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Re: [OM] OT: Use of verbs, was Re: olympus Digest, Vol 27, Issue 31

Subject: Re: [OM] OT: Use of verbs, was Re: olympus Digest, Vol 27, Issue 31
From: Bob Whitmire <bwhitmire@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2011 12:59:30 -0500
I remember hot type, turtles and such. Reading type upside down. Getting a 
black bar on your necktie from leaning over the turtle while reading upside 
down. Okay, I got into the business right after cold type had been adopted. But 
the composing room foreman was still bitching about the change, and I heard 
more hot-type stories than I can recall. That said, I got to make the 
transition from paper tape to computer-generated type. They sent me to school 
in Boston for two weeks on an all-expense-paid extravaganza.

Two four-foot towers contained in a climate-controlled, shielded room. We 
called it the bridge. Sometimes I'd turn off the overhead lights just to watch 
all the green, yellow and red lights blink and glow. Positively Star Trek. The 
two units were for what we called concurrent redundancy. System operated on 
DOS. I've got many times the computing power of that system on my desk, and my 
room isn't even shielded. <g>

In my family, having a letter published in the New York Times elevates one to, 
well, elevated status. I never had a letter published, but the sons of bitches 
did steal my crowning achievement in print journalism. Not that anyone knows 
it, but I was the journalist who broke the story about Waldenbooks taking 
Salman Rushdie's _The Satanic Verses_ off its shelves. The manager of the store 
in the town where I worked called me, asked me to come over, and when I did she 
gave me _the_ hard copy of the order from HQ. My editor decided it was too much 
of a story for our little podunk paper (after all, we still said "gotten"), and 
sent it up to the Times (which owned us), and they printed it on the front page 
as though it was their own.

Sons of bitches!

Then, pouring salt in the wound, when the company newsletter came out, they 
gave my executive editor kudos for passing the story along, never once 
mentioning the effing city editor, who acquired the damned story in the first 
place.

Sons of bitches!

--Bob


On Feb 1, 2011, at 12:13 PM, Piers Hemy wrote:

> Truth be told, I put that in expecting you to bite, Bob. And if I didn't
> cling to the "ASCII-only" in email convention, I would have out a real
> digraph in. I admit to a soft spot for them - got me published on the
> letters page of The Times too. But that was when it was a real paper, hot
> metal, printed in London, 60 screen mono images, none of this full colour
> web offset regionally printed tabloid nonsense!

-- 
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