As a non-subtle reminder Losanjealous constantly mines, sorts and processes the cruddiest cell phone photos ever taken, weekly, for your cheap enjoyment. Friday, the week’s most egregious is bestowed the honor CRAPTASTIC CELL PHONE PHOTO OF THE WEEK.

This week’s winner comes from our very own Jeannette, as she travels abroad:

Unbeatable Chingrish…Katrina M found this. She cameraphone’d it to me. It’s on a tub of glue….and try as I might for the rest of my life, I don’t think I can ever beat this.

After the jump, photo submission instructions and two incredibly shitty cell phone photos taken by yours truly at last night’s Hammer Museum concert featuring Foreign Born & Great Northern. ARE YOU IN THE PHOTO? …
»continue reading Craptastic Cell Phone Photo of the Week: The New Generation Is High To Glue To Fuck The Type Quickly

News comes today from Kellie Schmitt for The Recorder:

Dickstein Shapiro, based in Washington, D.C., has brought on four attorneys from Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner’s shrinking Los Angeles office, which has seen more than a dozen departures since its fall merger.

Dickstein added partners James Turken and Amy Rubinfeld, as well as two associates from Thelen’s commercial litigation group, part of its plan to grow its 20-lawyer office in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, “Thelen is going through changes with the merger, and this got me to the Westside,” said Turken, who lives in Manhattan Beach, which is closer to Dickstein’s Century City office. “Anytime you merge cultures, things are going to change.”

In January, the firm moved into Century City’s Twin Towers which gave it space for 40 lawyers — space firm leaders hope to quickly fill.

“We were pretty landlocked in terms of growth,” said Linda Kornfeld, the managing partner of Dickstein’s Los Angeles office, “but now there’s definitely room to grow.”

Peter Ocko, a recruiter with Major, Lindsey & Africa in Los Angeles, attributes some of the departures to a merger that wasn’t the best fit.

“Sometimes firms take a look at everyone else getting together, and it seems like a good idea, but on a micro level, it doesn’t work as well as it sounds in the press release,” he said.

Where is the juice? The juice is on Melrose Hill. It drains westward, down the hill, eventually pooling into the most exquisitely glistening coagulations in the cracks here at Western and Melrose. It’s true. Believe it! I’ve seen it.

Goudy! Times-Roman-alike with yon diamond-studded i’s!

Goudy! Preferred font of wedding invitations worldwide!

Goudy! Nowhere to be seen on the above Goudy Billboard!

Excluding the ‘VistaMedia’ branding, there are six distinct fonts on the Goudy billboard, and nary a one of them is Goudy. Where is the justice in this cruel, cruel world. Let’s take a closer look, then, shall we? We shall:
»continue reading Fontwatch: When Goudy Shuns Its Namesake

Sandwiched between the Blu Monkey an an adult video store touting PRIVATE BOOTHS just west of Western on Hollywood Blvd,

Club & Music

suffers from identity crisis. Is it actually R E L A X P U B? The verbiage on the canopy is a recent addition, this much we do know. Mayhap the owner awoke one day and thought, “Club & Music? Fuck that! Why limit ourselves when we could also be a PUB!”

Each time I stumble into Relax, something hilarious is happening on stage. You’ve pretty much got to turn out in person to see what I’m talking about, because I’m not sure I can properly lay down the concept of shadow-drumming in words. On to the font! Top sign, squashed Brush Script. You take your Brush Script Standard (Robert E. Smith, 1942), squash it to 70% vertical, throw a second layer behind it, offset second layer a couple pixels at 120 degree angle and call it a day. Relax! It’s just Brush Script. Why they chose to go reverse-on-black makes no real sense, but who’s arguing. From Adobe:
»continue reading Fontwatch: Relax! It’s Just Brush Script

Situated at the notorious mindfuck loosely dubbed an intersection at Fairfax, Olympic and San Vicente,

You Are My King

is truly a sight to behold. We’ve all been there. You lose balance after a while! You can’t stay hanging on your peg! There are many reasons to embrace Helvetica (Max Miedinger, 1957), but of all of them, I embrace Helvetica solely for the fact that it knows when it is simply time to get Shitfaced Balls Drunk. We are looking at a textbook Helvetica Neue Standard Black in today’s installment. Basically take your Helv Standard Black, squeeze horizontal scale 90%, crank vertical scale +110%. Done. Call it a day and go home.

Adobe tells us:
»continue reading Fontwatch: You Are My King LIQUOR (The ‘R’ Is Balls Drunk): When Helvetica Is On The Line

Situated just off the Virgil/Silverlake/Temple/Beverly mindfuck, has wisely chosen a reversed, all-caps bold on its brown façade. Specifically, they’ve opted for Lithos Black for the English speakers. You may recall Lithos, designed by the inimitable Carol Twombly (yes that Carol Twombly…Myriad, anyone?) for Adobe in 1989, as being the system font widely misunderstood (and misused) as Something Junglish throughout the 1990s.

Lithos = Jungle Safari? This is simply not the case, font lovers. The font is as Greek as they come. So why is it considered a jungle font? Blame Universal Studios’ Jurassic Park vessel, if you want to start pointing fingers. This is Lithos. And this is Neuland, a very similar typeface with very similar Grecian overtones. The 1993 marketing blitz for Jurassic Park plastered the movie’s name in Neuland onto every possible item that wasn’t nailed down, if you’ll recall, and the aftermath of said brand pummelling found poor Lithos lumped in with the Neuland crowd, for good. For all its noble beginnings Lithos was, frankly, too damned similar to Neuland to be discerned as a separate face by the layman.
»continue reading Fontwatch: Coffee Garden (Symbols) Sanjang: A Lithos Discussion (In Brief)

As part of the great lead-up to Project Pico (thanks for your feedback — keep it coming), we proudly present yet another section of the Boulevard of Pico Dreams in today’s installment of Fontwatch…

Unfortunately for the Outlet the oft-overused Arial Black, while exceptionally heavy, is largely lost within the confines of the background colors, most notably in the poor red-on-pink decision. Worse, at an average velocity of 22mph only the sharpest, most astute eye will be able to rise above the heavy red font for the Backpack º Luggage pitch, a bit of an amalgamation of Copperplate and something John Baldessari might have done on commission while bored. (Hey, it’s entirely plausible.)

Shortcomings aside we have no choice but to commend for its Starburst color scheme which, we hope, is effective in the battle for attention on the Boulevard - particularly in this jocund din of a stretch. The juice truly is loose. Pico OUTLET: We salute you!

O! What a tangled “J” we script. Typographers, Fontographers, and Fontyperaphers alike should delight in the “J façade” refresh recently afforded GAR, Suzanne Tracht’s chophouse situated at 8225 Beverly. In the past, drivers unfamiliar with the acclaimed establishment would phonetically vocalize for blocks, varying between GAR and JAR until one was eventually favored over other. Said drivers will now take comfort in the fact that the muddy water has been substiantally filtered with the recent J Refresh. Indeed, the establishment’s name is no longer a question in the mind of the casual driver: WELCOME TO SAR, acclaimed chophouse of chef Suzanne Tracht!

The Gar Sar Jar
8225 Beverly

Special Bloggy Shoutout to My Culinary Adventures for having the foresight to have captured historic “J=G” script

Before reading this review please download and install the font Pastor of Muppets to your computer. Copy/paste all of the text from this document into a new document in Word or your favorite text editor. Select all of the text. Change the font to Pastor of Muppets. Set the size to 36 point. Commence rocking and continue reading.

Master of Pollo I’m pulling your strings
Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams
Blinded by me, you can’t see a thing
Just call my name, ’cause I’ll hear you scream

Pollo Master serves great fried chicken at relatively normal rates. They don’t stop with chicken, though. You can order up everything from siete mares soup to a full fleet of Salvadorian pupusas. One catch: The dining room is small and the jukebox is loud. You might consider takeout. Hey, take it to the park across the way. Make a day of it. You’ve earned it, I said it. Back to the pupusas. They’re stellar, as is the requisite spiced cole slaw that comes with the package. If you’re a pupusa fan, and let’s face it, why the hell wouldn’t you be, you could do far worse than the Master when in MacArthur Park. Just watch out for that intersection off Burlington.

It’s no stretch to say that Pollo Master could probably triple their business were they to download the Pastor of Muppets font and take it to the local signsmith with a few hundred bucks so he could rock the logo just a bit more. It’s already prettymuch heavy metal, but it looks more Judas Priest than Masterly. Get it right the name’s Pollo Master, not Judas Pollo. Regardless, when I visited I found no shortage of customers. Something about the word ‘master’ drew me in, font be damned.

I’d like to close now with a stanza written by William Wordsworth in 1814. Seems fitting.

Nights I Lay This Head to Rest
Pondering the Great Hereafter
Recall Then Long, Dear Field of Green
My Fancy Pants, and Pollo Master.

 
Pollo Master
2131 W 6th St
213.484.9797