Douze Lunes points to « Scourge of Arial« . It tells a little bit of type history. I like those things, as you might have noticed.
Speaking of fonts, these days, I’m trying to use Gentium, « a typeface for the nations » as an alternative to my old favourite, Minon. It’s free-as-in-beer (and I’m not convinced the open source model would work well for fonts) and the goal of the project is interesting. I stumbled upon it looking for fonts with the required accents to write pinyin.
An implication I didn’t think of at first: on a Mac, is you don’t install IE (or Office), you don’t get Arial.
No Georgia/Verdana without IE on the Mac?
http://whatdoiknow.org/archives/001312.shtml
« But if in the near future nobody can download the browser without purchasing Microsoft’s operating system, and without the browser you can’t obtain Verdana, Georgia, Arial or Trebuchet, what will happen to the state of typography on the web »