Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
The future is now
Jules White, Typewriter, Photo-Collage
Jake finished reading Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger yesterday, so today we had him begin reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night (upbeat stuff, eh?) He got stuck on this passage:
It is a curious typewriter Mr. Friedmann has given me — and an appropriate typewriter, too. It is a typewriter that was obviously made in Germany during the Second World War. How can I tell? Quite simply, for it puts at finger tips a symbol that was never used on a typewriter before the Third German Reich, a symbol that will never be used on a typewriter again.
The symbol is the twin lightning strokes used for the dreaded S.S., the Schutzstaffel, the most fanatic wing of Nazism.
Jake’s problem with this? He’d never seen a typewriter, and couldn’t imagine how such a thing could work.
Even with ample visual aids, he still didn’t quite get it. I showed him the high magnification image, pointed out all the parts, described how they worked. Next, I took a #2 pencil and scribbled out a dense rectangular box of graphite. I flipped this paper onto another paper, and by marking firmly on the back of the first paper, I left a mark on the second.
“Like that,” I said. “The key strikes the ribbon, which contains ink. That’s like the graphite on this piece of paper. It transfers the ink to the typing paper.”
He got it eventually, but the whole thing proved surprisingly difficult. Now, I’m wondering what’s next. Will I have to buy him a sliderule on eBay to prove to him that, yes, you can work trig functions with a clever bit of plastic?
Go on — I know some of you must have similar stories.
***
In other news: suddenly, I’m the WordPress God. I figured out how to put a frog on my header all by myself! You’re looking at a Dendrobates leucomelas, also known as the yellow-banded poison dart frogs. They are native to northern Brazil, parts of Guyana and Venezuela, and they’re a hearty species, easily kept and bred in captivity.
We don’t keep leucs. We keep blue poison dart frogs (Dendrobates azureus), a frog so beautiful folks never believe they are real until they hop.
Honestly, though, I haven’t yet achieved WordPress godhood. I have yet to solve my Blogger importation problems, and I can’t figure out why other computers besides this one refuse to recognize my password. That’s why I haven’t been able to post in the morning. No, it’s not a cookie problem; I’ve made the cookie settings as permissive as possible and it does not seem to help.
Time for The Daily Show.
D.
I have never seen a blue frog! Those things are amazing, and truly beautiful.
Thank you so much for fixing my name. Identity crisis has been averted, the world is safe again.
As for the teaching thing? Ugh. I’m homeschooling my seven year old, and I’m thinking I’m gonna try sending her to public school next year.
Your style of teaching seems to be similar to mine [whatcha wanna do today?] but I’m the world’s worst at organization and scheduling, so we’re sporadic with lessons.
I did manage to teach her to read, though [pats self on back]. I also have a five year old and a very high-maintenance two year old, and I’m kinda ready for them to be elsewhere sometimes, so public school is looking good for that reason [I think that makes me a bad mom].
On another note, O WordPress God, have you figured out how to change the time stamp on your comments? Last night when I posted, my clock said 2:15am, and the comment clock said 8:15am.
Jeez, I’m just griping all the time these days, aren’t I?
Oops, it looks like you fixed the time already. Sorry:-)
In addition to typewriters, they won’t know why calling a phone number like 778-8899 took longer than calling a phone number like 322-4332. And I note that I’ve avoided the 0 because I can no longer remember which end of the dial it was on. I think it was the slowest, but I’m not certain of that.
Another thing is the ‘woooop’ sound that they use in commercials when they’re interrupting it. Only old people know that that sound is the sound of a needle being dragged across a phonograph record.
Doug, o WordPress God, I do dig the frog. Good job.
Hmmm, ancient technology stories… I remember 8″ diskettes for the Tandy TRS-80 (affectionately known as the “trash-80″), and I remember 12” LP records, and how very funny Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass sounds when you play them at 78 instead of 33⅓.
And say what you will about hip-hop, but at least it’s given the children of today some passing experience with the needle-dragging-on-vinyl sound…
Wow I had one of those old Tandy’s with the huge disks..haven’t thought about that in years..
Shelbi, I’m not haphazard with Jake’s homeschooling. Every day, he gets assignments in grammar, writing (those two items usually overlap, in that I will have him write sentences demonstrating grammatical rules), math (he’s almost done with geometry), science (biology with some occasional astronomy at the moment), American history (via Lies My Teacher Told Me), and literature. I keep the assignments relatively small so that he can get all the work done in one day.
I’ll add a bit about changing the time stamp to the post below.
Dean & Pat: great examples! I tend to forget about rotary telephones and record players. Eight tracks, on the other hand . . .
Lily, welcome to my new place on the web.
Dean: The “0” took the longest; it was at the far end of the dial. (Back when it was a dial…)
Jake should visit me. I could show him a genuine mechanical typewriter. Not from the Wehrmacht time, surely, but from the 70ies. I still use if for envelopes and to fill in forms. But the first typewriter I had was indeed one from 1940 or so that belonged to my grandfather. Big black metal thing, but some of the letter eventually wore out and the o made a hole in the paper every time. Since it would have cost more to replace the o and some other letters, I got a new one.
I deeply and desperately want an IBM Selectric, preferably in bright “I’m a Hot Secretary” red.
I loved that when you turned them on the little ball lept to attention, twirled like a little drum majorette, and the whole machine trembled in anticipation of your fingers tapping the keys. Flip the toggle switch and: Ba-DUMMMMMMM.
Except I’m pretty sure that a) I would wake the entire house if I tried to use this object in the early morning, and b) it would break about three months after I purchased it, causing me to spend an enormous amount of money in postage to send the creature to an IBM service person out of town.
And I realllllllly wannnnnt a Selectric.
I must be a dork.
forgot to add:
My Dad has an Engineer-friend who framed his sliderule in a deep shadow box. It hangs in his office just over a bright red sign which reads: In Case of Computer Malfunction, Break Glass.
Those MIT guys, such crackups.
Suisan, I used to own an IBM Selectric just the same as you described! I know exactly what you’re talking about. Don’t recognize the “I’m a hot secretary” red, though.
I used that typewriter in college. I wonder what ever happened to it?
As for your dad, I only have one thing to say: Geeks rule!
Suisan, I’m going to make you moderately jealous and tell you my office has a sprinkling of Selectrics here and there. Alas, though, ours are blue. I will say they seem to live forever – ours have been used since at least the 1970s and they’re still hanging in there.
My husband and I were just telling our daughter about the rotary dial phones the other day. She had her head cocked to one side like a dog hearing a sound it couldn’t recognize during the telling, but we think she sort of got it :). (We like to tell her all the time about tvs without remotes and with antennas on top, so that one’s not a novelty to her.)
Sorry, Doug, I didn’t mean to say that you were haphazard in your homeschooling.
The way you talk about the subjects you teach [all the deep, scientific, and apparantly high school level subjects] I had a feeling you were way more organized than I ever thought of being.
I was just referring to the time when you wrote something about going to the library and asked Jake what subject he wanted to learn about until the next trip to the library[sorry, can’t remember the details].
I probably should have added to my first comment that you seem to be doing a much better job than me at being laid back about which subject when. If we could afford an actual prepared curriculum, I’d probably do better at structuring her school lessons, but I pretty much suck at it by myself with no guidance. Which is another reason I’m leaning toward public school.
Homeschooling is another one of those things I wanted to be good at, but wasn’t. So anyway, I’m sorry I wasn’t more clear, and I’m sorry if you felt insulted.
Good heavens, Shelbi, I’m not offended. I just wanted to brag about how organized we are 😉
We have to do our own curricula, since it seems like all the pre-packaged curricula (1) are aimed at fundamentalist homeschoolers, and (2) are way too dumbed-down for our son. We’re giving Jake what we wish we had had: material which is consistently challenging.
We give him the freedom to veto literature assignments (as I recall, he nixed The Great Gatsby, and didn’t like a Borges short story I’d assigned to him) and to decide what electives to study. He works at French on-again, off-again. We’ve had a devil of a time finding a good French program.
Anyway, I wasn’t insulted. Chalk it up once again to the inadequacy of written communication.
Heh heh. TVs without remotes. God help you if the dial broke! In LA, PBS had channel 28 (I wonder if they still do?) and we received it with horrible static. I loved PBS programming as a kid, though, so I braved the static.
I had to explain vacuum tubes to Jake a while back. I’m so old, I can remember back to TVs with vacuum tubes!
Where I grew up, all the phone numbers started with 98 – 980, 988, 987. One friend’s number was 988-8848 – I hated calling her because it took forever to dial, and with 2 teenaged sisters, the line was usually busy.
And my grandfather, an accountant, had a 1930’s mechanical adding machine – the size of a typewriter, with a row of buttons for each digit, and a huge lever on the side. We’d enter 999999999, pull the crank, then 1, and shriek with laughter as all the 9’s flipped noisily to 0’s.
I don’t know why it was funny, but it kept us amused for hours. Which probably says something (not good) about our intelligence.
Oh, that’s right, we used to have a TV with a remote that worked via sound. The remote had two buttons on it — On/Off/Volume and Channel — and when you pushed one, it offered resistance, and then made a click that would either turn the TV on, turn it off, change the volume, or change the channel. At the time I had a length of metal chain that I used to play with, and one day I dropped it onto the air-hockey table that was down in the basement, in the same room as the TV, and the TV came on. Apparently the clickety-clank of the chain landing on the perfboard table top hit just the right frequency…
I think I’ve still got a typewriter in the basement, left over from high school and college. The last time I used it was when applying for a federal job, which required filling out that damn SF-whatever with a list of every job I’ve ever used (this was way back, before the government published Adobe versions online). Don’t know why I still have it, other than the fact that I have inherited packrat tendencies from the maternal line.
More random stuff: Last summer I took my cousin (age 11) to the sand sculpture contest sponsored by a bunch of local architectural firms in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. The theme was dinosaurs. All of the firms except one did elaborate sand sculptures of actual dinosaurs; that one did “Dinosaurs of Technology”, which I thought was very cool. Typewriter, tv w/ knobs rather than buttons or remote, rotary phone, a 5 1/4″ floppy disk, a Betamax tape, etc. The kid had no idea what the typewriter was supposed to be, and thought there was something wrong with the tv. Knobs? for what? just use the remote. She was dumbstruck by the very idea that at one point in time, one had to walk over to the television to turn it on or to change the channel.
i’m eighteen, but my mom still has her old typewriter so i grew up knowing what one was. i liked playing with it. it’s out of ink now, though, sadly. i took some really cool pictures of it from really close up for my digital photo class junior year. but yeah, the babies i work with dont even know what chicken pox is…sometimes even *I* feel old!