Sans Serif

"Come tatelleh, sit on Zaidah's lap. I'm going to tell you a story. It's a story about books. Do you remember books?"

"No."

"No? You little pischer, books are those square things with words written on them."

"Oh, you mean like iPhones?"

"It's the goyim in him talking, that's what it is. No, I'm talking about the things with pages and covers where you turn the pages and read the stories inside."

"Oh, you mean the Kindle?"

"Never mind, you little nudnik. Okay, so once upon a time, long, long ago, there were these things that people had called books, and in them were written all the stories of the world. This was back before video games, so no one had anything better to do than read."

"Wow, was that like back when the dinosaurs..."

"You better stifle, or I'll give you a zetz into next week. So there were these books, and there were a lot of good ones and a lot of bad ones, and pretty soon, the people who wrote the bad ones realized that no one wanted to buy them, because no one wanted to read them. So they all got together, and the next thing you know, they came out with an announcement. 'We know you thought our books were pure drek,' they said, 'but listen, we've come up with a great new idea, and we think you're gonna like it. We call it Sans Serif.'"

"What's Sans Serif?"

"I'm coming to that, stop varfing yourself. See, all books used to be written with letters that had little lines at the top and bottom of them, called serifs. Well, someone came up with the idea of taking away those little lines and calling it Sans Serif. So they published all these books with no little lines on the letters, and people were so worked up about the fact that Sans Serif was new and different that they didn't really pay attention to the fact that the books were still pure drek. Sure, there were some in Sans Serif that were okay, but mostly chazzerai. And the worst thing was, Sans Serif is harder to read."

"Why?"

"What do I look like, an expert? It's harder, you take my word for that."

The moral of the story is, just because we can do a thing, it doesn't necessarily follow that we must.

If that weren't so long, that would be the title of this blog. No, I do not genuinely believe that the preceding story, told me by my fictional Yiddish zaida, is true. I simply wished to point out that special effects in movies, and in particular shooting a movie in 3D, doesn't make the movie any better. You could invent a new font, print the Army Manual on Latrine-Digging from 1953 in that font, and it still wouldn't be a great American novel. Get over it, people.