The Iowa Iowan

MACLEAN HALL—After grappling with a decade of frustration, UI senior Thomas Krise has finally invented the solution to his inability to communicate accurately with females online.

According to Krise’s faculty adviser, Professor Bill Felgen, “[Krise] never stopped thinking about the problem: why don’t colons and parentheses look more like sideways smiley faces when you put them together?”

Krise secluded himself to his childhood bedroom in Humboldt, Iowa at age twelve, proclaiming that he would not emerge until he could successfully communicate with females on the Internet. He has nearly completed his bachelor’s degree at the University, enrolling in only Distance Education classes accessed from his home computer.

“Long ago, Americans online settled for the standard colon/right paren formula,” Felgen says. “Sometimes they would add a hyphen that was supposed to look like a nose, or the number eight—I think that was supposed to be sunglasses.”

“You can see how Thomas felt misunderstood by the women toward whom he was trying to express his deepest feelings, trapped in this flawed system.”

Krise’s new font, which he calls “>9000,” for reasons unexplained, is indeed a revolution in faces made out of punctuation. Asked to explain what >9000 looks like, Felgen was lost for words. “Imagine…cutting up your face and typing with it.”

>9000 is slated to be available to the general public by 2015, contingent upon Krise’s discovery of a way to produce typographical facial hair.