Art, Fashion, Design

The Beatles and The Stones: Beasts of Beard-dom

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“She asks me why I’m just a hairy guy. I’m hairy noon and night. Hair that’s a fright. I’m hairy high and low. Don’t ask me why. Don’t know.” Those words from the Broadway musical “Hair” pretty much summed up the “let it all hang out, let it all hang long” philosophy of the ’60s. When it came to facial hair, The Beatles were a bit more adventurous than The Rolling Stones. But in the end, Mick proved to be the furriest of them all. Here’s a little something for World Beard Day 2105.

Elvis 11 Times

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My mom was washing dishes and I was drying them when we heard the news on TV that Elvis died – August 18, 1977. Like the day President Kennedy was assassinated, you always remember where you were and what you were doing the day the King left the throne. (Actually, he had fallen off the … Read more

Liberace in Paradise (Nevada, that is)

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Those of us who embrace the adage “vanity trumps sanity” know it’s often necessary to suffer for beauty. But who among the world’s leading fashionistas would or could endure the discomfort of performing in an outfit that weighs 200 pounds? Flamboyant pianist-showman Władziu Valentino Liberace, of course. His famous, weighty King Neptune ensemble was one of many extravaganzas on display at the now-defunct Liberace Museum in Paradise, Nevada.

Confessions of a Font Addict

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Die Nasty. Dream Orphans. Beat My Guest. Highway to Heck. No, these aren’t names of punk rock groups or titles of angst-ridden, teen-penned poems. They’re names of fonts. Four evocatively named fonts that co-exist among the hundreds of others in my Mac. Fonts that compete on a daily basis to be chosen for use in one of my literary or graphic masterpieces (ahem). I’ve rarely met a font I didn’t fall in love with. I’ve cruised the Internet super highways by night, luring new fonts to my harem. I’ve risked system contamination, blindly downloading free fonts from fly-by-night sites with seedy names like FontLust.com. Rogue fonts now reside alongside legitimate fonts that automatically enter the neighborhood every time I install new publishing software. Ah, but this indiscriminate font love now poses a major digital dilemma: I simply have more fonts than I can fathom.