Lately I've been seeing a surprising number of books using unusual ligatures in the text on their back covers. It goes well beyond the standard f ones — I'm looking at a book right now which has ct, gi, ip, it, sp, and st ligatures just dropped in casually. I think I've seen this done on books from multiple publishers, too. Is there some recent fad for that sort of thing? I like ct and st ligatures, but the others look pretty distracting to me.

I saw Transformers tonight. I think it was as bad as a movie could be without accidentally being bad enough to generate some ironic value. I have also decided that Roger Ebert's opinion is worthless because instead of saying that Transformers was one of the worst films ever, he said positive things about it. Now, I didn't go see it on his recommendation or anything, but anyone who came away from that movie with something other than disgust or revulsion has thereby lost all credibility on the quality of anything having to do with movies.