This Is True...

This Is True is a weekly newsletter, sent by email each Monday afternoon (Pacific Time).  Each issue has ten or so stories from the recent press, each story with a twist of some kind.  Some are just funny, some point out an injustice, and there are several recurring themes (such as the many failures of zero tolerance).  There are also several other features, such as the “Bonzer Site of the Week”, and the “Honorary Unsubscribe”  I look forward to reading it each Monday.

I started getting it many years ago, by subscribing to the free edition (still available).  I've forgotten exactly when I started reading it, but I think it was probably 1999 or 2000.  Sometime later I switched to the (very inexpensive) “premium” edition, which has a few more stories and features than the free edition.  More importantly, it supports the publisher (Randy Cassingham).  He and his wife, plus one helper, publish This Is True out of their home north of the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.

Randy recently asked his readers to help promote This Is True, and I'm happy to oblige.  Read about it here, where you can either sign up for the free edition or subscribe to the premium edition...

He So Loved the Poor...

Via my mom, the Bumper Snicker of the Day:

For At Least the Past 23 Years...

The Center for Responsive Politics has been collecting data on the contributors to political campaigns for the past 23 years.  This is a political transparency initiative; their goal is to inform voters about the special interests that influence (or at least, try to influence) elections.

For all those years, the number one source of corporate money for the Democratic Party has been Goldman Sachs.  Until this year, that is.  This year, Goldman Sachs is contributing 3:1 for Mitt Romney. 

Broadly speaking, other financial services firms have followed suit.  The Democratic Party has lost the hearts and minds of one of it's loudest – and richest – supporters.

Isn't it interesting that the Democratic Party has been the dominant recipient of the financial service industry's largesse over the years?  The Democrats love to bash Republicans for being in bed with the corporate fat cats, and yet the fattest cats of them all have actually been in bed with the Democrats all along. 

Obama fixed that.  Nice!

Words and Phrases Based on Obsolete Technology...

That headline caught my eye, and I just had to go off and read the article.  I had to laugh at myself when I did, because I knew every one of these terms – and more related ones.  For the most part, that's just a simple reflection of my age.  For instance, I'm plenty old enough to remember when telephones all had dials, and you really did have to “dial” a phone number.

But the most interesting one to me was the post about terms related to typography.  In junior high school I took a class in Graphic Arts, which included a segment on how to manually set type.  For some reason I really can't fathom, I did really well at setting type – I could very quickly pull the individual letters from the “California job case” they were stored in, place them properly in a frame, use en- and em-spaces, use shims for the line spacing, and quoins (photo at right) to tighten them all up in the frame.  I loved operating the old-fashioned letterpress, and I could stand in front of it for hours feeding each sheet of paper in manually while the press was operating at top speed (20 sheets/minute!). I took that course in the '60s, and even then this equipment was on the verge of obsolesence.  I remember Mr. Mayer, the teacher, complaining that it was difficult to replace some of the type, and he urged us to be careful with them. 

I haven't thought about typesetting for many years, and yet all the old terms and gear came right back to mind.  I'll bet you I could still set type today, after a few hours of practice.  But the equipment may only exist in museums today...