National Handwriting Day

Today, January 23rd, is National Handwriting Day. It was established by the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association in 1977 to promote the consumption of pens, pencils and writing paper. January 23rd was chosen as the date for National Handwriting Day because it's also the birthday of the man with the most recognizable signature in America - John Hancock, the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence ...

Nowadays, handwriting is a dying art. Children are taught keyboarding skills rather than good penmanship, and it's a rare event to receive a handwritten letter. Those of you to whom I've handwritten personal letters will probably remember the pleasure of receiving an epistle that someone actually wrote by hand (if not necessarily the content thereof). A letter written by hand in ink on paper provides a degree of personal connection that a word-processed, laser-printed letter doesn't give, even if the content is the same. 

You've probably also received a lot of junk mail that looks like it's been addressed by hand, but was actually done with a handwriting font. The easy way to sort out those things (if the font initially fools you) is to check the postage - you can be about 99% sure that it was sent at the bulk postage rate.

If you want to make people think you've handwritten something, you can download many hundreds of fonts that mimic cursive handwriting* ... here's one site that offers them. 

And if you just want the practice, go ahead and celebrate National Handwriting Day by writing a letter to ol' Bilbo. Yes - you, too, Mike.

Have a good day. Write a letter to someone. If you want a personal, handwritten letter of your own, send me your snail mail address by e-mail and I'll send you one ... as long as you promise to write back.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* You can download the "Tiny Hands" font in honor of Donald Trump here.

The Constitution: The State of the Union

One of the annual high points of political theater here in Disneyland-on-the-Potomac is the President's State of the Union address (the SOTU, delivered by the POTUS, as insiders call it) to a joint session of Congress.

As I discussed in my post on Article II of the Constitution, which enumerates the powers of the Executive Branch of the government, the Constitution really doesn't give the President the authority to do much of anything without the "advice and consent" of Congress. One of the few actually enumerated duties of the President is this one, spelled out in Section 3 of Article II:

"He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient..."

For many years, the President communicated this information to Congress in writing. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson didn't want to appear before Congress in person because he believed it was too much like the British king's addresses to opening sessions of Parliament in which he (the king) delivered instructions and mandates, rather than providing information and seeking support for his measures. It's only in the fairly recent era that presidents have appeared in person to deliver a live address (not like they'd deliver dead ones). You can read a brief history of the State of the Union address here, and read every single State of the Union address ever presented here.

State of the Union speeches tend to be more political theater than informative discourse. In an era of non-stop, 24/7 news delivery, leaks of information to the press (either deliberately by the administration or maliciously by various insiders), and an unbridled and raucous free press, there's no element of surprise ... no news, as it were ... in a SOTU. The draft of the SOTU is circulated widely throughout the government for review and comment weeks ahead of time, and so - by the time the President stands at the rostrum to start talking - everyone already knows what he is going to say, and whether they'll jump up and applaud wildly at the right places (this year, like the Democrats) or sit on their hands and glower angrily (this year, like the Republicans). Indeed, well before President Obama delivered his SOTU this past Tuesday, House Speaker John Boehner had already described it as "pathetic."

Has the SOTU outlived its usefulness in the all-information-all-the-time era? I believe it has, at least as we've grown used to it. All it does is give Presidents a chance to look presidential, opposition parties to growl out their "response" to the president's message with bile and false sincerity, and piss off television audiences who see their favorite shows displaced. I think that regular communication between the President and the Congress, perhaps in the form of something like a written monthly or quarterly activity report, would accomplish more and reduce the level of useless theatricality.

It won't happen, though, because there's too much opportunity for all that political theater. Presidents love to be on television, Congress loves the opportunity to mug for the cameras, and we've all come to expect the annual ritual.

But I still like my idea better.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Not Just Sans Serif, Sans the Whole #@$! Letter

I am in a quandry, suffering from a problem that I do not often face: a world-class case of writer's block.

Yes, Dear Readers, ol' Bilbo, he of the enormous and overflowing fountain of verbiage, is having trouble writing a letter.

Most of you probably still know what the expression writing a letter means, except for Mike, but perhaps someone can explain it to him.

Anyhow, the situation is this: each year at this time, I write a Christmas letter that goes out to our closest friends to bring them up to date on what's been going on at Chez Bilbo. I begin by writing the basic letter to my friend Toni ... this letter is very long, because Toni and I haven't actually seen each other since her wedding in about 1980, and she always wants to know everything that's been going on. After writing the letter to Toni, I then word-process it to create individualized letters for all our other friends who may not need or want that much detail, or who are only interested in certain aspects of our adventures (family, travel, dancing, blogging, world domination, etc).

Generally, I don't have a problem cranking out the basic letter, but this year is different. I can't get it together. I have plenty of notes, lots of existing documentation in the form of the blog, my travel journal, and the 7500 exabytes of photographs I've taken over the year ... but I just can't seem to get it all down on paper (or in properly-aligned electrons on a hard disk) in a coherent letter. Or as coherent a letter as I usually write.

I'd say this is driving me crazy, but - as my mother would probably have said - that's not really a drive, it's just a putt, ha, ha.

So ...

Toni and everyone else who looks forward to receiving Bilbo's Extravagant Holiday Epistle, hang in there. I'll get it together sooner or later. Hopefully sooner. If you are not on the mailing list but would like to get a real letter (not handwritten, unfortunately ... because of the volume, this is the one letter each year that I prepare with the word processor) to keep all your junk mail company, send your snail mail address to der_blogmeister(at)yahoo(dot)com, and I will add you to the list.

In the meantime, for those of you who didn't get the title of this post, a serif is a small addition to a font that helps to set each letter apart from those around it and make it more legible. A letter that is sans serif is one that does not use serifs (the word sans in French means without). Here's an illustration:

This, of course, lends itself to todays terrible pun (sorry, Eric Clapton) ...

There's also a great riff on serifs offered up today by Miss Cellania ... you can read it here.

That's all for now. I need to hook up my mental jumper cables and get that letter written, serifs or no.

After all, somebody's got to support the Postal Service.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Phoney Baloney

Today is the day that Apple is expected to unveil the all-new, improved, latest, greatest model of its wildly popular iPhone, expected to be called the ... wait for it ... iPhone 5. It seems like only yesterday that Agnes and I went home from the Apple Store with our brand-spanking new iPhone 3GS's. The new iPhone is expected to feature 750,000 megapixel front, rear, top, bottom, and side cameras, electronic messaging, radar, sonar, GPS, MSG, and PDQ. It parallel parks itself. It slices and dices, plays games, scans funky pixillated images, and raises the dead. And you can even make phone calls with it.

Will wonders never cease?

I remember a time when you used a telephone to talk to other similarly-equipped people in distant locations. It weighed 30 pounds, sat on the desk or table, and a straight wire connected the telephone body to a wall socket, while a tightly-curled wire of insufficient length connected the receiver to the body. If you wanted to pace while you were on the phone, you had to buy a long enough set of wires, and carry the telephone body (a heavy little sucker made of indestructible bakelite) in one hand and the receiver in the other.

Now, of course, telephones aren't just for communicating by voice - they are multifunctional devices which allow you to annoy people within a wide radius by sharing your most intimate conversations at high volume while simultaneously taking their pictures and surfing the net. Sort of like a twenty-first century party line. Mike will remember what that is.

Whatever happened to the good old telephone? There was a time when you could defend yourself against attack in your home by smacking an intruder with a 30-pound bakelite telephone. With a four-ounce cell phone, not so much. When you wanted privacy, you dragged the entire phone at the end of its 40-foot cord into the bathroom and shut the door.

If I want to take a picture, I can use my trusty Canon. If I want to surf the net, I have my iMac (with a 24-inch screen) and my laptop (with a 17-inch screen) ... I'm getting too old to squint at a teeny little 4-inch screen on a cell phone. If I want to play games, I can haul out the Yahtzee, Monopoly, or Scrabble boxes.

So ...

The Luddite in me is grumpily scowling at the introduction of a fancy new iPhone, while the tech aficionado in me is salivating like Pavlov's dogs at the thought of the same toy.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was an iPhone that just ... well ... made phone calls? Of course, that would defeat the purpose of the whole thing, wouldn't it?

I think I'll wait for the new iPhone 6, which is already rumored to include a Swiss Army option that also provides a screwdriver, corkscrew, chainsaw, and - for inner-city use - 9mm pistol with 15-round magazine ...

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Love in the Age of Caller ID

If you're like me, you have learned to use caller ID to screen your calls. At home, we never answer any call that's from "unknown caller," "not available," "out of area," or a name and number we don't recognize. At work, I'm either able to anticipate the topic of the call or prepare myself for a wire-brushing, based on the identity of the caller. Caller ID has helped to make the telephone more useful, because it lets us decide whether to accept the interruption of the call. This is important, especially as we get ready for the enormous number of useless and inane robo calls coming in preparation for the November elections.

How we use (or don't use) the telephone was the subject of a fascinating article in yesterday's Washington Post: For Millenials, Love Is Never Asking Them to Call You Back" (online title, "Texting Generation Doesn't Share Boomers' Taste for Talk").

Author Ian Shapira sets up his article this way:

A generation of e-mailing, followed by an explosion in texting, has pushed the telephone conversation into serious decline, creating new tensions between baby boomers and millennials -- those in their teens, 20s and early 30s ... Young people say they avoid voice calls because the immediacy of a phone call strips them of the control that they have over the arguably less-intimate pleasures of texting, e-mailing, Facebooking or tweeting. They even complain that phone calls are by their nature impolite, more of an interruption than the blip of an arriving text.

All other things being equal, I would rather write and receive letters than make or receive an average phone call. It isn't that I don't enjoy talking with my family and friends, but that a phone call usually seems to arrive when I'm not expecting it, not prepared for it, and often can't think of what to say on the spur of the moment. When I write letters, I spend time thinking about what I want to say and how I want to say it, and I can always throw away a partially-written letter and start over if it doesn't sound right. You can't unsay the things you've already said in a telephone conversation, much as you'd sometimes want to.

Texting and, to a lesser extent, e-mail, are the new paradigm for communications. We also communicate via status reports on Facebook or 140-character tweets - impersonal to be sure, but allowing us more control over the information disseminate and the answer we provide. I thought it was fascinating when I attended a bloggers' happy hour last year and discovered that seven of the eight of us around the table had thumbs flying over the keyboards of BlackBerries, sending text messages in all directions...ignoring for that time the flesh-and-blood people sitting at the table. I don't recall anyone either sending or receiving a phone call during that time.

So, what does it all mean? Is it a sign of our growing impersonality and unwillingness to deal directly with each other? Perhaps. But it's also a sign of the evolution of communications that began with the introduction of the telephone. The decline of written correspondence (and the death agonies of the postal service) began with the ability to make immediate contact via telephone. It took less time to have a phone call than to write a good letter, and that time was available to do other things. But the telephone, in turn, eventually showed its own limitations...in the classic play and film Inherit the Wind (a fictional retelling of the Scopes Trial), attorney Henry Drummond says, "Sometimes I think there's a man who sits behind a counter and says, 'All right, you can have a telephone but you lose privacy and the charm of distance.'"

Privacy and the charm of distance - pretty good arguments in favor of both traditional ink-on-paper letters and, perversely enough, texts and tweets...all of which allow us to pre-screen the information we provide and the answer we choose to return.

All that having been said, I doubt that any of us will cut the telephone cord completely. A call in honor of a birthday or Fathers' Day or Mothers' Day or some other such important event is still more desirable than an e-mail or a text message. But we'll continue to slowly evolve the way we communicate with each other...

...and I'll bet we'll eventually come full circle and start writing letters again.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - My son Matt put me on to the wonderful website Letters of Note yesterday...via Facebook. QED.

B.