L.K. Rawles

I should be writing this from Sorrento, Italy, but the State Department sent me my passport the day after I was scheduled to leave. I shall work tirelessly towards their destruction.
(To the good folks in our intelligence services: I’m mostly kidding.)

So instead, I’m in Boston with my mother, and we leave tomorrow for Cape Cod. It’s still better than a kick in the teeth.

I haven’t written in a while, and I wanted to bring a new cause to everyone’s attention. It’s a movement called “Ban Comic Sans,” and it deserves our wholehearted support:

In 1995 Microsoft released the font Comic Sans originally designed for comic book style talk bubbles containing informational help text. Since that time the typeface has been used in countless contexts from restaurant signage to college exams to medical information. These widespread abuses of printed type threaten to erode the very foundations upon which centuries of typographic history are built. While we recognize the font may be appropriate in a few specific instances, our position is that the only effective means of ending this epidemic of abuse is to completely ban Comic Sans.

They make an excellent point. I myself have a passionate dislike for Times New Roman, but very few people will be willing to jump on that bandwagon with me. The least I can do for the cause is to support the ban of Comic Sans.

In related news, I saw an exhibit devoted to Helvetica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York two days ago. A very, very small exhibit. Check out this article about how Helvetica conquered the world.

I have to admit, I was a little alarmed by the intensity of my glee when I found out that Paris Hilton is going to be serving 45 days in jail. And I am not alone.

But I think I’ve figured out why there’s such public rejoicing: Paris Hilton is our modern-age Marie Antoinette.

It’s not just the coincidence of Hilton’s first name. They were born into fortunes. They were fashion trend-setters. They spent obscene amounts of money on their birthday parties. They both liked tiny dogs: Marie Antoinette’s dogs were Papillons, Paris Hilton has those chihuahuas. What was “The Simple Life” if not an extended version of “Let them eat cake?”

Of course, to be fair, those stories about Marie Antoinette’s depraved sexual exploits were almost certainly made up by French pamphleteers. The documentation is rather more solid for Hilton’s.

[Side Story: My friend Tara spent two years in Senegal with the Peace Corps, and when I sent her care packages, I’d try to include some DVDs along with the Visine and PowerBars. These were the lean years of grad school, so I got used ones from Blockbuster. But the most popular one I ever sent was The Simple Life 2, where Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie “worked” on a farm. Tara said her Peace Corps friends always gasped at a scene where a bucket of milk got kicked over, because dude, it was a whole bucket of milk!]

I have an unhealthy relationship with Amazon.com’s “Recommended for You” feature.

While some of our interactions are positive and result in me finding new books to love, I tend to look at RfY’s suggested products as referendums on my personality and worth as a human being.

For example, at the moment my #1 book recommendation is “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance” by Laurie Garrett. What does it say about me as a person, that three of the top 15 books on my RfY list are about how infectious disease can kill us all?

And okay, I’ve read not one, but two books on the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic in the past three months (”Flu” by Gina Kolata was quite good, but “The Great Influenza” by John M. Barry really dragged in the beginning - he spent 76 pages on the foundation of Johns Hopkins University alone.) But I’m not the survivalist lunatic that RfY seems to think I am! I’m not! I don’t need camping supplies!!

See how worked up I can get? I’m this close to breaking the dinner plates and shouting tearfully, “Sometimes it feels like you don’t know me at all!”

WE TV, in its infinite wisdom, has put the movie Waiting to Exhale in heavy rotation (along with Scent of a Woman) for April.

I had never actually gotten around to seeing this movie in the theaters or on DVD before this weekend. But I knew that it was a chick movie starring Whitney Houston, so I was ready for crazy.

I thought it was supposed to be uplifting or something, where you root for the ensemble cast to find their true loves and high-paying jobs. I’m cool with that.

But holy crap, these people were appalling. “Stop having sex with other people’s spouses,” I shrieked at the screen. “You blew up his car? That’s like nineteen kinds of illegal!”

Was I supposed to feel bad for Angela Bassett’s character, whose husband left her for another woman, when she slept with a man whose wife was dying of cancer? God knows I don’t want to break out the nun costume (wimples really do nothing for a girl), but how did this thing become a blockbuster?

I’ve decided that the only thing that makes sense is that Whitney Houston made a pact with the devil (The Bodyguard, Waiting to Exhale), a pact that went badly wrong (Being Bobby Brown, cocaine).

I’m sitting in a Panera cafe, mooching off their free wifi, and at the next table is a mother explaining how punchcards used to run computers. Her pre-tween daughter is all saucer-eyed, and she thinks that punchcards sound “really cool!”

But it made me think about how people used to say - when talking about the progress of computer technology - “I remember when floppy disks really were floppy!”

And now it’s just “I remember floppy disks!”

Remember zip drives? I had a zip drive. I wonder where it got to…

Okay, I just spotted an egregious new example of verbification on someone’s website. I’ve gotten used to “headquartered” and “authored,” but this is a new one:

Critical Mass is an interactive services firm that architects solutions to help the world’s leading companies increase revenues, reduce costs and deepen customer relationships.

Good God, people. We need to stop the insanity.

Well, I’m in the Greensboro airport, on my way to a 3-day conference in Reston, Va. It’s called “Interactive Community News,” and it’s hosted by the American Press Institute.

What I’m hoping to get out of it is a bunch of concrete suggestions on how to get the people in our region more involved with our website. Since that’s the title of the conference, isn’t this a no-brainer? Not necessarily.

This crusade for community journalism is an old and venerable one, pre-dating the creation of the internet. By now everyone’s on board with the theory (barring some nervous corporate attorneys). But I don’t think we’ve found the ultimate venue to provide it yet. It’s like we’ve answered the “What?” question, now we need to tackle the “How?”

I’m hoping that this conference will be focused on the how, not the what. There’s something very dreary about a room full of people agreeing with each other.

Since the conference isn’t about my company’s internal workings, I consider it a loophole in my no-writing-about-work rule. I’ll keep you posted on what happens…

I’ve been persuaded. The numerous articles advocating blogs for every journalist have persuaded me that it’s time to create my own.

But as the naturally suspicious daughter of two lawyers, I can come up with a long list of reasons why writing a blog is a terrible idea. Identity theft, being blacklisted by employers and shady deals with deposed Nigerian kings. That’s three right there.

So here are my ground rules:

• I’m not going to write about my job. Journalism in general, sure, but no details from my workplace.
• No details about my personal life that I wouldn’t want my grandmother to read. And since my grandmothers are in Irish Catholic heaven, they are watching me at all times (or so I have to assume.)
• All naked pictures of me are going to be password-protected. You know, if I ever take any.

Oh, and to all future employers: I work a mixture of nights and days, so don’t let the timestamp fool you; I’m not typing this at work. I promise.

Now once I get you all to sign these release forms in triplicate, we’ll be on our way!