A Dress A Day and Dictionary Evangelist
Dictionary editor Erin McKean gave a talk at eBay several months ago and I started reading her blogs immediately afterwards. I don't make dresses or know anything about dress patterns, but I do like her writing, and she does update regularly. Check out "The Secret Lives of Dresses" on her dressaday site. I read these every day.

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The Brothers Brick
This is a photo blog of LEGO MOCs (original creations). LEGO fans like acronyms, despite the fact that LEGO itself is not one. Worth checking up on.

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Bad Astronomy
Bad Astronomy is a great blog–when Phil is writing about Astronomy. He has a knack for finding and explaining beautiful pictures. I get at least one new desktop background a week from this site. He does spend a fair amount of time talking about politics and creationism, which puts a lot of readers off, and I'll admit that I skim or skip those posts. But there is a lot of great astronomy content here.

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Worse than Failure
The Daily WTF became "Worse than Failure" some time ago. It is an amusing read, but it is probably most amusing if you work in the software industry, and perhaps is not amusing at all if you have little or no exposure to programming. Still, there is a lot of WTF in bureaucracy, so a knowledge of Python is not necessary.

The Elements of Typographic Style

Robert Bringhurst

Title: The Elements of Typographic Style
Author: Robert Bringhurst

The story: Following the model set by Strunk and White in their Elements of Style, Bringhurst presents a series of dos and don'ts of typography, covering font selection, page layout, use of bold and italic fonts, numbering, running headers, and so on. There is an interlude for the history of typography, and the book ends with a selection of fonts of different types that he feels are worth looking at. Also covers Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, but has relatively little to say about fonts which cover, for instance, Chinese characters (no doubt a whole book could be written on that subject).

My take: I will admit that I am less interested in typography than the average owner of this book probably is–I do put a lot of text on the web, and I have some thoughts about that (a quick look at any of my writing [hey, there is a link over there <--] will show you that I use some css properties that many people ignore, increasing my line-height to give my characters a little more room to breathe), I am mostly an Elements junkie. Aside from the copy I was issued in college, I have a more recent edition, an illustrated, hardbound edition, and when I saw this, I was too tempted to pass it up. I read it cover to cover, and much of it was interesting.

Last thoughts: I was hoping that when I got to the list of noteworthy fonts I would find one that really appealed to me, but really the most attractive one to me, as they were layed out, was Futura, and I already knew I liked that one. I'm not sure what that says about me.