A light one for the weekend. I went to school with a lot of architects (including my wife), and this is pretty standard…

Many readers might not be aware, but my wife Meghan is getting her master’s degree in architecture (M.S., not M.Arch, for those who care…). So there’s not just one Kleon in our household who can draw!

Tonight I missed the bus and didn’t make it down to Vizthink, so I hung out with Meg down in the studio. She was using this crazy apparatus to do lettering:

It’s called a pantograph, or “Leroy” (named after the dude who invented it, I’d guess). It’s kind of like a compass: you basically trace a lettering template with a metal point, and the rapidograph pen follows along. I gave it a try…

…and I decided there was no way in hell I’d have the patience to do technical drawing! No thanks!

Dig my woman’s skills, though:

At one point she called me over and said, “Here, this will appeal to your sense of humor.”

She knows me well.

A short one:

No, this poem isn’t about my wife. She isn’t old.

My buddy Don sent me this quote by Douglas Hofstadter from I Am a Strange Loop, which makes me want to read it:

“In the end, what is the difference between actual, personal memories and pseudo-memories? Very little. I recall certain episodes from the novel or the movie Catcher in the Rye or the movie David and Lisa as if they had happened to me - and if they didn’t, so what? They are as clear as if they had. The same can be said of many episodes from other works of art. They are parts of my emotional library, stored in dormancy, waiting for the appropriate trigger to come along and snap them to life, just as my “genuine” memories are waiting. There is no absolute and fundamental distinction between what I recall from having lived through it myself and what I recall from others’ tales. And as time passes and the sharpness of one’s memories (and pseudo-memories) fades, the distinction grows ever blurrier.”