Thanks, Ace. "Keep It Simple, Stupid" has been the mantra running through my head all day.

You look at that .gif, and what used to be known as "common sense" tells you, "Uh-unh, no way."

We don't live in a world where people are encouraged to rely on common sense anymore. We live in a world where people think you have to consult experts on typography to get a clear answer on this. We live in a world where the argument from authority trumps all.

Well, bullshit. You don't need authorities for this one. The evidence is right there, clearly visible to anyone who's willing to employ a little common sense.

I'm thinking of throwing that .gif up as a banner, actually.

LGF is a Site worth visiting. C Johnson has his quirks, but has good articles. Some of the posters also add expertise, though this is clearly an "Israel-First" crowd given to occasional racist views on Muslims and "Nuke Mecca" exhortations.

Johnson was one of the 1st to spot this fraud, and though more technically expert people weighed in later, he debunked it simply and clearly by exactly duplicating it on MS Word, showing his results, and demolishing any critic showing up saying it wasn't so by elaborating on the technical aspects. Johnson should be credited as one of the 3-4 key people helping spread this like wildfire with his clear case showing forgery.

LGF gets a big boost from all the links to the Site given Charles Johnson his due, and for putting Rather and CBS's feet to the fire so fast that they had no time over the weekend to prepare a savvy response. What Rather and CBS said Friday resembles the off-guard, damaging, stupid statements that they hoped and prayed for when they ambushed hapless victims on 60 minutes. If Rather goes down, if many on CBS staff fall - LGF deserves partial credit for helping force reckless stuff from their mouths - before they could huddle in a damage control mode over the weekend with lawyers and PR consultants to limit the CBS disaster.

Johnson's GIF is genius. It could have benefited from a slide show feature that showed some other overlays proving that pica fonts, Selectric Times Roman typewritten samples didn't match up, only Microsoft Word did - but that's quibbling.

Ilyka - you are on mark about common sense being more important than waiting for "the experts" to tell you how you should think. In this case, I have sought out Kerry true believers for arguments, to entrap them to forcefully say "CBS and all the experts say that the documents are true" - then calling them to put some money where their mouths are - making bets with them that CBS will admit the documents are forgeries in the next 2 weeks.

The bets are from 5 dollars to 100 bucks. 225 dollars so far.

Like taking candy from babies.

In MS Word the superscripting in 187th is different then in that gif. The Word document was converted to an Acrobat file which raises the th in "187th" higher. Charles addressed this in an old post, but be careful because observant people will notice the difference at some point and you'll need to explain.

To see the difference actually type 187th in word and you can see the superscript rides lower. I made a pdf of the word document myself and confirmed it pushes the superscripting higher. All the original work was done here...

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12544

Question: How can a racist statement be made against a muslim? Is muslim a separate species?

But why just SHOW people what you're talking about when you can write a 5,000-word blog post about kerning??

"Johnson's GIF is genius. It could have benefited from a slide show feature that showed some other overlays proving that pica fonts, Selectric Times Roman typewritten samples didn't match up, only Microsoft Word did - but that's quibbling."

Well, this does a pretty good job:

http://img41.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img41&image=60minbusted.swf

Very impressive Jim.

Hey Ace, THE Jim Treacher is visiting. (At least I hope it is THE Jim Treacher.)

poker me up