Acquiring A 20th Century Word Processor

[David Orsam]

Okay so here's a challenge to all members of this forum. Please explain to me in plain English the meaning of last two paragraphs of #65 and the meaning of what was said after the word "Naughty" in #68. If no-one can do it then we can safely assume it can't be done.

[David Orsam]

Oh I do love this:

"Either Mike was getting everything wrong then, or the affidavit was not even in his words because Alan Gray composed it from what Mike had told him and Mike didn't read it through properly to see how badly Gray had mangled everything. I don't give two hoots which it is, but either way it doesn't help make it any more a reflection of reality."

The implication, apparently, is that if Mike had read through his affidavit "properly" he would have been able to ensure that it was a "reflection of reality". Seriously? This from the person who tells us (in so many words) that Mike had no grasp on reality.

No, the suggestion is that Alan Gray interrogated Mike and, on the basis of his answers, drafted his affidavit which was accurate to the extent that it was based on what Mike had told him but messed up the chronology, either because Mike had not been clear about it or Gray had misunderstood it. This strikes me as perfectly plausible and a perfectly reasonable suggestion but Diary Defenders don't like it because it provides a sensible explanation for why there are be dating errors in the affidavit. The Diary Defenders love the dating errors because they can use them to undermine the basic story being told in that affidavit. Once the dating errors are explained it causes them a real problem.

[David Orsam]

I think I read an admission in this thread today that it wasn't true to say that I had "chosen to change Voller's words"!!! My readers can, apparently, tell when am quoting someone's actual words, and I'm sure that's entirely correct, but that's not the point. Can they tell whether it's true or not when someone accuses me of deliberately changing a chemist's words? Will they all bother to carefully check exactly what I have written? I doubt it. That's why it's important not to make false accusations of this nature and important not to tell lies.

But anyway I had a good laugh when I read that I shouldn't have summarised Voller's words in this thread because I had only quoted them accurately in another thread!!!!! My goodness what nonsense. Apart from the fact that it's virtually impossible to keep up with which thread stuff has been posted in (and people who are following this mad discussion will know generally what is going on in any case), this statement was written by the very person who is not only responsible for introducing the subject of Voller into THIS thread (see #62), which is supposed to be a thread discussing the acquisition of a word processor, but also responsible for doing so, quite gratuitously, in the thread which is supposed to be devoted to a discussion about Anne's use of the English language.

Consequently, I have been forced to discuss Voller and his sunlamp in THREE different threads!!!

I have already demonstrated conclusively in another thread (the one about Anne's use of language!) why the accusation about my use of Voller's correspondence is baseless and I am sure that "my readers" who were not "all born yesterday" will be fully aware of this and will be treating the recent posts in this thread by a certain person with the utter contempt which they deserve.

[caz]

I hope they don't sell electric toothbrushes.

Or even worse, vibrators.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Just to add two things.

Firstly, I can't make head nor tail of the last two paragraphs of #65 nor can I understand anything said after the word "Naughty" in #68.

Not my problem. I'll wait to see how many others had similar comprension difficulties.

Secondly, Harrison (2003) says that the meeting with Voller, at which he visually examined the Diary, was on "Friday October 30th 1995". But 30th October 1995 was a Monday. Curiously, 20th October 1995 (which, as I raised earlier, is an alternative date one finds in Inside Story) WAS a Friday. So was that, in fact, the date of the meeting with Voller?

Interesting. I'm sure those ten days would have made all the difference to Voller's opinions.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Not sure what this adds but 30th October 1995 was a bank holiday.

Must have been a one off instance then, Dave. I don't recall any October bank holidays in the UK.

http://www.calendar-uk.co.uk/holidays/1995/

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Then nonsense switch appears to have been turned up to 10 today.

Everything I said in #61 about the possibility of Alan Gray drafting Mike's affidavit has been completely ignored. Yet this possibility explains EVERYTHING about the errors in the affidavit.

You know, I wouldn't mind but it was the world's leading expert on the Diary who first raised the possibility of Alan Gray being responsible for the contents of Mike's affidavit. Thus, by way of reminder, she said:

"I suggest he mentioned the red diary to Alan Gray, in the context of having given it to Anne recently, and Gray helped him "make something of it" in his January 1995 affidavit." (#1677, Acquiring a Victorian Diary)

There she is happy to "blame" Gray for something in Mike's affidavit when it pleases her. Now look at her two long posts of today. Not a single mention of Alan Gray! He has been airbrushed out of history!!!! Everything is "Mike said this" and "Mike said that".

Either Mike was getting everything wrong then, or the affidavit was not even in his words because Alan Gray composed it from what Mike had told him and Mike didn't read it through properly to see how badly Gray had mangled everything. I don't give two hoots which it is, but either way it doesn't help make it any more a reflection of reality.

But Mike was drinking heavily in January 1995.

Yes, and to put this into perspective, here is what I wrote to rj earlier on another thread:

What might be a tad more relevant is why Mike was sending 'notes by the dozen' to her Dad's address and why Anne had to have a police presence at her Dad's funeral - and why she got one. I wouldn't call that normal, even for a couple in the throes of a particularly bitter and nasty divorce.

And how stressful must all this have been for Anne? I think I'd have had more on my mind than making sure to remember all my apostrophes when writing to someone who wouldn't have known the difference anyway and was causing me such upset.

To put this in context, Anne's father died on 12th November 1994 and his funeral was held on 19th November. On 7th December 1994, Anne got her divorce from Mike. The following day, 8th December, Melvin Harris was famously quoted in the Evening Standard: 'The identities of the three people involved in the forgery will soon be made known'. Then, at the end of December 1994, according to an email I received from John Omlor, dated 13th February 2002, Robert Smith wrote to Mike, enclosing expense receipts to explain why there were no royalties owing on this occasion. Mike scrawled across one of them: "I don't give a dam [sic]". Five days later, on 5th January 1995, he swore the affidavit, supporting Melvin's uncannily accurate prophesy from exactly 4 weeks previously, by naming 'the three people involved in the forgery' - as himself, the wife who had abandoned him in the January and divorced him just a month ago, and his old mate Tony "dead men don't tell lies" Devereux.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I think I need to state that it is a barefaced lie to say that I have "chosen to change Voller's words". And it is a lie that is designed to cause confusion and falsely lead people to think I have actually changed Voller's words when quoting them.

I have done no such thing. My summary of the words of Voller that I had already accurately quoted is that he was saying that a similar effect would be created by a sunlamp. I stand by that summary entirely because that is clearly what he was saying in his letter to Warren.

Oh come on, David. Your readers weren't all born yesterday. They can tell when you are quoting someone's actual words and when you are paraphrasing. The inverted commas, or lack of them, tend to give it away.

Yes, you had already 'accurately' quoted Voller's words, but that was on a different thread. Here on this one you chose not to quote them 'accurately', but to put what he had written in your own words to represent his position, in effect exchanging his words for different ones of your own. You can nit pick like crazy to try and get out of it, but it amounts to the same thing. What were you doing writing a 'summary' in any case, when the relevant quotes were just a few words longer and only needed to be copied and pasted?

Here they are again: "at least some of the effects of an accelerated fading apparatus could be duplicated"

[by the use of - your own words presumably]

"no more than an ordinary sunlamp".

Love,

Caz
X

[David Orsam]

Doing a little search for the word I was trying to recall threw up an interesting piece from 2003 on the Telegraph's website. "Dixons is accused of selling used goods as new - again".

I think the key phrase there is "as new". While there is a very slim theoretical possibility that this could have happened to Mike Barrett, he would have walked away thinking he had bought a new computer. It wasn't second hand. The invoice shows that he paid full price.

[rjpalmer]

I hope they don't sell electric toothbrushes.

[Ozzy]

This whole thread had me trying to remember a word. This word was used by shops to describe goods that had been on show in a store. Usually if you wanted e.g. a TV you would check it out in store and if you wanted one they would roll out a new one from the storeroom. Then, when they had no more in the storeroom, you could buy the one that had been on show in shop. The word(s) I was trying to remember - shop soiled.

Doing a little search for the word I was trying to recall threw up an interesting piece from 2003 on the Telegraph's website. "Dixons is accused of selling used goods as new - again".

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1432323/Dixons-is-accused-of-selling-used-goods-as-new-again.html

"Customers have complained that the store sold, among other items, a digital camera which already had someone else's photographs on it, a computer containing private files loaded on its hard disk, and a portable cassette recorder that had been sold up to three times before".

"Some disgruntled customers have set up a website to detail their problems with Dixons (mastercare.blogsport.com)."

That website doesn't exist anymore.

[DirectorDave]

Just to add two things.

Firstly, I can't make head nor tail of the last two paragraphs of #65 nor can I understand anything said after the word "Naughty" in #68. If anyone can translate them into English I'd be grateful.

Secondly, Harrison (2003) says that the meeting with Voller, at which he visually examined the Diary, was on "Friday October 30th 1995". But 30th October 1995 was a Monday. Curiously, 20th October 1995 (which, as I raised earlier, is an alternative date one finds in Inside Story) WAS a Friday. So was that, in fact, the date of the meeting with Voller?

Not sure what this adds but 30th October 1995 was a bank holiday.

[David Orsam]

Just to add two things.

Firstly, I can't make head nor tail of the last two paragraphs of #65 nor can I understand anything said after the word "Naughty" in #68. If anyone can translate them into English I'd be grateful.

Secondly, Harrison (2003) says that the meeting with Voller, at which he visually examined the Diary, was on "Friday October 30th 1995". But 30th October 1995 was a Monday. Curiously, 20th October 1995 (which, as I raised earlier, is an alternative date one finds in Inside Story) WAS a Friday. So was that, in fact, the date of the meeting with Voller?

[David Orsam]

One thing I would say about experts is they are often the people who are most easily fooled because they think that they have all the knowledge but, while Voller might not have had a clue about the effects of a UV sunlamp on a manuscript, because there have been no published experiments, those in the criminal underworld, i.e. document forgers, might just have that precise kind of knowledge because that's their business. I somehow doubt if Voller had ever been asked to authenticate a document in his life before. He probably hadn't even been asked by anyone to give an opinion as to whether a document was written in Diamine Ink.

In any case, the whole business with the sunlamp may just be a red herring because it seems that Nick Warren managed to write a letter in January 1995 with Diamine Ink that was remarkably similar in appearance to the look of the Diary ink without the use of any artificial ageing. I have already posted an extract from an image of that letter in another thread. Voller saw a copy of that letter seventeen years ago. This is from a post by Chris Phillips on the forum on 1st May 2005:

"Well, in 2001 Voller wrote to Peter Birchwood in response to a colour photocopy of a test letter written in 1995 by Nick Warren. Here is Peter's quotation, from his post of 7 June 2001:

"...the poor opacity and fading and bronzing that are apparent in your copy of Nick Warren's letter. These are aspects that can be drastically influenced by relatively small shifts in the conditions...One factor that can strongly affect both the initial result and the subsequent behavior of the ink , is the choice of paper and it may perhaps be that Nick's choice was not such as to bring out the best in the ink...I agree that the ink of Nick's letter has taken on an appearance similar to that of the Diary, as regards fading and bronzing..." [my emphasis]

If the ink of a 6 year-old letter could have taken on an appearance similar to that of the diary, it's difficult to see how Voller, who saw the diary in 1995, could be "certain" on the basis of its appearance that it hadn't been written 6 years before."

I have to concur with Chris Phillips' conclusion and say that Voller's concession in 2001 is quite remarkable.

[David Orsam]

Two other things.

Firstly, we may note the irony of the Great Expert saying that Mike's affidavit states that Anne purchased the Diary, as opposed to it being Mike who contacted Martin Earl, while at another time (as I have already quoted) she said:

"I suggest he mentioned the red diary to Alan Gray, in the context of having given it to Anne recently, and Gray helped him "make something of it" in his January 1995 affidavit." (#1677, Acquiring a Victorian Diary)

If it wasn't so hilarious it would be tragic. That someone can practically argue against herself. On one day the Great Expert suggests that Alan Gray drafted the passage in Mike's affidavit about the red diary and on another day she is utterly baffled as to how Mike's affidavit could have got the facts so badly wrong about the acquisition of the red diary!!!

Secondly, there has never been a response to my point that there are plenty of other dating errors in the Diary such as the date when Mike is said to have acquired his word processor. Yet no-one is suggesting that this means that Mike didn't buy a word processor, simply that he (or just as likely Alan Gray) got his dates mixed up.