September 3, 2008
Important Dates (Not to be Late!)
Important Dates, Not to be Late!
Here's a list of upcoming important show dates (I will be adding more as I confirm my fall and x-mas show schedule):
October 4th, 2008 - Manitoulin Island Visual Heritage Project Film Premiere at the M'Chigeeng Community Complex - This is the premiere of the project that I was involved with last summer, playing the part of William Gibbard, fisheries minister and the principal protagonist of "The Manitoulin Incident". This was my first time acting on film, so I'm excited to finally see the results!
November 8th, 2008 - I will be attending the first ever Northern Ontario Conference of Kink (NOCK) as a vendor. You can visit the NOCK website for more information regarding this unique adult oriented show.
November 8th, 2008 - My dad will be running my regular market table for the annual Manitoulin Farmers' Market Association Christmas show in Gore Bay from 10am to 3pm at the Community Hall. He will be displaying my full range of original chainmail earrings and pendants, as well as Manitoulin Illustrated Volume I and his new Manitoulin Island Sketch Book!
Things I would like to Figure Out - Part 2
Back around the change of the millennium I recall seeing a music video on Much Music that featured a male band singing in a club. As the band sings, the perspective changes to that of the tattoos on the lead singer's arms, which come to life. In particular, one of the tattoos is of a surfer, which proceeds to surf around, eventually (I believe) ending up meeting up with another living tattoo on the arm of a lady in the club's audience.
I have no idea who the band or the song was, but I would love to find out, as I recall enjoying the song and, as everyone knows, I'm a self proclaimed "Ink Slut". The only detail that I thought I remember is that the song title or band name had something to do with "California" and would have aired some time in the late 90's or early naughties. The only other person who remembers seeing this music video is my wife, who also can't remember any more details than what I have described. Because it aired on Much Music, it may have been a Canadian band, which, in turn, could be one of the reasons that it has defied repeated attempts at identification through Google.
Anyone out there have any clues that could lead us in the right direction?
Mankind is Noodlekind
Anyone visiting Mississauga (Southern Ontario) who is interested in a real snack treat, should be sure to visit "Happy Cake House", a small Asian bakery that's part of an equally small Asian Mall. Besides having the coolest name on the planet, Happy Cake House offers an assortment of interesting sweet buns filled with an incredible variety of tasty ingredients, such as hotdogs and BBQ pork, which are my two personal favourites. They also have a pretty narfy selection of regular cakes and Swiss style cake rolls!
Right beside HCH is one of my favorite Markets, which besides carrying my favorite brand of Ramen*, also has some very interesting soft drinks. I'm crazy enough to drink the really unusual drinks, like the folks at Crazy Asian Drinks, so I usually stick to the more regular looking drinks, such as Sarsi, which is best described as a tasty cross between Pepsi and Root Beer. Sarsi is actually the perfect compliment for tasty bun wrapped hotdogs from Happy Cake House, so if you're ever in the region, it's definitely a different sort of snack to check out. From time to time the market in question as has a supply of imported Coke, Sprite and Pepsi from the Caribbean, which means that it's made with real cane sugar, as opposed to the icky high fructose corn syrup that we're forced to imbibe in North America. Plus, these imported sodas still come in the old glass bottles, which combined with real sugar improves the taste by about a thousand percent! Be sure to check the labels on your bottles, there ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby!
*I was recently in this market, hunting for unusual and humorously named goodies, like "Cream Colon" and "Kaka" (which is apparently chocolate "jam" and biscuits) when I happily discovered that this particular market sells my favorite brand of Ramen noodle in bulk. Made by Nissan Foods, I was practically raised on what I like to call "Red Kid Noodles" (from the picture on the package), so I was saddened to read recently that the rather interesting and philosophically minded inventor of Ramen noodles had passed away at the age of 96.
Things I would like to Figure Out - Part 1
Back in the mid-90's I used to work summer evenings at Manitoulin Island's only health and international food store: The Island Pantry. I have fond memories of slinging frozen yoghurt on those hot summer evenings, which could actually be fairly quiet, given that, in those days, The Pantry was the only store that was open past 6pm. So, to entertain myself, I used an old tape deck to dub a pile of mixed music tapes from various sources, which mostly consisted of other dub tapes that I borrowed from other people.
My pile of mix tapes is lost somewhere in the sands of time, having been long since replaced by mixed CDs, however, there's one song form the old days that I would love to locate, but have never been able to find, due mostly to not knowing the title of the song or even the band that sings it.
It was a very strange song, very slow and dreamy, filled with a distorted male voice and long twangs of steel guitar. The only lyrics that I can recall are: "Sammy was a boxer, took a beating in the ring, hands raised in victory, something, something, something".
I have, of course, tried variants of these lyrics in Google, but to no avail, so I would be eternally grateful to anyone who might be able to point me in the direction of what this mystery tune could be!
Font of Knowledge
One of dad's requests when designing his new "Manitoulin Island Sketch Book" was that he wanted to have the text written in his own handwriting. I know that technically it would be nearly impossible to get a good quality, readable reproduction from a regular scan of handwritten text. However, I recalled reading an article many, many moons ago about software that allows one to convert scanned glyphs into regular font files. This, of course, allows for a much higher print quality than just a standard scan. However, I couldn't remember the name of the actual software and even my well-honed Google search skillz couldn't turn up anything in the way of easy to use and affordable font creation software.
Eventually, I dug back through my records and discovered that software I was looking for was created by a company called "Fontlab", which, fortunately, was still in the business!
After reading through the descriptions of the various pieces of software from Fontland, I decided on a combination of ScanFont 5 and Type Tool 3.
Basically, Scanfont allows you to scan a page of glyphs and assign them to letter positions in your font, while Type Tool is used to finalize the glyphs, correct problems, set kerning and basically do everything required to create new fonts. Given the complexity of creating fonts, I found both programs surprising easy to pick up, just a couple of references to their respective manuals to clear up confusion over esoteric font terms and I was ready to go. In the end, I would estimate that it took me about a 8 hours in total to take samples of my dad's hand writing and convert it to the two original fonts we used for the Sketch Book, which is pretty good efficiency for starting off with no font foundry experience what-so-ever!!!
Time allowing, I will hopefully be able to post some of my original font creations for download, in the meantime, I wholeheartedly recommend Fontlab products to anyone who's ever been interested in creating their own fonts!
P.S. As a bonus, here's a great little tool for identifying mystery fonts: What The Font?!
Manitoulin Island Sketch Book
One of our exciting new Manitoulin Illustrated projects is finally ready to go! This hand-picked 90-page compilation entitled: "Manitoulin Island Sketch Book" contains a collection of well-known Canadian artist Jack Whyte's sketches, drawings and prints of the Island from the past 50 years, along with select complimentary stories and anecdotes.
You can click this link for a sample tour of the Manitoulin Island Sketch Book and ordering information, which is being handled by the excellent, high-quality print-on-demand service: lulu.com. I will also have a limited number of copies for sale at my regular and holiday market tables on the Island and hopefully at various retailers both on and off the island, which I will list as information becomes available.
October 2008
