THE QUICK BROWSE FIREFOX JUMPS OVER THE
LAZY BLOG
Okay, 83% of you
got it – and 17% of you are . . . so
young!
Once upon the
time, you see, there were typewriters and, as one of
you reminisced in the comment field, “Ribbons. Correction fluid. Keys that stuck if you typed
too fast. Forms
in triplicate with carbon paper between the sheets. Ah, good times, good times...”
(Several others
of you correctly noted I had it wrong – I had “JUMPED” when it should be
“JUMPS.”)
Wikipedia explains it all better than I can:
"The quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog" is a 35-letter pangram (a phrase that uses all the letters of
the alphabet) that has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards because it is nicely
coherent and short. It was known in the late 19th century, and used in Baden-Powell's
book Scouting for Boys
(1908) as a practice sentence for signalling.[1] In later years, the
phrase was popularized by Western Union and
the Telephone Company
to test Telex/TWX
data communication equipment for accuracy and reliability. It was often used
for testing the teletype services (a
procedure known as "foxing") . . .
Many minor variations exist, including replacing one of the "the"s with an "a". Although it is the most
popular, many other sentences are shorter and use each letter of the alphabet,
such as "The five boxing wizards
jump quickly."
F So it was a play on that. All in the cause of
promoting the new Quickbrowse
for Firefox.
(Another of you commented, “I love
QB, and I do use Firefox.”)
Thanks for all your other wonderful
comments as well. (“Elmer Bittleston, my typing teacher in 1956, taught me this to
check out all the keys.”) (“It helped
that in 9th grade Miss Rhodes, the typing teacher with large firm breasts,
walked around the room while we were typing that and smacked us with a 12"
wooden ruler.”) (“And you should read a
great book, Ella Minnow Pea.”) This survey thing is fun.
Of course, the other famous
typing sentence is this one:
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party." Do you know who said that? (Obviously, a long time ago, or would have been “all good women and men . . . “) Patrick Henry? Andrew Jackson? Teddy Roosevelt? No, it was Charles Weller in 1867, a court reporter whose pal Christopher Stoller had invented the first workable typewriter.
Which
brings us – the aid of their party – back to politics.
DELEGATE COUNTER
Slate offers you this handy gadget.
WEEKEND VIEWING
Tuesday’s
endlessly long column included this
link to a “60 Minutes” piece on the
group of volunteers who have begun offering free weekend health care clinics in
America as they do in the jungles of the Amazon. I can’t imagine many of you found time to
watch it; but with the weekend coming up, maybe you now can.