Anthony Lane writes in The New Yorker:

Beryl is the one and only still at 58 Gin, a small but purposeful firm, founded by an Australian named Mark Marmont, in 2014, and now tucked away down a mews in the East End of London. You go through an archway, and there, at the rear of the premises, stands Beryl, a steampunk dream in copper and steel. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you would probably ask yourself why the brass, woodwind, and timpani sections of the London Symphony Orchestra had been moved to the lair of a Bond villain.

On the left is a pot, as bulbous as a genie and as big as an igloo. Polished to a blinding shine, it can hold four hundred and fifty litres. There’s a lockable metal hatch, which swings open, as if to admit a deep-sea explorer. (Marmont is a former dive instructor. He must feel right at home.) Down the hatch you tip your personal potpourri of ingredients; inside, they mingle politely with near-pure ethanol and demineralized water. Once heated, the mixture emits vapor, which steams out of the top of the pot and passes through a network of pipes, cooling as it goes, and eventually emerging, from a column on the right, as a clear liquid. This you dilute. And that, give or take a hundred adjustments, and a few perspiring years of practice, is how you bring gin—proper gin—into being.

I’ve always loved the distinctive taste of gin.

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

In October 1863, President Lincoln declared the second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions, and kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured in to replace the men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous, than ever. The President invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

This is a good reason.

Philip Deloria’s “The Invention of Thanksgiving” in The New Yorker is a must-read and the following passage is worth quoting:

What follows is a vivid account of the ways the English repaid their new allies. The settlers pressed hard to acquire Indian land through “sales” driven by debt, threat, alliance politics, and violence. They denied the coequal civil and criminal jurisdiction of the alliance, charging Indians under English law and sentencing them to unpayable fines, imprisonment, even executions. They played a constant game of divide and conquer, and they invariably considered Indians their inferiors. Ousamequin’s sons Pumetacom—called King Philip by the English—and Wamsutta began forming a resistance, despite the poor odds. By 1670, the immigrant population had ballooned to sixty or seventy thousand in southern New England—twice the number of Native people.

We falsely remember a Thanksgiving of intercultural harmony. Perhaps we should recall instead how English settlers cheated, abused, killed, and eventually drove Wampanoags into a conflict, known as King Philip’s War, that exploded across the region in 1675 and 1676 and that was one of the most devastating wars in the history of North American settlement. Native soldiers attacked fifty-two towns in New England, destroyed seventeen of them, and killed a substantial portion of the settler population. The region also lost as much as forty per cent of its Native population, who fought on both sides. Confronted by Mohawks to the west, a mixed set of Indian and Colonial foes to the south, and the English to the east, Pumetacom was surrounded on three sides. In the north, the scholar Lisa Brooks argues, Abenaki and other allies continued the struggle for years. In “Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War” (Yale), Brooks deepens the story considerably, focussing on indigenous geographical and linguistic knowledge, and tracing the life of Weetamoo, the widow of Wamsutta and the saunkskwa, or female leader, of her tribe, the Pocasset. Weetamoo was Pumetacom’s ally, his relative, and a major figure in the fight. In the end, not only Pumetacom’s head was stuck on a pike; hers was, too, displayed for Wampanoag prisoners who were likely soon to be sold to the Caribbean.

The Thanksgiving story buries the major cause of King Philip’s War—the relentless seizure of Indian land. It also covers up the consequence. The war split Wampanoags, as well as every other Native group, and ended with indigenous resistance broken, and the colonists giving thanks. Like most Colonial wars, this one was a giant slave expedition, marked by the seizure and sale of Indian people. Wampanoags were judged criminals and—in a foreshadowing of the convict-labor provision of the Thirteenth Amendment—sold into bondage. During the next two centuries, New England Indians also suffered indentured servitude, convict labor, and debt peonage, which often resulted in the enslavement of the debtor’s children. Thanksgiving’s Pilgrim pageants suggest that good-hearted settlers arrived from pious, civilized England. We could remember it differently: that they came from a land that delighted in displaying heads on poles and letting bodies rot in cages suspended above the roads. They were a warrior tribe.

Fascinating history.

Thy Hà, a graphic and digital designer living in Melbourne, is working on her final research project titled Up? Down? Left? Right? for the Master of Communication Design at RMIT University. Her topic is about designing a diacritic system for the Vietnamese language. She shares the project on her website. I am happy to see more Vietnamese designers delving into Vietnamese diacritics. I also glad that her project is a response to my Vietnamese Typography. I would love to see the final product once she is completed.

Khi trời trở lạnh tôi thèm ăn món gì đó cho đời đỡ nhạt. Thế thì còn gì mặn mà hơn là tô bún mắm? Đến quán lúc một giờ trưa nên cũng vắng. Chỉ có tôi và hai người đàn bà lớn tuổi đang ăn bún bò Huế. Hai bà vừa thè lưởi vừa tâm sự. Bà này nói bà nọ, “Thằng con trai tôi lấy vợ ở xa. Nó thì hai ba bữa gọi điện thoại về hỏi thăm còn con dâu thì cả năm gọi được vài lần.” Bà kia an ủi lại, “Dâu ở Mỹ nó lạnh vậy đó. Con dâu tôi chiều đi làm về trể, ăn tối xong nó cũng trốn vào trong phòng có để ý gì chồng con và mẹ chồng này đâu.” Tôi nghe câu “Dâu ở Mỹ nó lạnh vậy đó” thật buồn cười. Dâu ở Mỹ bị đông lạnh hết rồi dùng không được nữa. Đem đi xay ra là sinh tố hết cho rồi.

It’s been only six months and I can’t even wait for our obligation to be over in another six months. I was expecting it, but it is getting way too uncomfortable. The level of awkwardness is getting unbearable. It is really a damn shame that it has to be this way. I hate to put a crack in a relationship, but we have offered what we could. We have done what we could, but we simply can’t change someone else’s thoughtlessness. It is what it is. I can’t do shit about it. I just have to patiently waiting it out.

On Saturday evening, I drove Đán and his cousin (same age) home after their Taekwondo’s class. I let them watched Curious George. At a red light, I peeped at them from the mirror. While Đán glued to the TV, his cousin turned away from him, put his finger up his nose, sucked the finger, and repeated rapidly. He definitely knew what he was doing; therefore, he tried to hide it from us.

I didn’t know whether I should let him know or let it go. Two years ago, he did it without hiding while I was driving and I told him nicely not to do that. For a while, I thought he stopped, but apparently he has not. He doesn’t do it in the open, but he does it when he thinks no one is watching. I decided not to say anything and just let him have his moment. I am sure he will grow out of it.

At dinner last night, his grandma (my mother-in-law) gave him a silkworm to tried. He tried it, liked it, and asked for more. She told him that if he like it he can ask his mom to make it for him. As he popped another one into his mouth, Đạo told him it was a silkworm and he freaked out. His face got red and he went to the bathroom trying to spit it out. He didn’t want to finish his rice with grilled pork. I thought to myself, “Dude, you ate your boogers yesterday. Silkworms aren’t as gross.” Then again, Đạo’s friends freaked out when he brought silkworms to school for lunch.

It was clearly a psychological effect. He was enjoying the silkworms until he knew they were “worms.”

I am reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and trying to detox for the hundredth time. I am fed up with Facebook allowing disinformation to spread on its platform. I removed Facebook app off my phone and temporarily deactivated my account. I am logging off Twitter as well. I’ll spend this weekend hanging out with the kids and reading Newport’s book. Have a great weekend, folks.

My book, Professional Web Typography, has been mentioned in issue #30 of “Web Fonts & Typography News.” Jason Pamental writes:

Donny is a deeply talented designer and typographer, and has released a second edition of his book recently, updating it to include variable fonts and some other newer developments. It’s very well written and an incredible resource. Well-deserving of a place on your digital bookshelf.

It is an honor to be included along many of my favorite books on typography. If you are new to web typography, this issue is a great introduction. If you haven’t already, you should subscribe to “Web Fonts & Typography News.”

Lunarpages, my hosting provider, has been acquired by HostPapa. They are making infrastructure changes. As a result, all my websites, including this blog, will be down for four hours today. Here’s the notification from HostPapa:

In order to perform important infrastructure updates, your service will experience downtime starting on:

Wednesday, October 9, 2019 10 pm (PST)

And ending on:

Thursday, October 10, 2019 2 am (PST)

During this maintenance period, your website and email will not be available.

I’ve hosted with Lunarpages for almost 20 years. They have done a great job with minimum downtime. I am not sure what will happen with HostPapa. Just keep my fingers crossed.