The Day When Everything Hollows Out
Sometimes my Instapaper reading list has a running theme. On the train home last night I read two ruminations on that curious period just before a transcendent athlete’s decline:
From ‘Still Life’: The Long Autumn of Roger Federer by Brian Phillips:
The saddest moment in the career of a great athlete is the one when he’s tagged with the word “still.” One day you’re fast. One day you’re slow. There’s an in-between day when you’re “still fast,” and that’s the day when everything hollows out.
I liked Brian Phillips’s piece, because it captured what makes Roger Federer so much more interesting (to me, at any rate) these days. I didn’t really pay much attention to him when his victories had the air of inevitability about them. Now that he’s in that weird “still” phase—as Phillips calls it—any victory seems born more from sheer willpower than effortless magic.
Another bit that I enjoyed:
Watching Federer increasingly feels like looking in on something private. It’s as if his game is just somewhere else, on some secret corner of the map where it can stage its weird encounter between beauty and death.
That brings me to the other piece I read, a blog post by Justin Bourne: Will Nicklas Lidstrom’s return be one year too many?. In it he writes from the perspective of a hockey fan, making the case that Lidstrom should retire and go out on top. Bourne, like Phillips, talks about mortality casting its shadow over sporting gods:
I just don’t want him to look mortal and I fear that may happen.
Earlier he writes:
He had the opportunity to do something completely unheard of – win the Norris and retire. The concept of that is mind-boggling. Returning won’t sully his legacy any and may in fact add to it, but I just hate that there’s the slightest hair of a possibility he might come back and not play up to Lidstrom-like levels, or worse, get hurt. He’s accomplished it all. I wanted to see it end like that.
I understand the appeal of going out on top (Bourne mentions Mark Recchi’s retirement after winning the Cup with the Bruins days ago). But I’m also selfish, and I want to see Lidstrom give it one more season. There’s something curiously compelling about seeing a great athlete pull through when you’re no longer dead certain they can do it. For me it raises the stakes as a spectator. For why cheer at all if you’re not convinced on some primal level that you can somehow will an athlete to greatness, even if it’s for just one last time?
By the way, what is it with essays on Federer and footnotes? Reading Phillips’s Grantland piece I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s Federer profile from 2006.
Drupal Features Module and Nodequeues
A little thing I’ve noticed with the Drupal 7 Features module and Nodequeues: the View automatically created by a nodequeue doesn’t show up in the “Views” listing when creating a Feature. You have to manually create the View, and then it’ll show up in the listing.
If you haven’t used Features before, they’re a way of collecting your configuration changes into a module that can be applied to an existing site. Since the changes are pushed into code as a module, that means they can be applied to a site without disturbing the database. This way you can apply changes to a site that’s already live and full of content.
Father’s Day
Sometimes kids cut right to the heart of things. My daughter Amelia, prompted by my wife to wish me a happy Father’s Day:
Happy Mother’s Day, Daddy!
This kid has her priorities straight.
Typekit and Drupal
We recently got a Typekit account at work, so the next step was to see if I could integrate it into some Drupal 7 projects. I was going to include the JavaScript files manually, but fortunately I stumbled upon this module first: @font-your-face. You’ll need to generate an API token and you’re going to be up and running. If you’re not using Typekit, @font-your-face also supports other font services, like Font Squirrel, Fontdeck, Fonts.com, Google Fonts, and KERNEST.
One quick note: If you’ve enabled the @font-your-face module and the Typekit module but you don’t see your Typekit JS being included in the HEAD of your html, check that the sites/default/files/fontyourface/font.css file is writeable by your server. I’m not sure why that makes a difference—it doesn’t look like that file contains anything, but after making it writeable and disabling/re-enabling the modules the Typekit JS showed up.
Typekit and MAMP
Because I couldn’t find much info on this out on the web: Does Typekit work with MAMP? Yes, it does.
Typekit’s domain settings cover local domain hosts just like actual public domains. You just have to enter your local domain names into the kit settings. For example, if I have a local “dirtystylus” host I just add that to the kit settings and when the kit propagates my fonts will be available for local testing.