It was small, but that’s not a bad thing since your average scone is 105% butter and has more calories than you’l burn in a lifetime of sitting in coffee shops writing blogs.  It was on the crumbly slide, as opposed to the sometimes chewy type of scone.  Visible bacon bits, a good sign for sure.  It most certainly hit the spot.  Highly recommended.

At a later visit, I tried the Goat Cheese Scallion Scone.  I must say the goat cheese was subtle, and that’s not the vibe I usually get from goat cheese.  But here’s what sets this scone apart: the scallion was actually visible and tastable, like it is in the better scallion pancakes you can sometimes get in Chinese restaurants, or , if you’re super lucky, in the homemade kind.

A touch of spring onion-ness and buttery goodness.  I don’t think I’ll ever go back to sweet scones.

Thinking about these issues has led me to join, indeed to co-found, a group called Sprout Lenders.  Inspired by Slow Money (itself inspired by Slow Food), Sprout Lenders is a group of people putting their money to work for local food businesses in the form of an investment club offering loans.  I’m writing about this not to pat myself on the back, but in the hope that both of my readers will help get the word out to local food businesses that might benefit from a Sprout Lenders loan.  We’re looking for greater Boston food businesses with local and sustainable bona fides (not necessarily official organic status) that need cash for expansion or working capital.

Slow Food and Money

Slow Food is a movement founded  ”… to counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”  Slow Money came out of the Slow Food movement and describes itself somewhat less succinctly but I like the 4th principle a great deal, “We must learn to invest as if food, farms and fertility mattered. We must connect investors to the places where they live, creating vital relationships and new sources of capital for small food enterprises.”

Sure, I’ve got access to a dizzying array of food from around the world, much of it organic or artisanal.  It feels nice to support small businesses and farms around the world.  It’s also nice to support small businesses and farms in my own community. Some of the Slow Money principles sound anti-growth to the free market enthusiast in me, but why not be pro-growth right here where I live?

Why Lending?

If you believe in any of the ideas of Slow Money and Slow Food, how can you advance those agendas in your community?  Buying local and eating local are great starts, but individual action only goes as far as your own spending. Activism, advocacy and lobbying are other paths.  In the organizing discussions at Sprout Lenders, we wanted to take our experience in business and orientation as capitalists in a kinder and localer direction.

Equity investing might be the “slower” path, being more involved in the running of the business and having a long time horizon.  Lending, however, is somewhat lower risk for us as beginning investors, and it fits the seasonal and cyclical needs that a lot of food businesses have for working capital.  If we’re successful, the loan fund will grow with interest on repayment, and we can help several businesses a year become a little more successful themselves.

Sprout Lenders is taking applications for loans now for the spring/summer round. It’s not just for farmers, it’s for any food business that thinks and acts locally in the greater Boston area.  Please help us spread the word.

Today is the day!
— TeamMMRIBS (@TheRibTruck) May 8, 2012

Did those words mean what I think they meant? It turn out, yes, they did.  M&M Ribs finally graced Boston City Hall’s rainy windswept food truck plain with their presence.  B and P tagged along.  Actually, they could barely be restrained.

Early signs were good.  A medium-sized line to order but not too many waiting around for food.  A short menu board with two sandwiches, three meals, four sides and one dessert.  A nice canopy on a good-looking but not overly polished truck.

I ordered the brisket sandwich and a side of collard greens for a total of $9.  The Froyo and Savory trucks’ staffers stared jealously.

This is, in my partially informed option, a very well-run truck serving some very tasty food.  With a staff of just two, they moved the line along admirably, in stark contrast to the slow pace of similarly delicious Anthony’s Catering and the more numerously-staffed Paris Creperie.  I’d say the operational setup was on par with Staff Meal.

But the food is what it’s all about, and I am officially all about this food.  The collards were tender and not bitter at all.  On their own, I might have wished for more garlic or maybe even vinegar, but as a side, they were perfect.  Some  wished for a bit of bacon in there, and I sympathize, but for me, the greens are sufficient.  The sandwich was about the right size and not so overstuffed to be hard to eat.  The meat was falling-apart melty and the sauce was zippy and tangy. The bun knew its place and held its own. Fingers were licked.  The rest of the menu, notably the mac and cheese, must be sampled.

This would be the perfect place to end a food truck safari, but who would want to end such a journey?  Tomorrow, we’re giving Boston Speed Dogs one more chance to show up. Stay tuned.

As if a warm and gooey syrup-filled waffle cookie wasn’t great enough, the stroopwafel originates in the city of Gouda (pronounced with a throat-clearing “chow-da” and a big smile), yes, the Gouda of the most excellent cheese.

In this video, you can learn the proper way to say “stroopwafel” (makes me wonder if the New Yorker would print it as “stroöpwafel”) and also note that the recommended 2-3 minute melting time fits rather nicely with the span of time one might steep some tea.  Just sayin.

In the Boston area and looking for a stroopwafel fix?  There’s a thread on Chowhound for that, and I can vouch that you might also find some North American organic stroopwafels at Whole Foods and Wegmans, made with maple syrup of course.

When you’ve done all that, it might be time to join the Association of Stroopwafel Addicts.

First, the are going to turn off their wifi during lunch hours to reduce, well, dwell time, and to avoid becoming a co-working space.  Second, they have a petition going to get the Peoples’ Republic City of Cambridge to allow them more than 20 seats, a number to which they are limited because they have no off-street parking.   Are these things related?

Item 2, crap anti-business elitist NIMBY zoning

There’s a bus stop out front and the place is 4 blocks from the red line, but somehow the city thinks that the business needs to provide parking.  And the penalty for not providing parking is to be restricted to perhaps half the seating capacity it could serve.  Certainly the last thing I want in my precious Cambridge neighborhood is a cafe full of people.  Ugh, the thought of it.  I’m sure the only reason the neighbors tolerate that school across the street, teeming with germy children and no doubt swamped with SUVs at dropoff and pickup times, is some kind of grandfathering.  Awesome pro-business stance there, Cambridge.  An empty storefront across the street from a school is a much better idea.

Item 1, people who sit in a cafe all day

Before Dwelltime opened, I remember hearing a piece on the radio in which the owner talked about reducing the number of electrical outlets to prevent people from setting up camp all day.  I laughed.  Maybe that will slow down some people with crummy computers, but you can easily go four hours on a modern laptop, all day with an iPad, and as long as your supply holds out with an actual book.  So now they’re throttling wifi to keep people moving?  Again, that’ll hold off some people, but it won’t hold off technological progress.  Tablets, phones and hotspot devices let you skip the cafe’s wifi, as I am doing right now with a personal hotspot from my phone connecting me to a 4G data network.

It’s a social, behavioral problem, and restricting the tech, even if it could really work, won’t do the job.  High unemployment, scads of students, cheap technology, and a sense of entitlement will keep people camping out all day at cafes.

So, what to do?

Obviously the need to turn over the tables faster is exacerbated by having fewer tables than you might “naturally” have in the space.  At the same time, having people move through quicker would mean parking spaces would also turn over faster. Most of the parking nearby is resident or metered with a two hour limit.  If metered parking really worked, it would probably cut back a little on the all-day cafe types, but I’m guessing many of them are walking or taking transit.  I’ll leave the zoning thing alone for now except to say that the city needs to price street parking appropriately and let the cafe live or die on its own merits. For the all-day cafe dwellers, I suggest…

A modest proposal: waiters

People sit in cafes all day because they can.  Passive-aggressive moves like restricting power outlets and internet won’t cut it.  You need to make those people pay up or move on, and I think table service is the way to do it.  If I get a single coffee at the counter and hunker down for six hours, nobody’s coming over and asking me to buy more stuff to earn the right to stay or telling me that another party is coming in and they need the table.  But that’s exactly what waiters do in restaurants.  The better ones are less obviously obnoxious about it, but they all do it. “Anything else for you sir?”  Subtly-yet-pointedly leaving the bill.  You know the drill.

They way I see it, a skilled waiter or two could increase the average revenue per seat per hour and keep the malingerers moving along.  Plus, despite the best efforts of city planners, it would create another job, and it would make the cafe a bit safer by having another set of eyes on the floor.

Your mileage may vary, but if you’re car-free in the area, you should drop by Dwelltime and sign their petition.

Monday:

Anthony’s Catering:  One of the slowest trucks with the absolute worst sound system, but the food is just too good to pass up if you’ve got the time to wait.  Check out Bill’s favorite, the meatloaf sandwich on a croissant with cheese.

Dining Car: A solid contender with friendly service and good food, but I’m still seeking the sweet spot here.  More research and a full write-up coming soon.

Go Fish: Get the fish n chips or the salmon rollup or the sliders, there are lots of great choices here, and they have an impressive sauce bar.

Tuesday:

M&M Ribs: Showing up is a big part of a food truck business.  M&M did not.

Savory Food Truck: The ur food truck. Good not great Chinese food served fast. Dependable.

The Froyo Truck: A small little truck focused on doing one thing and doing it well.  But I’m still waiting for the waffles.

Wednesday:

Boston Speed Dogs: No shows for April. Very disappointing, but Dining Car has kielbasa and lots of hot dog stands are just a block away.

Chubby Chickpea: Classic falafel and shawarma.

Staff Meal: My pick for best of show.  Two guys, one truck.  Fast service, a regularly changing menu and the best sound system of all the trucks.

Thursday:

Bon Me: A returning fave with a simple menu and a great sandwich.

Paris Creperie: One of the longest waits but arguably worth it.  Also has a nice breakfast menu including l’alternative.

Staff Meal: As if I didn’t love them enough, they come twice a week.  Also, chicken skin!

Friday:

Clover: Possibly the progenitor of the current food truck thing, these folks serve up some great vegetarian options, massive popovers, and, of course, crypto-falafel. Highly recommended.

Grilled Cheese Nation: A little on the thin side but ya gotta have grilled cheese, right?

Lobsta Love: I gave myself a pass on this one cuz I don’t dig on crustacean.  It’s all too zoidbergian for me, but maybe I’ll give it a try in the name of science sometime later.

In general, the trucks each have a sweet spot, a signature dish or sandwich that’s the thing to get.  I say stick to the core competencies and the moral center of the menu board, at least until you get bored or adventurous.

So what’s next?  A little additional research at some of the trucks, maybe a dip in the lobster pound, and I’ll be monitoring the situation for the no-shows to return.  Soon enough the windswept plain of City Hall Plaza will be sun-baked and uninhabitable and I’ll be back to eating out of tupperware in my air-conditioned office. Until then, I suggest you get out at lunch and see the world.

Here’s something you may not know: everybody’s favorite West End French-themed Korean deli with a kick-ass salad bar, Bonne Chance,  serves the best-wrapped breakfast sandwiches you’ll ever see, even if you don’t get them to go.

They’re not just pretty on the outside.  Here’s my standard, egg and cheese on wheat toast.  Have you ever seen such perfectly toasted toast?  Sometimes I think they use a mold of some kind to make the egg exactly the size (and shape – I’ve had this on an English muffin too) of the bread.

Inside the sandwich?  Perfectly cooked egg, a nice buttery salty thing going on.  The cheese?  Well, you know how I am about the cheese.  It’s not in a class with that other Frenchified breakfast sammie, l’alternative, but it sure is a nice way to start the day.

I’ve been a fan of FLOR for some time and I’ve deployed the half-meter modular carpet squares both at home and at the office.  One of the difficulties with FLOR is the overwhelming number of choices in colors, patters, textures and materials (some FLOR tiles are wool, others are recycled and recyclable vinyl), so having a retail location where you can see and touch the stuff in person is a good idea.  It’s such a good idea, this is FLOR’s 11th retail location.

The store (I keep wanting to call it a “STOR”) has three levels and tons of small and full-sized sample squares. One could still get pretty lost in the choices, but they also have some full-sized “rugs” of tiles on the floor and walls to give you ideas.  I love how they have the tiles “spilling” out into the street.  We’ll see how many seasons of Boston weather that idea can handle. Check it out when you can – the store’s official opening to the public is set for May 10.

One more thing I like about FLOR is their blog.  Sure, it’s a corporate organ designed to sell more FLOR, but they do it right.  Not every post is about FLOR, and even those aren’t always all about FLOR.  I visit the blog for design ideas beyond carpeting.  In that respect, the blog is more fun than the store, which is too small and expensive to show much besides FLOR.  I wish more corporate blogs could be so generous and respectful of their visitors.  I bet the investment pays off in spades when customers come back for mor.

Dear Lime Duck,

Thank you for the solar system machine and the globe it really helped our class learn.  Our old globe was from like the 1980′s well thank you for helping our class learn!

Solar system machine?  I have no idea what that is, but I wish I’d had one when I was in school.  ”Like from the 1980s” (yes, I’m pedantically omitting the common but superfluous apostrophe) I just love that turn of phrase, it reminds me of how we spoke, like, in the ’80s. (yes, that’s where the apostrophe should go if you drop the century)

These notes are charming and heartwarming all right, but you know what I would really have loved?  I would have loved to get that 1980s globe in return for helping to buy those kids a new one.  East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, what a world.   But I’m being selfish here – what a great lesson it would be for the students to document and research the differences between the globe of 1980 and the globe of today!  Not only have countries come and gone, but the very art and science of cartography have changed.

I’ll spare you my usual lecture on the importance of geography in education, but in exchange, you’ve got to promise not to throw away your old maps and globes without one last round of study.

I’m still looking for the answer to that one.  A great grilled cheese sandwich is not necessarily a great cheese sandwich. I ordered mine with bacon, about $7 with a bottle of water.  (A relative bargain in food truck terms, but I suspect many will be left hungry after just one such sandwich.)  GCN clearly has their basics down.  It’s grilled just right, buttery on the outside, pressed enough to hold together, cheese melty and gooey but not scalding, lots of options both classic and nouveau.  The cheese?  The menu calls it “Aged Mild Vermont Cheddar”, but it’s so mild as to be almost invisible, and in stingy amounts, it’s Davis Square all over again.  GCN delivers a really nice classic grilled cheese sandwich but they just don’t deliver the cheese experience I’m seeking.

The sandwich – the only one on Paris Crepe’s menu although it’s not on their website menu – is called l’alternative, which I suppose makes sense at a crepe joint.  It’s sharp cheddar, a fried egg, arugula, and bacon on some kind of rustic white bread. More or less a breakfast sandwich, not that there’s anything wrong with that.  It was well-toasted but it had gotten a little soggy on the bottom.  They left off the bacon, and the other ingredients were spilling over the edges of the bread.  It was a hot mess.

Lots of cheese sandwiches talk about sharp cheddar.  Most of them are faking it. This sandwich is serious as the heart attack that it could ultimately cause.  The cheddar is sharp and tangy like a macbook air that’s been in a barn and melted like a mixtape on a sunny dashboard.  It’s not even officially a cheese sandwich and it’s the best cheese sandwich I’ve had in a long time.  The arugula is a nice touch, offsetting the salty greasy nature of the egg and cheese, but not too much.  The bread is crusty and just thick enough, not over-buttered or too crunchy to enjoy.

I’ve heard there are whole trucks devoted to the art of the grilled cheese sandwich.  I dare them to come down to City Hall Plaza and best l’alternative.

OK, social media mavens and startup geeks, I know Facebook did not pay a billion bucks for “just filters” and I don’t mean that Instagram’s filters are so super special.  Facebook bought a social photo utility, they bought a mobile app, and they bought a user base, all to build and defend their market position. But this post is about film, so move aside hipsters and deal-makers, let the photo nerds gather round and pour out libations of D-76.

There’s been a funny thread here and there asking if Instagram somehow owes Kodak something.  In a way, they owe Kodak everything.  Instagram’s visual style trades on a variety of now-vintage photo techniques, styles, and even equipment, much of it Kodak’s but also some by Polaroid and others.  Those companies didn’t just create the look that Instagram trades on, they created the culture of personal, instant, and shareable photography that gave birth to digital photography and then the cameraphone and ultimately Instagram and its ilk.

The Instagrammers could probably buy Kodak and Polaroid with their newfound megazucks (Kodak was worth $145 million in January, and Polaroid was almost sold for $60 million in 2009) but they have no reason to.  I doubt that “style” and “culture” are terribly well-protected as intellectual property.  And even if they were, history has shown that Kodak and Polaroid were too late to the digital game to even think of trying to protect these assets, intangible as they were.

I like to play a little game trying to match Instagram’s various filters with the films or technologies that inspired them.  There’s the Polaroid SX-70 clone, the Tri-X knockoff, the Kodachrome copy…  They are at the same time obvious and impossible to confirm – except maybe one that I’ve noticed:  Instagram’s “Nashville” (I wonder how they came up with that name?) swipes the edge code of Fuji’s Velvia film, RVP100.

Does the look and feel of “Nashville” correspond to Velvia?  I’ll leave that up to finer appreciators of color film. For what it’s worth, I also found the Kodak Tri-X edge, reversed, in this Hipstagram that looks reasonably like Tri-X.  Don’t forget that Kodak had some cameras called Instamatic.  But none of that really matters to the Instagram generation. TX400 or RVP100 doesn’t mean anything to them, it just looks cool and vintagey. I hope they get as much out of that feeling as those of us who remember, even a little, get out of the memories.

The menu, distributed across a couple of different papers and boards, was a little confusing at first, but I found my way and ordered the “healthy choice” of rice paper wrapped salmon with greens for $8.  B chose the Fish n Chips for about the same price.  Service was on the quick side and our lunches were nice and fresh.

The wrap was a little on the small side for the price, but that’s probably also a function of the “healthy” factor.  The salmon inside was warm, nicely seared, and delicious.  The greens and other veggies inside were also right on.  If there was dressing, it was very subtle, but that’s fine with me, I find most sandwiches overdressed anyway.  The weak link for me was the rice paper wrap: it was sort of sticky and loosely wrapped, so the sandwich was hard to eat by hand and I lost some filling along the way.  I guess they saved a few calories over a tortilla and got some asian cred (and maybe some wheat-free points) but it felt sort of sloppy.

I should have stuck to the signature dish.  That’s what B did, and his fish and chips – with fries – was hot and crisp. Maybe next time.

Still feeling peckish, I searched for a quick bite or dessert to round out the meal.  Go Fish was offering a small menu of sliders for only $2.50 each – perfect!  I tried the smoked cod with chorizo.  Jackpot.  A good sized slider, almost a meatball or crabcake in scale, almost but not quite overwhelming the toasted bun.  Lots of onions, smoky cod and spicy sausage, a bit of corn inside.  I should have had two of these and called it a day.  Sorry for the lousy pic, it’s not Instagram, I think I got some grease on the lens.

What’s the big deal, you ask, almost all paper books and publications use full justification, don’t they – why wouldn’t all ebook readers do the same, and why would any user want to change it to left justification?  Some people are rabid defenders of one kind of layout or another, but I’m more of a “right tool for the job” guy.  To illustrate my point, I’ve set this post to full (flush right) justification, while I generally use left justification (ragged right) online and on paper. Full justification is popular in print, but I don’t think the technology for online has really caught up.  Print depends a lot on hyphenation to make full justification feel natural, keeping the word spacing reasonably consistent but also giving the nice solid feel of a flush right margin.  Online, and this gets worse as the line width gets smaller, the lack of hyphenation means that word spacing can get very irregular to keep the right margin aligned.

So back to my gift for my aunt.  I was thinking that Barnes & Noble was a brand she’d trust more than Amazon, and one that was more aligned [sic] with the needs of the reader.  The price difference might tilt me toward the Kindle, but this small but significant oversight in meeting readers’ needs also makes me think again.  So what do you say, Amazon, maybe make it just a bit easier for readers to tune their ebooks for maximum enjoyment?

5,000 followers is neither here nor there by itself, but this person was following only 30 people and had under 100 tweets in just a few months on Twitter.  Reading the tweets, I was not super impressed: almost all were links to various marketing and social media articles, no added commentary, no @ replies, no real value add from information or entertainment.  How do you get 5,000 followers with 100 mediocre tweets in a few months?  I was pretty sure there was only one possible answer: cheating.

A phone screen confirmed, the intern candidate had paid some shadowy service to deliver followers.  It was, she said, an experiment to see if having more followers would make it any easier to get noticed or get her message out on Twitter. Purists – and even semi-purists – can be horrified all they like, but here’s the thing: it works.  5,000 followers and 100 tweets over a few months gives you a higher Twitter Grader score than mine with about 1,000 followers and 5,000 tweets over more than four years. Maybe that says more about Tweet Grader than it does about buying followers.

So if you’re still in the habit of judging people by the quantity of their following, or using follower quantity as the raw materials of social media scientific inquiry, or to create dubious metrics like TweetGrades, beware, not everything is as it seems.

And the intern?  No decision yet, but I give her points for scientific method.  If she’d done a double-blind study, I’d be willing to double her salary.

Oh yeah, there’s a taco on the left, too.  Speed Dogs didn’t show so we advanced the schedule and got tacos a day earlier than planned.  Staff Meal runs a lean and mean operation with just two men in the truck and five items on the menu.  That’s my kind of operational efficiency.  Above, “truck-made” chorizo, lime crema and radish on corn tortillas, also $4 and also spot-on delicious.  The menu changes frequently so dine early and often.

After a detour to some food carts a couple of blocks away, we returned to The Froyo Truck for dessert.  They didn’t have waffles but  I ordered some frozen yogurt in wishful anticipation of a warm front.  I chose dark chocolate, one of two flavors on offer, with some Reese’s Pieces, one of a dizzying array of toppings and sauces.

A pretty generous portion, and they did were not stingy with the Reese’s…. wait a minute…. what’s the green thing?  No, not the spoon handle.  It’s a rogue M&M!  Well, no big deal, no harm done, it’s all chocolate goodness.  I took a bite.  Creamy dark chocolate yogurt.  Crunchy… M&Ms.  Definitely M&Ms, not Reese’s.  How odd.  Check the photo again, can you find the little white “m” on one of the orange candies?  Try around 11:00.

A few more bites confirmed I did have some peanut-buttery candies in there, but also lots of plain chocolate M&Ms, but just one green and no red or blue. What evil OCD genius would have taken the time to separate out the yellow,orange, and brown M&Ms to disguise them as Reese’ pieces, and why? Perhaps it was just a really slow day at the Froyo truck, or perhaps something more sinister is going on.  More research is required, to be sure.

At a loss where to begin with so many good-looking choices – catfish, crabcake, pulled pork – I ordered the first item on the menu, the Fried Fish Wrap and a cup of corn chowder.  The wrap is billed as fried haddock in beer batter with chipotle slaw and fries.  The haddock was fried perfectly, a thin filet very crispy even inside the wrap with slaw and tons of spicy mayonnaise.  There was kind of a lot of mayo on the scene, but no fries.  That might have been because I ordered the soup or it might have been an error, I’m not sure.

Fellow truckers B and P had the meatloaf sandwich on croissant with cheese and fries, and the special mango BBQ chicken with dirty rice, and both reported excellence across the board.  This place has depth that we’ll have to plumb further.

Drama demands that nobody can be perfect without a flaw.  Food truck customers demand good food cheap and fast.  Food truck business models demand fast turns at peak time.  Here’s where I’m worried about Anthony’s.  Maybe it’s just early, and I hope that it is, but they seem to be having trouble organizing themselves to process customers efficiently.

With my order of a wrap and soup, I got a standard package of napkin fork and knife.  No spoon.  P got no napkins with his BBQ chicken.  The other two trucks in attendance had tables out front with cutlery and napkins and sauces, so we availed ourselves.

Bucking what seems to be the usual model with food trucks, Anthony’s takes your order first, then takes your money only when your food is ready.  They have one window – and one employee – for both transactions. I think this could be done better with an outside order/money taker (like Clover) or a second window for order pickup (like Paris Crepe).

The Empty Restaurant Syndrome suggests that a food truck with no line will get no business, but I’m also pretty sure that the food truck with the longest line will suffer a loss of business too.  Small operational improvements can go a long way when you have only an hour or two of prime time to do the bulk of your lunch business with an average check of only $10 or so.

The Typography Edition has a lot going for it that has nothing to do with typography, and honestly, not a lot to do with Scrabble either.  It comes in a birch-covered walnut box and the game board is made up of six magnetically-attached cork-bottomed sections. This is winning major points with me on materials – wood and especially cork are favorites.   The board itself is nice enough but I’m a little worried that the treatment of the grid and the double/triple score spots is a little too low-key and therefore harder to read and use than the orthodox version.  But I’m ok with all of that.

What I’m not ok with is the “typography” part.  It’s not clear to me if each of the 98 letter tiles is printed in a different font or if there’s a smaller number of fonts distributed across the letters. I can see that at least some letters come in different fonts.  What we have here is not typography, it’s ransom note.

Bear in mind that anybody trying to “do” typography on a Scrabble board has an uphill battle.  Typography is not just letterforms, it’s the way letterforms work together in words and paragraphs.  In Scrabble, you have  no paragraphs or even sentences.  You have only words, and only capital letters. The spacing between letters is defined by the grid of the board, which rules out ligatures and leads to some pretty awful keming.  About half of all Scrabble plays go vertically, and hardly any fonts look good doing that.  All of those characteristics of the Scrabble game board are pretty much barriers to good typography.

Does that mean you shouldn’t try?  Certainly not.  In fact, in what I believe to be the origin of this idea, designer Andrew Clifford Capener proposes that you could buy his Scrabble set with the font of your choice or that you might even buy additional font packs.  I think that would be a much better idea than this ransom note nonsense.  Unfortunately the edition being marketed for pre-ordering now has only the ransom note available.

So, if I ran the zoo what I would do here?  Well, as I’ve outlined above it might be a fool’s errand to do typography in the confines of a Scrabble board.  But if this blog isn’t about foolish quests, what is it about?  With that in mind, I have two semi-contradictory ideas for better Scrabble typography:

1. lowercase it. I like lowercase letters for the legibility.  I DO NOT MUCH LIKE UPPERCASE IN GREAT QUANTITY.  [On a total tangent, if you visit the grave of e e cummings at the Forest Hills Cemetery you'll learn his full name and see that his family didn't much care for the lowercasing.]  Since Scrabble word plays exist in a vacuum outside of sentences, who’s to say they should be capitalized or not?  I realize there are practical problems with the varying heights and ascenders/descenders in the lowercase world but it might be interesting to try lowercase, it certainly would be fresh and different.

2. Choose the right font for the job. As in any design project you need to pick what works, not your pet concept or what you think will win you an award.  Redesigning a Scrabble board includes making a playable game. Given the constraints of the board and how the game is played, I’d probably go as close to a monospaced font as possible although maybe not all the way.  (Designer Capener’s nice minimal website is done in Courier, a bold choice for a website if you ask me, but a find candidate for a Scrabble set.) Maybe something with a slab serif.  Ideally the font would fill the almost square Scrabble tile well to reduce the uneven letter spacing, and work passably in vertical play.  Poster Bodoni could be a fun choice.

Will I pre-order typography scrabble for $200?  As of now, there’s only 39 sets left out of 1,200. Would I pay $200 for a set that addressed my issues above?  I’m thinking probably not, since I already own three scrabble sets that I don’t use enough.  Perhaps I’d buy a new set of typographically enhanced tiles for a lot less money.  In any case, I hope that board game makers will pay attention to the possibilities raised here for better design and better materials in game boards.

It should be no surprise to anybody who has grown up a member of a minority that the media and culture is soaked with the images and traditions of the majority group, and that this can give the minority a weird envy for the cultural trappings of the majority.  It is out of this cultural soup that the Passover hamster emerges every year to, well, I’m not really sure what, if anything, the Passover hamster does.  I hope it’s not that creepy breaking & entering you get with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

The Passover Hamster, to be simple and direct about it, is a chocolate Easter bunny with the ears removed.  And by “removed” I mean eaten by the Jewish parent preparing (creating? constructing?) the Passover hamster for a credulous child with a bad case of Christian holiday envy.  No, there are no hamsters in the old testament, except perhaps to note that they are not kosher.  But hey, are there any chocolate-egg-laying bunnies in the new testament?

There’s something about this story that delights me, and that’s odd since I have such scorn for the Hanukkah bush.  To me the Hanukkah bush is just straight up envy of another tradition.  It accepts lesser stature (bush vs tree) as if it’s ashamed of something.   The Passover hamster is satirical, even slightly transgressive, like a golem in drag at a Purim spiel.  Plus, in years where Passover comes after Easter, you can get the bunnies at a good discount.

Here, for the perplexed, is a brief guide to creating not the classic Passover hamster of our youth, but a modern version with a twist.  I illustrate with peanut butter, but of course that’s not kosher for passover so I’ll have to eat this hamster before sundown.  I think I can manage it.

1. Procure hollow chocolate Bunny and filling

Traditional eastern european fillings include prune and poppy seed, but you can also use more middle eastern fillings such as organic almond butter or tahini.   Chill the bunny and let the filling sit at room temperature.

2. Remove the ears

Strictly speaking, this should be done in a single swift stroke with a sharp knife by a man with no stain upon him.  Or you could just chew them off.  If you need more explicit directions, I can send you an e-mohel.

3. Fill your hamster

Depending on the configuration of your particular bunny, you can either just spoon in the filling, or you may have to use a pastry bag.

4. Let set, and serve

This little guy kinda looks like Bart Simpson, doesn’t he?  Happy holidays.

* The observant – and the Observant – will note that it’s pretty unlikely that a chocolate Easter bunny would be kosher for passover, or even kosher at all.  I would instruct such persons to carve their Passover hamsters from solid blocks of passover chocolate, or perhaps build them with laser-cut sheets of chocolate-covered matzo.