hang one strand backwards and instead of pulling it down, head to the hardware store in search of an “adapter” that is colloquially referred to as a “suicide cable.”

DO NOT DO THIS!

I’m not kidding around. If you don’t kill yourself with such an arrangement, you can easily kill some hapless person who stumbles across your work later.

Our Most Important Thanksgiving Traditions 🦃💀

I repost this (or a variant of it) every year. This is a year, and so I repost. QED. After all, without our traditions, we are as shakey as a fiddler on the roof.

1. “What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

I wrote this essay a few years back, as a little bonus for the folks kind enough to have subscribed to my newsletter. A good friend, Chris Salzman, was gracious enough to make something pretty of it. I relish the opportunity to reshare it each year, and I’m doing so once again. Every word here is both true and factual—which is a harder trick than you’d think.

You’ll be 15 minutes into that Lesser Family Feast in Michigan when your mother-in-law will turn to you and ask:

“What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

You should be prepared for this sort of thing in Michigan. But even though I’m warning you in advance, you still won’t be prepared.…

(read more: IN MICHIGAN: A PRIMER, A TRAVELOGUE)

2. “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”

THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! (WKRP in Cincinnati) from Tony DeSanto on Vimeo.

I repost this every year, because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest holiday memories. But it is, in my humble, a damn-near perfect gag. That’s saying something, because I find single-camera laugh-track situation comedies almost entirely unbearable to watch. If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)

3. “…your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs; we will sell our bracelets by the road sides…”

4. ♬♫♪ “Caught his eye on turkey day / As we both ate Pumpkin Pie … ” ♬♫♪

5. The Alice’s Restaurant Massacre (in four part harmony)

I’m a child of the 1980s, so most of my nostalgic holiday memories are TV-related. 🤷‍♀️

I hope your T-day is good and sweet. Gobblegobble! 🦃💀

We’ve Always Been Here, and You’ve Never Liked Us: Exploring Michigan’s First Jewish Burial Ground

It’s my town’s bicentennial year, and the local library graciously granted me the opportunity to write about The Old Jewish Burial Ground here—which was, in fact, the first Jewish cemetery in the state, despite being a fair distance from the Detroit Metro Area (which is where most Michigan Jews have lived).

SPOILER ALERT: the old Jewish burial ground is mostly underneath a big university building that was built in the 1930s, long after that first Jewish community had mysteriously left entirely of their own free will and not for any unpleasant or embarrassing reasons.

An advertisement with the headline "OPPOSITION TO JEWS," which ran in every issue of the Michigan Argus newspaper (Ann Arbor, MI) from fall 1851 through spring 1852. — *An advertisement that ran in the local Ann Arbor newspaper (spring 1852)*

Kudos to the library, who agreed to go forward on this endeavor, even though the working title I pitched it under was “We’ve Always Been Here, and You’ve Never Liked Us.”

A sign displayed by anti-Jewish protestors outside a synagogue in Ann Arbor, MI (spring 2024) — *A sign displayed by anti-Jewish protestors outside a synagogue in Ann Arbor, MI (summer 2024)*

Comedy is the Best Horror🎃

A lot of my favorite horror films are SNL digital shorts. I’ve been mulling this over for years now (in fact, I just spent the last hour writing about this from a craft perspective, a screed that I mercifully deleted rather than sending).

I think it all comes down to this: horror in film basically relies on four tools:

jump scares
mounting dread
squick (e.g., gore, body horror, and torture porn)
uncanniness

Jump scares are easiest, mounting dread takes the most time, and squick is often the best way to cash in or make a name for yourself. But it’s always the uncanniness I’m after in horror, that experience Freud described as abruptly seeing the “familiar and old-established” as strange and alien, thus giving the sense of revealing a deeper truth “which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

It’s the horrific uncanniness I love in these comedy skits. In part, this arises from what’s implied about the universe that the characters live in, all the stuff that’s outside the frame (e.g., Jason’s refrigerator, the pizza beast, the old woman across the street, that high school).

But I think the key element—the thing that pushes this beyond “the familiar and old-established made strange and alien” and into the territory of “that which ought to have remained hidden being dragged up into the light” is the fact that the world we actually really live in—where I’m sitting and typing and you’re sitting and reading and we’re both watching these little 3-minute-gems—is also outside the frame.

The awful thing the characters in the movie are about to experience? It’s already happening here. Hell, it’s us. And we’re laughing.

For your viewing pleasure:

“My Best Friend’s House”
“Touch Up”
“Almost Pizza”
“Lonely Christmas”
“Cockblocked”
“After High School”
“Tasty Toaster Tarts”
“Unedited Footage of a Bear” —> the unskipable Claridryl ad —> the uncanny Claridryl reality that may or may not be part of the unskipable Clarifryl ad

Looking for some spooºOºoky Hallow-Reads?🎃📖👻

I’m callously taking advantage of the Reason for the Season to plug some of my free-to-read/hear horror stories:

This Place Is Best Shunned

“This Place Is Best Shunned“—Allie and Rooster are heading down to Asheville for Rooster’s new gig, a cushy stint as artist-in-residence at UNC. Rooster is more of a con artist than maker of art, but Allie doesn’t mind, because he’s good-looking, charming, and values what she is: a girl with a keen eye for abandoned places and a knack for getting into them. But when they stumble upon an old backcountry church—the perfect backdrop for Rooster’s latest project—they discover that some “abandoned” places have a knack for keeping themselves occupied.…

Whatever Comes After Calcutta

“Whatever Comes After Calcutta”—It was late in the day when Lyle Morimoto saw the hanged woman and almost crashed his Prius somewhere between Calcutta, Ohio, and whatever the hell came after Calcutta. For hours he’d been sipping warm Gatorade and cruising the crumbling two-lane blacktop that sliced up the scrubby farmland of southern Ohio. He understood that he was not thinking clearly, but that seemed OK, since it also meant not thinking about his ear, or his wife, or Detective Jason Good, or the gun in the pocket of his suit jacket.…

The Slender Men

There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House

If you simply must purchase something, you might just as well purchase this (especially if you liked any of the above, because it’s all that and moooooore):

There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House—”Downtrodden architect Glenn Washington and his none-too-bright sidekick Lennie help a crooked real estate baron flip houses in downtrodden Detroit. A house comes up that is too good to gut for parts. Too good to be true. Waaaay too good. Thing is, nothing leads where it should — go through the front door, step out the door on the back porch. Best library ever. And why are the cops nosing around? Non-Euclidian architectural petty-crime adventure, and all that implies.”—Adrian Simmons, Black Gate magazine

Progressives: We Have a Huge Problem, and It’s Us

I strongly urge everyone—especially my fellow left-leaning folk—to listen to this in its entirety with an open heart.

FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast: American Politics Has A Respect Crisis

Snippet:

related: “A recipe for cooling down American politics”

Antisemitism in Ann Arbor, MI (July 7, 2024)

I’m mostly posting this for archival/documentary purposes. But I’m also posting this because I think that the “Is anti-Zionism antisemitic?” argument is stupid; you can go to these protests and demonstrations yourself, or look at comprehensive coverage, and decide for yourself if what you see is primarily motivated by a love of the Palestinian people or a loathing of Jews.

I captured all of these video at the weekly protest held outside Beth Israel Congregation each Saturday, during morning Shabbat services. This protest has been held mostly weekly for the last couple decades, and has been mostly the same throughout that period. The pictures show all of the signs that were on display that day. Some have been the same for years (I’ve lived less than one mile from this site for 20+ years), others are relatively new. I think only “Jews Bomb Hospitals” and possibly “Jews Bomb Churches” are new since the pogrom of October 7 and intensified bombings of Gaza. The entire video of my stroll past the demonstration is included at the bottom, for those curious.

a man holding a sign reading "No More Wars for Israel" outside a synagogue in Ann Arbor, MI

I never spoke a word to these men, nor was I wearing anything inflammatory. I had on a plain black shirt and this hat, which I wear basically everywhere:

A fairly beat-down green brimmed baseball cap with four buttons on it. The buttons show: 1) a "love" hand in rainbow colors, 2) the text "BLACK LIVES MATTER", 3) a peace symbol, and 4) a stylized Jewish star and the text "Secret Jewish Space Lasers Corps: Mazel Tough"

I wouldn’t rule out that these two protestors knew I was a Jew: the “Jewish Space Lasers” button on my hat is pretty legible (folks have complimented me on it) and, besides, I’m active in Jewish communal life here, and it’s just not that big of a community.

I mention this because near the beginning of the video you can hear the mustachioed protestor begin by talking about dead Palestinians (reasonable, at a nominally pro-Palestine demo) and then abruptly switching gears to talk about the “fact” that gas chambers never existed. I don’t know why he jumped topics like that, although I’d been warned that these two men (who both wear GoPros) would try to goad me into a fight. A portion of their signs are clearly intended to offend, and especially to offend Jews–like the families with small children who were arriving to attend religious services as I arrived.

Gerrymandering Solved Just Like Mom Used to Make!

Remember when you were a kid and would fight over who got the bigger slice of cake, and so your mom made one of you cut and the other choose, in order to ensure fairness and decrease the amount of kvetching and whining she’d have to deal with, so she could just get on with her life?

Well, turns out you can fix gerrymandering exactly the same way (more or less): Schneier on Security: A Self-Enforcing Protocol to Solve Gerrymandering

This protocol is self-enforcing (i.e., it requires no outside arbiter or commission or oversight board or judges), mathematically verified, and fair—all of which taken together basically guarantees we’ll never ever ever use it, because (waves hands) will-of-the-people-constitutionalism-orginalist-intent-textualist-consistent-with-traditions-blah-blah-bullshit.🤬🇺🇸🔥

“the only thing in life that’s really worth having is good skill”—Jerry Seinfeld

I do not endorse Seinfeld or Seinfeld (no deeply held conviction or ideological bone to pick there; he just never particularly worked for me, as a comedian or writer), but I do wholeheartedly endorse both the above sentiment, and reading the entire op-ed it came from (here’s a gift link 🎁🔗 ):

“Opinion: The life secret Jerry Seinfeld learned from Esquire“[*]

The takeways summarized in the op-ed are good and worth your time, and the core message is a fundamental truth:

Dedicating yourself to the mastery of a craft—against all odds and despite all distractions and obstacles—is the only path along which there is relief.

Along these same lines—delving into and reflecting on what it means to dedicate yourself to craft—I likewise wholeheartedly endorse this documentary (noting that, over the last decade I’ve revised my opinion on it in at least one important detail: although I still love the documentary, I no longer even mildly like any of these comics).

[*] I also don’t endorse Esquire—again, it never really worked for me is all. I do endorse the Washington Post, though. I read a lot of news reporting from a lot of sources, and there’s is consistently the most even-handed and makes the most honest attempt at being honest and accurate, in my humble.