AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Two adequate miles this morning, coffee and fruit, showered and dressed and did a couple of tasks from my list, Morning Prayer, coffee and toast, Teams meeting, worked at a task but then was distracted by trying to improve the flow on a pen with shims (I think the problem is with the feed tube, not the nib itself), now off for my Easter haircut.

(That’s ‘Minus First’, since Easter Week is Noughth Week.)

Two satisfactory miles this morning, then coffee and fruit, showered and dressed, another cup and toast, then off to church early to prepare for Palm Sunday.

Part of this morning’s activity — and alot of yesterday’s activity — involved putting together scripts for the reading of St Luke’s Passion today. Until this year, St Helen’s used to have the Liturgy of the Palms, and the Procession, but no Passion on Palm Sunday. There’s a logic to that — the reading of the Passion belongs especially to Good Friday, doesn’t it? And the Entry into Jerusalem cries out for a liturgical observance of its own (Palm Sunday, right), right? But Common Worship decrees the Liturgy of the Passion for the main part of the Palm Sunday service, so Passion it was — we’re hewing close to CW during the interregnum rather than foreclose anything the new Team Rector might have in mind.

So, since we were reading the Passion, I planned a dramatised reading of Luke’s Gospel, with Pilate and Peter and servants and soldiers and priests and crowds. I had half expected the music director to print the text for the choir, but yesterday morning he reminded me gently that he’d asked me to. So late afternoon I strolled to the parish office, began printing, and quickly discovered that the parish printer had run out of tuner.

All right, says I, I’ll go on and print them at home. So I strolled back and began printing to the Brother laser printer at home… but part way through that, our printer ran out of toner. I looked in desperation over to our inkjet, which doesn’t duplex printing, so I had to flip pages over and print on both sides. This wasted a certain amount of [ink and] paper, because there are pitfalls to trying to duplex print an eleven-page document by hand. In the case, I got enough printed, and some stalwarts had printed their own copies at home, and I collated and stapled this morning between shower and church.

I gave the choir the ‘crowds’ part, because having the whole congregation cry out ‘Crucify!’ always feels unsuccessful to me. Most Christian congregations can’t get it to sound as though they’re actually baying for Jesus to be crucified. When I first proposed this, my colleague Jen said, ‘Well, then, I nominate you to read the part of Jesus’ which was clever of her because if she’d given me a moment, I’d have said she should read Jesus’s part. She narrated (as Luke), the wardens were Pilate and Peter respectively, and various members of the congregation and choir read the other parts. I stumbled a couple of times on Jesus’s words (in Luke — just different enough from Matthew and Mark to trip me up now and then), but everybody else knocked it for six. Profound thanks to all our readers this morning for a job exceedingly well done.

And now I’m exhausted, except there’s the Boat Race to watch. [Later:] Well, that was dispiriting. Well played, Cambridge, but remember that whatever can’t go on forever, eventually comes to an end. Here’s hoping the end is 2026.

A good, full night’s sleep last night, but I mostly walked my miles this morning because every element of my person, body and spirit, felt sluggish. I was going to try to title this post some sort of pun on ‘Loiusville Slugger’ but I just didn’t care to cast about for an apposite, punchy joke. I’m metabolising the caffeine in my first cup of coffee before I start my Saturday fry-up. We’ll see whether the first cup of coffee suffices to set me in motion….

SNPTD. This morning’s miles were adequate, nothing to shout to the Web about. Coffee and fruit, shower and dress, Morning Prayer, home to bid Margaret and the ladies au revoir as they made a trip to the vet (all is or will be well, and they met a lovely vet who likes the ladies very much), coffee and toast, a spate of emails, lunch, and a walk into church to check for phone messages.

We’re reading the Passion in parts for Palm Sunday, so I’ve been wrangling who’ll do what via a series of emails.

Two mornings, two adequate runs. Hot breakfast yesterday, fruit and coffee today. Showered, dressed, Morning Prayer. Yesterday hurried home to spend time with the ladies before Staff Meeting and Preachers’ Group and a [Home] Communion by Extension; today I indulged in public-facing office hours at R&R, catching up on odds and ends. Margaret will arrive home in a while, then I have a Sodality Day meeting and, this evening, we receive feedback from the Diocese about our work preparatory to announcing and advertising the vacancy for a Team Rector.

Two satisfactory miles this morning, coffee and fruit, shower etc, Morning Prayer, return to socialise with the ladies for an hour or so, then off to a Deanery Communion and lunch with colleagues, after which I came home for the afternoon and worked on emails and other odds and ends.

After yesterday’s moaning, this morning’s run felt pretty good. My only issue arose from my the arch of my right foot, which registered a protest after I wore dress shoes without arch support yesterday morning. Good pace, good limberness, good breathing. Cup of coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, coffee, toast, then helping Margaret prepare for her annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Theology. Then I leaned into preparing for an interview with a student from SOAS, then the interview itself. It was, I think, a good interview, and the student (one Balthazar Greer) asked pertinent questions and seemed pleased with the noutcome. I didn’t catch myself saying anything too foolish, so that’s good. Now on to squaring out the Palm Sunday service book.

I was excited when I saw Hermeneutics and honor: negotiating female “public” space in Islamic/ate societies (Asma Afsaruddin, ed.) on the Naval Academy’s list of books censored out of their library — maybe my work on hermeneutics could matter enough to draw fire from DOGMAGA! But alas, I’m stuck persumably in the ‘mostly harmless’ category.

It all goes back to Rolling Stone. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, the body copy of RS were set in Cloister, an exquisite Venetian Jenson-style face designed by Morris Fuller Benton. Its almost (but not quite) spiky eccentricity within the Garalde-Jenson type sphere appealed to me immensely, and it became the hallmark of RS’s typography to me, as vivid as Dennis Ortis-Lopez’s condensed slab-serif heads and Roger Parkinson’s definitive wordmark….

In the late 80s, when I depended on AOL for online connectivity, I happened on a digital version of Cloister made by a user who called himself ‘Uncle Goot’.* I used the daylights out of that slightly condensed digital Cloister, as I couldn’t afford the professional versions offered by URW or Elsner + Flake. (Cloister Black, the prevalent usage of ‘Cloister’ in the free font/bootleg font world, is a blackletter offshoot of the original Cloister family.)

After I acquired some professional typefaces and some good open-access type, I drifted away from Cloister — not out of lack of affection, but because it lacked some glyphs, and the kerning was a shade amateurish, and (if I recall correctly) Uncle Goot only released Roman, Italis, and Bold — a good basic family for many uses, but sometimes one just wants a bold italic, or some other offshoot, and in the Unicode OpenType era Cloister seemed… limited. I had acquired Monotype Centaur, a similar typeface that draws on Jenson’s Venetian type, and that was close enough as makes no difference to most users.

But a couple of months ago, I was reading Wikipedia pages on typefaces (as one does), and I clicked from Cloister to Centaur where I saw the sentence, ‘At least two open-source digital typefaces, Museum (by Raph Levien) and Coelacanth, are based on Centaur.’ I knew of Raph Levien’s Museum project, which the multifarious imagination of the estimable Mr Levien has left unfinished, but I had never heard of Coelacanth. You probably hadn’t; now you have. I perked up my… well, my eyes, both at the possibility of an open sourced iteration of a Jenson venetian, and because my childhood love of dinosaurs has never dwindled away.

Browse and be amazed. Where Centaur runs on the thin side, Coelacanth is sturdier (though its ExtraLight weight can supply all the undernourished look you might want). Vast character sets, including Hebrew and polytonic Greek (and yes, Kelvin, it has an ð), with several different optical weights depending on the work you want it to do. Rich, sweet, and amazing.

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* Sadly, it appears that Uncle Goot has vanished without a searchable trace. If you are Uncle Goot, or know Uncle Goot, I want to thank you (or ‘him’) wholeheartedly. Feel encouraged to make yourself known!