+1  A: 

You want something along the lines of what I have here. You're going to have to experiment for pixel-perfection. The reason I don't use a definition list is that you can't manipulate both definitions as a block, which this relies on. The key element here is setting line-height manually. The exact markup here isn't important, but this is one way it can be done.

<h2>MONDAY</h2>
<ul>
    <li>hi</li>
    <li>blah</li>
</ul>

* {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}
body {
    padding: 100px 0 0 100px;
}
h2 {
    font: 40px sans;
    width: 200px;
    line-height: 36px;
    float: left;
}
ul {
    height: 40px;
    float: left;
    list-style-type: none;
    margin-top: -2px;
}
li {
    font: 16px sans;
    line-height: 16px;
    margin-top: 2px;
}

(Another property that may be useful is vertical-align, which could be used to position the text within the text line rather than shrinking the text line to fit the text.

Also note that the physical text is going to look smaller than the text height you set because you need to factor in descenders--the parts of letters that go below the text line, like lowercase g's, p's, y's, etc., which is why you'll need to play with the exact pixel amounts if you change text size. Things may also vary between fonts--you'll want one that's well supported cross-platform to get good results on all platforms.)

Sam DeFabbia-Kane
+1  A: 

I've come up with the following solution (let me know what you think of it):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"&gt;
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"&gt;
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<link href="reset.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<style type="text/css">
<!--
body {
    font:12pt Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
.container {
    position:relative;
}
.day {
    font-size:2.75em;
    color:#ccc;
    letter-spacing:-7px;
    margin-right:15px;
}
.line1 {
    position:absolute;
    top:0px;
    margin-top:5px;
}
.line2 {
    position:absolute;
    bottom:0px;
    margin-bottom:7px;
}

-->
</style>
</head>

<body>
<div class="container">
<span class="day">MONDAY</span>
<span class="line1">hi</span>
<span class="line2">blah</span>
</div>
</body>
</html>

I'd still like to see other ideas so if you have one please post it. Thanks.

blcArmadillo
It works. line1 is a pixel too high for me (FF 3.5.2, Fedora Linux). (Although that's just going to happen, independent of method.)The main reason I did it the way I did (as opposed to this way) was that this requires a CSS class on every HTML element you're using, and I prefer to avoid that if possible. This works fine too though.
Sam DeFabbia-Kane