[MD] On Formatting

[MarshaV]

Man, even in a case, is the measure of all things.  Or as Lila 
insinuated, you cannot be wrong.



At 05:57 PM 2/4/2009, you wrote:
> >Marsha:
> >QUESTION EVERYTHING!!!
> >
> >[Krimel]
> >Not to belabor the point but that is EXACTLY what scientists do.
>
>mel:
>Except when grant money is at stake
>and then they become...flexible.
>
>Marsha:
>I question that.   That is an ideal.   Do you even read a newspaper???
>
>[Case]
>A newspaper?
>
>I remember newspapers...
>
>There I am in 1976.
>It's Uncle Sam's birthday.
>I'm growing the only goatee I will ever wear
>To commemorate the occasion.
>
>I spend my days talking:
>To anyone
>I can find
>Who has done...
>Anything, the least bit interesting...
>
>Yeah, I remember newspapers...
>At night I attended public meetings.
>There were Chairmen and Secretaries,
>Agendas and Minutes...
>I had a pad and pen in the hip pocket of flared Levi cords.
>Whatever I could decode from the deteriorating script in the pad
>I typed onto newsprint with a manual Underwood.
>There were scissors and oil cans filled with glue
>On every flat surface in the newsroom.
>Narratives were pieced together from shreds of newsprint
>Bound together with beads of rubber cement
>I once handed my editor story that was five feet long
>He took the scroll. Grumbled...
>Scribbled furiously with his red ink
>Rolled it up and sent it out for typesetting.
>
>Typesetting involved "keypunching"
>The result was a roll of perforated paper tape.
>The tape was feed into a player piano
>But instead of a song it played light
>Through a font wheel
>Hammering photons onto sheets of photo paper
>The paper was scissored, coated with bees wax
>And stuck onto sheets of paper
>Lined with "non-reproducible blue"
>The final "page layout" was taken into a camera
>So big that you could walked around inside it.
>There the "layout" was flashed onto
>Sheet metal covered in silver nitrates.
>The "plates" were bolted onto rollers
>Covered with ink and splattered
>Onto paper fed from spools
>That had to be replaced by forklifts.
>
>By the time my musing on a meeting
>Or my interview with an itinerant Moonie
>Arrived at its highest and best use:
>Catching bird droppings or wrapping fish
>It had been scribbled, typed, chopped up,
>reassembled, retyped, punched, photoed,
>chopped up and re-reassembled
>etched, inked,
>Folded and flung...
>
>Read by a few over coffee
>Or before dinner
>And in the end it all came down to
>Bird shit and fishheads
>
>Thoughts flowed from head to fingers,
>Were moved and molded thus
>Pondered on sofas and toilets and
> >From thence to dust...
>
>For a while I worked in a "Bureau"
>For a "Bureau Chief"
>Once I was a "stringer"
>I had to fill a "news hole."
>
>The "lead graph" of one of my stories once read something like this:
>
>"The smoldering volcano of Eagle Lake politics, erupted in hot charges and
>fiery accusations at last night's city council meeting."
>
>My wife thought, it sounded like porno.
>
>At the bureau newsroom there were no higher order transductions of ideas. We
>type on our Underwoods and glued our stories together. I loved the smell of
>pools of rubber cement drying into what looked like wads of snot. I would
>roll them into tiny balls and bounce them on my desk, chain smoking between
>phone calls to "sources."
>
>When a story was written to my satisfaction, I had to type it ++perfectly++
>into a "teletype" machine that went "chugga chunk" when you banged on its
>keys. It produced a printout and sent a telegraph signal to the main office
>were it "chugga chunked" out on the other end.
>
>Somewhere near the "city desk" in the main office newsroom my chunga chunk
>was added to the chugging from the other bureaus, from the AP and from New
>York Times, sports wires, Rueters... When you went into the teletype room
>all that information was spooling onto the floor. It was like you might want
>to dance but it was hard to pick out a rhythm. All those stories. They
>spooled-in "chunga chunk" from all over the world. Stories of tragedy and
>heroism, recipes for slumgullion, box scores, the Dow Jones. My ideas pooled
>onto the floor, their rhythms dissolving into occasional syncopation with
>the AP machine across the room.
>
>It was intoxicating. It made you want to roll it all up in a ball and bounce
>it on your desk.
>
>It was just as well to work in a bureau away from the frantic transduction
>of ideas. For a while I worked alone in quiet office on the mezzanine. There
>were polished wooden railings in a building constructed during the land boom
>of the '20s. My office door had the name of the newspaper hand-painted on
>frosted glass. Some days I half expected Peter Lorie to come through that
>door with an arm load of exotic statuary.
>
>At the last paper I worked at, there were still people in the building who
>knew how to run the linotype machine in the back of the warehouse that
>housed the composing room and darkroom and the everything else room. I never
>fully understood how linotype worked but it sounded like a huge typewriter
>that you had to sit inside and instead of ink and paper you were typing with
>molten lead.
>
>A newspaper is a system for delivering information. After a series of
>transductions, the final format is ink on paper. Here is a static form of
>information, whose process of becoming, has changed from lead to light to
>laser printing. The process of formatting the information has become ever
>more dynamic. So dynamic in fact that these days the whole idea of unfolding
>a newspaper just seems quaint. The information it contains is been set free
>of its earthly bonds. It exists as clouds of zeros and ones; encoded as
>microscopic patterns of light and shadow, disturbances in magnetic fields
>and streams of electrons emptying in a well of knowledge that may never be
>filled but might one day be unplugged.
>
>But to get to your questions:
>
>I think science began as alchemy and has become alchemy once more.
>Transducing lead into gold is nothing compared to turning lead into data or
>transducing dirt into computer chips.
>
>I've watched a mulletwrapper shape-shift into liquid crystals. I've seen
>science fiction plot devices integrated into economic systems.
>
>Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is
>indistinguishable from magic."
>
>Well, I say, "Abracadabra, motherfucker."
>
>Look around!
>
>Science has given ideas substance; whether they had any before or not.
>
>But no I don't read a newspaper.
>
>Haven't read one in years...
>
>
>
>
>Moq_Discuss mailing list
>Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
>http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
>Archives:
>http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
>http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/


_____________

QUESTION EVERYTHING!!!