In New horizons for office furniture, Matt Webb ruminates what we sit on (or swim through) when we Zoom.

I spend so much time on Zoom these days, I would prefer to be bobbing around in a salt-water bath with a virtual reality headset strapped to my face. Like the precogs in Minority Report.

Let me christen the term whergonomics for this emerging field.

“What kind of tree are you looking for?”, asked the jaunty Christmas forester.

“Um,” I replied, uncertain of how to respond (evergreen? festive? broad-needled? post-modern?).

Sensing that I was out of my depth, he deftly sauntered behind the tree that had caught my eye.

“Tall and bushy?”, he asked, Vanna Whiting my eyeline.

“Yes!”, I exclaimed.

He hefted the tree into the back of my KIA Soul. I paid him $40. I drove up the hill toward home.

It never occurred to me that the tree wouldn’t fit. But I need not have worried, as there are four inches to spare (I suppose there’s a standard Canadian ceiling height that trees are grown to hew to?).

“Catherine, where do we keep the Christmas tree stand? And that skirty thing?”

That’s what I’d normally be shouting up from the basement.

Except that I know the answer, because I put them away myself last January, as Catherine was in Palliative Care. Or at least I think I did. Perhaps someone did it for me?

Catherine went into hospital on December 17 last year, and came home on December 22. Her mother surprised us with a visit from Ontario on Christmas Eve. Catherine loved Christmas, and she especially loved being a mother at Christmas. It was as if the fates opened a window for her to have one last one, with those she loved, and who loved her.

And so the putting up of the Christmas tree this year is bittersweet: it’s the start of marking a beginning of an ending. But there’s a degree of “fuck yes, we’re still here, and we’re doing this thing” to it as well.

I got down in the dumps this week because all the dead movie wives leave years worth of birthday, anniversary, and holiday letters to their surviving movie husbands, and my real world (dyslexic) Catherine did not.

But then, watching Oliver carry the tree into the house, I realized she’d left me Oliver, and everything she taught him, and every example she set for him.

As Catherine’s prognosis evolved to “days, perhaps a week,” these were my words:

I wrote to a good friend this afternoon that “It’s sad, in a deep-down-body-sad kind of way. But it’s not only sad.”

And that is true: we laugh together when Oliver makes a joke. We gossip. I pass on kind wishes from near and far. And we sink into the contentment that Catherine radiates.

Catherine continues to radiate through this season. It won’t be nearly at all the same without her. But it will be something else.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Let’s do this thing!

There’s a Christmas Tree stand at the end of Prince Street in front of Founders’ Hall; mindful of “killer drought combined with Trump election protests and COVID means there might not be enough trees”-style headlines, I knew I needed to act fast.

So, roughly 20 days earlier than I’m used to, I stopped in and picked one up. And then made Oliver carry it into the house. It’s drying out from the rain in the vestibule as I write.

If you are a character in Oliver’s cinematic universe, you have, no doubt, been the recipient of his strident lobbying on behalf of Christmas, often distilled to its essence: send cards and gifts!!

Catherine, you see, was the Head of Christmas in our family. Leaving me to be cast in the role, often with some cause, of steely curmudgeon. The kind of person who leaves securing a tree until all the trees are gone, who wonders what the point of Christmas cake is, at all.

So, sensing a pending vacuum, Oliver has launched a marketing campaign to save Christmas.

Understandably, given past performance, he is skeptical about my protests that This Year I Will Rise To The Occasion. Truth be told, I will rise to the occasion. But it make take a year or two for Oliver to believe this.

So, fear not, Christmas is not in jeopardy.

If it are moved, nonetheless, to help Oliver fill the holiday vacuum, he is, confoundingly, non-specific in his wishes, which are “things that bring joy and relieve sadness and grief.” The ball is in your court, Christmas-lovers.

Remember other continents!? Ten years ago today my crew was en route from Munich to Basel by train, and feeling the jetlag heavy.

While I was printing my MMXX! cards last night, I was also filming what I was doing, using my iPhone and a tripod.

I’m not an accomplished filmmaker, and know very little of camera angles and visual storytelling; what I tried to do was to tell the story of how the idea came to life, and how the typesetting and printing process works from beginning to end; I hope I succeeded, at least a little. I learned a lot editing this in iMovie: the mind is capable of filling in so many gaps that it’s possible to trim big stretches of what I might have otherwise thought as invaluable action; watching the video again now, I see I could have done even more of this.

Thanks to Olle for the filmmaking inspiration; he has started a YouTube channel for his tool-cleaning videos, and his efforts made me remember that I carry around a powerful video camera in my pocket.

The music is from Scott Buckley, an Australian composer who’s generously released much of his music with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License; I used his Solecism, Snowfall, and Wanderlust tracks.

I’ve uploaded the movie to YouTube (with captions), YouDescribe (with audio description); you can also download it here (without captions or audio description) or watch it below (it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License).

I decided it wasn’t just to release the video without captions or audio description, so, with the help of my friend Cheryl, I figured out how to add these; I welcome feedback on these particularly, as they are a freshman outing, and I want to get better at it. The audio description suffers, I think, from the relative volume of the music and the description, but I couldn’t find a way to adjust this in YouDescribe.

I had a lot of fun doing this. 

Sometimes you get hit out of the blue with an idea, an idea that cries out for immediate action. That’s what happened with MMXX!, which, over the last 90 minutes, I’ve imagined, set, printed and offered for sale in the shop.

It all started with this video about railway track laying from Geoff Marshall, the closing frame of which is this:

Although we’re almost 11 months through 2020, this was the first time I’d realized that in Roman numerals it’s MMXX, and that seemed to have some typographic potential for adventure.

Next year will be MMXXI. Or, I thought, MMXX!. Read the entire story in the shop. Here’s the result:

Nineteen copies standing by for your 2021-anticipating, Black Friday shopping-from-home pleasure.

I added three “classic” items to the Queen Square Press shop this morning:

• The Island Hymn – a triptych of the lyrics, originally set and printed in 2012 (if you need backing organ, you can find it here, reconstituted from sheet music).
• Set a Goal – another from 2012; watch a video of its printing here.
• Map of Charlottetown – from 2017, the simplest map ever. Available both with and without a whole punched in the top!

Reception to the shop from friends and familiars has been heartening, and I’ve enjoyed the process of packing and shipping envelopes across the continent and across the ocean.

From US Aids to Navigation, from the US Coast Guard:

You may have heard the phrase, “Red, Right, Returning.” This expression refers to the fact that when returning (entering a channel from the open sea or proceeding upstream), a boater must keep the red Aids on the right (starboard) side of the boat.

Red, Right, Returning. Except when it’s not.

The world has two marine aids to navigation systems, opposite of each other. From Cruising World:

Region A consists of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Africa and most of Asia. When entering a harbor in this region, marks to port are red and marks to starboard are green.

Region B consists of North America, Central America and South America, plus the Philippines, Japan and Korea. When entering a harbor in this region, marks to port are green and marks to starboard are red (red, right, return!).

This seems like something everyone should be taught in elementary school.

Trailer for Our Friend, coming to “theatres” in January. Impossible to watch without crying, at least if you’re, well, me.

(via Jason Kottke)