So, I decided to make a Panerai skin for Beautiful Widgets.

Click the picture to see an enlargement of what I feel is the most handsome Panerai timepiece, the near-$20,000 Luminor Flyback Regatta. Only 500 of these were ever made in 2006. Absolutely gorgeous!

The Panerai 253

One of the most striking features of Panerai watches is their typeface. After searching high and low for the Panerai font and coming up with nothing, I went ahead and recreated the type in Photoshop using paths and strokes.

Panerai numerals are almost universally a light green color because of the luminescent paint (commonly referred to as “lume”) used. They are one of two types of dials, painted numerals, wherein the numerals are painted onto the dial, or sandwiched, wherein the numerals are cut out of the dial and the dial is placed on top of luminescent material.

Painted Lume

Sandwiched Lume

So, I’ve created two skins. One for each type of common Panerai lume! Screenshots:

Painted Numerals

Sandwiched Numerals

These are for the classic “Home Weather” widget, not the new “Super Clock” widget (which I don’t much care for — yet).

You may download them here:

http://bit.ly/ihjCDF

Let’s see, about eight years ago I started this blog… We covered news items. First it was strange news items, like the heartwarming story of the Nevada prison inmates who nursed a gaggle of puppies back to health. Then we moved into political news because none of us could stand George W. So we covered things like Ann Coulter’s alleged sex change and voter registration card.

And then the site crashed.

And then the Obama came!

We got sick of writing about that sort of thing all of the time. Bad news, bad news, bad news, and more bad news. Every day it’s more bad news and all we were doing was reveling in it. Let me tell you, it majorly sucks to be jonesing for downers all the time.

Politics was a happy place in 2008. After Obama was elected, we were afraid that because of our joy and elation we may wind up feeling like a lost lot. We may have no daily fuel to stoke our outrage. There would be no more fire. No passion. Evenings past, spent watching our side’s pundits take the fight to them, would be no more! Now was the busy task of waiting for the next election cycle, to see just how awesome the rout would be!

So in other words, we lost interest.

Anyway, we’re back for the time being. We’ll make no effort to restore the old database. It’s too far gone. We may bring back the picture archive at some point, because there are too many forums and spam sites that link directly to URLs of benign photos that will soon be replaced with redirects to tubgirl.

So says I.