Warm yourself with this edition of Quipsologies.

Noted without comment. [Thanks to updating victim John Stephenson for the screen shot]

Designer designed T-shirts for a cause at support.whoiscarrus.com.

The Anholt-GMI City Brands Index, released late last week, ranks the top 30 cities. Based on attributes like “Presence” (contribution to culture/science), “Place” (physical aspects), “Potential” (job/education opportunities), “Pulse” (urban lifestyle) and “People” (welcome/diversity), London kicked every city’s ass. The cities, in order of ranking, top to bottom: London, Paris, Sydney, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles, Madrid, Berlin, San Francisco, Toronto, Geneva, Washington, Brussels, Milan, Stockholm, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Prague, Hong Kong, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, Mexico City, Moscow, Johannesburg, Cairo, Mumbai, Lagos. [Via Gothamist]

Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style is a must read. Now, Richard Rutter brings its principles, accompanied with HTML and CSS examples, to typography on the web.

Alec Wilkinson profiled Matthew Carter in the The New Yorker’s December 5th issue. The telling article paints a picture of Carter’s rise from apprentice to well-respected artisan.

Switzerland is to host a diplomatic conference next month aimed at approving a third emblem for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

The long-standing controversy focuses on the symbol the Israeli first aid society — Magen David Adom — could use to identify itself for humanitarian missions in armed conflicts; so far the authorities have rejected the red cross used in most countries and the red crescent preferred by Muslim countries. And the winner is…

Xmas carols to keep gangs away.

One of my favorite Paul Rand-isms — used at least once a week — in response to statements like “I don’t know… I don’t like lime green” is to suggest that the other party is practicing “Magic and Superstition”. Well, it seems that I may need to reconsider.

Attention branding firms: The Consumers are Revolting!

Gay and Lesbian paperback artwork from the 50’s and 60’s.

Good architects borrow, great architects steal.

It’s most likely a hoax; but just imagine future versions with improved, um… sampling.

What dire offence from am’rous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things

Over the weekend on eBay, a collection of poetry by Alexander Pope (with an *ahem!* intriguing fore-edge painting) failed to meet its reserve.

Just be careful with the nuclear waste dump: how to turn your home into Moonbase Alpha.

Established professions, academic disciplines, and other organized forms of cultural production periodically bestow honors and distinctions upon some of their members. These annual events represent more than just rituals that call the attention of specialist audiences and the interested public to the names of distinguished individuals. They are exercises of autonomous authority, by which the symbolic gatekeepers of each specialized field try to preempt the judgment of outsiders with their own.

Even in the most insulated fields, producers of culture seldom hold the ultimate “purse strings.” Symbolic rewards are therefore easier for them to control than material ones. If, as is often assumed, lack of control over material resources compromises creative freedom, symbolic rewards administered by creators themselves should, in contrast, encourage innovation. However, symbolic gatekeepers have their own personal standing and ideological positions to defend.

How the elites of a field deal with innovation may test their objectivity, but the autonomy of symbolic rewards systems resides elsewhere. Organized producers of culture affirm the superiority of their judgments by striving to establish a “feedback link” between that which they do control and that which they do not. The symbolic rewards that elites grant to their colleagues are intended to impress the elites’ judgments on relevant outsiders and to make the acquisition of material rewards more likely. In turn, achievements that bring fortune and public fame are reinterpreted in terms of a field’s specialized discourse so as to bring more symbolic recognition.

Magali Sarfatti Larson’s Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America is available online at the Callifornia Digital Library.

Also of interest in the Callifornia Digital Library are Writing Signs: The Fatimid Public Text by Irene A. Bierman (an exploration of Fatimid public text, or signage) and Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination edited by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan.