RIP Bob

Fellow Park Slope residents might remember Robert Schindler, known to most as Bob, the bespectacled old coot and occasional panhandler ("Pardon me, can you spare some change?") who could often be found sitting on a milk crate in front of the Starbucks on 7th Ave, entertaining passersby with his Mae West impressions and musings on the human condition as he chain smoked Maverick Menthol Box 100's. He died in a hospital last week, 12/23/10 of congestive heart failure. He was 76 years old.

I came to be friends with Bob, an NYC native Park Slope resident of 50 years, in 2004, when, once a week, I started helping him carry groceries up to his fourth floor single bedroom apartment on Garfield. Crippled from a severe inguinal hernia that went untreated in the 1980's, Bob wasn't always that hunched over panhandler who took frequent sitting breaks on milk crates in the middle of the aisles while grocery shopping at Key Food. In his glory days, Bob was an audio technician, and sold hi-fi stereo systems for Sam Goody. He was an avid appreciator of classical music, and had an extensive collection on vintage reel-to-reel tape. And you wouldn't know it if you saw the gaunt, wispy white haired man with his huddled, shuffling gate, but Bob stood over six feet tall, and was a fiery redhead.

In the last few months, Bob's health declined and he stopped going outside. I'd do his grocery shopping for him — his diet consisted largely of Utz Onion and Garlic Flavored Potato Chips (never Wise, they have the highest brown spot ratio of all the chip brands), green bananas, and sour cream. After he took a nasty fall in his apartment, I visited him at New York Methodist Hospital. He was full of self-pity, but cracked a toothless smile when I introduced him to my new wife. "You're a midget!" he exclaimed after looking Malya up and down, all 5 feet of her. "But she's very pretty", he said to me, aside, as if Malya couldn't hear.

The day before he died, Bob called me to complain, lamenting that he didn't want to be in the hospital anymore. I could hear the life leaving him, and I knew he couldn't come home. Desperate, Bob begged me to spring him from that joint, any way I could. I spoke to the administrators to see if they would authorize his release, but in his condition it wasn't going to happen.

"I have no friends," Bob said, "Nobody cares."

Bob was wrong.

Robert Schindler, January 11, 1934 – December 23, 2010

H.V. ElECT

Our lowercase L mission may seem frivolous at times, but when an important message like H.V. ElECT. is made difficult to understand, it's no joke.  That stands for High Voltage Electricity, but by the time you figure out that word doesn't say "eiect" ... ZAP!  Thanks for this warning, Rimpy.

VAllEY of the DOllS

The doll on the left reaches out to Alden, who found this eerie display in Gatlinburg, TN.  She beckons for help, as her Clothes SOlD Separately.

LATIN SCHOOl in PAlESTINE

Is this a "crunch case", in which the sign maker had space for all but a final uppercase L and had to resort to the lowercase?  This LATIN TAYBEH SECONDARY SCHOOl in Ramallah, Palestine, knows about uppercase L's, as in LATIN, so this lowercase L was probably the result of poor planning.  If the English portion had been assembled right to left, as the Arabic portion of the sign, the sign maker may have had to resort to a lowercase S.

This street signage can probably be found nearby.

AUTO SAlE

Sheila thought that Cortez Auto Sales Inc. got away with it this time, by slipping in a little foot on the otherwise lowercase L in WWW.CORTEZAUTOSAlE.COM. But look again, and you'll see that they remain guilty as charged in the next line down with their abbreviated TElS.

TGIJ

After running this blog for over 5 years, the substitution of an uppercase i for an uppercase L has become so familiar that it no longer surprises or frightens me.  In fact, I've become so used to the typographical phenomenon that I now accept that approximately one percent of the world's uppercase i's are intended to be an L.  So when I encountered this image of the title page from Christopher Marlowe's play, THE IEW OF MALTA, from 1589, it was like discovering a new species of flying insect in a rainforest.

Sometimes written as THE RICH IEVV OF MALTA, I wondered why the title hadn't simply used a J and W, as THE JEW OF MALTA.  It seems the typesetters had uppercase J's, as in MAJESTIES.  And it looks like they used an actual W in WAS PLAYD instead of a double-V.

After doing a little research online, I believe the substitution of I for J may be the way typesetters avoided having letters descend below the baseline of type.  It could also be a result of I and J represented as a single glyph in the digraph combination of IJ, an example of a typographical ligature.  Apparently the letter J developed as a swash of the letter i.

Why would I present a case of I-for-J on a blog dedicated exclusively to the substitution of I for L?  I believe the IJ may shed some light on our IL.  From this scrap of a 16th century manuscript alone,  we have an opportunity to learn something about how the human mind used to work, and continues to work, when writing and setting type, and the desire to cut corners — and swashes — to save writing space or typesetting materials.

Shabbat Shalom from the IEVV OF BROOKlYN!

SMAllS

Anicia found these SMAllS in Pismo Beach, CA for just $2.  She didn't bother to ask about the lARGES.

MOUlDED SLAB

This advert for 6 PANEL MOUlDED SLAB was created by a repeat offender at The Home Depot, and submitted by repeat submitter Rimpy Rimpington to remind us exactly what a perfectly erroneous lowercase L is all about.

As tempting as this offer is — possibly the best MOUlDED SLAB price I've ever seen — I believe I will pass on the deal on principle alone.

5 Years of BlOGGING

Breaking my own #1 rule about submitting lowercase L's, I decided to celebrate 5 years of blogging by fabricating my own Bar-B-Q Sign.  It was necessary to force the L's into lowercase by substituting them intentionally with uppercase i's.  I guess whoever wrote this clever little application wasn't aware that most readerboard letter distributors never ship more than one uppercase L.

Repair ClOSED

Fellow animator Chris Haga found my work on the Aniboom Sesame Street animation contest along with his own entry, and subsequently discovered that this lowercase L blog he already knew about was from the same bloke.  But never mind all that, it's his prime example of a ClOSED sign that is important.  Peabody Shoe Repair must be tired of fixing soles.