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Pajama Party!
Now that I have my
pajamas on, I can write something this evening. Do I have to go out to my
living room, or can I stay here in my home office?
Does anyone else think that a great name for the best blog writing (like a
Pulitzer for blogs) would be the "Jammy" and the awards ceremony would, of
course, be called "The Jammies?" Someone has to set that up!
It's pretty clear the CBS is hoping something else will come along to
supplant the scandal over the forged memos that Dan Rather and 60 Minutes II
tried to push on the American public. The furor seems to be cooling off a bit. The
blogs
that
pointed out the forgeries have
pretty much proven their point, with one expert after another coming down on the
side of the memos being fake. Only the most close-minded, leftist partisans
could deny that the memos are phony. The only real questions remaining are:
- Who forged the documents?
- What were the forgers' motives?
- Just how low is the forger's IQ, assuming he or she was trying to
smear President Bush?
- How in the world did CBS allow themselves to be taken in by such amateur
forgeries?
- What does it say about CBS's collective IQ?
- How long will Dan Rather last?
In some late updates, RatherBiased.com
has posted some information on Dan Rather's latest lame attempt to defend the
forgeries. Once again, Dan just doesn't get it. Read on!
Traffic!
Like Instapundit, I
have to thank Mr. Rather and CBS; the number of hits on my site has grown
tremendously over the past couple of days. Here's graph showing it:
Look at that! On September 11th, I had around 140 unique hits! That's
major league, I must say. Compare my hits, for example, to Instapundits'
hits:
Glenn only had about 380,000 unique hits on the 11th. That means he just had
roughly 2,712 times as many hits as me. Compare that to a more typical day, like
September 2nd. On the 2nd, I had 11 unique hits. Instapundit had about 280,000.
That's about 25,455 times as many. That means I've gained on Glenn by roughly an
order of magnitude in just over a week! Clearly my plan for taking over
the blogosphere by being ignored is working. Mwah ha ha ha!
Ok. Sorry for the lame attempt at being funny. I should just let
Frank J. do the funny. Or
Scrappleface. Or
John Addis. Or
Daily Kos (snark).
Rather's Defense: Is this an 1 or an l?
Or is it a 1 or a l?
According to RatherBiased.com, Dan
Rather is still trying to
defend the forgeries.
His latest defense comes from some "software designer" named Richard Katz that
claimed, "He noticed the lower case l is used in documents instead of the actual
numeral one. That would be difficult to reproduce on the computer today."
This is more utter stupidity on CBS's part. Take a look at my heading for
this part of the post. Is the first character a lowercase "L" or the numeral
one? It's somewhat hard to tell, isn't it? And that's with the characters in close
proximity in boldface. Take a look at normal 12 point type:
Which is it, an 1 or an l? Or is it a 1 or a l?
In the Times New Roman typeface, at 12 point,
the two characters are nearly indistinguishable on my monitor (which is an
expensive Samsung 17" 173P flat panel at 1280 by 1024 pixel resolution). So,
let's enlarge:
18 point. Is it an 1 or an l?
24 point. Is it an l or an 1?
36 point. Is it an 1 or an l?
It doesn't get much better, does it? The characters are nearly identical. The
lowercase "L" is on the right in every example (or is it? Can you
tell?). It looks to me that it's a
little bit taller, a little heavier, and has a slightly shorter serif. I can see
that at 36 point, but not very well at 12 point. If I didn't know which was
which (because I typed them!), I wouldn't be able to tell you, that much is for
sure. Perhaps an expert on the Times New Roman font face would be able to tell
them apart just by looking, but not many people could.
Now, wasn't one of CBS' earlier assertions that there was no way anyone could
be certain about authenticity because the documents were reproductions that had
been distorted by copying? Yet, we're now supposed to believe that Mr. Katz can
tell a lowercase "L" from the numeral one in these documents?
Give. Me. A. Break.
Take a look at the ones "1's" in the screen shots on
Joseph Newcomer's page (copied
by Little Green Footballs). Do you think anyone could honestly tell a
lowercase "L" from the numeral one (1 versus l) at the resolution of those
images? CBS has admitted that they don't have the original documents, only
copies, so what Mr. Katz was working from is distorted as well. We don't know
how much, relative to what CBS posted, since CBS won't release high-resolution
scans of their copies. But if CBS's versions are distorted even a little,
distinguishing a Times New Roman 12 point lowercase "L" from a "1" will be next
to impossible.
Mr. Rather asserted that "the lower case l is used in documents instead of
the actual numeral one. That would be difficult to reproduce on the computer
today."
You know, I've never had any trouble using my lowercase "L." I'd better try
it to make sure:
l l lth Fighter Interceptor Group
111th Fighter Interceptor Group
Hmmm. That didn't seem very hard. In the first line, I used lower case L's
with spaces in between; in the second, I used numeral ones. The spacing is
slightly different (because of the darned automatic character spacing that
Microsoft products do, but typewriters don't!), but other than that, it
looks almost identical. Since the animations that Charles Johnson at Little
Green Footballs produced show exact registration between Microsoft Word
and the CBS documents, it's clear that Mr. Katz is wrong. The characters used
are numeral ones, not lowercase L's.
Dan Rather has produced yet another completely inadequate, easily
debunked defense of the forged documents. He claims that a Times New
Roman 12 point lowercase "L" can be distinguished from a numeral 1
(1 versus l) on a low resolution image.
Here's an excerpt of the PDF version of the CBS document that they posted:
Sorry, Dan. There is no way anyone can make that distinction based on this
image. It's way too distorted to see details that fine, but you certainly can
see that the font is proportional and is probably Times New Roman or a close
variant. So, you can compare basic letter forms and spacing. That's
what Charles Johnson did, and it's an exact match for Microsoft Word.
Compounding the stupidity, Mr. Rather asserts that using lower case L's would
be "difficult to reproduce on the computer today."
But Dan, I just did it! It wasn't difficult at all, and the control I
have over letter spacing on this web page is much less than I would have in
Microsoft Word. If I wanted to use lowercase L's rather than numeral ones, I
certainly could (and did!), and in Word I could match the character spacing
very, very closely, if not exactly.
Mr. Rather, you're in way over your head. You don't understand the
technologies involved, you're relying on "experts" that aren't, and this whole
thing is caving in on you. Stop digging! Apologize, take the hit, and
retire. It will be better for you and for the country.
P.S. I lied. In the 24 point example above, I reversed the "1" and the "L".
Did you catch it? Really?
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