• Christine O’Donnell Rubs One Out
• Christine O’Donnell Climaxes Primary
• Christine O’Donnell Pleasures Teabaggers

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Having designed a fair amount of publications over the years —books, magazines, tabloids — we know a thing or three about fonts. Not just display fonts — someone once dared us to find a legitimate use for Comic Sans — but much more importantly, text fonts, the stuff you actually read. Especially if you’re reading at length.

It’s not a question of “readability” as such, but of — pardon the pun — character. Set a given piece in twelve different fonts, and it’ll read in twelve different voices. Some fonts resist their material. Some will make you read too fast for the purpose, or too slow. (We recently set a technogeek thriller in Times New Roman, because that was the only font that made sense for a page-turner. Newspaper fonts are designed for skimming, and that book demanded to be skimmed.)

What you’re looking for — especially if you’re setting a book — is a font that becomes “invisible” to the text, a font that lets you read without thinking about reading. It’s a craft, not a science. It takes judgment, and a good eye.

And it’s why a lot of books suck. They weren’t born bad. They were set that way.

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We had little time for reflection this weekend, which is probably a good thing, given the 9/11 porn out there. But we did notice that Newt Gingrich was stepping up his game:

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

“This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich tells us.

“I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Gingrich continues. “In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve… He was authentically dishonest.”

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After Thursday afternoon’s special edition of Not Necessarily the News, we figured we needed a break. And what better break than Spike? Or even better, one of the responses to Spike? Say, the dance troupe of six kids?

But no, Sheryll wasn’t going to let us off that easy. She mischievously hacked the YouTube search system, so that when we looked for “Spike Can Dance,” results for “CanCan Dance” turned up — including this clip from a British music hall, circa 1943.

Which, in turn, made us think of Thursday afternoon again.

Damn you, Sheryll. Haven’t you punished us enough?

We’ve been online about twenty years, give or take. We skipped the BBS era, but working on campus in the early ’90s, we were privy to the pre-Web Internet: email, newsgroups, gopher. We remember the office geek excitedly telling us about this new software called Mosaic. We remember being excited ourselves about what Netscape 1.1 introduced to the world.

Our life has been almost bifurcated by the Internet: before, after. We managed to reach thirty without it, which, at this point, makes our youth some kind of alien netherworld, full of exotic primal technology like rotary phones, 8-track tapes, console color televisions (works in a drawer!), and free-form FM radio.

You had to be there. And if you were lucky, you weren’t.

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Fred Fox Jr., writer of the immortal (as in zombie) Happy Days “Jump the Shark” episode (officially known as “Hollywood 3”), would like to defend his honor:

Which brings us to the question: Was the “Hollywood 3” episode of “Happy Days” deserving of its fate?

No, it wasn’t. All successful shows eventually start to decline, but this was not “Happy Days'” time. Consider: It was the 91st episode and the fifth season. If this was really the beginning of a downward spiral, why did the show stay on the air for six more seasons and shoot an additional 164 episodes? Why did we rank among the Top 25 in five of those six seasons?

Well, since you ask…

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There’s nothing worth talking about this morning. Enjoy it while it lasts.