Tuesday, March 7, 2017

One of my favorite human beings has died.

Holy crap, I really didn’t mean to do this again. It’s been FIVE WHOLE DAYS since my last post! I haven’t been sick, thank God, just all wrapped up in my other favorite addiction ... namely, creating new greeting cards for The Howdygram Store. Here are three of my latest designs for your possible interest. There are 14 new cards in all and I’m still uploading the artwork, writing descriptions, choosing keywords and so on. This is a tedious — but seriously BIG FUN — process.


Please check out this enormous herd of AWESOME FREE FONTS! I’ve got a little bit of everything for you this morning ... weird hand-drawn whatnots, antique condensed newspaper type, a terrific variety of modern sans serifs, lovely brush scripts with dancing baselines and even a very well done dingbat font featuring all kinds of comic strip speech bubbles. I LOVE WELL DONE COMIC STRIP SPEECH BUBBLES! My favorites here are “Amelia,” “Archive Old Style,” “Neue Norm, “Alin Speech Bubbles” and “Estampa.” Download links will appear below the graphic so you can grab some of these for your personal font library.



I’ve just snagged a bunch of thrilling NEW and FREE high-resolution digital background textures ... courtesy of Creative Market. There was also a strange collection of 20 abstract digital landscapes in EPS format, but the files were so damn huge that InDesign quit unexpectedly FOUR TIMES while I was trying to put together a few samples to share in the Howdygram ... so I decided to just give up because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life rebooting InDesign. It’s an enormous program that takes forever to load. Thank you for understanding.
Instead, here’s another free collection that fell into my lap this morning. It’s a set of 20 black patterns on a transparent background — commonly known as “overlays” — and they’re all SEAMLESS, too, which means you can tile them in any direction to make one gigantic pattern as big as a Buick! To help you understand what the hell I’m talking about, I overlaid four sample patterns on metallic foils ... silver, gold, rose gold and copper.


One of my favorite human beings has died. Robert Osborne, the film aficionado who shared his knowledge of (and love for) films as the host of Turner Classic Movies, died on Thursday at age 84. Osborne stopped appearing on TCM about a year and a half ago with no explanation whatsoever, but those of us who watched all the time noticed problems with slurred speech, and towards the end he was always seated, not standing, when he introduced films. I assumed he was having minor strokes and then probably succumbed to a big one, but I’m just guessing. No cause of death has been mentioned and I’m not a doctor.

Osborne was a Washington native who moved to Hollywood in the 1960s to take a stab at an acting career. He appeared in one episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies” (as Mr. Drysdale’s assistant at the bank) and was mentored by Lucille Ball, who encouraged him to channel his love for films into a column for The Hollywood Reporter, which ended in 2009 after nearly 30 years. He also authored several books on the history of the Academy Awards, loved green olives and was a close personal friend of Robert Wagner and Jill St. John.
I always wanted to meet Robert Osborne but never had the chance, so I bought a high-quality Robert Osborne bobblehead doll from TCM.com a few years ago that stands guard over several shelves of DVDs on the bookcase in our study.



You may have seen this outrageous news story already but I can’t let it slide by without a much-deserved rant. Professional halfwit Ben Carson, Donald Trump’s new hire as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the Howdygram’s latest Putz of the Week, said in a speech to HUD staffers this week that African-Americans were immigrants who came to America with “dreams” looking for a better life.

Immigrants with DREAMS?!

Ben, Ben, Ben, you fucking idiot ... THEY WERE NOT IMMIGRANTS! Africans arrived here in LEG IRONS, torn away from their families on the west coast of Africa and chained 10-deep in the hold of a slave ship. Because they were SLAVES, not IMMIGRANTS. People correctly labeled as “immigrants” — like my grandparents, for instance — arrived in America with their wives and children and suitcases. If you don’t know the difference, Dr. Carson, I feel profoundly sorry for you. Also, HOLY SHIT.
Carson also warned HUD employees that there would be “no favorites for anybody, no extra” services for any one group. “Everything that we do, every policy; no favorites for anybody, no extra for anybody, but complete fairness for everybody. Because that is what the founders of this nation had in mind, and if you read the Constitution, it becomes very clear that that was the goal.”

In other words, according to Ben Carson the Constitution clearly states that rich people must never be slighted by the government because they’ve suffered so badly throughout history. RICH PEOPLE WANT FAIR TREATMENT, TOO!

I think my brain is going to explode.



And now for a brief little news turd about Not My President Donald J. Trump, pictured below on the deck of the U.S.S. Gerald Ford, a state-of-the-art $12.9 billion warship that’s under construction at Newport News, Virginia. Dressed in his snazzy “Sunday best” Maytag repairman cap and jacket — and addressing 2,500 shipyard workers — Trump announced that the Navy will very soon have “the finest equipment in the world.”

Don’t look now, Donald, but we ALREADY have the finest equipment in the world. YOU GODDAMN JACKASS!
I thought you might like this cartoon just for the hell of it. (You’re welcome.)


And now I have to get back to work on more greeting cards for The Howdygram Store. I found some terrific public domain photos of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson (online) that I can use with wacky captions!

Thank you for reading this.

No comments: