Ouch!

This is my home machine, and I can't do an overlay. But that's seriously not a match.

Good job, yet again.

Are you tired, yet? The msm is hoping you'll get tired.

I hope you don't. This is important.

I wonder why he didn't try the overlay ... hmmm?

And they ought to know better than to link to kos for a "better-informed perspective"!

Yes, don't get tired. They figure one man will eventually just bag it.

That is so sad.

Send me your email address and I'll send you my two perfect matched from Word -- with all supporting graphics and description of how they were done.

Jeez they really are getting desperate. Since I am somewhat more mature than most folks out here, I have
to wear reading glasses; the blurring seemed pretty obvious.
So I reached out for my trusty magnifying glass (when you're a successful lawyer, it helps to keep one handy to read the small print) guess what? It's even more blurry. There's absolutely NO WAY these documents match. None. zilch, nada. What made Mr. Mendelson think he could get away with such obvious bs?

Note that this guy is apparently relying on a full-fledge specialist for his brilliant demo.
None other thant Kos 'screw them' Zúniga.
Bwahahaha!

I'm sure this has ben said already, but I got really angry when I saw you described in the LA Times as a "former musician" who is now a conservative blogger.
Such a complete lack of regard for your credentials exposes the very worst type of media bias.

Why the big fuss about President Bush's National Guard performance and no fuss about John Kerry's treasonous behavior when he return home from Vietnam. I guess aiding the enemy is on par with liberals.
Missing a few guard meetings is nothing compared to Kerry's false statements to congress.
Missing a few guard meetings is nothing compared to
Kerry meeting with the Viet Congs in Paris.
Missing a few guard meetings is nothing compared to
holding a meeting, discussing whether or not to kill a few pro war senators.

I guess I just don't understand.

one word: swine.

Charles, you should redirect refers from the link PC magazine has to a page showing the two images superimposed with the words "Exact match? Yeah, right..." above it, then put a link to LGF proper below it.

Just to slap them in the face with reality like a cold dead fish.

Let's see him duplicate the entire memo on his machine without benefit of wordwrap. Let's see if the superscript lines up and if the centering is the same.

Is he really from PC World or PC Twilight Zone?

Setting his machine it to justify to both margins automatically eliminates any difference in total line width. Any variance in letter spacing will then be less obvious, since differences would not be adding to each as the line goes from left to right. Instead, both machines would be "fudging" their ineherent letter widths to reach the total same line width.

His small postage-stamp sized pictures appear to have different margins set, which exagerate the differences that still exist. However, the last line of the paragraph (which is only left-justified) loses similarity much faster than the lines above it.

Of course they're desperate:
The truth has begun to dawn on the rank and file media-left conformists as well as the professionals: Dan Rather has bet the ranch on this flimsy fraud. If he goes down, he takes the whole thing with him; the Democratic Party, the LLL, the academic left, the entire dominant culture of the last 40 years.
This is one of the weak points of an authoritarian culture, a strong enough authority can destroy the whole thing with a single miscalculation.

All this time I thought it was Personal Computing Magazine (aka PC Magazine). Who knew it was Politically Crazed Moonbat Magazine?

This is stupid! What is he trying to prove by comparing justified text? The Killian forgeries are not justified.

For those unfamiliar, "justified" means straight on both right and left margins. The Killian forgeries, like most letters, are typed left justified, lined up on the left and raggedy on the right.

I might be missing something here, but in attempting to match a Word document with the Selectric Composer sample is anybody using default settings (spec. margins)?

I think a key point is that Word duplicated the memos without meaningful user intervention.

Add PC magazine to the list of things to put in the circular file.

TOOLS!

1. I have eleven years experience in typesetting on 70's machines.

2. I was the firsdt person to develop an interface between them and PC's.

3. I have determined that these documents are fakes based on the same evidence that Charles Johnson used, and my own experience.

4. I am a registered Democrat with no partisan interest in the election of George W. Bush.

5. I have investigated CBS repeatedly -- They lie, deliberately, with malice aforethought.

AND I WILL TESTIFY TO ALL OF THESE IN COURT. JUST TELL ME WHEN AND WHERE!

#17--

The sample is not just justified, it is narrow, like a newspaper column. This is to keep the lines short, to avoid the text becoming too misaligned on any one line.

In other words, this is a careful, yet inept, attempt to discredit Charles. They minimized all the differences, but to do that they had to use a sample completely different from the documents at issue here.

Well that helps me thin out my bookmarks. PC mag is a lefty rag!

Maybe old age is catching up to me but just what the hell is PC world trying to do? Even if all of their staff worships at the alter stone of liberal BS you'd think they would have the common sense to stay well away from anything that would impact their business, especially political controversy.

Maybe it's just the pack instinct calling to them, oh well.

Next week will be key. MSM will begin to ignore this issue as old news. Any reference will be 90% rehash of the contents of the memo, with 10% mention of attempts on the internet to discredit. It is possible that the NYT may actually stand up and plunk CBS. If not, Ashcroft's hand may be forced. Certainly, up until now, the Admin had been sitting back not wanting to be accused of partisan use of DOJ and FBI. The play might actually start on the Hill, with a few senior GOP demanding an investigation, though not without political consequence. What breaks this wide open is the FBI making a definitive statement, maybe jointly with the DOD, that the documents are forgeries, followed by a request to CBS for the source.

The kicker is that the overlay of the PC mag images appears to slip in both directions. Which is what you would expect if you were comparing a kerned, proportionally-spaced MS-Word document with an un-kerned, pseudo-proportional output from the IBM composer. Some letters would be fatter in one, some fatter in the other, and the images would match more or less well as you go across each line.

cathy :-)

#23 Correction, PC Magazine not PC world. Sorry guess I'm to tired and sober to post properly. I'll get a bottle of Bushmills and get properly acclimated:)

Actually Charles, if you give him the benefit of the doubt that the images may have gotten their aspect ratios screwed up during their conversion to gifs and do a free stretch to match up the corners you do get a pretty damn good fit.

My problem with the article, though, is you have to really play with Word to get it to get the words to line up that well. The article claims (implies) that not much tweaking was done, but I could never get the full justification and word breaks to match up like his sample. I messed around with margins, but eventually I had to add spaces here and there to get words (or parts of words) to drop to the next line, which of course totally screws up the match.

Bottom line, you have to do quite a bit of munging to get Word to match that 30 year old document. You have to do no work what so ever to get Word to match up with the CBS memo.

The wording in the sample talks about how to adjust the justification, thus I think the word "justified" is correct

Oh sorry, you said "not just justified," not
"not justified"

My bad.

Well all it did was show the guys political leanings, and exactly which direction PCMag is going. What a shame...I used to like it.

Huh.
So why didn't he do the test with the text of the Bush memos, instead of text from the Selectric manual? Wouldn't that be more to the point? And why justify it, when justification has nothing to do with the memos?

Couple other observations -- he asks:
"Which one was typed forty or more years ago on a typewriter, and which one was typed on a computer today?"
So he's saying that one is scanned from a decades-old piece of typing paper? Really? Looks to me like it's scanned from the Selectric manual, which would have been typeset and printed like any other manual. -- Or was the Selectric manual typed on a Selectric as a marketing gimic back in the wayback days? Seems unlikely. So what are we supposed to think -- that somebody "forty or more years" ago typed out that passage from the manual as an exercise for themselves? Well, OK, maybe, but then we're also supposed to believe that that typing exercise has been saved in a drawer for all these years? Or is he saying that he himself typed it out on an old Selectric himself just this week -- but he doesn't ask "which one could have been typed 40+ years ago" ... he asks which one WAS.

It's ironic that he chose the instructions on justification as an example, because the instructions say you have to type the whole thing twice, which I think we can agree is pretty unlikely to have been done by a man whose widow says he couldn't type. (And if it were typed by a secretary then where are the secretary's lower-case initials?)

Finally, he does this little song and dance at the end:
"Of course, none of this demonstrates that the documents dated from the early 1970s are in fact genuine. It only demonstrates that the fact that the disputed documents can be reproduced in Microsoft Word is not convincing evidence that they are inauthentic ... I performed this experiment in typography because I have been interested for years in the history and technology of type, not for any partisan political purposes, except to the degree that the public interest is better served by truth than by falsehoods."
Uh, yeah, OK, but if he's so openminded and nonpartisan then why is he branding Charles's example as a "falsehood"?

#23

I guess some genius at PC Mag figured, "Hey, this looks like a computer controversy!" and thought they could weigh in with some authority. Who better to comment on computer typography issues than Personal Computer magazine, huh?

Too bad it turns out that the so-called computer experts at this computer magazine know less about computers than the median readership of Little Green Footballs.

This is why I only read magazines about subjects I know I know less about than their authors.

Everyone knows that musicians are mad geniuses who can figure out computers and politics faster than a computer geek can figure out a French horn. Screw the LA times.

let’s leave aside the issue of why Jerry Killian, who his family said did not type, would have used the most complicated and expensive typewriter available to type short memos, only to file them away

Not to mention, whether the National Guard spent $4k ($17k in today's money) on a specialized typewriter which needed training to use, and why would Killian be trained on it in an era when clerks/secretaries did all the typing and officers/executives never did their own typing.

So far no one has investigated what would be a typical NG typewriter in 1972.

Hey, does anyone else get a "Locked" message when trying to view the exact match?

To be fair, Mendelson doesn't actually claim to have debunked LGF's comparisons. His point seems to be that one can't necessarily distinguish Selectric Composer from computer-generated output by hasty visual inspection, which is true, albeit far behind the current state of the discussion.

And before people get mad at PC Magazine, they should look at this post by John Dvorak.

Wow,

He completely missed the point.

Is it normal for PC Magazine to get into partisan politics?

Sorry, my bad, I read too quickly and didn't catch the paragraph saying that the Selectric manual was indeed typed on a Selectric as a marketing gimic.

I'm going to have to look at this closer, and look at the Selectric manual some more. It does seem as though he's suggesting that Killian changed the ball on the typewriter to do the "th" and then changed it back.

I didn't think people actually read PC magazine. I'm sure LGF gets more hits in a day than PC magazine gets subscriers in a year.

[Link: moderncrusader.blogspot.com...]

Ask and ye shall receive. An emailer to High Hewitt just answered my question in #34 above.

"Dear Hugh

During my illustrious military career, when not on secret missions up the Hudson, I was assigned to the newspaper at Ft. Lewis, Washington, where there were a number of IBM Executive typewriters but no models that could do proportional type. There was no such typewriter on the entire post.

When assigned to the publications section of the Admissions Office at West Point, I found the one and only such typewriter on the post. It was in our section and closely guarded by the civilian secretary trained and assigned to operate it. It definitely was not used for memos. It had taken a special requisition, signed by the head of the Admissions Office, a full colonel, and the Superintendent of the Academy, a general, to get it. The military's standard purchasing procedures had to be waived in order to obtain one of these machines because these were not something normally purchased by the military and were available from only one manufacturer, IBM. Those typewriters cost over $4,000 in 1971, about the same as a Buick Roadmaster.

You can bet the children that neither Guard nor Reserve units, not to mention the majority of military posts, had such typewriters at any time.

Keep up the good work.

Glenn Avery"

From Charles' posting:

Mendelson includes two postage stamp-sized images of a right-justified paragraph typed in MS Word and on an IBM Composer, and claims that they are an exact match.

Charles, shouldn't that read "field justified" rather than "right justified"?

Is Mendelson the same guy as 'sockeye,' I wonder?

PC Magazine: Trolling for hits! ;)

/just kidding, I think...

What a pity BYTE magazine is no more. :(

Now, we have the left vouching for the veracity of the left. This is just great!

Charles, I posted several responses to Edward Mendelson of PC Mag yesterday (use name wamoore). Mendelson's post is flagrently dishonest in several ways: (1) He uses two small GIF's that cannot be easily compared. (2) He preformed the wrong test. He should have tried to demonstrate that the IBM Composer can duplicate the forged documents, not that MS Word can duplicate an IBM Composer document. (3) His cite of KOS as more qualified than you would be laughable if it were not so stupid. (4) His disclaimer is openly dishonest, especially the last phrase. He was clearly trying to vendicate CBS/Rather on the forged documents, yet he claims interest in the truth.

As a subscriber to PC Magazine since it's inception, I'm offended by such flim-flam from one of its employees. I did enjoy John Dvorak's response. (the second post in response).

LOL, PC Magazine -- owned.

Score so far:

Blogs: 2
CBS News: 0
PC Magazine: 0

Note that the PC Magazine article refers to Daily "Screw Them Dead Americans!" Kos as "a notably better-informed perspective."

Hey PC Magazine, stick to writing about motherboards and hard drives...

PS: I notice that PC Magazine writer John Dvorak has chimed in on the

He used a fully justified text sample. No shit they are going to match.

I sent him an email telling him to try an unjustifed sample.

This is a revolution.

New media + blogosphere= power to the people.

Frank (post #44); Jerry Pournelle, a major columnist for Byte is an avowed political leftist and Bush hater. He has done and said far worse than Mendelson.

And Charles Johnson says it's not even close. "Calling this a match is completely ridiculous. A person writing for PC Magazine really ought to know better than to try to pull off such an obvious flimflam."

posted at 04:38 PM by Glenn Reynolds

Glenn's got a hair-trigger response for LGF these days.

How friggin appropriate, a failed rebuttal from the PC? You can't make this shi'ite up! :)

I don't doubt that the Left will accept this 'proof'. After all, they've been saying for years that if you overlay a Charlie Chaplin moustache on a picture of George Bush, the result looks exactly like Adolf Hitler.

InstaPundit on Sullivan:

I don't think the tone on his blog has been as constructive of late

Hmmm, given his Southern-Gentlemanly obliqueness, this is pretty serious.

I don't think the tone on [Andrew Sullivan's] blog has been as constructive of late

A hypocritical tool would be the description used in my locale.
 

How appropriate. It's called PC Magazine.

My advice is for everyone to light up a smoke, kick back and watch the Dan Rather Kneepad Brigade march onward into oblivion.

#56,

Ahhh, my alma mater gave this fool a Ph.D.? The shame.

I haven't bought a copy of PC Magazine in years. This is one of the reasons why.

What's a Comparative Lit major doing writing for a computer magazine, anyway?

Wow, how sad for PC Magazine, to wade so clumsily and stupidly into this argument, and at just the moment when even leftist standbys like the NYTimes are acknowledging the forgeries and laughing at the CBS 'we stand by it' plankwalk. Bizarre, actually. I hope that it's just some old-fashioned shadiness - like somebody at PC Mag owing somebody at CBS or KerryKamp a favor - and not that they're just morons.

Look, PC guy, why dont you just go down to DNC headquarters, get on your knees, open wide, and blow Kerry to completion.

It would be a much simpler way to get your point across, and you wont be distracting the rest of us from the more serious issue of a biased media using blatantly fraudulent documents to rig a presidential election in a time of war.

RUn along now, PC boy.

Charles is making the biggest mistake of his life in taking on this guy. Doesn't he know he's tangling with a professor of English here? :-)

Edward Mendelson

Edward Mendelson is a professor of English at Columbia University and a contributing editor at PC Magazine.

[Link: www.columbia.edu...]

Edward Mendelson is a professor of English at Columbia University. Before joining the faculty at Columbia he taught at Yale and Harvard. He earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and his B.A. at the University of Rochester. His professional interests span from nineteenth and twentieth century literature to formal and social aspects of poetry and narrative.

[Link: www.marshillaudio.org...]

Mendelson's family web site:

[Link: mendelson.org...]

I don't think the tone on his blog has been as constructive of late

That is pretty serious for him. Much better than an email to AS about his politically correct fence-sitting lately on the WOT and other things and the detrimental effect that fence-sitting might have on his ass. Kinda glad I didn't send it.

For reasons much too sensitive for me to explain, here are a couple of ketchup lovers.

A person writing for PC Magazine really ought to know better than to try to pull off such an obvious flimflam.

Why would you think that? Writers for PC Magazine are mostly tards.

Mr. Mendelson's fellow PC Magazine columnist, John Dvorak, provides yet another incriminating George Bush / TANG letter for Mendelson to subject to his decisive expert analysis. [Link: www.dvorak.org...]

Edward Mendelson has been writing computer-related articles for years. I developed some keycap fonts back in 1994 and he was writing then. He ought to know better.

Everyone has been comparing the Word doc to the forgeries. I was one of a zillion people who typed those memos Thursday morning and I was convinced. Today I decided to see if I could create the same memo in Lotus Word Pro and WordPerfect.

I did not overlay my docs over the forgeries, I overlaid them over my Word doc (it's already been established to my satistfaction that the Word doc matches the forgeries). Neither matches.

Okay, so I can't duplicate a Word doc with Word Pro or WordPerfect and have a match. The horizontal and vertical spacing are off.

Charlies, if you are interested in getting the images, e-mail me.

You tell 'em, Charles! Another one bites the dust! The bodies are piling up so fast and thick a girl can't find a place to sit down around here. Sheeesh!

social aspects of poetry and narrative

Translation: "Bullshit".

Kos is a better source than LGF...yes and there is this magic world behind my wardrobe with talking lions and that Heinz/Kerry/Kerry/Heinz woman.

Dole Office Clerk: Occupation?

Mendelson: Professor of English.

Dole Office Clerk: What?

Mendelson: Professor of English. I coalesce the vapors of human existence into a viable and meaningful comprehension vis a vis the formal and social aspects of poetry and narrative.

Dole Office Clerk: Oh, a BULLSHIT artist!

I have not posted for a few days. I have been watching and listening. I know nothing about the techie stuff so I did not want to embarrass myself or the lgf site. But now I need to know something. Pardon me if this is stupid and I think I know the answer but why doesn't the link to daily kos work? I have been having few probs with my computer so it could be my computer.

I got the site to display now.

Here's the letter I just sent to Professor Mendelson:

Dear Professor Mendelson;

Your article on the uproar about Bush's purported National Guard papers tells me a lot about you.

You are either 1) a dishonest, highly partisan Kerry supporter, or 2) incredible stupid for someone who is supposedly a personal computer expert.

I really don't care which you are. But since you are one of these two, I can no longer rely on PC magazine for advice -- because I can't be certain that other PC magazine authors aren't also dishonest and/or
stupid.

I have read PC magazine for over 20 years, have subscribed to it since 1985, and presently have two subscriptions -- one for home and one for my office. I can even remember when Bill Machrone was
editor in chief, and the column he wrote when he stepped down. I don't intend to stop reading PC magazine. In fact, if I need to, I will purchase a copy at one of the local bookstores.

But I will also immediately cancel my two subscriptions to your magazine, to hopefully impress on your superiors that perhaps they should consider the implications of allowing shoddy propaganda
such as yours to be published with their imprimatur.

===

Professor Mendelson's e-mail address is:

emendelson_pcmag@hotmail.com

So basically what Edward Mendelson is saying is that Killian allegedly typed on a professional, $4,400 (1973 dollars, adjusted for inflation to 2004 = $22,000) desktop typesetting machine (ra^ther than a regular office typewriter), then went back and dialed in the justification settings so he could type it again line by line to make it look as pretty as a future Microsoft Word document, all for a memo to himself to "cover your ass" (CYA - in case he forgot what he was "covering" for?), and the London Times loaned him the world's only IBM Selectric Composer-compatible stylus ball with the Times New Roman font on it for him to use. To complain about orders given to him by a retired general. And keep for posterity.

Um, okay.

I'm convinced. It's Bush's fault Edward Mendelson is an asshat.

I think the memos are a fake, but I have to say that I disagree with Charles that the blow up is an exact match. Quite a few of the letters appear to differ in shape. The lower case L, for example has differently shaped serifs (I think that's the right word). The lower case G is shaped differently. The letter width and line spacing are right, but it looks like a different (though similar) font to me.

#77 Freeven

As has been observed repeatedly, the aging process used on the original Word document distorts those tiny details you're seeing. They are irrelevant.

Why didn't PC Rag simply present a sample without doing the extra work of justification (which requires typing everything twice on Composer). Why is their sample so tiny? What are they trying to hide? Hmmm?

There's a simple explanation for this - MSWord TimesNewRoman font upper case letters are wider than the Composer's PressRoman. See page 108 of
[Link: www.ibmcomposer.org...]
The M's and W's in the memos match MSword's font, not Composer's. The 'W' is 10% wider in MSword, and in the "memos".

By presenting a sample with right-justification, PC Rag was able to conceal these subtle character width differences. If they hadn't justified the text, then these subtle errors would accumulate across the page resulting in quite significant spacing errors at line ends.

"If the 'W' don't fit, you must acquit."

Too bad Mendelson is letting his politics get in front of his logic. Also too bad he missed so badly - perhaps he wanted the >$10K reward being offered if someone can exactly duplicate the memos with either an IBM Selectric or an IBM Composer.

It's really pathetic at the lengths those with BDS / ABB will stoop to confirm forgeries to spread lies about a candidate.

The crime is bad enough. The spin, coverup, and justifications are even worse.

How many people are willing to destroy their reputations for the perpetuation of a fraud?

Exactly Thom.

Nothing like 30+ generations in a photocopier to give the appearance of age...

I’m surprised that the letters match up so well. I am not an authority on the subject but I do know that early Xerox machines actually would magnify the size of the document that was being copied because by doing so this would get rid any bordering effect caused by the edges of the documents being copied. So, when you copy a document over and over again on an old Xerox machine, you are in increasing the size of the type, and also distorting any imperfections. That’s were all the little dots and dimples on letters come from. Now what I don’t know is if the new digital copiers magnify the image or not. I suspect they don’t and rely on software to get rid of any bordering. That would explain why the letters are the same size as copies made with word defaults. - Jenbung

BDS / ABB

What's ABB?

Anybody but Bush :-)

Thanks sweetie :-)

;-)

Where is the superscript in his example? Am I overlooking it in the blurred overlay?

What the PC Mag Bozo does not say is that while the composer could do proportional spacing, it is alas MECHANICAL spacing. Which means it’s limited by the amount by which it can shift text around. It basically divides the page into units. It assigns each letter a set number of units, 3 to 9. Each unit is scalable as today’s fonts are but only to 3 levels depending on the pitch selector. It can be 1/72”, 1/84” or 1/96”. At the 1/72" pitch setting each character can be 3/72”, 4/72” …. 9/72”., the space bar is assigned 3 units and is 3/72" of when not fully justifiying the text. An i is assigned 3 units and a m is assigned 9 units. So at the largest pitch 1/72” (and the right ball, so to speak) an i is 3/72” wide and a m is 9/72” wide. In TrueType each glyph has it’s own visually appropriate width. As an example a Truetype Times New Roman comparable size t would take 87% less space in word than it would on the Selectric Press Roman and a g would be 20% larger (horizontally). This may not sound like much but on let’s say the first line of the August 18th memo.

1, Staudt has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush. I’m having trouble running

this line when printed on the Selectric would take approximately 5.652777778”
in Word/ Truetype it would take 5.897460938” about a ¼” longer.

He talks about resizing the images, he above everyone else should hope at least that size does not matter. In comparing documents of different scales proportion is all that matters. as long as the same scale is applied to both dimensions in the final image(scan or what ever) of the document it does not change the proportions or relation of characters to each other or the relations in size.

The overlaying of his two images and the text shifting back and forth horizontally was completely predictable. Some letters may line up but it is by complete chance. The fact that all letters align in your experiment is the compelling factor. Text from Truetype versus the Selectric would never line up, some lines would be longer some shorter but the only ones that would line up would be a fluke or maybe all numbers since they are none proportional on both systems. It is physically impossible with the Default unmodified MS Times New Roman in word compared to the Selectric. The metrics of the fonts are simply different.

#78 Thom

Distortions are one thing, but I'm not sure they account for the differences I'm seeing. If you look at the lower case Ls, Is, or Ds, you can see that the upper serifs point in different directions. This seems to happen consistently throughout the document. It's possible that this is due to distortion, but I'm still leaning toward it being due to a different font being used.

William, I corrected the typo in my PC Mag post. That done, I seriously wonder why everyone is jumping all over ED, who is apolitical and trying to add something to the debate. Yes, it's unlikely that a Composer was ever used. And the quote marks issue was a good observation although unimportant in the Bush memo since they were not used at all in that note.

I DO NOT get the point of overlaying the two docs then bitching. What does that prove?? Baffling. If anything, the only target for abuse should be Dan Rather and CBS. Too many of these older men (I'll be there soon) have not kept up with simple technology and are bugfallowed (yes bugfallowed) by simple scams. I've looked into this letter and nobody can come up with an explanation for the superscript, especially since it does not appear on the TOP line where I suspect it was backspaced-in like I did on my fake note posted on my blog.

I also do not understand the complaining about a PC Mag writer chiming in on this issue because he is no expert. Like who else is??? This crowd? Bloggers in general? Puh-leeze.

Dvorak (if that is you posting here as JohnCDvorak) -

I used to read you a lot - back when you wrote for infoWorld in the mid 80's.

I think you suffer from the same myopic perspective as Rather - it can only be called elitism.

Those who earn their pay writing are apt to dismiss outright those who don't. Yet the internet, like so many technologies in the past, is obliterating a profession - that of professional prognosticator.

Blogs now do that - the writers get paid little or nothing yet come up with more interesting and challenging perspective. Does any one blogger do it consistently? No. Not really. But neither do you. Back when dead tree media had a monopoly on distribution, many WOULD read you for the simple reason that there was little else with any edge. Now, one can find (each day) more "edge" than a knife factory.

You and Dan and the rest of you are in denial. The economy rationalizes all output. You have been commoditized. It is over. In the meantime, cling to your elitiist notions in an effort to maintain the patina of differentiation - like a gold plated buggy whip.

I DO NOT get the point of overlaying the two docs then bitching. What does that prove??

Thanks for stopping by.

If you don't see the value in overlaying the two documents, there's not much more I could add in response.  This is essentially the typographic equivalent of a DNA test.

Bear in mind we are comparing a document allegedly created by a mechanical device (1973 typewriter), with a document created in a computer having no mechanical pixel placement limitations. That these two documents line up exactly, would likely be enough evidence to send someone to jail, were this a murder trial.

As to "complaining about a PC Mag writer chiming in on this issue because he is no expert" note that Edward Mendelson wrote of Daily "Screw Them!" Kos as "a notably better-informed perspective."

Kos has said his "better-informed" typography "expertise" derives from a few minutes spent with Google...

In addition, in case you are unaware, the "Screw Them!" references are to when Daily Kos said of Americans murdered by Saddam loyalists, who were then burned and hung from a roadway bridge: "Screw Them!"

If this is a "better-informed" perspective, I'll go with the folks here at LGF every time.

Your defense of Mr Mendelson is honorable, but this is a tough crowd, and anything short of solid facts doesn't sell.
 

#61 Sergio - I must have missed it (how I don't know) but when did the NYT acknowledge that they are forgeries (much less laugh at CBS)?

But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, how can I believe a non-typing (hunt and peck) National Guard officer did his notes on a very expensive, top of the line, professional quality typewriter? PC Magazine's analysis assumes my stupidity. What are they going to say about their expertise and their tainted analysis when CBS confesses shortly after the election?