The morning names of 6/14, all Z names — well, I’m a Z-person, and I notice — all of which were in my mind from recent mentions on Facebook
of Zapf dingbats (named for the typeface designer Hermann Zapf)
of the Zagat restaurant guides (now taken over by Google)
and of the singer-songwriter Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing MN (who became famous as a very young man in NYC under the name Bob Dylan and is more or less constantly in the news)
Zapf and his dingbats. From Wikipedia:
Hermann Zapf (8 November 1918 – 4 June 2015 [AZ: a very long life]) was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include Palatino, Optima, and Zapfino [and the widely used ITC Zapf Dingbats]. He is considered one of the greatest type designers of all time.
And from Wikipedia:
In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer’s ornament or printer’s character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting
Examples of characters included in Unicode (ITC Zapf Dingbats series 100 and others), from Wikipedia:
(#1)
The Zagats and their guide. From Wikipedia:
(#2) A representative Zagat guideThe Zagat Survey, commonly referred to as Zagat, and established by Tim and Nina Zagat in 1979, is an organization which collects and correlates the ratings of restaurants by diners. For their first guide, covering New York City, the Zagats surveyed their friends. At its height around 2005, the Zagat Survey included 70 cities, with reviews based on the input of 250,000 individuals with the guides reporting on and rating restaurants, hotels, nightlife, shopping, zoos, museums, music, movies, theaters, golf courses, and airlines. The guides are sold in book form, and were formerly only available as a paid subscription on the Zagat website.
Zimmerman and his songs. From Wikipedia:
Bob Dylan (legally Robert Dylan; born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941 [Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham]) is an American singer-songwriter. Described as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his nearly 70-year career. With an estimated more than 125 million records sold worldwide, he is one of the best-selling musicians of all time. Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 1960s, infusing it “with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry”. His lyrics incorporated political, social, and philosophical influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture. [Also winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature]
Dylan (who’s just a bit younger than me and just a bit older than my man Jacques) as we’re inclined to remember him:
(#3) Joan Baez and Dylan during the civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963 (Wikipedia photo)
To put the photo in context, 1963 saw two notable political assassinations in the US: President John F. Kennedy and civil rights activist Medgar Evers.
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