Skip to main content

Chapter 19 - Juula turns Del on to Pilcrows and Text Geography

                

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete

"All right, buckle up. Here's a copy and paste job from the internet: '100 Best First Lines from Novels'." 
Best first lines from novels
"We'll take out the graphics and leave only the words. Only plain text. Now look carefully and tell me what you see?"
Del looked long and hard and failing to see anything meaningful, was afraid that his bruised ego would be tempted to transform her into a paramecium or a postcard of the Matterhorn.
But instead he held strong and steady and was even shot through with a pertinent thought regarding such awful transformations: Luckily for us, God had a good attention span! We love to say 'it's a crazy world,' but actually, it's not crazy at all. It works. A beautiful Estonian girl doesn’t turn into a flower pot or a boxing glove on a sudden divine whim. God was…
"Del, hello? Del?"
"Oh... Nothing, comes to mind, Juula. I mean I see words of course..."
"All right, but looking a little closer, what else is there?"
"Numbers, punctuation marks and symbols?"
"Perfect... and they're very important. But now watch." She clicked the 'show non-printing symbols' toggle and looked at him expectantly.
"Ah yes, I've seen this done a few times. The paragraph marks and the little dots between words".
"Exactly right! Okay, those paragraph symbols... what are they called?"
Del knew they had a proper name, but he also knew that it wasn't among the bazillion mostly foolish things cluttering his memory banks. Nonetheless to keep the atmosphere sweet and to revel in Juula's smile which made his toes curl - he invented 'candidate names.'
"Dingus?"
"No."
"Doodad, doohickey?"
"No, no."
"Wait, I have it... Thingamabob?"
"Silly! It's a pilcrow."
"Pilcrow! Sounds like a gland... 'I'm taking Vitamin E supplements for my Pilcrow'."
"Del, are you paying attention?"
"Yes... a pilcrow... Wait a second, let me look at them."
Del chastised himself. Why did everything have to be a damned joke?! God not only had a long attention span, but he had created a world in which the best possible fun was honest success in serious endeavors. AND NOT COMMENTS FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY!
Whoa! Heavy! Chill bro!
No! Along with generating millions of dolts and perverts, our culture had churned out endless varieties of Daffy Ducks and Goofies. And he was one of them.
Damn it, Del!!! Never mind the low-budget psycho-theology and stay focused!! Pilcrows... why was Juula, pointing them out to him?!
He examined the screen and for a few seconds, was like the stark naked Arnold Schwarzenegger in the second Terminator movie, when he had electronically 'sized up' the people he needed to steal clothes and a Harley Davidson from. Et voilà!
"I have it Juula, I think I have it! There's a pilcrow before and after every paragraph."
"Yes! Like every river has a 'headwater' and a 'mouth' - a starting point and a place where it spills into an ocean or a lake, every paragraph has a pilcrow before and a pilcrow after."
"It's like the geography of a page."




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 1 - From Keyboard Reject to Action Hero

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Once upon a half-life ago, there was a guy called Del. That was his nickname, short for Delete. And he was a reliable, hard-working key on most of the world's computers. A straight-forward and regular sort of guy, he was never more prominent than any of the letters he had been charged to kill, no fatter than an 'i', no skinnier than a capital 'W' - unlike Backspace who was super-sized and flaunted a Nike-style arrow pointing hard-left ←. Some hardware companies, like Lord Macintosh, had refused Del right from the get-go, preferring to farm out his tasks to a combination of other workers like 'Function-Delete,' with 'Delete' on Sir Mac actually being Backspace ←. But then one day, for Del - the original Del - things took a bad turn, real bad! And it happened at the speed of a toilet flush vortex! Millions upon BILLIONS of small handheld flatscreen devices suddenly began to spill from the heavens - the 'STPs' - smartph...
Post a Comment
Read more

Chapter 18 - Juula promises to get a "new and improved" DEL back on phones and tablets

                THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Good morning, Del! Ready for the big day?" "Sure, what do you have in mind?" "A tour... to a place you've often seen but never noticed." "I like it already. Where?" "A page in MS Word." "Eh? Microsoft Word? I must've done two-thirds of all my work there - even starting before Windows. If there's one place that holds no mysteries for me!" "So you might think, my sweet bundle of mashed-up bones, so you might think!" "Okay, I believe you, number one because I have to and number two because I want to. But may I ask why?" "Yes, of course. You feel that you were unjustly removed from the telephones and tablets of the world, correct?" "Well, I can't say 'unjustly' - there wasn't any room for two deletion buttons, so they left the big guy - they left Backspace... but all right, yes, it hurts." "What if I told you I could...
Post a Comment
Read more

Chapter 15 - It gets real. Juula, an Estonian girl visits Del at the ICU - Text Editing will soon take a quantum leap forward

             THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Del came back to his senses chastising himself. Lucidity, lucidity at all costs! Machines don't beg doctors to kill patients! Lucidity, damn it!!! How is lucidity obtained when in a coma? he wondered. And as always, because of his experience, the answer came instantaneously: prayer. He mumbled a Rosary. And in the middle of a Glory Be, out of the blue but with poignant clarity, he remembered a moment well after he had been banished from the keyboards, but shortly before the 'additives' - the damned drugs - had lost their magic. He had met a marvelous Estonian girl, marvelous because she was so pure and clean and straight and unsullied by drugs or cynicism or attitudes. Juula was fresh and had honest twinkles in her eyes. Del had been entranced. But after all the bad living he'd been through (with the worst yet to come) for all he was bedazzled, he had refrained from courting her because for the first time in his l...
Post a Comment
Read more