Eccentric Flower:199811/song of the cranky em-dash

nine eleven burgundy floral print

song of the cranky em-dash

My mail program has been acting strange. I have repaired my Mac any way I know how (which is a lot of ways), and no other application is acting strange anyway. Just that one. It doesn't like displaying messages in Courier anymore. It shows them in this weird garbled format. The text is actually fine. If you roll up the window and then open it again, forcing it to redraw, it looks great. But if you type, often it reverts to the garbled version again.

I messed with all sorts of settings and such - in the process, I inadvertently set my email to send my Columbine messages out under my birth name, which is exceedingly annoying to me. I didn't find that out until this morning when I started seeing the replies, and now I'm upset, in the sense that one is upset when one finds one's slip has been hanging out all day or one's fly has been open.

To solve the mail appearance problem, I eventually had to switch to another, prettier font last night, which annoys me as well. I have this idea that email should not be pretty.

If I use a real font, it makes me forget that email is a very unsophisticated technology, where only a very limited set of characters is acceptable. If I use a font which has an em-dash, I might be tempted to use it, and then no one will be able to read it. Em-dashes, printer's ("real") apostrophes, other goodies like that - forget it. You can't use them in mail unless you know perfectly well that the recipient's using the same mail program, on the same kind of computer, under the same phase of the moon.

We have Harrison Bergeron technology. We are offered the best of all possible worlds, but we generally end up playing to the least common denominator instead. Computers have been able to show funky characters on their screens for ages now, and do amazing things with visual layout, but we are generally reduced to a more limited reality somewhere along the trip. There is a thin point in the pipeline, a strait dating back to the time when a computer was a teletype with a screen.

I don't have this gripe about web pages, which some people do, because I can do everything I want with a web page and still have people read it. As far as I'm concerned, there is no excuse for Java or Shockwave or any of that flashy stuff. The web is about words and pictures, and I can send those just fine. Need to do something fancy? That's what the CGI format is for. (Look at Heliotrope, or the message board systems I've written, or any of that - hey, no Java! How about that?)

I spend a lot of time telling people how to build simple, spartan web pages. The virtues of simplicity. And here I am, trashing email because I can't get a real em-dash ... which, as shown several places above, I don't really need.

Moral: Technology is only unacceptable when it doesn't do what you want it to do.

Never mind.

I was going to write about Pleasantville today, but I find I have nothing to say about it. Go see it. It's quite good. There.

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