Saturday's Site

Sometimes it's easy to get bored of the same old fonts on your computer. I mean, comic sans is okay for invites to a child's party, Book Antiqua is what it says on the tin, and Times New Roman should be left for, well, The Times. If you want to jazz up your letters, add some bling to your booklets, make your newsletters new, go to dafont.com.

Okay, that sounded like a really cheesy advert. Sort of like this one.

 

Just a small disclaimer. I haven't uploaded any fonts onto my computer as of yet. It's getting a bit old and doesn't even like to be turned on at the best of times, so I'm trying to do as little that will exacerbate it as possible. But the fonts do look really good, and, although I'm no huge typography expert (I do know the difference between a serif font and sans serif font, and about the interrobang), I can say I'm impressed by some of them.

In the last (and only other) Saturday's site I mentioned BookCrossing.com. I finally got round to releasing the book and I did so on a park bench in quite a busy park. I watched it for a while before I had to leave; and it made me realise something: how unobservant people are. Quite a few people passed it, and one woman sat on the same bench as it, but failed to pick it up. Hopefully it got found before it rained that night, and not thrown away. I went there the next day and it was gone, so something has happened to it.

Factual Friday

Image by Philip Morton via Flickr

With this weekend's weather set to be hot the Met Office has issued a health warning, as well as there being a housepipe ban in Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside. For advice on how to stay cool despite the high temperatures you can visit the NHS website.

In 2003 Europe found itself in the grips of a heatwave, killing over 30,000 people, nearly half of which were in France. Temperatures of over 40°C were recorded for more than seven days during July to August that summer. The UK was also affected, and record temperatures of 38.5°C were recorded in Kent.

The hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 57.7°C, and this was in Al'Aziziyah, Libya on 13 September 1922. This does not, however, make this the hottest place on Earth.

This title falls to Dallol, Ethiopia, which had an annual average of 34°C between 1960 and 1966.

The driest place on Earth is an area that have the somewhat unoriginal name of the Dry Valleys, in Antartica. This area has not seen rain for probably 5 million years. Second is the Atacama Desert, Chile (image above). If meat is left out in either of these places it is unlikely to rot. It will either freeze or dry out completely.

Saturday's Site

Back in the days where life was carefree and easy I use to write posts about random websites. This included Ian's Shoelace World and Land of Marbles. What fun was had. I've decided that I will recontinue this under the new name of Saturday's Site.

The first site is going to be BookCrossing.com. This is a bit like GeoCaching meets the Hay-On-Wye festival. The premise is that you register a book on the website and then set it free to be found and enjoyed by someone else.

So I thought I'd give it a go. I registered The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, stuck a little notice inside the cover and all I've got to do is release it into the wild. I'll keep you updated on what happens. Why don't you give it a go and tell me what happens?

Factual Friday

This week's Factual Friday is dedicated to typography. This is because I have a bizarre obsession with the interrobang. The interrobang is a symbol that is a combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark and looks like this ‽. If the name interrobang is not good enough for you (and who wouldn't it be good enough for‽ I mean, it sounds like something out of a comic strip), you can also call it a quesclamation mark. Despite its amazing names it hasn't gained popularity and the ?! is favoured. However, it was popular in the 1960s and it even found its way onto typewriter keyboards.

Another interesting, but more widely used, piece of punctuation is the asperand, also known as the at sign. The at sign, @, is not a recent phenonemon that appeared with the rise of the emails, as you would probably presume. It was used on keyboards as far back as the 1880s and the symbol was used for other purposes before that. An @ was found in a document from that land of Ikeas, Sweden in 1674 (image below). However, not even this is the first recorded usage.

In 1448, the @ symbol was being used in the Kingdom of Aragon.

In order to honour its rich and long history, I think that when giving out our emails we should say 'asperand' instead of 'at'. On that note, feel free to email me at bookwormsblog asperand gmail dot com.