On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as “Osama’s endorsement of John Kerry.” But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin-Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term.

But who didn’t know this already?

I just knew they wouldn’t stop with poor President Bush!

Fingers Crossed!

[UPDATE: it’s tight, with the conservatives holding about a 1% lead.  Doesn’t look good for Obrador, I’m afraid. . .]

I had a tasty lunch the other day with a friend who’s about to become part of the happy exodus from Champaign.  But things quickly turned deadly serious as she and I disagreed on what must surely be the most important question in the world, namely: whether one ought to put two spaces, or one after a period.

Frankly, I was aghast that anyone would question the importance of putting two spaces after a period.  Not doing so is just a step away from getting rid of paragraph indentations!  Total textual anarchy, with nary a visual cue to offer a sense of how long the sentence is going to take to make its point.  (Some argue for the extra space on narrower grounds that the space distinguishes between sentence ending periods and those used in abbreviations).

Anyway, it seems that certain malign forces, particularly within the publishing industry, have conspired to promulgate the notion that a single post-period space is to be prefered.  Shockingly, this view seems even to have become predominant.  The conspirators justify this barbarism with odd stories, such as this:

“The only reason that two spaces were used after a period during the ‘typewriter’ age was because original typewriters had monospaced fonts — the extra space was needed for the eye to pick up on the beginning of a new sentence. That need is negated w/proportional space type, hence [it is] the typographic standard.” (source)

As if the invention of the typewriter necessitated a strange new practice of putting extra space after a period.  Because nobody thought to include such spaces in printed books or written documents prior to that sad fall into mechanization  early in the twentieth century. 

Moreover this stuff about proportional type is totally bogus.  Microsoft Word is smart enough to give an “l” less space than an “M,” but in my world of Microsoft Office 2003 a space between letters and a space after a period is pretty much invariable, as far as I can see.  Maybe if you center-justify, Word is smart enough to put more space after a period (though I sort of doubt it).  However no one center justifies Word Documents, since they look terrible that way and aren’t what MLA recommends.

In short, a small cadre of editors (probably Liberals!) have foisted upon the world the dubious notion that all documents should be printed in a style that can be easily cut-and-pasted into their software, even at the cost of reducing the readability of documents that aren’t printed for publication, by telling people to leave out a visual clue that people have used for literally jillions of years to visually mark gaps between ideas. 

They’ll have to pry that extra space out from in between my cold dead fingers!  Or at least wait till I’m asleep.