Things Younger Americans Should Know

Uhm, that would actually be the decomposing room.

 

Things everyone should know:

Just because someone doesn't know what you know doesn't make them an idiot. People have different standards for their cultural intake. I couldn't name you four Nirvana or Pearl Jam songs. Doesn't make me an idiot. You probably couldn't name four En Vogue songs. I wouldn't judge you for it.

Should people have heard of Nirvana or Pearl Jam when they're mentioned outright? Likely. But all this "Oh god, the world is going to hell in a handbasket because someone didn't know the chord played during the bridge of 'Stairway to Heaven'" is so overdone.

 

No, it's not. But consider it a compliment from some of us, given how territorial and arrogant we Americans can frequently be.

 

En Vogue made four songs?

 

I hate you.

 

I do know they were four hot (at the time) women.

 

hahah good enough wicked. At least you know who they are.

That's my thing. I know who Pearl Jam is, I know who Nirvana is, but I certainly don't feel like they've impacted my life. And I think it's so easy on here, on a ton of threads, to judge people for not having had the same things happen in our lives.

 

Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the whole Seattle grunge experience bypassed me because they came at times when I was a) in the military and b) overseas quite a bit. I feel absolutely no connection to the young-adult experiences that people my age experienced in their early 20s. Also, seeing as how I, at 20, married a woman 13 years my senior, there were quite a few things I had no connection with as a result.

 

Back in the good old days before newspapers invested in desktop publishing programs and had the technology to send pages straight to press there was an intermediate step needed.
The stories would be sent to a printer where they would come out on a special type of filmy paper. That filmy paper would then be fed through a hot waxer to make it sticky and then people known as compositors would cut the story out using a cutting blade (x-acto knife) and paste it onto the page per the slot person's layout. Editors and paginators would argue frequently when it came to making a good cut or switching the page around to make a story work.
This page would then be brought to the production room where it would be shot onto a negative and that negative would be fed into a machine that made it into plates for the press.
(To save time I tried cutting & pasting the copy myself when I would do agate.. several compositors threatened to cut my fingers off I tried it again)

 

Thanks EStreetJoe. I have heard about Paste up before, but had not heard of a composing room.

 

Nicely done, E-Street.

Now, can you give us a lesson in linotype?
(Can't wait for CU to ask what linotype is)

 

Linotype is slightly before my time, I think. We might have used a linotype machine my freshman year in college (1987) at the school paper. Is it a machine that you use to type headlines in on and then it prints them out for you so you can paste it up?