“There’s just one typewriter in the world that can make YOUR letters command the attention they deserve…”
Remember, no other typewriter – manual or electric – gives you this “proportional letter spacing.” That’s why your correspondence – typed on the IBM “Executive” electric --will be easier to read and far more distinctive
Those “Executive” letters you’ve been turning out on your new IBM are so handsome, they look as though they were printed. I know they help build company prestige – actually open doors for us!
From what I’ve heard, not all the blame for the bad cockney accent should fall on Dick. Supposedly he had a dialect coach misinforming him as well. Maybe the posh accent was one Dick could already do or the coach could.
OK, I’ll share. Just after college, I was taking a train from London to Edinburgh to meet up with some friends. I found a seat on the train next to some other 20-somethings, one from Holland, one from Sweden, and one from Glasgow. I introduced myself and the guy from Glasgow just started talking my ears off. Eventually, he felt the need to go take a smoke and went off to the smoking car. The others turned to me and said, “Thank you so much for sitting down with us. He just kept talking and we couldn’t understand him. You’re a native English speaker, what was he saying?”
“I didn’t understand a word he was saying until he said he was going for a smoke.”
My recollection is that tests using those have show than none of them reproduce the Killian memo nearly as well as using “word” on the default settings. And there is no evidence that his office had one of those fancy typewriters. They weren’t common and probably were not available through the normal requisition system. The secretary has also stated that they did not have one. Another detail rarely mentioned is that the “memo” is on the wrong sized paper. The US Government used 8"x10.5" paper. Government procurement being what it was “8.5” x 11" paper would have been a private purchase. You would NEVER get reimbursed for purchasing it. Added together those and several other irregularities point STRONGLY towards incompetent forgery.
Good news, conservatives! You finally have evidence that someone tried to smear a prominent Republican with false accusations of sexual assault!! You must feel so happy to finally be vindicated, right?
I remember when I first played Assassin’s Creed III and met Ben Franklin early in the game. With the accent he had I half expected him to start singing The Wurzels greatest hits.
Sorry, I jumped the gun because it’s a consistent pattern. They had the press conference and… no accuser.
But this hypothetical woman, the spelling of whose name they can’t seem to decide on, “went to many schools around the world,” not Canada, so she’s obviously legit.
But… the whole reason anyone mentioned his mother in the first place is because it tied the scheme to him, not her. My head hurts.
It’s like, “I didn’t commit the crime, I was nowhere near the place. It has nothing to do with me.”
“A cellphone registered to your family was left by the perpetrator at the scene, though.”
“How dare you impugn my family, you creep! That was my cellphone I left at the scene!”
You’re moving the goalposts. You went from the assertion that it was ridiculous to think that anyone would type up a memo using…
…and now, after it’s pointed out that that contradicts IBM’s actual marketing of the machine, which says nothing at all about “camera-ready copy,” but, in fact, urges its use on “your letters” and “all your business correspondence,”
So now you’ve fallen back from “it’s a terrible forgery because on one would have used an expensive proportional typewriter to type up a memo” (which itself a fallback, originally, from the initial and easily-disproven claim that proportional-spacing typers didn’t exist back then) , to, basically, “a well-informed typewriter historian could have caught it under close forensic examination.”
Though why they would notice and investigate such a thing, given that proportionally-spaced type in business correspondence from the period is perfectly common, I don’t know.
But, hey, just keep hauling those goalposts down the road. Now, it’s “wrong-size paper” and “probably not available” and “no evidence his office had one” and on and on.
Nobody said that proportional spacing typewriter didn’t exist.
Their high cost, however made them very uncommon. They represented a tiny proportion of typewriter sales. That high cost in turn mean that most of them were used as a cheaper alternative to even more expensive typesetting machines. Yes, IBM did produce advertisements trying to popularize their most expensive typewriters for common office use, but they were not particularly successful in this.
To anybody old enough to have worked in an office before word processing was common, the proportional spacing is JARRINGLY uncommon at first glance, not something that would require an expert at typewriters to be wary of. A cursory comparison to a document produced using the default settings in Word should have settled it quickly.
The thing is, before the memo surfaced, the facts embodied in it were in common circulation. It didn’t CONTAIN anything new or particularly newsworthy revelations. It was just the fact that there was a written paper trail that was newsworthy. It was the memo ITSELF that was newsworthy, and so it demanded a higher degree of scrutiny than it received.
