Unearthed Arcana: The Classic Rich Texts

Last week I was going through some archive CDs from the late 1990s looking for something I had written to forward to a colleague, and I came across a folder of my old Micro Publishing News humor columns--yes, the column that launched a thousand hate letters! Desperate to put off what I was supposed to be doing, I started scrolling through them--and aside from becoming nostalgic for MS Word 5.1a for the Mac (the last version of Word that didn't make me want to kill myself), I thought they were actually still kind of funny--though a bit dated technologically.

As some of you may know, from February 1997 to September 2000, I lived in Los Angeles (the suburb of Torrance, to be precise), working for a magazine called Micro Publishing News (and its sister publication Digital Imaging, for which I had been a contributing editor since 1995, and its other sister publication Print On Demand Business). Notably, our office was right across the street from Torrance High School--aka Sunndydale High School--which was where they filmed Buffy The Vampire Slayer around that same time, and whenever we were in the office late at night we would see strange lights coming from across the street....

Anyway, Micro Publishing News was billed as "The Newsmonthly for Electronic Designers and Publishers" and one of the many many things I did for it, in addition to writing news stories, features, and hardware/software reviews, as well as doing some page layout, copy editing, scanning, digital photography, running files to service bureaus at 2 in the morning, etc. etc., was write a humor column called "Rich Text," which I sort of based on Woody Allen's old New Yorker pieces from the 1970s (which themselves were based on Robert Benchley's New Yorker pieces from the 1920s).

Some years ago I had the idea of culling them together into a book, but that idea has languished, and probably for good reason, so I thought it would be fun to sporadically post them here (or at least what I think are the good ones--so you can just imagine how bad are the ones I won't post!). They were fun to write, I used to get a good response, and they actually didn't yield as much hate mail as my reviews did.

For the first installment, click the link below.



June 1997
A Guide to Summer Courses
By Richard Romano, Senior Associate Editor

(First published in the June 1997 issue of Micro Publishing News, Southern California Edition)

More and more schools are offering courses in various aspects of the new media. Here is a sampling of some of the classes that may or may not be coming to your local college or university.

INTRODUCTION TO DESKTOP PUBLISHING
This is the first of a summer-long suite of classes designed to teach the basics of publishing on the desktop. In this first series of sessions, students will learn how to assemble a desk, supplemented by field trips to Office Depot and Staples.
Prerequisite: Advanced Hyperbolic Geometry

INTERMEDIATE C PROGRAMMING
The writing and debugging of clean, concise code for a variety of applications is taught by means of concrete project examples and random beatings. Students will also be required to dissect a frog.

INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTERS
Meeting a computer for the first time can be a nerve-wracking experience. This course aims to prepare students for that fateful day by having them engage in conversation with their own household appliances. Discussion groups, conducted by the instructor’s toaster, are also included. In the final session, students will meet the computer, by which time they will be expected to have mastered all the customary social graces.

MAC VS. WINDOWS: THE GREAT DEBATE
Students will experiment with both major platforms, debate the positive and negative aspects of both, and defend his or her own preference in discussion groups and full-contact wrestling matches.
Note: This course also earns three credits in Physical Education.

HOW TO DEAL WITH A SERVICE BUREAU
Through a combination of lectures, field trips, and mild electroshock treatments, students will learn how to prepare files for film or paper output. In a special session, representatives from several local service bureaus will lead the class in a spirited rendition of “Kumbayah.”

PDF PRINTING AND PUBLISHING
Everything one needs to know about the Portable Document Format will be taught. By the end of this course, the student will be required to distill him- or herself into a PDF and be e-mailed to Belgium and back.

MAKING MONEY ON THE WEB
Everything there is to know about creating a profitable Web site will be covered. In this one-session course, guest speakers will weave the complex tales of their successes in the Web market. A detailed look at creative accounting practices will also be included.

COLOR SCANNING 101
Through hands-on training and fetal pig dissection, students will gain experience in capturing high-quality digital images from photographs, slides, and various parts of their anatomy.

ADVANCED OBSOLESCENCE
In this course—in which everything that is covered will be out-of-date by the end of the semester—students will learn advanced tips and techniques for software applications that are on the verge of having major revisions released. Also included is a detailed study of the Mac OS.

INTRODUCTION TO MAGAZINE PRODUCTION
In this course, students hoping to land a job in a magazine production department will examine a variety of workflow models. Included: How to remain lucid at 3 a.m., how not to convert RGB images to CMYK before sending files to a service bureau, how to make extensive last-minute changes to composed pages, and how to mix caffeine and alcohol for that extra zing.

INTRO TO LARGE-FORMAT
In this course, students will learn the ins and out of really big stuff.

LITERARY STUDIES OF NEW MEDIA
New media are increasingly being looked to as a viable new form of literature. In this course, students will explore the symbolism incorporated in such CD-ROM productions as Myst, Dark Forces, and many others. Such questions as “What are the parallels between ‘Waiting for Godot’ and graphic-intensive Web sites?”, “How is ‘Leather Goddesses of Phobos’ reminiscent of James Joyce?”, and “How is ‘Doom III’ a metaphor for the soul?” will be raised and promptly discarded in favor dissecting a variety of shellfish.

DIGITAL PRINTING AND MODERN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT
What is the nature of reality? Are we looking at color printing or, as Plato thought, merely the reflections of color printing? Is, as Nietzsche believed, paper dead? Is the proof of God’s existence analogous to an accurate color proof? If so, what’s up with that? Is e-mail creating a “new epistemology”? What are the theological ramifications of HiFi Color? Is it, as Spinoza believed, akin to expanding the Holy Trinity? Do the fonts for one’s job not actually exist or, as logical positivists such as Hume contended, are they simply not installed in one’s system? Students will be required to mull these things over while the instructor does lucrative consulting work elsewhere. Time passes. Leaves fall. Frogs are dissected, then put back together again. The instructor does not return. Printing goes on.