The Roar of The Greasepaint The Smell of The Crowds …

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a bit of black ink

This is how it used to work

It has not been long ago, in real time, that movable type was invented, actually twice I understand. But let’s give Guttenburg the credit because that might incite someone to correct me and actually respond. Please do. Movable type, what was that? Each symbol for each letter carved out of wood or brass or lead in reverse was set into a chaise and inked, then paper pressed over it. At least in simplest terms. The result was an ‘impression’ of the inked type on the paper, now right side up and readable – Printing .. and it was now possible to print many many of the same document.

It was now possible to communicate an idea to the masses through the printed page that was never before possible. However literacy was so low, that the importance of the invention was primarily for religion and government, followed closely by a group of busy bodies that came to be embodied by the legendary Mark Twain … News Men and Women … Reporters Newspapers .. without the advances in printing would have never happened. The world would have been a different place.

Can you imagine Superman if he had to work at a car wash during his off hours? It just wouldn’t have worked out. The people that worked in the industry in the early days of newspaper, and printing, all sorts of printing have a special bond … oh bond .. some have a fondness for bond black ink. That was good.  Outlawed now by the pollution police, everything had to go to tasteless soybased inks. Nothing like pulling the lid off a barrel of fresh bond black ink. Probably like kids huffing spray paint but  bond black ink stays in the system.

A month later, you could buy a magazine in the newstand, open it up and stick your nose in the middle and get a good whiff of bond black. Yeah, it was that good.  But fresh … it was priceless.  The one sheet at a time printing was hard and slow, technology quickly moved to speed the process along. there really was no way to eliminate the one image one impression rule. The solution was to make those impressions happen very quickly.

So paper was kept in rolls, presses handled the “type” on drums photographically, ink was rolled on at high speed and the paper ran through like ‘webs’ running through multiple drums getting printed on both sides at the same time, in multiple colors and many pages, at incredible speed. Even coatings, drying and shined and polished, cut, perforated folded and stapled. At the end of the giant machine, completed newspapers, books, magazines, whatever … totally amazing.  Communication

All because we learned to shape letters on little blocks and arrange them on a frame we we could print a little faster than writing by hand. …. don’t take things for granted, build on our past, reach for our future. Life is not fair, we all have an opportunity to do something in life, find it and do it.

Can it be true expression is dead?

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Are we finished as thinkers? Has the electronic media finally overcome our children to the point that thought has ceased? It may be so, or at least soon. Talk to young people. They answer in single syllable replies and look at you sideways if you try to draw out their answer … this is at 4 or 27 years old. My experiences with both and in between tell me that communication has changed, forever. I don’t feel good about it.

Here is why. In a nutshell, I read articles and pieces these young people write. They write badly .. no, excuse me. I write badly. There is little excuse for the errors that they make in published works. That said … where are the editors, proofreaders and who is paying to have it published? Is no one doing any quality control? OMG

I understand that ‘journalists’ are generally getting younger and younger, graduates and interns being churned out from schools that have consistently lowered standards year after year. It really is a pity that one of the requirements of English language journals is not fluency in the English language.

Pardon me, sentences have structure, paragraphs have purpose. If one properly writes the first sentence in the paragraph, they can usualy tell the reader what to expect the topic of the paragraph will highlight. The sentences will have a subject noun or pronoun and a verb or adverb telling us what we need to know about the subject. Telling it clearly is the art of writing.

Can Not Read Past The Spellling

At some point my sense of reason has refused to accept information from sources with huge grammatical and spelling errors that should have been easily corrected. Have you found the same to be true? When I read a headline that is ambiguous because of a spelling error, I have to question if it is deliberate or possibly that poorly managed. Either way; the writing from that source has to be in question in the future.

Must Disconnect

We have to help young people get back into reality and real time. This being connected every second to the Xbox, phone, droid, iPhone, car, icemaker, tv, latest shoes is killing them and their minds.

We had a young man over visiting a few weeks back. He sat on a chair a couple feet away and was trying to talk to us. He could not. His phone was in both hands. It demanded all of his attention. I tried to interrupt, but he said that if he didn’t respond ‘they would just keep texting him’ (like that would cause some global panic or something). So our visit really ended with him wandering off with his phone. I dont’ remember his name, don’t guess I care. It won’t be important.

 

Random Energy

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I wish there was more direction that could drive comments tonight, but Chaos Theory will have to suffice. Pumkin pie is good, homemade pumkin pie is better simply because of the factors of differential that occur. Perhaps no two home made pumkin pies should ever be identical. Like snowflakes. That may be a Law. A harmess one, beyond knowledge of it’s impact on the universe, but it seems benign at this point.

On the other hand, the commercial stores put out thousands of pies that are so exactly chemically alike that they defiy consumption. They are round Twinkies (unable to find the key for the trademark) last forever, never spoil never taste differerent. To be avoided at all cost. At least this year, I failed to notice last year, but this year I looked and noticed a definite lack of tins of those terrible fruit cakes that were once such a popular gift to give someone you did not really know or like. A total gag gift. Not cheap, but has anyone really tried to eat one? I think they descovered them in the Pyramids and they were determied to be still edibile so they marketed them. Who knew?

Hello world!

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WordPress seems to have more facets than a cheap Zirconium, not certain that it needs them all. but it borrows or maybe is a generation removed from the old WordPerfect creation that died in the 80′s.

then they added the web on top of it …. or so it seems.