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joke du journal 5-15-01
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By Funny Guy, Section Culture
Posted on Tue May 15th, 2001 at 08:13:19 AM PDT
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joke du journal 5-15-01
Sorry about missing yesterday.
I was looking at this old typewriter in the store the other day. We use it as one of our props to make the clothing we spread around seem like it's one more juicy chunk marinating in the rich brew of the past. A sort of merchandising form of borrowed prestige. Put a really nice new shirt next to a really nice piece of warm burnished antique luggage and people just naturally feel better about the shirt. Either that or they add it to the pile of shoplifted merch in the piece of false-bottomed luggage they brought into the store.
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| Where was I? Oh yeah. I was looking at this old typewriter, arched up high as it was, completely the opposite of the low slung, streamlined keyboards of today, its keys ranked in staggered rows that reminded me of the stadium seating in new movie theaters, and I said to myself: "That must have been a bitch to type on those things." Yet people were known to get 80 words a minute out of em. And, even more remarkable, the pressure required to strike those keys required not just a wimpy tap like today's clicking ergonomic keypads, but an entire positive stroke of the finger. They say the unusual combination of keys that persists in even today's keyboard setup derives from the tendency of early typewriters to have their letterhammers tangle up when certain letters were propelled rapidly forward and back again. I say, QWERTY be damned, how could anyone get those spindly metal puppies moving fast enough to jam up anyhow?
My own past predates the ease of computer assisted writing. I'll never forget all the papers I could have wrote better in college if I had even the rudiments of word processing technology at my command in the sixties. Many's the time I wanted to modify a phrase or even properly spell a word that I let it slide because I didn't want to retype the whole damn page on one of those clunking QWERTY monsters. Even the advent of electric typewriters didn't help that much, I just made mistakes with less effort, not to mention the occasions when my fatiqued-college-student-writing-a-term-paper-at-three-in-the-morning fingers would hold for a millisecond too long on one key and I'd suddenly get a line full of 45 kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk's. Oops.
Typing used to be a hard, hard task indeed. My only question. Why did no one in the 40's 50's or 60's ever get carpal tunnel syndrome? |
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