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This trip was pretty ridiculous. We actually wound up leaving around 4 am, not 2 am. I was exhausted but also sort of nervous, so I didn’t really sleep for a long time. The van was rickety and rattly like crazy, but it never died, so I gave it credit for that. We did stop every few hours to give the van time to rest. In the afternoon of the first day, we stopped in like a cowfield in rural France and slept there. Later, we picked up a French girl who was hitchhiking by herself. She had guts; I’m not sure I would’ve taken a ride from us.

We talked about hitchhiking, she said she’d done a lot with a friend of hers, but this was the first time she’d hitched alone. I told her I’d heard it was difficult to hitch in Spain; she said, “Not when you are two girls. We have never waited for more than 10 minutes.”

It was actually a cool trip and we got to see a lot of the French countryside. Apparently the main French highways are incredibly expensive toll roads, so we stayed on the “national” routes, which are basically the equivalent of the famous “Blue highways” U.S. routes. You can make pretty good time, but they go through little towns and villages so you see a lot more. We also took a detour to avoid paying the toll for the highest road bridge in the world, the Millau Viaduct, which is too bad because it would’ve been really awesome to drive across and see clouds below the car.

Anyway, here’s some photos:

What the heck’s an intererrobang‽

Contrary to popular opinion, the interrobang (or IB to his friends) is not a curious form of sexual intercourse.

Rather, it’s one of the most glorious punctuation marks (un)known to mankind. Formed by superimposing the humble curve of the question mark (or, depending on your nationality and/or font, the accusatory interrogation point, or even the exotic, snobbish erotreme) with the vertical insistence of the exclamation point (or his well-bred cousin, ecphoneme). The interrobang is at once wondrous and wrathful, skeptical and surprised, quizzical and querulous, inquisitive and indignant, examinatory and exclamatory.

Many of the commenters on blogs that follow developments in the font world have strong, negative opinions about the interrobang. These people are wrong. The interrobang is awesome. Also, they read font blogs.

Like DaVinci’s helicopter, Mendel’s independent assortment, and even its contemporary, the Ford Seattle-ite, the interrobang was simply too far ahead of its time. Invented in 1962 by advertising executive Martin K. Speckter—to date it remains the only actually worthwhile thing ever invented by an advertising executive—the interrobang would have to wait for the rise of the internet to find a medium that truly cried out for its unique mixture of questioning outrage.

Consider: How many times have you written “WTF!?!?”
Wouldn’t you really rather write: “WTF‽‽”

Elegant, efficient, obscure. Using an interrobang online is a mark (pun accidental, but deliberately retained) of distinction and refinement. As a further benefit, the use of the interrobang has the potential to resolve a dispute even more protracted than the battle between the Little- and Big-endians—should it be “WHAT?!” or “WHAT!?”, are you more surprised, or more confused? What if you’re equally both‽

Alright, you’ve sold me! How can I use this magic mark‽

Luckily for you, the overachieving geeks at the Unicode Consortium thought to include the interrobang in their standard. Actually, they sort of had to, because Unicode is the kind of project that computer geeks undertake with a goal so superficially simple, it’s only after you think about it that you realize just how insanely audacious it is. Unicode aims to provide the means for computer representation of every character in every language that exists (and maybe a few that don’t). Easy, right? You just need enough codespace. Unicode contains space for up to 1,114,112 characters.

Interrobang is number 203D, in hex.

On Linux systems running Gnome, you can press:
Ctrl+Shift+U then you’ll get an underlined “u”, type 203D and press space and the underlined code will transform into an interrobang! This works in almost all GTK+ apps.

XFCE is the same deal, but use Ctrl+Shift+X instead. If you’re running KDE, you’ll just have to dig through the character map.

I haven’t tested this, but in Windows, you should be able to generate an interrobang by typing “203d” and then pressing Alt+X.

If you’re running Mac OSX, Apple doesn’t want you thinking that different. Typing an interrobang is a huge hassle, but the instructions are here.

Finally, most browsers will render the (X)HTML character code & #8253 (remove the space) as an interrobang, so you can use that for platform-neutral interrobang placement, in, say, comments on internet blogs.

For the record, I have no idea how the totally worthless tilde (~) rates its own damn key on the QWERTY keyboard, but the noble interrobang is relegated to the nether-reaches of the unicode table. Apparently in the late 1960s, there were actually some typewriters produced that included an interrobang key. If anyone has one they’d like to sell me, you would be awesome.

What can I do to promote this wonderful typographic innovation‽

Well, for starters, use it! But if you want to showcase your love of the interrobang in a more visible, real-world way, Arts & Letters Daily has Interrobang T-shirts and merchandise available for purchase.

Wearing one of these will allow you to easily segregate the population of the world into three groups.
1) The people who approach you and say, “Why do you have a question mark and an exclamation point on your shirt?”
2) The much better class of people who approach and say, “You’re wearing an interrobang shirt. You are awesome.”
3) Font-blog readers.

Enough about interrobangs, where are you‽ What have you been doing‽

I am in Paris, France. I have been doing some cool things, and also agonizing and procrastinating over my 2nd Quarter Watson report, which is the main reason I haven’t been writing here. I will try to write more frequently, and possibly go back to cover some of the stuff I missed.

I think this is the commercial I saw:

As presented, being in the French army involves, in order:
1) Climbing a wall.
2) Looking at a fancy 3d computer display.
3) Making out with your (government-issued? vivé le socialisme!) hot French girlfriend on a roof.
4) Showing grateful black people something (porn?) on your laptop.
5) Holding your newly-born child child while your suspiciously non-postnatal-looking hottie gazes on adoringly.
6) Gesturing at equipment (is that an oscilloscope?) with both hands like an idiot (or a flight attendant).


Wow! How can I sign up?


In any case, it’s pretty clear that the French government has spent a lot of money on this ad campaign. There are several other great ads on youtube.


Look! The French army is exactly like a Medal of Honor game:


And this one makes me think that maybe the whole French army is just on E a lot of the time:

Jupiter and Semele by Gustave Moreau

The whole museum is devoted to one artist, Gustave Moreau, who I’d never even heard of before. It’s too bad he’s so un-famous, because his work is really quite spectacular. Most of it is executed on a very large scale, with deep, rich colors and an intricate attention to detail. I also found him fascinating for the way he mixes imagery from different traditions. The painting above features the story of Jupiter and Semele, from classical mythology, but quite clearly draws on Hindu and Buddhist iconography. In another of his works (which I’ll try to find an image for later), he mashes together the story of Prometheus with the Christ narrative, representing Prometheus with a crown of thorns, as a sacrificial martyr for humanity.

The museum itself is really cool, too. It’s located in Moreau’s former workshop, and the lower floor preserves the apartment where he lived.

Moreau's Apartment

I want a staircase this cool in my house.