S01E199: YIKES
A Brief History of Fonts and Typography ⛧ The Invention of Serifs ⛧ Modern Memes and the Fonts That Built Them ⛧ The Impact Typeface ⛧ OK Soda – Advertising’s Awkward Attempt at Postmodernism ⛧ Boostable Intermission ⛧ The Willy Wonka of Cheese – James Leprino ⛧ Private Pizza Billionaire Gets Sued By His Own Family ⛧ Rivers of Cheap (Possibly Government) Cheese Flows into Hot Pockets, Frozen Pizza, Stoufers ⛧ Loaning Money To Your Own Corporation
Mom, He Won’t Stop Subverting Me!
BYO3-DG
SHOW NOTES (Zoso’s Corner)
Tonight’s Tarot:
Freaks of Hazard:
JS came in with a groovy $10.00!
FoxFur graced us with a monthly $5.00!
Wiirdo dropped a monthly $3.33!
Sir Cross Stich monthly’d us with $5.33!
Capt Oblivious slapped us with a monthly $5.55!
JL came in with a $33.00! Very culty and we appreciate it!
Tjunta monthly’d us with $3.33! Check out his music here!
Spaz himself came in with a $9.99 monthly! His music is here!
MakeHeroism sent in a chunk from the BTS Shop!
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THE KING OF CHEESE
James Leprino is a mysterious figure atop Leprino Foods, a dairy company that allegedly controls 85% of the American Pizza Cheese Industry. Only one photo of him can be found online, pictured below (right) next to former company president Wes Allen (left) in 1978.
“I support what’s going on, but I don’t try to lead it,” he adds. “My job is to hold them responsible for doing what they said they’re going to do.”
He wasn’t always so hands-off. While acknowledging his “genius,” numerous industry executives paint Leprino, in his younger days, as an “aggressive” leader who wasn’t above visiting individual franchise owners to pitch his technologically advanced cheese. But very few will go into detail, and fewer still will attach their name to their comments. One pizza entrepreneur puts it this way about the man who owns 100% of this mozzarella giant: “Jim Leprino is a very powerful man.”
– Chloe Sorvino, Forbes Magazine 2017
George Turner, vice president of purchasing for the handheld foods division of Nestle Foods based in Englewood, said the company has been using Leprino’s mozzarella for its Hot Pockets brand sandwiches since 1997.
– Denver Business Journal 2002
The Story, according to Forbes…
James, the youngest of five children, noticed his classmates spending free time at neighborhood pizza joints. After graduating high school in 1956, he started working with his father full-time and shared a revelation: “Pizzerias in this part of the country were buying 5,000 pounds of cheese a week,” he recalls. “I thought, This is a good market to go after, so I did.” In 1958, after larger chain grocery stores had forced the Leprino market to close, the Leprino Foods cheese empire started with $615. (66!)
Below we see James’ father Mike Leprino Sr. hanging mozzarella balls at their family’s grocery.
The timing couldn’t have been better. That same year, the first Pizza Hut opened, in Wichita, Kansas. A year later, Mike and Marian Ilitch opened the first Little Caesars, outside Detroit. Another year went by, and Domino’s began delivering pizza, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Frozen pizzas, introduced after soldiers returned home from WWII craving slices, were also gaining popularity. After two years in business, Leprino Foods was delivering 200 pounds of block mozzarella a week to local Italian restaurants.
Leprino realized he needed to learn the science behind making cheese on a mass scale. But with a young daughter at home and another baby on the way, he didn’t have time for college. Instead, he hired Lester Kielsmeier, who had run a cheese factory in Wisconsin only to find out that it was sold during his stint in the Air Force during World War II, because his dad believed he’d been killed in action. “When Lester came, I went downtown to the junkyard and I bought a couple bigger cheese vats to make it look like we were really in the business,” Leprino says.
While Kielsmeier made the cheese, Leprino fixated on efficiency. He quickly realized he was dumping half his raw ingredients into the river in the form of whey, the calcium-rich liquid left over after curds are strained. Inspired by the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, Leprino traveled to Japan to meet with scientists using milk proteins derived from whey to help the Japanese population grow taller. More than a half-century later, Leprino Foods remains the largest U.S. exporter of lactose, a by-product of sweet whey, and retains a large market share in Japan.
On the cheese side, Leprino hustled to satisfy Pizza Hut, which went public in 1972 with around 1,000 stores and, at its peak in the 1990s, accounted for 90% of Leprino’s sales. Pizza Hut franchises would sometimes wait too long to thaw the presliced mozzarella and reported that their cheese would crumble, so Leprino Foods responded with its first major breakthrough: a preservative mist. The scientists there soon realized that this method allowed them to add flavors such as salted caramel and jalapeño. They could even make a reduced fat “cheddar” by using a mozzarella base and then misting on cheddar flavor and orange food coloring. Leprino Foods’ production rose sixteenfold, to 2 million pounds of cheese a week.
A Secretive Mozzarella Dynasty Unravels in Court – City Cast Denver – host Paul Karolyi interviews Helen Xu reporter for Denver newspaper Westword
Leprino 1 – Origins
- Reclusive Denver cheese billionaire forced into the limelight with family lawsuit. The son of Italian immigrants, he worked as a boy in his father’s deli in Denver’s Little Italy. Capitalizing on the rise in pizza chains, James Leprino builds a cheese empire from humble origins.
Leprino 2 – Private
- The family stays in the shadows as best as possible
Leprino 3 – Cheap Cheese
- James Leprino focuses on cheap and consistent products, and invests heavily in the process of mass producing cheese.
Leprino 4 – 4 Hours
- Leprino masterfully develops elite relationships with some of the biggest pizza chains in the country and tailors the cheese to their needs. That’s how Dominoes has that perfect flawless cheese you dream about.
Leprino 5 – Dominating
- Cheap cheese leads to market domination
Leprino 6 – Successful Jim
- Members of the Leprino family sue James Leprino. Due to a familial agreement made decades ago, the descendants of James’ brother Mike are entitled to a significant share of the business.
Leprino 7 – Payout
- James Leprino’s nieces are blocked from loaning money to the company in the same fashion that James did.
Leprino 8 – Not About The Money
- The family’s are divided, but comfortable!
Leprino 9 – Fully Set Up
- The trial rules in favor of James Leprino, and the neices have to settle for a measly 90 million dollars.
IT IS DONE (MINUS CHAPTERS)
Please check out the final product from months of hard ass work! It certainly paid off! There will be a watch party tonight after 199 in the kosmi room: https://app.kosmi.io/room/tkyiux
Watch on Podverse!
12 Rods Tour Eclipse: A v4v Mirror Ball Stream Featuring Mellow Cassette
Podcast Index Link Watch on Podverse! Last night we had the chance to go catch 12 Rods at the Fine Line, and boy let me tell you what. They absolutely slayed it out there on the stage. Can’t wait to hear how the rest of their tour goes over the next month and some change. Also had the pleasure of hanging out with John and Dan from Mellow Cassette, and Eri…
Also had a chance to go check out 12 Rods set at the Fine Line on Saturday! Here’s some shots of the show!
THE GRAPHIC THRUST
Straight up, why the impact font for memes?
⭐ The History of Typography – Animated Short
- Blackletter – Not the first time Gutenberg has been brought up here. Guy makes printing press, guy falls in love, etc and so forth. He based it off the monks work scribing books. Cue a French guy Nicholas Jenson, who was inspired by the letters of the romans.
- Serifs – 18th century lands and brings with it Old Style.
- 20th Century Fonts – Sick of serifs? Make your own font!
⭐ The reason every meme uses that one font
- How did this happen? We’re gonna carve our spot in history!
🌙 The reason every meme uses that one font
🌙 “The Impact of Impact” typeface advert brochure
- “Impact is a sans-serif typeface in the industrial or grotesk style designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1965 and released by the Stephenson Blake foundry of Sheffield.”
- “During the 1960s, there was a trend towards condensed, bold, “industrial” sans-serifs like Schmalfette Grotesk and Compacta, largely pioneered by West German magazine Twen, and Impact was intended to fit this trend. Writing in 2004, the year before his death, Lee explained that the design goal was “to get as much ink on paper as possible in a given size with the maximum possible x-height”.”
- “Released at the end of the age of metal type as phototypesetting gained popularity, it was one of Stephenson Blake’s last typefaces released in metal.”
🌙 Impact (Know Your Meme)
- “By the beginning of the 2000s, image captioning had become a widespread practice among MS Paint and Photoshop users in online forums. As the early image macro culture began to emerge on sites like Something Awful, the font became increasingly visible as a popular choice of font for captioning images, along with Arial and Comic Sans. According to the founder of Something Awful Richard Kyanka[6]:
“I believe the first time the font face changed to Impact was when somebody posted an image of a very obese black woman wearing a spandex superhero outfit, and the text just said ‘DAAAAMN.’ After that, everybody seemed to use Impact.”
- In 2003, Something Awful forum user FancyCat submitted the earliest known instance of the Happy Cat image macro with the caption “I Can Has Cheezburger” written in Impact typeface, which paved the way for Impact to be known as the de facto font for captioning LOLcat images. Soon, many other popular image macro memes and reaction images of the time, such as FAIL and Cool Story Bro, began featuring Impact-stylized captions, followed by Advice Animal memes that exploded on to the scene at the turn of the decade (shown below).”
🌙 A Brief Introduction to Impact: ‘The Meme Font’
- A really nice write up that gets into the weeds of Image macros can be found here.
⭐ The “Impact” & History of Impact Font – Internet Iconography
- Already Outdated – The spine of a modern meme was born out of what? Ease of use. Also a fun throwback clip to phototypesetting.
- Advice Animals – People have been pretty conditioned to this use of the font, that sometimes using anything else may look weird. The only way this came to be was consistency and repetition. Enter the advice animals.
- Fonts Are Sentient – The maker of the video does bring up a cool p[point, that fonts are sentient. That a font choice can be an identifier and give a unique voice to the art.
🌙 How to Easily Make a Meme with Standard Impact Font
Let’s take a look at an unsuccessful venture that was deep in the impact.
⭐ OK Soda – Advertising’s Awkward Relationship with Postmodernism
- The Second Most Known Word – Who subverts the subverters?
- Meta Ads – Hail the unsensational! We promise underpromises!
- All We Need Is Dirt – Big shoutout to Johnny Kudzuseed here!
- Project Yourself – Who will you spend your money with? It’s interesting, is v4v a post-modern or return to modernity value system?
- The Taste – Mmmmm……
⭐ OK Soda Ads
⭐ Graphic Communications We Used to Call it Printing
- Art and Adventure – Let’s dive into an old ass PSA on graphic design! The first clip is about setting scenic models to capture photos with.
- Ticker Tape News – Longer, may need to skip, but a cool clip on how newspaper were printed and “broadcasted” at the time.
- Color Correction – It’s a precise process to nail the color when printing! It really takes a photographers eyes. !lamp. They almost sound like alchemists.
- Millions of Whatever – Just think about how many ink has been used out there.
- The Main Thrust – Another clip on phototypesetting. Enter the age of the computer!
- He Said The Thing – Seriously, the Print Industrial Complex is definitely a magickal operation no doubt in my mind. With Ad Men running the ship.
⭐ https://www.printingfilms.com/
OPENER
Howard Stern Thanks President Joe Biden for Making a Difference
INTERMISSION
I Need A Little – The Retrograde
Wen this is over – Ali Mitchell
CLOSER
Sensual Laces – Numskull The Album Vol. 2
PRESHOW
Daves Not Here – Queen Of The Midday World
[The Revelation Post-Hardcore Hip Hop Beat]
1point3 – Pseudo Pettifogger
THEM TEETH – Packin’ A Rod (The Fiends)
[Hardcore Punk instrumental UK82 style]
The Velvicks – Sweet Cheeks
The Trusted – Doomsday
OC Rippers – Late Night TV Lover
[Perséphone – Retro Funky (SUNDANCE remix)]
Mellow Cassette – Control
12 Rods – Accidents Waiting To Happen
[‘Evil Genius’ – East Coast Hardcore Hip Hop Beat]
$2 Holla – Lonesome Love
Johnson CIty – AssLip
[SKA – Chivlok (INSTRUMENTAL USO LIBRE)]
The Band Oslo Snowe – Marty
Empath Eyes – Momma Bear
[[FREE] Indie Rock x Alternative x Surf Curse Type Beat – No More]
Survival Guide – Don’t Feel Bad
TAKE THESE, IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE!
