Remember when being 'all thumbs' was a BAD thing?

(8:02 am)
Holy crap. I never thought a blank page combined with an obligation to write would present me with a problem. Anyone who knows me knows it's never stopped me from running my mouth. (BTW, there's a term for that: "logorrhea.") When writing an accepted assignment, whether for a class, or for some publication (usually political,) the subject material, and the point of it, has been obvious to me. Usually, the keyboard is my enemy just because I'm a lousy one-to-two finger typist, which is why I've always preferred speaking.

But one of the tenets of writing is "Write what you know." And I know I promised myself that I'd write, and post. So it's the act, not the content, that's the point of sitting here, between the gym and the shower, before going to work (yes, I have a regular job) and banging on this keyboard.

Let's talk about the keyboard, then. The standard terminology for this device is a 'QWERTY' keyboard, named for the six keys in the upper left half-a-row of letter keys. My mother is a past master (mistress?) of the keyboard, being a journalist. She could bang out 85+ words a minute on a mechanical Smith-Corona with hammers that swung up on arms from a central arc of hinge pins. Her earliest predecessors in the world of typing could type far faster. In fact, with a keyboard laid out in alphabetic order, in 3 or 4 rows, those early typists could go so fast that the weak metal available for the arms that hammered the type fonts onto the page would soon give up. The resulting tangle of bent metal, like undercooked spaghetti, confounded engineers. Then one came up with an idea: if we couldn't find a metal strong enough to withstand the use (and of course cheap enough to make typewriters profitable,) we could make the typists slower.

But how? Easy. Rearrange the keyboard so that, in an English-speaking population of 90% right-handed persons, the most frequently-used letters are on the rows away from 'home', under fingers that are the weakest, and usually on the left. The five most frequently-used letters in the English language are E,T,O,A and N. Look at them on your keyboard. The first two are on the upper, LEFT row, the last two are on the upper right or lower off-center. have to reach, using third or fourth fingers. And the A, the only one on the home row, is on the farthest left key, under the weakest finger.

Unfortunately, by the time this layout had become standardized across manufacturers, metallurgy had caught up with need. But it was too late. The intentional crippling of typed communication was permanent. The IBM Selectric made the arms obsolete, and the computer keyboard made the need for moving parts almost moot. (I still have a key that sticks on one of my laptops...)

iPhones and iPads rely on virtual keyboards on touchscreens, and still use this layout. Others have been invented, the Dvorak for one, that are designed to increase typing speed. All are far more functional that the QWERTY keyboard. But you've never seen any of them, have you?

Now, the keyboards on cell phones are so small that they can only be typed on with thumbs, because the rest of the hand is needed to hold the phone. An icebreaker I often use to interrupt people texting in the middle on parties or events is "Remember when being 'all thumbs' was a bad thing?" Yet even here, there are speed contests, and instead of rearranging the keyboard to be more useful, the language is instead rewritten to use fewer keystrokes, or phonic versions of words. BTW, it sux.

So, sometimes it's worth going back and re-examining the original idea, the contraints, and their results, rather than just continuing on.

An exercise for those interested: See those solid-rocket boosters on the side of the Space Shuttle's main booster? The ones that fall off about half-way to orbit. Why are they that diameter? Here's a hint: Roman chariots. I'm not kidding. Look it up.
(8:42 am)(8:49am)

9-11, Katrina, and my birthday

It's my birthday. I'm 55. Weirdly, this birthday seems to matter, while most of the others haven't mattered, at least not since 31.
No, this isn't going to be middle-aged angst, but there is a bit of reflection due on these dates, and this one happens to have a syncronicity with the news, and recent history.
See, my 50th birthday, for which my wife held a surprise, and surprisingly fun party, got upstaged somewhat by Hurricane Katrina. I suppose for the rest of my life, I'll get to hear about that event on my birthday, like folks born on 9/11 or 11/23. Folks born on 8/8 or 8/9 got off easy this year, as no major news outlet commented on that event. Look it up.
Being a political activist, I remember the flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina as the beginning of the end of the Junior Bush mystique. There on television, on every channel, was the incompetence of the omnipotent, unstoppable Republican machine. Just about a year later, the 1000-year Reich of One-Party Rule that Karl Rove had trumpeted came crashing down in the Democratic sweep of majorities in both houses of Congress.
In just a couple of weeks, we'll get the 9-11 remembrances. The other main inflection point in the arch of the Junior Administration. In all the recent polling on Obama's popularity, comparing his to that of other presidents at this point in their first terms. Missing in those analyses is that Junior Bush had the lowest incoming ratings of any president since they started polling. Well below 50%. 'Course, his did start by being appointed over the wishes of a majority of Americans. His actual popularity stayed in the toilet until 9-11. Suddenly, he could do no wrong. Suddenly, even my leftiest friends thought Junior was wonderful. My wife and I were in Europe on 9-11, so we missed the "all 9-11, all the time" media black-out/white-wash. (More about that on that date.)
But the similarity of the two events, 9-11 and Katrina,  each just over eight months from Junior's two presidential inaugurations, and the effect they had on how America viewed him and his, strikes me. The first gave carte-blanche to a perceived incompetent, and the second exposed the incompetence and cronyism of an administration that had seemed capable of doing, or getting away with, anything.

One of the many lessons I draw from this is that old saw, "Success is being ready when luck comes around." The Republicans were ready, with legislation and policy initiatives, especially ones that had nothing to do with national defense or terrorism, and rode America's sympathy for the president to every one of their goals. These included the re-election of the Junior King, a dubious bet even after all this.

Four years later, constant organizing by the other political wing of America made it ready when Katrina hit. Hit not just New Orleans, but the entire Republican apparatus.  Liberals, progressives and independents who'd either never drunk the FOX Kool-Aid or who'd snapped out of it after so many other things had already gone wrong saw an opening in the poll numbers, and ran the table in 2006. If the White House had been on offer in that cycle, they'd have taken that, too.

Since it fell on my birthday, I think a lot a bout Katrina, and New Orleans. I never went there before the levees collapsed. A conference we were supposed to attend ther in Nov of '05 got moved to some other city, naturally. I've been since. Seen the French Quarter. Seen the Ninth Ward. Sent money to various efforts there. I won't make any recommendations, because if you want to, you already have made donations, and will again. But Harry Shearer has a documentary in theatres tomorrow, The Big Uneasy, about how it wasn't Katrina that destroyed New Orleans, it was the poorly designed, badly built, and rarely maintained levee system that did the damage. Go see it.