Blayne Sucks

Unless you’ve been living under a rock on another planet in a parallel universe, you know by now that LeBron James will be playing basketball for the Miami Heat next year. The story is on the cover of basically every newspaper (Favorite: The Cleveland Plain Dealer). ESPN did an hour-long special for the announcement, but I really wasn’t all that interested. The NBA is less fun to watch than college basketball, and since the Pacers weren’t even in the LeBron sweepstakes, I was even less interested. For me the most interesting part of this story is how LeBron James’ decision has devolved into a debate about typography.

One person who probably watched the announcement is Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, LeBron’s former team. He took the news particularly hard and wrote an epic letter expressing his feelings. The letter is a study in how to take the low road. It’s basically a psycho ex-girlfriend letter. More importantly, it’s written entirely in Comic Sans, a surprisingly hot trending topic on Twitter.

When I first read the letter, I thought it was fake entirely because of the font choice. However, the letter is hosted on NBA.com and it’s been covered by ESPN. Thus, it has to be a legitimate letter. Of course, the big question is why did Gilbert choose Comic Sans? It’s such a silly font to use for such an important, multi-million dollar topic. Further, many type designers hate Comic Sans and wish it could be uninvented. There’s even a website about this: Ban Comic Sans.

Vincent Connare, the designer of the Comic Sans typeface, has been giving radio interviews about the choice. When asked about why he though Gilbert picked Comic Sans, Connare said, “You don’t know if he’s being sarcastic, if he’s being angry, or if he didn’t even think about it.” He does think the font choice could work for this kind of letter because it epitomizes the lack of seriousness that the Cavs have for LeBron James now.

I guess I’m left kind of dumbfounded. I sort of thought that Comic Sans on the Internet had gone the way of the blink tag. Let’s hope this doesn’t resurrect it.

Amazon.com recently acquired woot.com. Normally, company acquisitions result in rather mundane press releases. That did not happen this time. Woot’s CEO wrote an absolutely hysterical post about the acquisition on the woot blog. If you haven’t read it, it’s definitely worth reading.

Woot’s blog post was quoted by the Associated Press, which is where things get even more interesting. The Associated Press don’t seem to understand the world they live in. For example, they have been trying to control “the bloggers,” which is about as impossible as it sounds. One of their proposed methods to control bloggers was to charge them for quoting AP stories. After all, they have the copyright, right?

Woot decided that turnabout was fair play. Since the AP charges $17.50 for quoting up to 50 words and since the AP quoted Woot’s blog post liberally, Woot wants their $17.50. (Note: this link is part of Woot’s daily deal. I’ll update the link here when it hits the archives in case you’re not reading this post on the day it was posted.) Hey, if you’re going to ask people to ignore Fair Use, you should expect that people will ask you to do the same. I hope the AP actually pays up here. It would be a great mea culpa.