Good Job, Brain! - 221: It's Another One for the Books

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Get hype for type and go gooey for Dewey because this week, it's all about books, writing, and reading! Dana's quiz about famous librarians gets us jumping from page to page, and Karen's graphic novel quiz gets us hopping from panel to panel. Colin dives deep into the Microsoft archives to discover the dramatic origin of Comic Sans, and the man behind this typeface phenomenon. Discover what common words and phrases we use everyday actually stem from the tradition of the printing press. And do you ever wonder why books have a certain smell? Our own chronic book sniffer Chris is on the chemical case! Also: Where in outer space is Carmin San Mateo? Good Job, Brain is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. For advertising inquiries, please contact [e-mail]! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, pals and gals, corralling at this locale, not getting a root canal. This is good job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. Today's show is episode 221. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen. And we are your typical type founders making typos about typhoid and typhoons. I'm Colin.

I'm Dana. And I'm Chris. Well, without further ado, let's jump straight into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz. Hot shot. Here I have a random trivial pursuit genus edition card. You guys have your barnyard buzzers ready. Let's answer some questions. Here we go.

Blue Edge for Geography. As of 2016, which two countries both in North Africa boast the only two subway systems on the whole continent? Wow. Can you read that one more time? Which two countries, both in North Africa, boast the only two subway systems on the whole continent? Colin I will guess Egypt

Ding-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-1 Second one This gets a little trickier Morocco Incorrect Hmm Algeria Yes, it is

Algeria So the Cairo Metro opened in 1987 and the Algiers Metro in 2011 So actually pretty new Oh yeah, yeah All right

Pink Wedge for pop culture. Which TV shows 522 episodes were aired on FXX on August 21st, 2014, and played for 12 straight days for your binge

watching pleasure. Dana. I almost feel like you should give it to Chris because I feel like his household watched all of them. Oh. Is it the Simpsons? Yep, the Simpsons.

Okay, Yellow Wedge. From which root vegetable were Jacko Lanterns originally made? Oh. Good job, Brains, first Halloween show. Colin? Yeah. It was, it was, it was, it was, uh, do radishes, turnips? Turnips, so it says, turnips are correct. Uh, people also carve beets and potatoes in order to ward off those who might bear them ill will.

If this is your first time listening to the show, maybe you never heard that episode. I really, really encourage you to go Google the turnip jack-o-lantern because it's just, frankly, equal parts, frightening, and hilarious. But they're so small. I think that's why they look. They look kind of creepy in those old photos. It's like it's not a lot of real estate to carve and also they shrivel. Yeah, right, yeah.

All right. Purple Wedge next question Which prolific artist famous for is Quote paintings of light Hid the number 5,282 in his work To honor his wedding date May 2nd, 1982

Everyone was waiting for me to finish the question Well it's just like The question is just it's like You get the answer in the first like four words And then the rest of it It just goes on and on and on and on and on. Colin, you busted. I believe it is Thomas Kinkade.

Indeed. Correct. I have no idea who this person is. You would. If you saw his work, you'd be like, oh, okay. Yeah. How would you describe it? Foresty, cottagey.

Like a greeting card, but a boring greeting card, not a sassy greeting card. I might be wrong on this. And if you're a Kincaid fan, I'm sure you'll correct me. But isn't one of his features of his paintings that there are never any people in them like they're like they're like little houses and they're lit from inside and they look very warm but there are no you know actual people these look like paintings where like if you get cursed you get trapped in them right it's very like pastoral witches from from rule doll all right okay green wedge for science which type of engine uses the same basic technology

as a pressure cooker that was dana steam engine steam engine i don't know is that yeah is that Yeah, okay. Yeah. Orange Wedge. Last question. Which carbonated drink patented in 1885 has a name that is synonymous with the word gutsy. Chris. Moxie. Correct. New England's own. Moxie soda. I was going to say Pepsi, like, because I know it has to do with like the peptic. And I was like, gutsy. Like your stomach is gutsy. Yeah. I think they're all at that. time the marketing was around for for ailments and for being sick here have a sugary soda possibly with some controlled substances in them like that I'm controlled at the time hello here you go if this show has taught me anything anytime I ever research any product that's over a hundred years old it's always just like it originally contained heroin

I know. They were like, we found this amazing thing. Yeah. Our marketing campaign is great. Oh, yeah, you think it's, you think it's the marketing? Yeah, yeah, that's what you think it is. For babies. Yep.

Yes. Heroin. For babies. Ooh, all right. This week's episode, I don't know. I don't know that this is a surprise to anybody. You know, we're pretty big nerds. We're nerds.

And I think we spend most of our time reading, researching. This week we're going to be talking about books and things on print. I think all of us are pretty voracious readers. So this week, it's another one for the books. Did you all have this when you were growing up where you call the library? and you can ask the librarian a question and then they'd go research it and tell you the answer. I did that all the time when I was a kid.

No! That's so cute. I don't think I was doing it out of loneliness. I was just, I was always curious about something. And then it would be like, oh, you could just ask somebody. And I loved it. And then when the internet came, I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing. I was a very early adopter of the internet

because I just liked to look stuff up. So I made a quiz for, you all about librarians. Somebody, people I hung out with a lot when I was a kid on the phone at school. Like, I thought they had magical powers. They knew everything. Right, right. Yes.

So you guys buzz in. I think you'll, I think it'll be a mix. I'm curious if you'll get all these questions. Some of these are maybe deep cuts, but we'll see. Ooh. Okay. All right. So kicking it off.

On Sesame Street, which human worked as a librarian for 31 seasons of the show? Holy cow. So this was like the librarian. Other people did the librarian, but she did it. Maybe we should work together. Oh, it's a she. I know. It's a she.

A hint for you. Yeah. 31. No. Okay. Oh, no. All right. It's not the person I'm thinking of.

Okay. Maybe you're thinking of who I'm thinking of. Well, I'm not going to say because I don't want to. Well, I'm going to say it. Only human female I can name is Maria. Right. I thought she had the store. She has the bicycle repair.

Yeah, exactly. She did some librarian stuff. I think at one point, but she didn't do it for... That's not her, yeah. No, yeah. Who was? Who else was? The only long-term, yeah.

Another female character. Another female character. Who's on there for... A long time. A real... Human or... I'm sure I'm gonna kick myself when you say it. You're right.

Ready? Linda. Oh, Linda. Yes, of course. Linda librarian. Okay. Yeah. Can you guess which...

main cast Muppet was the self-proclaimed library expert? Like, out of all the main Muppets of Sesame Street, who do you think was like, I'm the library expert? Hmm. Chris. If it's not Burt, I don't know who it is. Oh. No?

No? It's not. He likes libraries, but there's- Yeah, he would. Who's an expert? Self-proclaimed, right? Expert. Yeah.

Grover. It's Grover. Could it be Grover? He self-proclaimed a lot of things. There's one other Muppet who works in the library. sometimes, and her name is Francine Lloyd Wright. She's a word. I love it.

What is librarian hand? Librarian hand. Oh, I think I do. It's got to be when your fingers are like stained black with like library ink from stamping books. And like librarian hand is all that ink on your hands. No? No. It's like a guess, but no.

Karen. Is it your obsessive compulsively trying to straighten things? No, but that's amazing too. But library in hand is the handwriting. Like they were trained in a real specific handwriting. Oh, really? For the card catalogs. Melville Dewey was helped popularize librarian hand so people could use the card catalogs.

So it's kind of like a seraph font. It's very neat. They learned it in library school in the 19th and 20th centuries. Whoa. librarian hand. Okay. Which Italian adventurer, whose name is now synonymous with a womanizer, was once a librarian? Well, how can you guys all know?

Casanova. Casanova. Spent the last decade or so of his life as a librarian. And he did. Yeah, he worked for Count Waldstein in that man's big library. But he really just sat around and wrote a book about how many people he had sex with. Like that's what he wrote the buck was when he was a librarian. He's like, yeah, finally, I have the time.

I've got a story for you. On Parks and Rec, the show Parks and Rec, Ron Swanson's ex-wife is the deputy director of library services. What's her name? That is Tammy. I forget if it's Tammy 1 or Tammy 2. but it's Tammy. It's Tammy 2. Okay.

Played by Megan Malali, who's Nick Offerman. Oh, who's his real life? Real life, yeah. Which DC superhero earned a Ph.D. in library science and ran the Gotham City Public Library. Gotham City Public Library. Okay. So it's got to be that. Oh, Barbara Gordon, Batgirl, Batwoman.

Yes. Oh, that makes sense. Yes. Dr. Barbara Gordon. And then I guess she stops being a librarian after the Joker storyline where she gets shot. She becomes the Oracle. Yeah, so she's real good at managing information. Yeah.

She puts that degree to use. All right. In Game of Thrones, Samuel Tarley briefly works on a giant library resh shelving books and being trained as a maister. What is the name of the training complex that houses the library? Like where it is? Chris. The Citadel. The Citadel, an old town.

Yes. But, oh, I found this amazing article by these academics who were talking about Game of Thrones Library, specifically. They study medieval books and kind of how libraries have worked in the past. This, I love this quote, I have to tell you. They go, despite the absence of visible retrieval aids, coding systems, or catalogs, and while he is by no means an expert librarian, Game of Thrones, Sam Tarley is able to reshelve books in the Citadel as part of his chores in his first week as a novice. In our opinion, this is a truly remarkable feat. rivaling DeNaris's dragon writing and Aria's sword skills books in the past didn't always have the names on the spine and there's no card catalog.

So how does he know where to put any of these books back? Yeah. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, the character of the librarian is turned into what kind of animal? Oh, man. Do you know? It's been a while.

Nope. Okay. Okay. Well, is it an animal that would make sense. There's like pros and cons to being this animal in a library. I guess pros. And so this character never goes back to being a human.

Yeah. I had so many friends. Is it a worm? Like a bookworm? No. It's random. It's an orangutan. Ah, okay.

Yeah, like to be able to climb up to the high shelves with the arms. Oh. That's actually a great imagery. Yeah, it was great. Okay. And then the last one. Great sand. A. D. Candido wrote in a 1999 article for the American Libraries that I'm not alone in the

belief that the appearance of this school librarian has done more for the profession than anything in the past 50 years. This wily and attractive professional is our hero librarian, a pop culture idol whose love of books and devotion to research hold the key to saving the universe every week. Okay. What school librarian is she talking about? This is 1999. Okay. 1999 when she wrote this. I was going to guess it's Evie from the Mummy series, played by Rachel Weiss. That is a famous librarian, but that's not who.

This is like a sexy man librarian. Sexy man librarian. 99. High school? University. High school. High school librarian. This is a TV show.

It's very adventurous. I'm scared people are getting ill it is. Well, is the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer? It is. It is. It is. So what's the name of the librarian? Niles.

The heck out of me. Ah, you're close. Giles. Yes. Yes. There's a lot to me of librarians who are like, yeah, Giles is the gateway to wanting to be a librarian. I love the way he makes our profession so cool. Good job, y'all.

Librarians. Do God's work. Bring us the information. there was a brief period when I was in maybe I want to say third or fourth grade and I went to like a community school and so this is down in LA and my mom for about a year was the school librarian cute it was very cute and I yeah I again being a very kind of nerdy bookish kid like I felt kind of cool like oh I could go in at lunchtime and you know check out books I guess you know just because like I had an end with the librarian yeah yeah but uh It was, it was a, I got a hookup. I got a hookup. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I remember very clearly on our breakfast table at home, she made on a, on a big piece of poster board, like a hand lettered, Dewey Decimal System guide that sat above. I will forever, forever remember, yeah, Dewey Decimal System and just picture it with my mom making that poster. I used to put fake bibliography citations in my paper before the internet existed. I was like, no one should catch me. Because they're all like, you have to. to put three sources. I was like, I just made up books and names and years. No one's going to check this sixth graders work. It's really, did you format it correctly? It's like, oh, that looks

right. This is how you cite. They don't care about who you cite. You know, and like the names I came up with were all really generic and stuff. Thomas Smith. Your report gets pure reviewed. They're like, turns out fabricated all the data. So on the Good Job Brain Twitter account, we recently retweeted someone who was like freaking out and losing their mind over discovering why we call uppercase letters, uppercase, and lowercase letters. Yep. In his tweet, he had a picture of the actual case. It stemmed from printing press olden days where letters were casted in metal and they're stored in a giant kind of story. box. And of course, they're the letters that are stored on the top shelf, which is the

uppercase, and then the bottom shelf, which is the lowercase. And then someone else on that same thread, listener Nick Webster noted that the printing press storage box of letters is also where the phrase, mind your P's and Q's came from. Because lowercase P's and lowercase cues are mirror image of each other. That's where it came from. And they're located next to each other in the alphabetical order. Because at first I was like, wait a minute, Bs and Ds are very similar or like P's are just upside down D's.

I should add a note here maybe to head off some internet chatter that the mind your peas and cues is there are many, many origins for this one that people suggest. That does seem to be a more plausible. Plausible. But you're going to get people saying,

no, it's mind your pints and quartz. It's from the old English pub days. You're going to, yeah. But so this has totally inspired me to look at the phrases and words we use today that originated from the tradition of printing press and typesetting. And Colin, I know you, you love this realm of stuff. Can you give us a quick recap of how the printing press worked? There was a case of the little individual cast metal letters, uppertase, lower case. You would line the letters up, the little metal letters.

You know, of course, mirror image. So you have to be able to sort of imagine how they're going to look. make sure they're spelled right and there's spacing and alignment and you get them on and you're basically clamp them in on the side and you're making a big stamp like if you've ever gotten one of those craft store stamps with a little pad it's the same basic idea just scaled up to letter or you know newspaper size yeah before that people ought to write it right just write copies and copies of it and so I think when I was a kid I had to do like a little mini paper probably with a fake bibliography um about the Gutenberg you know printing press and I think when I was a kid it didn't

I didn't really understand. I was like, okay, sure, yeah, this was a great invention, whatever. But it wasn't until I was an adult. I was like, oh, changed everything. Automate. We can print a high volume of stuff.

This is how people learned about things. How people were entertained is reading. And so here I have some phrases that derive from the tradition of printing press. So we talked about the case, the storage box. It's huge. And the metal casted letters like the stamps that live in this box, they're called sorts. So each letter is a sort. So letter K is a sort. Letter C is a sort. And so a collection of them would be sorts. P printers back then, depending on what they're trying

to print, what they're trying to type set for, maybe they lost a few letters. Maybe they don't have enough letters for what they're trying to print. And so they would be out of sorts. I thought that's where it was going to go, but that's crazy that that's where that came from. If you're feeling out of sorts and you're not 100% on top of it or right or you're flustered, that's because you're, your page is missing some letters. Yep, you're out of sorts. Yeah, I'm sure you guys have seen this too, like movie marquee or gas station lettering with the hand plastic. You know, sometimes they're out of an E and they just like, they'll, you know, they can just turn the three around or, you know, just liberal exchange of ones and lowercase L's as needed. it's like ah this movie time has too many zes nobody has this many z we'll just put the end sideways

it's like really wide so obviously setting type and letters in a plate is a very very tedious process so to make things more efficient with common sense people started to cast words like common words together so instead of you know let's say the word and instead of having the letter a and d they're like hey, let's just move this let's just have a stamp for and. And so some of these common words from two really, really common prepositions and conjunctions

and eventually evolved into like the name of the company because people are printing things and they have to put their company name in them. And then people started to get a little bit fancy and artsy with them, maybe design them with some decoration, more stylized fonts.

And these are called local Types, which is where we get the word logo from. Like a company's logo is from their logo type because it's a repeated one piece of a stamp. People also did this to common phrases. So they would just have a whole block of phrases that people use. They also did this with generic images like a tree or a snowflake. So these common templated things that were commonly used took on the French word for clicking, because they're clicking the piece into place. cliche

Ah Describing things that are commonly or maybe like overly used Yeah Other other terms probably a little bit more obvious

Hot off the press Ah Right right right Yeah yeah Also make an impression So impression is what I think the British term for we say printing

But for them the proper term is impressing Because we're impressing an image or text onto a piece of paper So when you make an impression, that's what we're impressing that stamp onto a piece of paper. So say you're working at a newspaper factory and you just put together, you just did typesetting for a whole plate for the front page for the news tomorrow. So we got to print a lot of copies and you have this one plate.

So what do we can do? We're not going to print all of it from just one plate because it's going to take a long time. it's going to degrade the letters the sorts in the plate so what do we do we need to make a copy of this completed plate well how do we do that so printers developed a system where they would make from this mother plate molds that the common thing is they would imprint this using paper machet and they would wait for the paper machet to kind of set and dry then they poured metal on it so now we have the complete front page in one one big metal press. This system was called stereotyping. Ah. In 1946, this is for the New York Times. So that one plate, that mother plate,

they would cast as many as 6,000 copies of plates so that they can keep up the demands. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of what I have for the printing press movable. type period. And in between then and now, which is word desktop publishing, there is a period in the middle where it was phototyping. And essentially it is giant Z-Roc. Instead of using

stamps of letters and words, they're cutting it out of paper. It's pre-printed text that it looks like a giant ransom note. So if you're making a newspaper then, it was just a giant ransom note. Can we cut out a picture and then cut out words? And this is where copy and paste comes from. this is where clip art came from. Exactly. They used to be a book of just generic art that you literally clip out using scissors to put it on your page

so it can be photocopied. When I was first starting to learn desktop publishing, some of like my mentors and people that I worked with older co-workers, they came up in this environment. They say they could like smell the glue that you would use to like, you know, do the pasteups. That's wild. It just seemed like learning from somebody from another era,

just the pre-reed, the free digital era, yeah. That's all the news fit to print, you guys. So, yeah, so I was thinking about books, because that is the topic of this next episode and was trying to, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know how I landed on this is what I wanted to talk about, but I'll say this. I went as preparation for this, I went to the good job brain fans and lobe-trotter's Facebook group that we have, where thousands of good job brain fans gather to discuss things. I posted a poll. I posted a poll. And I simply gave them the prompt.

So, do you smell books? And I gave four potential answers that I was hoping everybody would fall into. We got 220 votes so far. I'm looking at the results right now. Yeah, a lot of people wanted to vote. That was just from yesterday. That was just from yesterday. Yeah.

And so the most popular answer of the four options that I gave people was, I enjoy the sense of books, but I don't go out of my way to sniff them. No. With 47 votes, the second most popular answer was, absolutely, I jam my nose into the gutter and inhaled deeply every book every time. 13 votes, no, not my thing, no real interest in the scent of books. And then two votes for, I only just now found out this was a thing and I'm super weirded out. I was very curious. actually, who would fall into what buckets here. I did this because I am absolutely an unrepentant book sniffer. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just for the, you know, for the same reason that I might, when I get my glass of wine, I may swirl it to release some of the aromas and stick my nose in. It is a very pleasant feeling to inhale a pleasant aroma, and I absolutely find the aroma of books. some books don't smell great but when a book smells really good it smells really good and so i was just like okay karen's smelling a book now they smell great it's your book i'm smelling your book

karen is now smelling i think every book on her shelf yeah i assume the smell of books is like fresh kind of ink clean chemical yeah yeah with a little bit of like paper nuttiness am i right yeah sounds about right um in an actual scientific study not a facebook poll a real scientific study that was conducted in 2017, researchers presented people with the scents, a sense that came off of historic books, old books. And they collected the scents and then kind of disassociated them from the books. They didn't give people a book to smell. They said, smell this sort of isolated scent and try to describe what it is your smelling. Like, what do you smell? What's the, what's the scent there? Number one, with

the bullet, the scent that people said that they got off of the scent of old books was chocolate. Huh. What? Yeah, was the scent of chocolate, followed very closely by coffee. You saw lots of people saying, I smell, you know, burning or wood or ash, things like that. But chocolate was the number one answer. Researchers posit that, you know, this is because books and chocolate and coffee share many what are known as volatile organic compounds or VOCs and those those are the things that give everything their smell VOCs are the

things that the the compounds that give off parts of themselves those parts go up into our nose and we smell them and in fact books and chocolate both contain lignin and cellulose some of the main substances that are in wood lignin itself is actually very close in terms of its makeup to vanillin, which is, which is the scent of vanilla. And so lignin is even used, uh, in some cases to make artificial vanilla flavoring. Really? So, um, yeah. So a lot of times when you're smelling and we're talking about old books that are

starting to break down and release, you know, more of those compounds. Definitely a difference between new book smell and old book smell. Yeah. They're made, they're made with, uh, I would say. it seems like a little bit more organic materials back then? Yeah, for sure. In fact,

there's one compound called furferal, fur, fur, firl, that they actually use that to determine the age of some books because more of it ended up in the compounds of older paper. The paper that used more like linen and cotton, you know, versus like wood pulp. It smells like almonds.

And again, they can use it to date books how much furfural is. is coming off of it. When lignin breaks down, that's what kind of causes books to start turning yellow as well when the lignan starts leaving. When you eat a chocolate bar,

often there's vanilla flavoring in the chocolate bar, right? So, I mean, there is like this, that combination of chocolate with vanilla notes that can come off of old books.

Now, old books that are in good preserved condition and weren't exposed to a lot of moisture because if you're smelling old books and they smell like mold or, you know, the must be able to smell like that. That's just mold. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

In newer books, which can also smell fantastic, what you are smelling is not the paper breaking down. You're smelling whatever the inks are used on the paper. Also, there's, I mean, they can use other compounds on the paper as well to treat the paper and make it more durable. So you're smelling those. And then also adhesives. You're sniffing glue when you're smelling a new book.

And then, of course, books for most people, I would hope, remind us of happy time spent with the book. And, of course, we know that. smell. It's very close to the memory center of the brain. And so that's why a smell can be so powerful and bring back a certain time or place. You know, if you enjoyed your time reading books, like that smell is sort of transporting you back to that as well. And so that's kind of the idea of like, why do people really enjoy the smell of books? Not only is it a pleasant sort of reminder, but it's also, it just smells like chocolate sometimes. Yeah, there's scented

candles that smell like everything. But yes, there are scented candles. that smell like old books that you can order. I have perfumes that are formulated to capture that smell as well. Yes. Actually, somebody mentioned in the in the Good Job Brain fan group post that there's a company, specific company called Demeter Fragrance Library, yes, which sells things in. Turns out all kinds of weird sense. So there's paperback, but also kitten fur.

Grass. I really like grass. Yep, gin and tonic, junior mint. You want to smell exactly like a junior mint and crayon. If you want to smell of cram. You just want little kids to bite you. The last sort of corollary to this is if you smell a book and it does smell bad and you don't want it to smell bad anymore. I actually go through this a lot with video games because often I will buy a video game on eBay and it will come in and the person did not disclose that they are a chain smoker and they've had this thing for 30 years and it smells.

Well, yeah, I mean the the appell. smell, the basement smell, but also the smoking smell. What I will generally, you can put it into an airtight container with odor-absorbing material. So you can put a book, you shouldn't put a book directly

into kitty litter, but it's like if you put a book into a loose container and then put that into a container full of kitty litter, so the book's not touching it, but it's all in the same atmosphere, then airtight, then seal it up. The kitty litter will absorb the bad smell off the book. And leave it in there for a long time, you know

I mean, like, leave it in there for, like, a week or whatever. I actually use dryer sheets, unscented, fabric softener sheets. I heard the dryer sheets. Put those in between pages or, you know, wrap it around the video game, as the case may be. Put it in a Ziploc, wait for a while. If it's like a mild smoke smell, it should be gone within a day. It's really strong. You might have to throw it in the trash.

I mean, yeah. But there are absolutely common household solutions that you might have lying around right now that you can use. to get rid of, get rid of bad smell. All right. Well, everybody, let's take a quick break. And we'll be right back with more books. I'm Chris Hadfield. I'm an astronaut, an author, a citizen of planet Earth.

Join me for a six-part journey into the systems that power the world. Real conversations with real people who are shaping the future of energy. No politics, no empty talk. Just solutions-focused conversations on the challenges we must overcome and the possibilities that lie ahead. This is on energy. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks, more points, more flights, more of all the things you want in a travel rewards card, and then some.

Get your ticket to more with the new BMO. V.I. Porter Mastercard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply, visit bemo.com slash V-I. Porter to learn more. I'm at a grade school in Chicago. We're going to find out if these teachers listen to Good Job Brain. Emperor Quincy Huang ruled China until his death in 210 BC. How did he die? Oh, it's definitely C. He was crushed. It's mercury poisoning. Ding, ding, ding, ding. No way. Way.

Eddie white or penicillic. which came first no that's crazy so you would learn all of these things if you listened to good job break I should I will and we're back

Colin what do you have for us okay Karen well I took this a little more broadly but I think we are absolutely certainly safely within the realm of books here but let's talk about writing if you have been on the internet used Facebook worked in an office

or even touched a personal computer at any time in the last 25 years, I am 99% certain that you are familiar with the topic of this segment. This is something that is reviled by many. It is earnestly, perhaps ironically, loved by many as well. And there is honestly not a whole lot of ground in between those positions. I am talking about the typeface known as, comic sands I've changed my opinions on it

oh yeah you know what Karen I've gone back and forth and back and forth I really I have to say I like a lot of people you know maybe in the design or type and font world it's it's easy to sort of get caught up one way or the other either defending it or hating on it I'll give you a description here

if just the words comic sands are not sparking any recognition for you here I'm going to quote from a very wonderful book called Just My Type by Simon Garfield. It's a very common book. Good name. Terrific. It's a great book. Yep. So here I'm quoting here. He says, Even if you didn't know what it was called, you will be familiar with comic sands.

It looks as if it was written neatly by an 11-year-old, smooth and rounded letters, nothing unexpected, the sort of shape that could appear in alphabet soup, or as magnets on fridges, or in Adrian Moll's diary. if you see a word somewhere with each letter in a different color, that word is usually in comic sands. He says, you know, Comic Sands is a type that has gone wrong. And I think that is in some ways true, but it has a very redeeming, to me, very interesting story here.

And just as an aside, I may use font and typeface interchangeably. Please just accept that and go on. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then it doesn't matter. Just be cool. Please leave me alone. Please, please. I know, I know, but it's, please.

Okay, so Comic Sans was created by a man named Vincent Canori. Vincent Canori in the early to mid-90s was a typographic engineer for a little company called the Microsoft Corporation. Okay. At work one day, Vincent was reviewing a pre-release copy. of a program called Microsoft Bob. Now, I think we've talked about Microsoft Bob on the show before. You know, again, it may be lost to the mists of good job, brain time. If you don't remember, and if you were not perhaps alive in 1995,

Microsoft Bob was a program or an interface, a product that was created to serve is a super, super user-friendly interface for sort of that era of Windows operating systems. Okay, Windows 3, Windows 95, even NT a little bit. And, you know, Microsoft, like a lot of companies, felt like maybe this need to really hold your hand and teach you how to use the computer. Oh, I see. Okay. It came with a lot of common programs at the time.

There was a word processor. I had a calendar, a planner. It had a basic kind of home finance app in it. It was stuff that you might need if you were just sort of the average, you know, American personal computer windows buying family. It used a metaphor that was actually pretty common in some stuff at the time. It had the house metaphor. Okay.

So it was very visual, had a picture of the inside of a house. And, you know, you go from room to room depending on what you wanted to do. And everything was really heavily, visually metaphor based. So when you wanted to open your calendar, you'd click on the, you know, the clock. And if you wanted to write a letter, open up the word processor, you would click on the pen and paper or on the desk. You know, it had a lot of assistants in it, kind of cartoony assistance that would give you advice and tips. And there was a cartoon dog named Rover who was, you know, pop up and hey, do you need help doing this? And would guide you with little, you know, little speech bubbles on screens.

And yeah, came out in March of 1995. It was discontinued in early 1996. Yeah. Yeah. It was never a hit. It never took off. It was just really widely criticized by most of the professional reviewers. Like they just...

Oh, no. I mean, the critiques of it ranged from just being too dumbed down. The cartoon character is too cute, too over the top. So anyway, for whatever reason, or I should say, for all of those reasons and more, yeah, they took Bob off very, very quickly. But yeah, you know, it did kind of spiritually live on and do a lot of the later Microsoft office assistants, which in their own turn were widely criticized, but that's how it goes. So our friend Vincent Canori was reviewing, you know, a pre-release, unreleased copy of Microsoft Bob. He saw something he didn't like. And specifically, what he didn't like was the typeface they were using.

They were using in the release that he was looking at, Times News. New Roman for all of the text, all of the labels everywhere. And again, you know, Times New Roman, if you don't know the name, it's just a very, very, very traditional, is serif font, boring, you might say, newspaper, right, exactly. Vincent felt that Times New Roman really felt out of place with kind of the tone and the vibe they're going for. They're like cartoon characters, this is soft and fuzzy and rounded. There's dogs, you know, I mean, this is not, this just didn't feel right. And so, you know, so he said to the Microsoft Bob team, he said, hey, you know, have you guys like, have you worked with the, you know, the kids software team?

Yeah. Maybe they have some, some ideas here, maybe typewise that you can kind of tie it in a little bit more. Sounded like maybe that didn't really go anywhere. Ultimately, you can see where I'm going. Vincent Canari decided, you know what, I'm going to create a font here for them. And he designed Comic Sans. The word comic is right in the name. It is in fact inspired, inspired by comics and comic books. And in fact, one of the books that Vincent had in his little workspace there by his desk was Batman, The Dark Night Returns. The very, very well-known by Frank Miller, Klaus Jansen, Lynn Barley. Wow.

You know, he also had taken some inspiration from Watchmen, another great, well-known, gritty of comic and now trade paperback from that era. Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, of course. And he really took a lot of inspiration from the hand-lettered, organic feel of those comics. And so he drew the letters by hand. He drew the entire alphabet that he felt that the program needed, got it pixelized just the way he wanted it. He sent the files to the Microsoft Bob team. He's like, guys, people, this is great. We don't need to use Times New Roman. We can ship this thing with this awesome font that I've created for you. And they said, wow, we cannot use this. Why?

Well, for a couple reasons. One, partly because they had designed all of the screens, all of the interface around the sizing expectations for Times New Roman already. So just from an aesthetic layout perspective, having to move margins or change things around, it was a problem. It just didn't fit, frankly. It just really, it wasn't that they didn't like. it, you know, necessarily. So Microsoft Bob was in fact released with Times New Roman as

as he saw. Who can say to what extent the font type choice was part of its downfall. Was he working at Microsoft at the time? Yes, yes. This was all, no, this was, yep, makes right. He wasn't on the Bob team. He waited until they had a release candidate. And then he's like, you know what, you should change all of your font to this thing I made for you. I'm not on your team. I don't care about the people who had a bunch of meetings. and talked about this and figured it out. I'm just going to go for it. Dana, it sounds like you're familiar with software development.

Oh, yeah, maybe I've done some software development before. That would be so annoying. I'm like, wow. That's true. This whole time, calling your tone is like this dude is kind of like a hero. And Dana's like, no, he's that guy. He's making me busy. This thought of somebody like, I really designed your whole thing.

So Bob came, it went. He wasn't part of that. He created this font system, and it did, in fact, become adopted for Microsoft Movie Maker, which was a very successful piece of software for them. And, you know, thinking back now, you know, when I read this, I was like, yeah, you know what, I do kind of remember in the 90s seeing comic sands on a lot of sort of home video slide shows. And it was a hit. Great.

Of course, as I mentioned, this was 94, 95. it was bundled as a typeface in Windows 95, which is how it's sort of, you know, if we were tracing a- Start me up. Yeah, if we were tracing a virus here, this, yeah, Windows 95 was a patient zero, I guess, right. And again, as Simon Garfield notes here in this wonderful book,

like if you are the average kind of home user of Windows in the 90s and you're making something at, you know, a book report or something fun, yeah, what are you going to use? You're going through that little, list of fonts you might very well decide i don't want to use times new roman i'd rather use comic sands it exploded i mean it really maybe leapt sort of uh the bounds of uh proper use by uh by whatever your definition uh you'd see it on ambulances the uh the the Portuguese national basketball team used it for the the names of the players in the back of the jersey yeah yeah yeah um

I read, you'll be used in some online adult sites would use it for their, you know, font branding, just really places that did not seem appropriate. Into the late 90s, there definitely started the backlash of the anti-comic Sands movement. There was a husband and wife named Holly and David Combs who started selling ban comic sands merchandise and they would catalog some just crazy places that it was used as well like they've documented it being used on tombstones someone from uh south africa i guess contacted them let them know that they uh they had a a textbook their african's textbook the entire textbook was printed in common sans i would go nuts after just a couple pages yeah they found a use of a

you know, a pamphlet handed out to patients about irritable bowel syndrome, again, printed all in comics hands, yeah. Vincent Canore, he really took this all in stride because, again, he is a professional and he understands the nuances of fonts and type and how it's used, and not everybody is going to use it with the same mindset as a professional. He's gotten a letter from Disney thanking them for his contribution. Disney has made a great use of comic sands. The letter was in comic sands, signed by Mickey Mouse.

I'll close here with a joke again, cribbing from this wonderful book. Comic Sands walks into a bar, and the bartender says, we don't serve your type. Oh, no. You should sue them. And that's discrimination. Yeah. What's worse? That or the brush stroke thought?

Mommy Needs Wine font. Oh, Karen. The live, laugh, love font. I liked that before. Karen, I have the results here of a 2007 survey published in the typographic papers series. This was a questionnaire sent to more than 100 designers, asked them to list the ones they liked the least. Coming in at number five was brush script. Coming in number four, papyrus, of course, another.

the avatar font at number three newland inline or noyland perhaps inline the Jurassic Park font you know the American spirit cigarettes font right right no number two number two ransom note yeah like this one it's just it's communicating the the legitimate use cases for ransom note yeah right subversive zine right right that's it yeah and a ransom note yeah yeah right and an actual ransom note imagine a textbook all ransom note yeah it's Shakespeare play in ransom note I was in a story meeting when I was at wired um it one day and somebody was like oh yeah and we'll take um the uh the letters and kind of you know cut them out in the presentation it'll look like like a murder letter.

The whole room is like, wait, what? Ransom note? Like, oh, yeah, you know, you know what I mean. The murderer letter. Yeah. Like, why, what do you call it when you make one, you know? Well, yeah, it's presupposing that there'll be a murder, you know?

Like it's not just a kid out there. Right, right. That's really, yeah, you're assuming your ransom letter is not going to be successful. and just to not to leave you guys hanging this might be maybe a sign of when this survey was taken the the 2012 Olympic font London was ranked as the number one most hated font among the designers in the survey

I actually had to look it up it was a really kind of angular one writer observed it looked like the equivalent of dad dancing just you know something just trying so hard to be cool that it, it, it, it fails. I see a little bit of Greek glyph and, and, and, and, and, and, you're right. You're right. It does.

You're right. But surprisingly, Comic Sans did not make the designer's own list of most hated fonts. So maybe that speaks well of it. Because it's really like saying you hate your grandma, if you hate it. You know, it's just like, when she sends me these emails and comic, comic fans. My dad emails, powerpoints, like, of memes. Like, you know, we, we, we said. each other memes and stuff but like all of their memes are in a PowerPoint file with music

that you have to download and it's slideshow of like not even memes like funny web comics or whatever oh my god it's like so not efficient your your memes per second yeah it's like forward forward forward forward yeah yeah yeah it's a chain mail it's a chain PowerPoint that's I never open it you should never open it that's viruses I know I know but That's what's downloading and taking so long. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, Colin.

I got our last segment. And I didn't know you were going to talk about Comic Sans. And I am actually, I have a quiz here that is in the same vein as what you talked about. All right. My segment here is called From Panels to Frames. It is a quiz about movies, films that came from were adapted from graphic novels. novels or comics so here i have a bunch of questions get out your barnyard buzzers here we go number one nobody could stop cameron d as a star trajectory after her first film acting gig in

this smoking movie oh cow dana the mask correct the mask didn't know until today that the mask was based on a comic by Doug Manky and John Arcudy. The comic is super dark and not like the movie at all. Next question. This gritty Chicago mob drama was the last movie appearance of Paul Newman and features an all-star cast including Stanley Tucci, Daniel Craig, Jude Law with Tom Hanks as the lead. Oh. It's really good.

The film is very good. What was that one? Based on graphic novel. Wow. It's one of the few roles where Tom Hanks plays a, not that he's a villain. Like he plays like a mob, like a gangster dude who kills people, which is a very un-Tom Hanks thing to do. But he's still the hero of the film. Oh, man.

This is, ah. This piece of work is called Road to Perdition. Yes, road to edition, based on a graphic novel written by Max Allen Collins and art by Richard Pierce Rainer. Fantastic movie, the last movie appearance of Paul Newman before he retired, I think, in 2007. Salad dressing king himself, Paul. Okay, before she got us to love, hate her in Game of Thrones as Circey Lanister, Lena Heady played Queen Grogo in this battle epic. battle epic battle epic battle epic battle epic battle epic

queen gorggo oh gorggo gorggo or grogo very like gorgon with no grogrew queen grogrogo uh Colin this is a guess was it uh 300 correct it is 300 oh yeah okay this is sparta Searcy, no, sorry, her name's not Searcy. Lena Heady, she was the queen, like the Spartan queen. This is 300, the graphic novel written illustrated by Frank Miller, we just talked about. Next question.

This film and comic takes place in a post-apocalyptic Australian outback. The comic was created by artist Jamie Hewlett, who then afterwards went on to create the band The Gorillas. This film stars Lori Petty, Naomi Watts. Here we go. Ice tea, Malcolm McDowell and Iggy Pop. Chris, you buzz in first. Tank girl. Tank girl.

You are correct. It is Tank Girl. Commercial flop, but beloved cult film. Boy, they wanted that one to be such a hit. I remember the writing. You know what? It was pretty quirky and pretty cool. Yeah.

But yeah, so the actual, the comic book was made by Jamie Hewlett. I did not. If you look at it, it looks a lot like guerrillas. It looks like the guerrillas stuff. Oh, that's a good one. It's his style. We have two last questions, and I want you guys to work together on it.

We, of course, associate Chris Evans now with playing Steve Rogers, Captain America, but did you know, in addition to the Marvel movies, he starred in four other films based on comics or graphic novels. Can you name the four other films? I can name

one. Okay. He was in Fantastic Four. Fantastic Four. Yep. By Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. He was the Human Torch. Yeah.

There's three more. I could give you guys clues. Three more. Goodness. He played an ex-boyfriend. Oh, he was in Scott Pilgrim. Oh, right, right, right. Pilgrim versus the world.

Yeah. By Brian Leo Malley. He was one of the ex-boyfriends. Yep, yeah. And two more. He starred, he was kind of like an anti-hero in this Korean movie about a train. Oh, he was in Snowpiercer. Snowpiercer. That's right. That's right. That's right. I forgot. That was an adaptation. Right. Okay. Yeah. Snowpiercer, a Korean movie, but it was actually, uh, the comic was

French. Jacques Lobb and Jean-Marc Rochette. Yeah. And the last movie you might not know, it's called The Losers. He played, it was kind of like a, you know, like special elite team doing like a heist. And it also has Zoe Saldana, who played Gamora, Idris Elba, who was also in Thor Jeffrey Dean Morgan who became the comedian the watchman anyways All-Star comic-based cast

yeah Jeffrey Dean Morgan also in Walking Dead and Idris Elho also in the new suicide squad right or am I? Yeah wow well so here we are last question

not to be out done Josh Brolin has played a character in six movies based on comics can you name all six he currently has probably i think the record i mean i think we can all name at least one right he's he does thanos in he is thanos from avengers wow seven five more um was he uh was he uh the sin city adaptation was he in yes he was in sin city two okay he replaced clive

owen okay uh give me some hints i'll give you some hints he played a young version of tommy lee jones in a movie. Men in Black? Yep. He's a Men and Black three, also based on a comic. Okay. One, he played a Western Bounty Hunter with Megan Fox. Oh. Do we remember that movie?

Megan. It's a DC character. We do not? It's a Jonah Hex. Oh, gosh. No. No, I don't remember that. No.

He was also cable in Deadpool 2. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah. And then the last. one. This is probably the only manga Japanese comic in this quiz. There was a manga called Old Boy that got turned into a Korean movie, award-winning Korean movie. And then that was adapted to the Western audience, Old Boy starring Josh Berlin and Elizabeth Olson. Wanda. Oh, really? Yeah. That's so funny. Okay. Just to recap, here we go. Josh Berlin's Big Six. He was

Thanos in Avengers, cable from Deadpool 2, Old Boy, from the manga Old Boy, Men in Black 3, Sin City 2, and Jonah Hex. Good job, Josh. Yeah. From the Goonies now to the top. Good job, Josh's agent. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget.

After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. So, if you guys recall, we have been floating in outer space this entire time because a few episodes ago, we received a challenge from our old nemesis, Carmen San Mateo, who stole a trivia prize from us and escaped into orbit somewhere. So we're playing where the heck in space is Carmen Sam Mateo right now. And we were voyaging in our fartists when we picked up a mysterious signal over the space radio or whatever. And this signal was an endless loop of a series of numbers.

Now, we could not solve this. So we turned to you folks out there in podcast land, the listeners, who correctly surmised that the numbers should be transposed into letters. One is A, two is B, and so on and so forth. And this gives you K-L-E-O-R-I-O-N-S-B-U-C. Now, unfortunately, that means basically nothing, but it was a loop, and we didn't know where the loop began and ended. So, as it turns out, the way to actually spell something with that would be to start with the first O, and you get Orion's buckle. So then, of course, you realize that the star formation in the night sky that we know as Orion's belt has three stars in it. And thus came to the conclusion that Orion's belt buckle would probably be the star in the middle.

And then you Googled it. And then you found out that that star is named Al-N-N-L-A-M. And that was the answer. A-L-N-I-M-A-M-L-N-L-A-M was the name of the star that serves as Orion's Beltbuckle. Then you went to Good JobBrain.com and you typed that in to learn that that was the correct answer. So off we are traveling, everybody, to Al-N-Lam, a brief 2,000 light-year. years away from our, from Earth. Or actually, I mean, it turns out that Alam is about 40 times the size of our sun and is

estimated to be about 500,000 times brighter. So let's just get within spitting distance of Alam. Okay. So now that we've arrived in the general vicinity, who's name, by the way, is derived from the Arabic phrase for a string of pearls, Orion's belt being a fairly recognizable sort of concatenation of stars and the night skies recognized by different cultures, even if they don't know about, you know, Orion, the Hunter.

In Arabic languages, it's often known as the belt or the line. And in some places, including Chinese mythology, it's known as, like, the scale or the weighing beam. Because it's a balance. It's a straight line with three things. Like a balancing scale type thing. Anyway,

none of this is going to help us. But what is, is that once we arrive in the general area, we spy another vessel out of our viewing holes. This is a spaceship that seems to be in the shape of a wireless handheld microphone. We begin to receive a transmission.

Hey, Gumshoes, it's us, Macapella, everybody's favorite non-instrumental, non-infringing, parody musical group. A five, six, seven, eight. Carmen isn't here. Somewhere in the Milky Way Hiding on a moon named for a lady in a play

In other words She has fled In other words Use your head Now that little ditty's not going to give you the complete skinny on Dede and Carmen's whereabouts But we did hear Didi tell Carmen this, daughter of Hermione, mother of Lucky. Now, what that means, don't ask us, we're just a simple, legally distinct group of doo-wop singers on a voyage into space. And it's time to get going to infinity and then pass that.

That was great. I'll finish it. Five stars. Oh, thank you. I'll let Macapella know that you said so. Macapella, ladies gentlemen. Wow.

They're keeping it legal. Their production value really went up. It's it. When you have extra time to spend on it, you know, traveling to people in outer space, you want to really double it out on the production value. You have a lot of, you just have a lot of time to think and, yeah,

really get those harmonies tight. So. Okay, what are our clues? We had some clues. So in the song itself, I believe, well, what did they say? I think they said that Carmen was hiding on a, moon or somewhere somewhere in the Milky Way hiding on a moon named for a lady in a play yeah named after

a lady in a play uh-huh and then we got another little hint at the end after that daughter yeah daughter of hermione yeah mother of lucky so i don't know i don't know i wouldn't even begin to speculate or even provide any hints here um to the to the people listeners listeners we need you again on this one you're going to have to figure out where Carmen and Didi Convict have blasted off to. Help us get to the next place, everybody. We got to catch Carmen San Mateo. Please visit Good JobBray.com, our website, and you'll see a little fartis, and we're going to punch in the code.

And that's our show. Thank you guys for joining me and thank you guys, listeners, for listening in. Hope you learned a lot of stuff about smell of books, librarians. graphic novel and comic sands you can find us on apple podcast google podcast spotify and on all podcast apps and on our website good job brain com this podcast is part of the airwave media podcast network visit airwave media dot com to listen and subscribe to other shows like clever movie therapy and ben franklin's world and we'll see you guys next week

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