As part of our constant efforts to blend in with the blogging masses, here's today's mandatory amateur typographical analysis.

Catherine alerted me to this post at LittleGreenFootballs comparing an image of the new documents from CBS to a version ginned up in MS Word. Astounding! They do match closely. But I think it's a little disingenuous for the author to line the two copies over top of each other in grayscale as proof of the samples' identity. Times New Roman is a specific thing, you know, invented in 1931 by some guys named Lardent & Morison. When word processing software engineers sit down the design spec doesn't say "something that looks newspapery", it says "Times New Roman". Different examples of it are supposed to look the same.

But in this case, that's all they do: look the same. They aren't the perfect match that LGF pretends. Have a look here:

I just put one copy in front of another, changed the color, and lined them up as best as I could. You might expect scaling issues, the rotation of the scan, or antialiasing to account for the red bleed-through. And they do, to some extent -- fortunately the LGF folks have formatted the picture as closely as possible to prove their point, so we don't have to worry too much about making it an even closer match.

Now, like I said, it's close. But notice that it really isn't an identical match, and, more importantly, the offset is not uniform across the document, and does not increase linearly along any direction. Some words and phrases, like "pushing", "obviously pressured" and the date are more offset than other sections. If you bother to zoom in, you'll see there's actually whitespace between some characters and the red bleedthrough (and no, I don't mean the superscripted "th"). To me, this all implies that this isn't just a case of a heavily-xeroxed laser print.

So add one more uninformed partisan jerk on the internet to the "genuine" column. I'm just trying to keep the score even. I've got a sneaking suspicion that CBS's experts aren't as dumb as the blogosphere thinks they are -- and let's not forget, they had access to the original paper stock. And to me, the white house's failure to jump on the forgery bandwagon has got to figure into this debate somewhere.

UPDATE: An expanded, considerably more thorough and overall better version of the above is available over at DailyKos.

i cannot fucking wait for this election to be over.

i think i'm going to drink myself into a stupor for the next two months.

not that that's so different from my normal lifestyle.

that is all.

apparently other people think travis morrison sounds like dave matthews.

not a totally terrible interview, anyway. i can't wait to hear his new album. i'm a little afraid i'll be disappointed, though, because it's apparently nothing like dismemberment plan stuff.