A New Look for a New Month

When I started Oz and Ends, I modified the template so postings would appear in a form of the Courier font. That in turn required handling some other typographical details—such as em dashes—differently from how I normally type. All in pursuit what I’ve called “Typewriter Realism,” even though I haven't used the Courier font in my manuscripts for well over a decade.

But Blogger’s font formatting isn’t working on the latest version of Safari, and no amount of my futzing with the settings, the template, the preview, or even the CSS code has kept the postings from shifting into a default style after a quotation or bullet. (At least not without destroying the rest of the design.) The result looks like a mess. In Firefox the postings still look fine, as long as I take some extra steps to maintain that formatting, but I shudder every time I see them in Safari.

Therefore, with the arrival of a new month, I decided to shift to using a sans-serif, proportionally-spaced font, as this template originally called for. (Of course, for whatever reason Safari shows me the serif Georgia font as I type. And why there’s more leading in a bullet item I can’t understand.)

A few items of interest to round out the day:

• On 23 September, Warner Bros. will promote the 70th anniversary of the MGM Wizard of Oz by screening the film in actual cinemas. Prompting thousands of children to ask, “Mommy, what’s wrong with the screen? Why is this movie so narrow?” Connie Ann Kirk, the Books on Film Examiner, adds a warning: “Some moviegoers who did see this film in a theater when they were young have reported being afraid of some of the scary images.”
• A reader of the Serbian translation of Flash Gordon found what looks like the earliest depiction of a laptop computer in a drawing originally published around 1937.
• In the Guardian, Ursula K. Le Guin needles Margaret Atwood about her insistence on not writing science fiction.
• Author-illustrator John Lechner thinks too hard about the labels “graphic novel,” "comic,” and “picture book.” A man after my own heart.