FIRE YOUR DESIGNER!- Issue 2: 2009 Penny

{Editor's Note: I had to make corrections to this. The building was not the memorial but the Illinois capitol building. Also I failed to look it up before but apparently this is a part of a series of pennies about Lincoln's life, it's his bicentennial or something. Still sucks though.}

We've all seen pennies, some of us may or may not have even shoved them up our ass at one time or another in order to get a one up on someone (anyone?...please?). Growing up in this country, there are certain things we as citizens just kind of get used to. In the past 10 years the US Mint has been trying to reinvent itself to some degree of success. The state quarters were a pretty neat idea when they started coming out and the presidential dollars now allow me to carry James K. Polk, and eventually Taft, with me wherever I go. The warm and more likely just innocuous reception of these is because it's something just new enough that people will say "neat" for a second then carry on. Another very important difference is those other coins were just well done. The US Mint just released a penny though that, while it's not offensive by any means, just makes me replace that "neat" with "the fuck?".



My god...GIANT ZOMBIE LINCOLN HAS COME TO ENSLAVE US ALL!!!!!

This is just another one of those things that a lot of designers just call "overkill." How many times can we put something related to Lincoln on a small metal disc and just release it to the public as (be it useless) currency? I see what they were trying to do, and I know Lincoln is supposed to be in the foreground but it would've been must better if they just completely kept the second Lincoln out of the picture and just had the Illinois Capitol Building. Hell, Lincoln even looks like an after thought. This is very possibly the worst juxtaposition of any presidential figure to anything. Woodrow Wilson at a Klan rally would not only probably look better but make more sense (little known fact: Wilson actually was a very outspoken white supremacist.) It looks like the client saw the beautiful building etching, said "that's nice, but people are dumb GIVE ME MORE LINCOLN! and the designer, fed up with client, just put him in there as a very last ditch thought and the client said "fantastic, right in the viewers face THE VERY EMBODIMENT OF THE AMERICAN WAY!!! Hell, half the time people don't even look at these things anyway." You know what US Mint? I do, and that is why you should fire your designer.


Seriously, doubly now because this is the second screw up this year. Stick to what you folks know, please, this country is enough of a mockery as it is.

Creatively Stumped: ep. 3 Best of the Aughts part 1

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Babel Fish Telephone: or why Babel Fish doesn't work.

Here's an experiment I've been doing for a while when it's late, there's no good skin flicks on, and I just feel like fucking around with something that is not called a "power tool." For as long as I can remember there has been an online service called "Babel Fish." This is an online service (named after the "Hitchhiker's Guide" creature of the same name) that originally started as an alta vista website (geez, when was the last time anyone ever heard that name?) and now it's a yahoo service. Pretty much you type in a phrase and you can translate through several languages. The thing is, it's not very good, observe a little exercise of telephone. I started out this journey by typing in a simple phrase "I enjoy cake with my tea." in english.



simple enough, so I then translated it to English's closest language cousin, German.



So far so good, it seems like it could be what I initially wrote because it has a close number of words. I didn't test it out, but I'm going to assume that says "I enjoy cake with my tea." in German. Then I "translated" from German to French.



This is when things seem to get weird. Now, my limited knowledge of French tells me that sentence structure is very different between germanic and romance languages, but as far as number count goes this just turned from a simple sentence to something illegible. Let's throw in a curve ball and translate from French to Dutch.



Wow, personally I'm almost frightened to see what in the fuck that even says. So, that said let's get back to jolly old English.



Yup, just what I expected. This is like a Bizarro version of the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" where you have to try to get as far away as possible to the original phrase. What started as an innocent enough phrase of "I enjoy cake with my tea." has gone through the channels and become hideous Engrish of utmost proportions and has been raped and pillaged to say "I profited of the cakes of my the." Try it sometime when you're bored, you get especially wonderful results when you go into a completely different alphabet like Greek or Mandarin.

-Jonny Gonzo

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Coming soon

My dear friend Matt Rosen and I are starting a weekly podcast. First episode is recording Monday and probably will be online Tuesday. The podcast is called "Creatively Stumped" and we will be primarily talking about pop culture and movies. First episode is about Nicholas Cage, stay tuned readers as soon as it's online I'll post it here.