funny

Lucida Sky with Diamonds. Bauhaus (in the Middle of Our Street). Rock the Caslon. I Wanna Bold Your Sans. Nope, this isn't the set list from designer/rock star Chip Kidd's latest Artbreak gig, they're fontsongs, a Twitter thread (#fontsongs) that challenges pun-loving design types to insert typeface names into popular song titles. Call it Textual Healing. The typographical phenomenon is going strong with recent gems such as Goudy My Dreams, Get into my Car and Garamond (My Wayward Son), but don't delay in tweeting a fontsong of your own today, before the trend changes cultural course. One Twitter user is advocating a switch to fontfilms. First on the list? Back to the Futura.

We understand that you're saving the latest issue of The New Yorker (and the promise of a swell fact piece by Patricia Marx about the wacky world of high-end timepieces as she reports from Baselworld) for your imminent Memorial Day weekend plane/train/car/van/burro ride to Bilbao/Sag Harbor/Hoboken/Niagara Falls/The Grand Canyon, but we simply couldn't resist sharing this excellent piece—a bite-sized Shouts & Murmurs that sneaks in among this week's Talk of the Town casuals—by George Meyer about the wondrous absurdities of frequent flyer program branding. And so we present "The Privileged Few." Return your seat to its upright position, stow your tray table, and take a read:

Good afternoon. This is your pre-boarding announcement for Flight 505 to Milwaukee. All first-class and business-class passengers, passengers needing special assistance, and families travelling with small children may now board the aircraft.

We also invite any Platinum Club, ProTravel Select, Apogee Plus, and Sigma Alliance cardholders to board at this time.

Thank you for waiting. We now welcome members of Skyline Advantage, Priority Partners, Front Row Preferred, Exclusa, Summit V.I.P., Head of the Line, A-List Connections, Imperial Privilege, InCrOwD, Icarus Prime Choice, Top Rank Silk, and Top Rank Crystal Reserve. You may now board the aircraft.

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Our interest in Our Nation's Capital usually involves whatever's cooking at the Corcoran, the National Building Museum, or the Hirshhorn, but then we saw this photo taken by Kyle Samperton at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. The Saturday night gathering of a whopping 2,500 journalists, politicians, diplomats, celebrities, and a smattering of fashion designers (including Donatella Versace, Narciso Rodriguez, and Jason Wu) brought out rocker—and Obama fan—Jon Bon Jovi, who had the good sense to stand proximal to what we recognized as an Andy Warhol-style pop art graphic of Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council. To recap, that's Bon Jovi, Warhol, and Summers. As George Constanza would say, "Worlds are colliding!" Our brother blog, Fishbowl DC, has more images of the "politi-pop" artwork, which adorned the walls at the Atlantic/NJ reception, here.

Back in September of last year, things seemed to finally be going well for the World Trade Center rebuilding and memorial constructing. Then, of course, the real scope of the financial fall started to loom over everyone's heads and anything anywhere that was being built started to slow way, way down. This effect finally crept into the WTC location, as The Port Authority of New Work and New Jersey has come out to say that while One World Trade Center and the memorial/museum were still on track (what that means, we're not sure, since it hasn't been on track since day one), they were expecting that it might take some three decades before all the surrounding buildings might get constructed, given how there's not much money out there right now to start funding big projects like this. Fortunately, we can all laugh about this, as The Onion put together a rare architecture-themed American Voices pieces, asking their usual batch of regular people what they think of this announced delay. Only three to read, but each very funny.

Because it's die-cut, foil-stamped, embossed, and expensive ("about four dollars a card"). Because it took 25 years to design. Because it doesn't fit in a Rolodex. Because it doesn't belong in a Rolodex. Because it's on card stock so thick and creamy that it can slice cheese. Because there's a surprise inside. Because it demonstrates "incredible marketing capability." Because it's the pride and maniacal joy of this results-oriented entrepreneur, the Patrick Bateman of event planning. Thanks to Design Observer for sending us his way.

Hey, job seekers! Looking for a gig in the fashion world? Put down the glue stick and ditch that novelty hole punch. Even high drama fashion designer Rick Owens can't abide an avant-garde resume. "Not to put young people down, but I get portfolios and I get applications and CVs that have images...and like collages and stuff," he told Hint in a recent video interview at his Paris showroom. "And what the fuck am I going to do with a collage? I can do a collage. I need old people who know how to make things." Other wisdom to be gleaned from the sit-down? Clear your head and die a little with a nap! Owens takes one daily. "Partly just to recharge but also there's a little escape in it," he explains. "I get oversaturated in having to communicate with a lot of people all day, so it's kind of an escape in the middle of the day to kind of have privacy again—complete privacy. It's kind of a mini-suicide."

When a website defies both logic and easy description (e.g., Scanwiches), you know you're in for a treat, and so it is with the "I Can Read Movies" Series by Mitch "Spacesick" Ansara. The growing collection of film-based book covers designed with a Saul Bass/Alvin Lustig flair imagines "novelizations of major pictures" such as Ernest Goes to Camp, Space Jam, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—in Japanese (English subtitle: "Mr. Wonka! Just Punisher of Coddled Children"). Click on each cover for a bonus comment/film quote. In the case of Wonka, it's "You're going to love this...just love it," which should be said with a maniacal Gene Wilder gleam in one's eye.

You be the judge. Since 1945, leading arists such as Georges Braque, Francis Bacon, and Ilya Kabakov have created original artworks for the label of Château Mouton Rothschild, the world-renowned claret produced on the Mouton vineyards in the French village of Pauillac. It was announced last week that Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, the owner of Mouton, had given the commission for the 2006 vintage, which hits stores this spring, to Lucian Freud. But the British painter didn't whip up anything the least bit characteristically craggy or moody. Instead, he sketched the head of a zebra and a potted palm tree.

The work's spare, doodle-like qualities make us suspect that Freud began and completed the work either while on the phone with the Baroness about the commission or after sampling a few bottles of previous vintages (for inspiration, of course). The company, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, looks to the painter's grandfather and takes a more Freudian view of the label, describing it in a press release as "a joyously exotic transposition of the pleasure of drinking, in which the vinestock is transformed into a springing palm tree and the winelover into a happily anticipatory zebra." Sometimes a zebra is just a zebra.

Oh Wall Street Journal A-Hed column, you had us at "a cross between a Stealth fighter and a Batmobile" (although frankly, we would have gone with the definite article before Batmobile). That's how the paper's intrepid Barry Newman describes one of two top-secret vessels that the United States Navy is looking for someone to take off its hands. In addition to the aforementioned Sea Shadow (pictured), a big black thing designed to "escape detection on the open sea," there is a barge named after Howard Hughes.

It looks like a floating field house, with an arching roof and a door that is 76 feet wide and 72 feet high. Sea Shadow berths inside the barge, which keeps it safely hidden from spy satellites.

The barge, by the way, is the only fully submersible dry dock ever built, making it very handy—as it was 35 years ago—for trying to raise a sunken nuclear-armed Soviet submarine.

We hate to make a fuss over a typo (the phalanx of shifty-eyed copyeditors here at UnBeige HQ are under enough pressure as it is), but we can't resist a good Freudian Slip. In Michael Cannell's "Design Loves a Depression" piece published in the Week in Review section of yesterday's New York Times, he follows up the mention of Marcel Wanders' half-naked girlfriend tending bar from the ceiling with a shot of sobering reality:

Now, given that all those slick Miami condos are sitting empty in the sky, designers like the Campana Brothers, with their $8,910 Corallo chair, and Hella Jongerius, with her $10,615 Ponder sofa, might have a harder time selling their wares.