Posted on 09/11/2004 7:51:29 AM PDT by rocklobster11
Or should I say fo or fr or f anything? It seems that the character f in all the MemoGate documents overhangs the character following it, as shown in the document below:
Based on information I got from Hugh Hewitt's blog, provided to him from Rice University Computer Science professor Robert Cartwright, I decided to look at the memos for evidence of kerning. You can see from the image above, that the character combination "my" appears to be kerned in one document but not the other. However, I'm willing to write this off as being due to artifacts from the copying process. Also, the default Microsoft Word document that overlays perfectly with the memos does not use kerning.
Even without kerning, the Time New Roman (and other proportional fonts) on the computer has a negative offset with the letter f. That means that the top of the letter f will overhang the next character. This is not something that you would get from a normal typewriter in 1972, event with proportional fonts. The text below was written on an IBM Selectric with proportional fonts, and you can see that there is no overhang of the "f" chararacter on the character that follows
It seems that the only way these memos could have been written in 1972 would be on an IBM Selectric Composer, which was a desktop typesetting machine. There is an excellent analysis of the IBM Selectric Composer on http://shapeofdays.typepad.com/the_shape_of_days/2004/09/the_ibm_selectr.html, that shows how close a document created on an IBM Selectric composer could match up to the memos in question. The image below shows the CBS memo overlaid with the output of the IBM Selectric Composer (overlay in red):
The line spacing is off, but if you read the site above, you will see that the line spacing could be adjusted, and you get a pretty good match to the CBS memos. However, this match is not as good as the one produced with Microsoft Word in default settings. To see this, you can look at this Flash animation showing an overlay of MS Word ontop of one of the memos. The animation takes about 30-45 seconds to run, so watch it all.
If you read the commentary at http://shapeofdays.typepad.com/the_shape_of_days/2004/09/the_ibm_selectr.html, you will see the difficulty of creating this document on an IBM Selectric Composer: (e.g. requiring the switching out of font balls to get the superscript or the purchase of a special font ball just to add this non standard character, and the perfect centering of the header which matches identically to the way MS Word centers the same text.
The Boston Globe has interviewed an expert who confirms that these memos could have been created on an IBM Selectric Composer and that the Air Force completed service testing of the IBM Selectric Composer in April 1969. However, using the Composer was not a simple task, and it seems possible but improbable that the Texas Air National Guard would have had one of these machines or that Killian would have typed memos for his personal file on one of these machines. I've heard but do not have any evidence that the Composer was an expensive machine, on the order of several thousand dollars (which would be like $15,000 in todays terms).
All of the other documents in Bush's officially released files were not written with a proportional font, so it's up to CBS to produce other documents written in 1972 by Killian that are comparable to the CBS memos. Certainly, Killian or someone else wrote more than these 4 memos on this complex, expensive typesetting device.
It is possible that Killian wrote these memo's on an IBM Selectric Composer even though:
It's also possible that the Moon Landing was staged in a film studio. It's also possible that there are Alien remains in Hanger 18 in Roswell, N.M. Anything is possible. If CBS were a news organization rather than a Democratic 527 organization, they might at least admit that while possible, the probability is that these are forgeries, and that there is greater probability of finding the Loch Ness Monster than that these memos were written by Killian in 1972.
Given all of the alphabet soup we've been fed by the Alphabet Soup News Stations, and the Alphabet Soupy Dim candidate, would "F" (in John F. Kerry) stand for
"Forged"?
"Fake"?
"Facetious"?
"Fractitious"
"Frumpy"?
"F-ed up"?
Or, to best describe his chances of winning...
"Fuhgeddaboudit"????
In 1970 I worked for a time as an advertising sales rep for a man who laid out his own camera ready copy which was then printed by a commercial printer. This man used an IBM Composer, I know that it was a major purchase for him and was probably the most expensive thing he bought to use in his business unless you count the Chevy Monte Carlo that he drove and I think the car may have even cost slightly less than the Composer. This is strictly a typeSETTER as opposed to a typeWRITER. In 1972 I went to work as a tech rep for Addressograph-Multigraph and was in and out of all kinds of small printing operations, I saw several Composers but I never saw one used as a simple typewriter, they were not practicle for such use. Office typing, if done on an IBM product, was done on the Selectric. The Composer was only used to set type which was photographed on a film negative and used to make an offset printing plate.
There are still old Composers around and I am sure that if anyone could produce a match for these documents by using a Composer they would come forward but I don't believe a match could be produced this way. Even if it could, the likelihood of Col. Killian having used one is almost nonexistant.
This site, The Shape of Days did create a copy on an IBM Selectric Composer, that was close, but not as close as the Word doc. It was also a pain in the ass to create. Here is the overlaid doc they came up with: 
.
So it was possible that Killian created these docs on a Composer, but again I think about as probable as getting fair and balanced news from Dan Rather.
SEND IT!!!!!
LOL!!!! I thought it was Donald Segretti
Gotta go now,
Regards, Donald
p.s..........I have always said and I will continue to say........ it has become time that good people do bad things...........just to stay a little ahead of the game! Get it?
Tagline - Nixon Era Dirty Tricks
...if we assume that the May 4 memo ordering Bush to get a physical by May 14 is legit...
According to this post:
Garrett: "The memo also requires a flight physical by May 14th. But military rules set a deadline for flight physicals as the last day of the pilot's birth month. In Mr. Bush's case, that would have been July 31st. All pilots had three months before the end of their birth month to obtain their flight physical."
This also puts the May 4 memo into question, doesn't it??
The Composer is really not even a legitimate suspect because it was a typeSETTER, people did not use typeSETTERS as typeWRITERS. It would be like hunting squirrels with a Barrett fifty caliber sniper rifle.
However, assuming I'm stupid enough to accept Dan Rather's argument that it is legit, the May 19 memo specifically answers that Bush did not obey a direct order, because Killian notes his discussion with Bush about waiting until going to Alabama to perhaps get a physical.
With a little boost and some Freeper art it'll be another "All Your Base Are Belong to Us"
Did you account for the fact that the text is rotated slightly to the right in the pdf copies? If you didn't, that could account for the over-hanging "f"s.
if you look at the image at the top of the page, the words are blown up enough for you to draw your own conclusion. To me, it doesn't seem that any rotated font is causing the issue. I have seen some talk that the apparent kerning is the result of multiple generations of photcopying and the fact that the documents from CBS are black and white images as opposed to gray scale. However, all of the "f"s in all of the documents overhang, so I think that is not really a persuasive argument.
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