is patented, in 1904 in New York by Frank Rose, who died before his invention went into production.  His son George continued with the business, raised the needed money on the patent and launched The Rose Typewriter Company in 1907.  The first Standard Folding Typewriter [the carrying case folds] is manufactured in 1908.

Patient Reader, I am back.

You may have wondered.  It's a long story, involving that old bugaboo about how one false keystroke can wreak havoc.  You've heard that one, haven't you?  How, unlike a typewriter, (for which all you need is WhiteOut), just by striking a single key, one tiny mistake and you can delete everything?  That's not possible, is it? 

Well, actually, yes it is.

But all was not lost!  Despite my hosting server not backing up the formatting and settings on blogs.  Enter: Z, tech support genius extraordinaire!  Watching him diagnose, hands a blur over the keys, pulling up and reading code, making Blitzkrieg-fast adjustments, opening more windows at once than I've ever dared -- it's like looking over the shoulder of a Talmudic scholar surrounded by a pile of commentaries and the Torah.  It's like trying to imagine reading a Chinese newspaper. 

"That space there," Z says, indicating an emptiness between a closed bracket and a 'greater than' sign.  "There's hidden logic there.  That's what the empty space is.  Hidden logic."

I am so charmed by the idea.  That you can bury logic out of sight.  It's like going backstage and seeing the reverse side of painted flats.  Standing amidst the struts and trusses that hold up the oh-so seemingly substantial and brightly colored images the audience sees out front.  You expect all the text to be backwards.  You see the unseen and complicated system of wheels and gears that make it all move.

Z's parents were Eastern European (Romanian?  Maybe.  I can't remember) musicians, classically trained, concert pianists or violinists, who came here I suppose during the Cold War -- for the better life, maybe defected along with a ballet dancer, seeking asylum?  I want to embellish.  I want them to be former Communists and intellectuals who smoke Gitanes and wear heavy knitted sweaters and hats and speak stoically about the deprivations and the cold winters and the KGB.  In any case they sent Z to computer camp when he was 5 and he wrote his own game program that summer.  Skip the music lessons, they figured.  Learn something useful, they said.  This is America.  Learn a skill and become a millionaire.

I was the one who got violin lessons.  There was wisdom behind that choice as well, but watching by Z's side as he works restoring my settings, hands flying, I wonder how life would have gone had I learned other things.

A new day.  The little white smudge by the first palm tree on the left is the Griffith Observatory.

As we reach the end of the year, I am reminded of the original intent behind all of this -- that there was a story of a man who begins receiving messages about Time and History and his place in a bigger scheme of things, and how he learns there is a significance -- not just personal but universal -- to the year 1904, and it is his Fate to figure out exactly what that significance is, and convince the world of it.  And time is running out.  Of course like all modern day reluctant heroes (think Buffy, think Scully the first few seasons, unimpressed by Mulder, think about that cheerleader they had to save to save the world), our protagonist in "1904" doesn't want the job, would rather be doing something else, until he realizes in a series of inexplicably strange situations and then disaster strikes in the Gladwellian blink of an eye, in the unintended stroke of a key --  ("What does this little button do?" Then, ka-boom) -- that he has no choice. 

Grafitti on a poster for "I Am Legend" in a New York subway station: Will Smith trotting away from a mangled city, half of a ruined Brooklyn Bridge behind him, and a thought bubble rising up from a series of tiny bubbles from Will's head.  "I shoulda voted for Kucinich."

So tell me, faithful reader, should I offer up parts of that manuscript here perchance, perhaps?  The narrative that motivated this trivia game of more or less-known facts about 1904?  Just snippets maybe?  You want me to tell you a story?  There's a good bit in Brussels, once the gun running capital of the world, with an evil Baron and a fountain with a statue of a kid having a pee, and then there's another scene where they threaten to leave our hero in No-Man's land outside the Gaza Strip.  They're yelling at him to get out of an old station wagon in full view of a guard tower with trigger-happy occupants.  There's a goat in the back seat and an Egyptian driver with gold teeth. 

You tell me.  I'm back.  Ready to serve.  Ready to do whatever it takes.  You tell me what you want.

Operators are standing by.