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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 8/13/99 -- Vol. 18, No. 7
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@lucent.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
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1. You know what I love? It is political organizations that send
you mail addressed using a computer font that looks like it is
hand-written. You probably have seen mail with this font. Someone
gives a sample of her or his handwriting printing each of the
letter of the alphabet in upper and lower case, and then they are
scanned by computer. Then when an address is put on the mail this
font is used and for a brief instant looks like it is hand-written.
But it does not look that way for long. It is obvious that it is
computer-printed if you look at any characters used more than once.
If you look not even closely you can see that every lower-case "e"
is identical to every other lower-case "e."
But this hand-written look is, I guess, intended to give the mail a
sort of grassroots feel. The party sending the mail wants you to
feel that their opponents have a big political machine and address
their mail (gasp!) by computer. But not this party. You are
supposed to think that some public-spirited sincere person has
hand-addressed each out-going piece of mail and frequently they
have added some sort of note like "Please, Mark, open this
immediately and give it extra special attention." I am supposed to
be bowled over by the fact he knew my first name. Of course, it
was right on the first line of the address. I suppose that it
takes some artificial intelligence for the program to screen out
titles like "Rev." We have probably all heard of the instances
where a computer program was not sufficiently debugged and sent a
piece of mail to The First Church of Christ saying "Dear Mr.
Christ, are you stuck in a dead-end low-paying job?" So I am not
saying that it is necessarily easy to computer-address a piece of
mail.
But if you are too unobservant to know any better it really looks
like the personal touch. It has programmed in imperfection. The
thing is that imperfection is supposed to indicate special care has
been taken. Somebody I know worked on the software for a sort of
automatic typewriter that programed in a random typing mistake.
The same software would white-out the mistake and correct it. This
is to make the letter look like it was typed and addressed by a
real human specifically for the addressee. The imperfection is
supposed to make the thing more personal.
But I love to get political mail with this sort of addressing.
Boy, it saves a lot of time and effort. Most political messages
you have to open up read the contents before you realize the sender
thinks that you are stupid and that she or he can easily pull the
wool over your eyes. If these people cannot even address the
envelope without being deceitful, what can you expect from the
contents? [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
If you could make everyone think alike, it would be
very much as if no one thought at all.
-- Phillips Brooks