10 Cane Rum is tasty rum, no doubt about it. In addition to the flavor, the bottle looks amazing with it’s screened classical engraving-styled front, it’s bright jaunty-angled label, and the embossing of RUM in vertical type on each side gives it that old school bottle feel. The folk that make this really know how to package this sweet golden liquid.

I bought a bottle a while back and it just looked to good that I felt guilty about drinking it. Me being the good little consumer I am, I just had to have a second bottle to sit and look pretty. So I go out and buy another bottle of 10 Cane, get it home, and I’m looking at the design on the front and what do I notice. A bug! A tiny little bug with wings floating around in my rum! I wonder how that got past quality control. Oh well, when I do get around to drinking it, which I will, I won’t sweat it; I figure the alcohol killed all the bacteria, plus I’m not a squeamish complain-y type person either.

UPDATE: Within a scant few hours of writing this I was contacted by one of the brand managers over at Moët Hennessy, the parent company of 10 Cane Rum, apologizing profusely for my unfortunate discovery. The next business day they had a new bottle FedEx’d out to me to replace the one with the fly. Quite unexpected and yet very awesome customer service to compliment the awesome rum. Time for a mojito.

I ordered some Obama stickers a week or so back from Sticker Robot and they just came in. Designed in conjunction Shepherd Fairey of the Andre the Giant Has a Posse fame, they look pretty sweet in person.

They also have a few other Obama sticker varieties in stock, and the profit from all the sticker sales goes straight back into getting more stickers made and getting more visibility for Barack Obama presidential campaign.

On March 6th I introduced the well known Chip Kidd at our weekly Penny Stamps lecture held at the Michigan Theatre here in Ann Arbor. You may know Chip Kidd by one of the hundreds of book jacket designs he’s done over the years, heck, you probably have some of his work on your shelf or even on your nightstand. Perhaps you’ve even picked up one of his novels, The Cheese Monkies or The Learners.

Before the lecture began I introduced myself to Chip backstage, and chatted with him a little bit before going onstage. I was introduced to a packed crowd, there were probably twice as many people there than our usual weekly lectures. It really is true though, you really can’t see anything when your at the podium and in the spot light; just a bright light and a sea of black.

After introducing Chip to the audience I headed down to my seat and enjoyed one of the best lectures since Ellen Lupton last September, or 2×4 the February before that. It was great to see how he showed work that he did that clients turned down; most lecturers would never show how they failed. It was a pretty humorous lecture all-in-all, soon you should be able to grab the podcast through iTunes.

After the lecture I met backstage again with Chip, Chrisstina Hamiliton (the Director of Visitors’ Programs), and Art & Design professor Shaun Jackson. I managed to get my copy of The Learners signed by Chip before heading off to dinner.

We ended up having dinner at Pacific Rim, a pan-Asian restaurant. Our dinner party consisted of 4 A&D undergrads (myself included), a grad student, two A&D professors (Shaun Jackson, and Jill Greene), and of course, Chip Kidd. Dinner was pretty tasty. Conversation was a little awkward at first so I started asking some questions about his first book. After that, conversation seemed to flow pretty well. Dinner was tasty, as well as dessert.

Here we have A&D undergrad Jeremy Daly throughly interested in Chip Kidd’s melting face.

Dessert was an interesting affair. I was in the mood for something a little cold and sweet. The sorbet was the perfect fit, so I ordered it.

Immediately after I ordered Chip asks, “Now Alex, you are straight aren’t you?”

I was a little taken back by the question but I respond, “Well, yes.”

Chip then says, “Well the sorbet was a terrible decision. I’ve never seen a straight man order sorbet for dessert after dinner before.”

I get a little red in the face and laugh (as does the table) but I say back “What then, would you say is a more manly dessert.”

Chip thinks for a moment and then someone chimes in “The banana roll.”

The table laughs a little and Chip says “Oh yes, the banana roll does it for me!” Laughter continues and then dinner ends.

Quite the experience, definitely not my usual Thursday evening.

Facebook, it’s pisses me off. It was nice back in 2005 when the feature list was short. But now?

I hated the integration of college Facebook and high school Facebook. I loathed the opening of Facebook to anyone with a valid email address. I abhorred the addition of all those third-party applications. And then all the requests from applications, that friends have added, to have me add the app as well. And now I’m getting spam from random people asking me to be their friend, people whom aren’t real quite akin to those spam friend requests on MySpace.

I haven’t tracked my time usage on Facebook but I’m sure most of my time would be devoted to denying requests, not actively posting on friends’ walls, sending messages, or browsing photos.

The harmony of the design I once lauded has been tainted by the introduction of those eyesore applications. Facebook used to be about communication, but now that part has seemed to take a backseat to lolcats, zombie attacks, superpoking, sending gifts, and stupid crap like that.

I’ve been thinking that perhaps I might remove all the frivolous information on my facebook, the “favorites”, the received gifts, photo albums, wall, etc, and just put up a generic message that says:

“I’m Alex. If you want to know about me or just want to say ‘Hi’ open up your email client and send me an email. I like emails from friendly people and I send emails back too!”

It’s not really Facebook’s fault I feel this way, it’s the fault of the general population that makes up the Facebook user base. I still think the company is pretty cool and the whole platform is quite an amazing piece of programming.

To this date, my laptop screen has been hit by no less than six different asses in lecture.  All asses belong to freshmen girls. Only one apologized. What does this mean?

I meant to write about this some time ago but things have been rather busy lately. Anyway, a few weeks back as part of the University of Michigan School of Art & Design Distinguished Visitor Series lectures (damn that’s a long title!) Ellen Lupton came to give a talk to the entire Art School body plus anyone from the public that was interested. Her lecture was entertaining, funny, a bit racy, and short (a welcome rarity among many long-winded, boring lectures). From what I hear the Q&A afterwards was even better than the lecture itself, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend due to another class coming up.

Anyway, Ellen Lupton recieved the AIGA Medal the previous night, in New York, for her fabulous contributions to the visual design world. And the day after the lecture, the Umich AIGA Student Group Board was able to obtain two or so hours to meet with Ellen to have a little portfolio review. To have a portfolio review with such a highly regarded designer is a rare event indeed.

We sat down with Ellen at 10am in the senior studios and talked a bit before delving into our portfolios; we talked of her newest book in progress and what it was like to receive the AIGA Medal. Three of us had a pretty well-rounded portfolio to show, one was just beginning to assemble her portfolio, and one was just there to take it all in. She had some pretty good, rather constructive, things to say about each of our portfolios.

Personally I had a decent reaction, but she did criticize the typography my business card as being “amateurish,” which admittedly it is. To be fair it is over 2 years old and I had never taken a typography class before this semester. Also, she commented that my portfolio website is rather plain and boring. I explained that it’s minimalist, but she said that I gave it a bit more depth it’d be a lot better. And guess what? She’s right. Not that that opinion was exactly rocket science but she hit the nail on the head. Goes to show outside opinions on projects are totally helpful, which isn’t that the whole point of a portfolio review to begin with?!

Between classes this fine Monday I’m listening to my iTunes library on random. First song up is Bing Crosby’s Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams, second up is Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise and third is a little swing number, Ingrid Lucia’s (& the Flying Neutrinos) Some of These Days. The randomness of the song lineup didn’t seem weird at all to me; must have been the mood I was in.

I love having such a varied music library.