Zip Script, Burnt Meat

Zip code picture.  Click on the map; see your zip code’s picture. 
It’s really that simple.  The project is only slightly more complicated
when you consider that a zip code, according to the note at the site, "is
not a geographical area but a route which may not be definable as a polygon." 
So a zip code could be a broken pathway, in a sense; a route that doesn’t close
onto itself–a delivery loop (mail’ll come again tomorrow…and the next day, polygon or
no polygon). 
Here’s the picture of my zip code.  I see it as the back of an owl who was
stung with a blow dart.  Or an awl. 

The latest copy of NCTE Inbox showed up today, and one of the links pointed to

this article
from the Hartford Courant declaring, "The Handwriting Is On The
Wane."  Curious title, I thought, so I followed the link and found a series
of delightfully old-fashioned observations from teachers who share concerns about
gradual demise of handwriting. 

Relying more and more on e-mail, blogs, websites, instant messaging and other
electronic forms of communication, students at all levels are forgetting the
fine art of handwriting, educators say. Cursive script, the graceful looping
style that connects one letter to another, might be going the way of the inkwell
and the fountain pen.

While I was reading up on the handwriting endisms, bemusing how
unbearable my day would have been had I attempted to handwrite the near-2,500
words of endnotes responding to a partial set of 307 projects, I decided I’d
prove once and for all that my handwriting skills have withstood a
reliance on "e-mail, blogs, websites, instant messaging, and other electronic
forms of communication."  And so I filled out my dad’s birthday card,
slowly and in my best script, resplendent with swishy, swooping smoothness. 
Took it to the office, where the envelope waited, and where I would check it
against D.’s eye for such things. "Decent
handwriting, yeah?" I said, almost proud of my finest Denelian.  She:
"It’s connected print.  Do you know the difference?"  Um. No.
I. Don’t.  All the same. When Dad gets it, the handwriting…it’s a special
blend of connected print and disconnected handwriting.

This link–last of the three I wanted to share–will send you to the hottest
(well, smokiest, sauciest) weblog in the Midwest:
Gremlin Grill–Kansas City
Barbecue
.  Burnt meat.  Recipes and foodstuff.  BBQ contests and beer-capades.
A cool flaming-car logo.

2 Comments

  1. Is that a PACER??

    Also re: the handwriting. Both Hannah and Jack went to a preschool that taught DeNealian, and I was so thrilled how the leans and curves really were setting them up to be successful cursive artists.

    Now at the school we’re in, they DON’T use DeNealian, and Hannah has started “cursive” this year (3rd grade) and their cursive model is seriously aesthetically lacking. This, what she’s learning as cursive, is connected print. The program is called Handwriting Without Tears (?) I think, and it doesn’t even LEAN. Straight up and down loopy connected print.

    Oh well. I suppose I could have more important qualms with my kids’ education. 🙂

  2. Might be a Pacer. Or a Gremlin. Whatever it is, it looks fast.

    I probably exaggerated my concern about handwriting by just a little bit. I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about it–never really performing handwriting as neatly the good-cursive kids (the ones smiling…”Done!” with a row of perfect waves and tails). Of course, just as much as I’d like to see a more robust computer programs in elementary schools (thinking about Ph. here), so many of the encounters with computers are prefaced by dull keyboarding drills (copying other people’s textbook sentences).

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