Thirty

Thirty? What about thirty, you ask? How about this: – 30 –

Aha, now you remember your journalism class, and the way to indicate the end of the story, right?

It used to be common to indicate the end of an article with that numeric designation. It was a means of communicating between writer and editor. Of, course, that mark did not make it into the publication.

But in magazines, journals, books, often there used to be a little thingy, at the bottom or end. Those might be a”fleuron”, or a “dingbat”, or a “flourish” (look ’em up.) Sort of like this:

We can still do that sort of thing with images or even with special characters that are part of the font set.

Nowadays it is all about emoticons, but the character sets contain some fun images. How about this:

◄☼►

Such characters are inserted by holding down the ALT key and typing a numeric code. In this case it was ALT-17 ALT-15 ALT-16.

Long before the internet, I used to use dots set in a triangle. There is not a character for that, so for many years I have used period-colon-period as my “end mark”. You can see it at the bottom of every post here. Before the end mark and the copyright notice, I also insert a little Cafe Ludwig logo. Oh, yes, the copyright symbol, ©, is ALT-0169 (the zero is needed).

Both my logo and my end mark are also links. Hardly anybody has ever noticed. The Cafe Ludwig logo link leads, as you might expect, to the Cafe Ludwig website (yep, it’s not just this blog). There you can see what I have been up to. Currently I am running a series on street photography. You might enjoy the photos.

Alright, I’ll make it easy: My Street Photography in Ludwig.Gallery.

I leave you now with a bit of a flourish based on a couple of my own photos – and in color no less.

.:. © 2022 Ludwig Keck