Blog - World Dominance

What a lucky day I’ve had! While on a Nature Hike* we discovered something remarkable: A squishy mass of hair and bones that was once inside of an actual owl!

Oh, Mother Nature, you are so full of treasure! Dissecting this was like a dream come true.

Teeth and a beak?! Yum! After using two sticks to pull apart the wad of regurgitation, I felt like writing a card. Woot, indeed.

I knew it!

People always ask me, “what made you write that card?” This question is usually followed by either laughter or tears and then I am dumped on the side of the road with a pack of cigarettes and a mix-tape.

If I even had time (or could pull the gag out of my mouth) to answer, I’d say that the inspiration for each and every card is just a reaction to some experience that I’ve had. I’m not a scientist but I’m pretty sure that the brain works like a Rube Goldberg Machine. One observation leads to a series of tangents and the end result is either a small, quiet room in a mental institution or a greeting card that part of the (dark and twisted) population can relate to.

Example: My grandmother decided to spend her twilight years traveling. She and her companion wanted to tour some parts of Hawaii in a helicopter. Tragedy struck, and the helicopter and all of its passengers were smashed against the side of a volcano. The only identifying evidence available were the teeth.

What?! Yes, it’s true. That card is not a big seller in the U.S. but strangely, it’s quite popular in Canada. What does that even mean?? And now are you going to wonder if there is a story behind this card?:

There isn’t. THERE ISN’T.

Speaking of letters! The new prints arrived at all of the Room and Board stores across this great land. The photographs on their website are gorgeous and make me feel like I live in a crack house.

I have nothing against crack houses, I’m sure the people that live in them are perfectly lovely and are just misunderstood.

The legendary, Katie Dohman (Minnesota Monthly) already wrote a little something about them. I’m feeling pretty fancy.

Katie Dohman, style editor for Minnesota Monthly, made a special guest appearance in the shop. She was just delightful and for that she got one of these:

I just need, like, 500 more photographs for a lovely coffee table book.

Enough small talk! On to the new cards:

 

PS: I know the card above looks like a black blob but it’s a man carrying a baby elephant. Don’t worry, the real card will be perfect.

Hot Plate-> 5204 Bloomington Ave South Minneapolis, MN 55417

I had no idea that I loved to be surrounded by paint-by-number art and Paula figurines. Who could know something like that? I was once surrounded by prosthetic limbs

 

Patina-> So many locations.

Another profile for the special series dedicated to bringing our readers biased reviews of shops that carry our goods.

I’ll tell you what Patina doesn’t sell: beer bongs, hazmat suits,

DIY cryogenics kits or kittens. And, while I’m still waiting for such a shop to open, (perhaps in the afterlife) I must admit that Patina has nailed the drag-me-out-of-this-store-before-I-spend-all-of-my-money formula.

Owners, Rick Haase and Christine Ward comb the planet in search of gifts for your (my) Aunt Lynn, Uncle John, teenager, baby, mom, neighbor, lawyer, therapist, evil twin,

dog or bf (blind faction). I don’t even know what I did for gifts (yes, I do – homemade soap anyone?) before Patina opened its doors on 5oth and Bryant. I can’t even think of another shop (I can, but they don’t carry Zeichen Press goods – yet) in the Twin Cities that has so successfully cemented itself into our retail subconscious. (Did you even know you had a retail subconscious?? Everyone does, without it we would only shop at Walmart.)

I guess writing this blog FOR TWO YEARS means I’m a writer. Or something like that. I’m going to put on hospital scrubs and walk around HCMC for a couple of years – I’ve heard that doctors make more money than me and I’d like to change that.

Loretta already gets it – she’s a princess.

That was a lot of syllables.

I’ve heard that experiencing four letterpress harbinger doppelgangers is about as rare as seeing the Virgin Mary in a pancake. I’m not saying that Zeichen Press cards predict the future, I’m just saying that some of our cards seem to foretell a subsequent event. Wait, what am I saying? Never mind, let’s just get to the evidence:

Don’t freak out. This is being investigated by the proper authorities.

Isn’t that nice?

OH, also: It only seems appropriate that on the eve of the launching of the new site, the dog was caught nursing the kittens.

Enjoy.

I’ve never met a middle-aged man at a BP in Grantsburg and given him money for a Kitchen-Aid mixer — until now! The ZP intern was the recipient of the gift. She cried and looked like she was just crowned Princess Kay of the Milky Way.

It was beautiful.

I spent the last 56 hours holed up in my room (cell) uploading content for the new Zeichen Press website. And just to make it interesting, I didn’t shower or change my clothes. I DID leave once to get a new iPhone because my old one decided it would rather be a hot plate than a phone.

So be it/good riddance.