Thursday, March 31, 2011

Updates and More

First update: The faulty faucet is fixed! I did it with the aid of a $4.59 Allen wrench and a huge lug wrench. Yeah!

Second update: MRI postponed to Monday do to poor weather forecast for tomorrow.

And now the really exciting news. Typewriters are back! The headline that warmed my old heart was in the Styles section of today's NYTimes: "Rather than go gently into the digital night, manual typewriters have captured a new generation of hearts."

Welcome to my world new generation(See title page of my blog). I started my journalism career on Royal Standards, those noisy, sometimes sticky keyboards when my fingers crashed into the spaces between the keys because I was in such a hurry to get the words out.

Does anyone remember carbon paper? As a copy boy at the pre-pre-Murdoch New York Post one of my chores was to make "books" for the rewrite men(Get me rewrite!"). The book was three sheets of copy paper with carbons between the first and second sheets.

The finished book first went to the City Editor who kept the bottom copy for his file, the spike. The other two went to the copy editor's desk and when it was ready for print we ran the clean copy to the linotype room to be made up for the next edition.

It was an urgent, noisy, exhilerating and downright insipring procedure. Digitizing the print media may be cleaner and faster and surely more economical but you can't beat the clash and clamor of an old fashioned news room, the heart of which was the manual typewriter.

The Royal is dead. Long live the Royal!

1 comment:

  1. Congrats on the faucet repair. I go back as far as the electric typewriter-a high school graduation gift. Came in handy for my room/housemates and me at school.

    Petrina and I finally saw The Social Network last night. Also had trouble keeping up w/Zuckerberg. I'd read about the twins legal battle but didn't know about law suit from friend Eduardo. What bothers me is can't help forming opinions about real life facebook characters portrayed in the film w/o knowing accuracy of actual events. Will be searching for story behind the film.

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