calimac: (Blue)
calimac ([personal profile] calimac) wrote2011-01-14 08:06 pm

Slatest

1. Oh, great. Now we can blame Philip K. Dick for the Tucson shootings. Or Nietzsche. (Paging Otto West, Mr. "Don't call me stupid" from A Fish Called Wanda)

2. The Grand Unified Theory of Palinisms. She knows so little, she doesn't know that she doesn't know it, and she doesn't know that there are other people who do know it.

3. The Military-Industrial Complex. Contains something of a history of the idea that wars are caused by arms merchants seducing and bamboozling politicians into them. Doesn't go into the literary manifestations, though. I first came across this notion in Shaw's Major Barbara, in which Undershaft the arms merchant says that he and his peers decide when there'll be a war, for the sake of profit. I once read a reprint of early issues of Superman from the late 30s. In them, Superman spent most of his time beating up arms merchants who were trying to lead the US into war. That he didn't even bother thinking about, say, Hitler or the Japanese militarists is unnerving.

4. Here's a truly insane screed against putting two spaces after a period, and he'll have to take my cold dead thumb from the keyboard to stop me.

[identity profile] vgqn.livejournal.com 2011-01-15 05:15 am (UTC)(link)
Here's a truly insane screed against putting two spaces after a period

But, um, he's right. Double-spacing after periods is an artifact of the monospaced typewriter era. With proportional fonts, a single space leaves an appropriate amount of space after a period. Really, putting a single space after periods is part of what makes text in any professionally printed book look professional. It's also true for most text you see on webpages, because HTML removes extraneous spaces (thank ghod).

Go ahead, type as many spaces as you like after a period when you write an LJ post. (I just typed 5 spaces there.) When it displays, you'll see one (1). And ghod and typographers meant it to be.

I've always been highly amused that the iPhone panders to the 2-space habit by allowing the shortcut that typing two spaces after a word will insert a period plus a space. Nice.

[identity profile] jane-dennis.livejournal.com 2011-01-15 06:15 am (UTC)(link)
Insane is totally right.*

I think he's just jealous that Julian had a hot thing with a (gasp!) 19 yr old female.

So he has to focus on something else.

*I generally don't double space after a . nowadays, but I think I'll tweet this, and double space everything for a while.

[identity profile] kip-w.livejournal.com 2011-01-15 04:51 pm (UTC)(link)
I learned two spaces in junior high typing. When I got a job where it mattered, I was told one space, so I changed it. Now I design and typeset books and have to take out extra spaces all the time.

What's more irritating is people who try to design the book, and indent paragraphs themselves, using spaces.

If it could be taken for granted that the extra spaces would always go away automatically, I'd say go nuts. Have fun. Build up those thumb muscles.