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Happy 24th Birthday to Amber Johanna Pack.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a very special place in my heart for puns and wordplay. In today’s issue of the Salt Lake Tribune, Paul Rolly included several puns from an “earlier” edition of the Washington Post. I’d come across these well over a year ago, and enjoyed them enough to pass them onto a good friend who appreciated them but didn’t fully trust their attributed source.

The vague wording in Rolly’s column renewed my interest in finding the original source. After spending a few minutes with Google, I got my answer. (Seriously, what did we do before Google?) Turns out, these were first published as part of the Washington Post’s Style Invitational column. From 1998.

Seriously, 1998?! Think back to 1998—back when politics was dominated by the Lewinsky scandal, back when Michael Jordan beat the Utah Jazz in the NBA finals (again), and back when N*Sync was cool. Are you kidding? Essentially, this columnist decided it wasn’t enough to forward this to everyone in his contact list—rather, he had to forward it to everyone within the newspaper’s circulation.

For the record, yes, I still think the wordplay is amusing. But not nearly as amusing as the fact that the Salt Lake Tribune actually paid someone to publish this.

As part of my always-random design job, earlier this year I was asked to design a small flag. While the flag itself wasn’t anything too exciting (just my company’s logo on a black background), the flag’s intended destination was. That’s right, everybody, I now have a connection (in a very small, “I’m not that adventurous” way) to…wait for it…Mt. Everest.

That’s right, if all goes well in the summit attempt, eventually I might have access to some pictures of my flag on top of the world. That basically makes me one step away from being on top of the world, right? The flag is being carried to the summit by Kevin, climber extraordinaire, author of KC Summits’ Everest Blog, and friend to the poo-bahs in my company who requested the flag (hence my involvement).

Honestly, I’ve adored the Everest Blog. Not only are the traditions fascinating, but the entire reading experience is tinged with a feeling of urgency—you’re really pulling for the guy, really hoping he’ll make it up the mountain.

He still hasn’t summited yet (mainly due to weather problems), so you’ve got time to catch up and enjoy the rest of the ride (and root for my flag). Enjoy!

The last few days at work have been…well…suffice it to say I’ve needed to vent a lot. One of my clients has requested revisions on a design I am particularly proud of. Worse, the requested revisions, in my opinion, make the overall product much less compelling than it was in my original. Now, normally I consider myself a fairly flexible person. I don’t mind making revisions as long as they improve the overall presentation. In fact, I really enjoy a synergistic collaborative process where the whole is significantly better than the ideas of its parts.

However, whenever I’m asked to introduce errors or “ugliness” into a document, I find myself in a foul mood. A really foul mood. An “if I were a cartoon I’d have a huge black rain cloud above my head” foul mood.

So fast forward to today, where in unrelated webdesign work, I came across this post by the brilliant designer Jeffrey Zeldman. In it, he discusses how—in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence—Thomas Jefferson had included passages that abolished slavery. However, in order to get the Declaration approved by congress, he had been forced to delete these passages. Zeldman then draws the following conclusion:

The next time a client requests changes that make your work less beautiful, less usable, or less smart, remember that greater people than you have lost bigger battles over far more important matters.

What did I tell you? The man’s brilliant. And the funny thing is that even as I was “put in my place,” I felt comforted to know that there are other designers who have perhaps experienced similar foul moods while accepting similarly frustrating, inane changes to documents that, overall, really won’t make any difference.

And the next time I’m in D.C., I’m getting a copy of the declaration and tacking it to the wall next to my monitor.