Keyboard capers
THE RATTLING Remingtons are no more. In the 1930s Evelyn Waugh described the fancy typewriters of the secretaries in the inner sanctums of Fleet Street making a sound no louder than the drumming of a bishop's fingertips on a leather armchair. But even they were jackhammers in comparison with today's silent digital world.
Yet the layout of the keyboards remains the same. My old associate Tom Dennen sends in some information you've all been itching to know:
· "Stewardess" is the longest word typed only with the left hand on a keyboard.
· "Lollipop" is the longest word typed only with the right hand.
· "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" contains every letter of the alphabet.
· "Typewriter" is the longest word that can be written using only one row of the keyboard.
I can confirm what he says about the quick brown fox. I take his word for it on the stewardess, lollipop and typewriter – except that when he talks of left and right hand he is talking about touch typists.
We hacks who use basically two fingers most of the time, never more than three or four, including thumbs – and type at three times the speed of a touch typist – do not divide the keyboard between left and right-hand operations. It's first come, first served.
Not only are we faster than touch typists, we're incredubly ackurate and never hav to goe bakk and correct tings.
Cedillas
THERE was a time when I would find myself having to use French telex keyboards in various parts of Africa. These are totally different from the QWERTY keyboard of Anglophone countries. They have cedillas and all kinds of other characters and they are small – you use only your right hand.
They take a bit of getting used to but after a few weeks away, they're second nature. Get back to base and it feels weird to be using both hands on a QWERTY keyboard.
I realise all this possibly makes sense only to the girls. (I must go and polish my nails).
New York, New York
TO TALK of telexes in this magic digital age is rather like harking back to the days of the runner with a message in a cleft stick. Yet we thought we were at the cutting edge. It seemed marvellous that one could be sitting at a telex machine in West Africa and know the words were printing out in Johannesburg, London, New York or wherever.
The trick was to know where to locate a machine. In the Angolan town of Nova Lisboa there was a tailor's shop called Nova Yorque, which was much frequented by foreign correspondents for its telex.
One fellow filed his dispatch from the tailor's shop, only to get an indignant response from his foreign editor: "What the hell are you doing in New York?"
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
That Test again
IT'S ASTONISHING how many people vividly remember that 1948 cricket Test at Kingsmead which featured Alec Bedser and Cliff Gladwin in a last wicket stand for England - and became a discussion point among readers quite by accident.
Philip Daniel recalls: "It was Gladwin who swung and missed at the last ball of a Lindsay Tuckett over but he and Bedser (1 not out off 18 balls) scampered the leg-bye in the rain and gathering gloom. The match, the first in the series, was played over four days."
Who will remember any Twenty20 match 62 years on?
Chocolate calculator
HERE'S another of those weirdo mathematical schlenters that actually work. It's called the chocolate calculator.
How many times a week would you like to eat chocolate (at least once but less than 10 times)? Multiply this by 2. Add 5. Multiply by 50.
If you've already had your birthday this year, add 1760. If you haven't, add 1759.
Subtract the four-digit year in which you were born.
You should now have a three-digit number. The first digit is the number of times you would like to eat chocolate in a week. The other two are your age.
Search me, but it seems to work. But apparently it works only for this year, 2010. (Next year we get onto marshmallows).
Tailpiece
Vicar: "You may now kiss the bride."
Bride: "Not now, I've got a headache."
Last word
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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