I hope something helps, msbelle. I feel so bad for your and the poor noodle, to have such rage inside him.

My handwriting has always been unreadable, and I got my first typewriter when I was about 14. People talk about writing out drafts by hand, but to me, writing by hand is sheer labor, but it feels like I think with the ends of my fingers.

The Royal Standard is the ultimate in the evolution of the manual typewriter, while the Selectric II is the pinnacle of the electric typewriter. (Not the Selectric III, which sucked.)

Also I apparently need to get him into a new afterschool since that is where all of the breakdowns are happening weekdays.

Um, wasn't that also true of the old afterschool? I'm guessing it's not location-specific...

Msbelle, I am so sorry that this is all happening, but so glad Mac has you to be there for him.

msbelle, hoping things improve for you and Mac.

My mother had (and may still have) the typewriter my grandfather took with him to college in 1926.

I think I got my first (manual) typewriter when I was 12 or so. It was practically a toy, it was such thin plastic.

56 years later, I was so glad that one of my housemates brought a good, solid Selectric to college. I lived among English majors and there was much typing. I fell asleep to the sound of that typewriter on many occasions.

For grad school I had one of the original Brother word processors. It displayed 70 characters at a time! You could go back and correct things before it put the words on the paper! Such advanced technology...

msbelle, sending all possible good thoughts your way and mac's.

We petitioned our Dean of Students asking for typing and other clerical subjects to be taught, plus personal accounting and budgeting classes, just to prepare us for survival while we searched for performing work. He and the board firmly vetoed the idea. The School of the Arts was training artists, and we were not to distract ourselves with thoughts of failure, needing to support ourselves other than by our chosen field of art.

Once in an evaluation he also told me the school was not training teachers, they were training artists. And if I was even considering teaching rather than performing myself, I was in the wrong school. Ass. He was most undoubtedly a frustrated performer wannabe, but his job boiled down to bean counter.

Wouldn't you hate if if you were required to stand every time your boss entered the room?

All rise for Liu, the prima donna!

What, no brass band performing "Hail to the Comptroller"?

New York City's new comptroller, John Liu, has ordered his staff to rise whenever he enters the room and to address him as "Mr. Comptroller."

The new presidential-like formalities were laid out during a series of meetings last week that had veteran denizens of the Municipal Building snickering behind his back, sources said.

"I am making the adjustment myself. I'm used to calling him J.L.," said his press secretary, Sharon Lee. "This is universal, for people who have known him for years or people who are meeting him for the first time."

It WOULD be fun to make people say "comptroller" as much as possible...

I love the site Hack a Day, but can people see what's wrong with this paragraph?

[Sean_Carney] build this clock that tells the weather instead of the time. The two hands display the current conditions and the temperature. Forty below zero seems amazingly cold if you’re on the Fahrenheit scale but [Sean's] from Winnipeg so he’s operating on the Celsius side of things.

Weather clock

eta: Possibly intentionally wrong....

I don't get how -40°C isn't devastatingly cold--isn't it about the same as Fahrenheit?

Yeah. -40 is the one temp that's exactly the same for F and C.