End. Period. Stop.

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This really is the end of an era. Western Union has transmitted its last telegram.

STOP: After 155 years in the telegraph business, Western Union has cabled its final dispatch.

The service that in the mid-1800s displaced pony-borne messengers has been supplanted over the past half-century by inexpensive long-distance telephone service, faxes and e-mail. In a final bit of irony, Western Union informed customers last week in a message on its Web site.

“Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services,” said the notice. “We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.”

The terse notice, confirmed Wednesday by Victor Chayet, a spokesman for the Greenwood Village, Co., unit of First Data Corp., was in keeping with telegraphese, the language customers devised to hold down costs. Sentences were separated by “STOP,” which was cheaper to send than a period, Chayet said.

Thus ends a comms channel that has given rise to more than its fair share of jokes.

Like the American news reporter who, upon arriving in Venice, cabled: “STREETS FLOODED STOP PLEASE ADVISE”

Or the time when Cary Grant got a telegram from a magazine fact-checker: “HOW OLD CARY GRANT QUERY”. He replied: “OLD CARY GRANT FINE STOP HOW YOU QUERY”.

Tom Standage, Technology Editor of the Economist, wrote a nice book about the telegraph entitled The Victorian Internet.

Pete (who corrected the Venice quote, above) reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s wonderfully comic use of telegraphese in his novel, Scoop, e.g. this dispatch from the hapless war correspondent, William Boot, in response to a series of urgent demands from Head Office for dispatches from the front:

PLEASE DONT WORRY QUITE SAFE AND WELL IN FACT RATHER ENJOYING THINGS WEATHER IMPROVING WILL CABLE AGAIN IF THERE IS ANY NEWS YOURS BOOT

Quote of the day

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The Carrowteigue area is notorious for its scenic landscapes.

From the online brochure of a Co. Mayo estate agent.

Update: I’ve had a lovely email from a fastidious reader who points out that ‘notorious’ has several meanings. For example, the Shorter Oxford lists these three:

  • Well known, commonly or generally known, forming a matter of common knowledge, esp. on account of some bad practice, quality etc., or some other thing not generally approved of or admired;
  • Such as is or may be generally, openly or publicly known. (Now rare.);
  • Conspicious, obvious, evident.

    I of course assumed the first, which is why I hooted with laughter upon reading the estate agent’s blurb. But it is perfectly possible, I concede, that in the recesses of Co. Mayo (where I was born), there dwells an estate agent with a more extensive grasp of the English language than mine and an even more antiquated style!

    What a thing it is to have erudite readers. I expect I will now become notorious among them for my ignorance. Sigh.

    • That State of the Union speech

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    The first President Bush loved to quote Woody Allen’s saying that half of life is just showing up. Last night, the current President Bush demonstrated the wisdom in those words. He delivered a pedestrian State of the Union speech, and he’ll likely get a brief bounce in the polls just for showing up at an annual ritual designed to make any president look presidential. But by next week, nobody will remember what he said….

    David Kusnet, writing in The New Republic. I think he’s wrong. Everyone will remember Dubya saying “America is addicted to oil”. I never thought I’d hear him say something like that.

    Helpful hints

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    My colleague Seb’s plane was diverted to Delhi when he was en route to Bangladesh to instal the first Ndiyo Internet cafe using mobile phone technology to provide internet connectivity. To compensate for the disruption, he was put up in a luxury hotel which, among other thoughtful touches provided this ‘To Do’ list. Suggestions include:

  • Have you called your family today?
  • Are there any important calls to be made before the day ends?
  • Are there any anniversary or birthday greetings?
  • Have you charged your mobile phone and/or laptop?
  • Have you taken your prescribed medicines or vitamins?

    • Photo arcade

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    Behind the facade of these buildings in St Andrew’s Street in Cambridge, there’s a huge retail development under way with the optimistic name ‘Grand Arcade’. In a smart move to counter public dislike of the disruption caused by a massive building project right in the heart of a medieval city, the developers commissioned Martin Parr, the populist Magnum photographer, to do a series of photographs under the general heading of “The Cambridge Portrait” which will be displayed over coming months on the hoardings round the site. So far the pictures have been quite nice but not really outstanding. But they do provide opportunities for interesting juxtapositions — as, for example, here,

    or here.

    Note for photography buffs: Looking at the images, I had concluded they must have been shot with a Hasselblad, but a visit to Parr’s web site suggests they were made with a truly recondite instrument, the Plaubel Makina 67. Now there’s a really obscure camera for you.

    Parr describes himself, btw, as a “mischievous ironist”.

    “Microsoft Would Put Poor Online by Cellphone”

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    This hilarious NYT headline goes over an equally hilarious report about Microsoft and the $100 laptop project.

    Mr. Negroponte has made significant progress, but he has also catalyzed the debate over the role of computing in poor nations — and ruffled a few feathers. He failed to reach an agreement with Microsoft on including its Windows software in the laptop, leading Microsoft executives to start discussing what they say is a less expensive alternative: turning a specially configured cellular phone into a computer by connecting it to a TV and a keyboard.

    Translation: Negroponte doesn’t want to clobber his laptop by getting it to run proprietary bloatware and had the temerity to say so to Gates & Co. So they’re going to teach him a lesson by, er, launching a mobile phone which runs Windows CE. Ho, ho. Wonder how you get Ctrl-Alt-Del on a mobile keyboard? Ah, I see. Like this:

    Divine (IP) Rights, contd.

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    Further to my comment about whether the pope is entitled to assert IP rights over papal encyclicals (on the grounds that he is merely a conduit for the Word of the Lord), Joe Newman writes,

    Encyclicals do not necessarily constitute ex-cathedra pronouncements, invested with infallible authority (see http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05413a.htm).

    Further, according to that inerrant source of all knowledge Wikipedia “papal infallibility is the dogma that the Pope is preserved from error when he solemnly promulgates, or declares, to the Church a decision on faith or morals.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility

    i.e. he isn’t acting as a conduit, but is creating an original attributable work (hence copyrightable), on his own behalf. Whether it is divinely free of error (hard to digest I admit) or not is neither here nor there where the intellectual property rights are concerned.

    Er, amen to that. Mark Stephens, a lawyer with a big London firm, wrote to the Creative Commons mailing list pointing out that while the Vatican is defending its imposition of a copyright on papal pronouncements it is placing no bar on dissemination and publication of the pope’s works by the news media, so it would be most appropriate for His Holiness to use a Creative Commons licence! (Might I humbly suggest the Attribution, No derivative works, no-commercial-use version.)

    Tiffany sues eBay

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    The New York Times reports that Tiffany & Company is sueing eBay for facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods over the Internet. Undercover agents working for the company secretly bought 200 ‘Tiffany’ items in eBay auctions and found that 75% were counterfeited. The case will go to trial later this year. If Tiffany wins, the implications for eBay would be dire: imagine the costs of policing all those auctions.

    Posted in Web

    Google falls at first moral hurdle

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    In the longer term … the commercial logic that led Google to capitulate may turn out to be counterproductive. The reason is that – in contrast to companies like, say, Halliburton – Google’s ultimate fate depends on trust. Its corporate mission – to ‘organise the world’s information’ – means that it aspires to become the custodian of immense quantities of private data. Already, it holds the email archives of millions of subscribers to Google Mail, plus records of every web search they ever made. And although it is resisting the attempt of the US government to mount a fishing expedition through those data, nobody doubts that, in the end, Google will comply with the law.

    But that’s different from making a strategic decision to compete in a space dominated by an evil political regime. Google could, after all, have said that if the Chinese authorities demanded self-censorship then it would not play. One only has to put it like that to imagine the incredulity of mainstream media reaction to such a proposition. Imagine standing up at a CBI conference and declaring that one is not going to do business in China until it makes serious moves towards becoming an open society! By joining the Gadarene rush into the Chinese market, Google may have gained short-term advantage. But it has also forfeited its right to our trust.

    More: Just seen this post on Brad DeLong’s Blog. It compares the results from an image search for “tienanmen” on (1) Google.cn and (2) Google.com.

    Yet more: Bill Thompson (who is less censorious of Google) sent me a link to this Geekculture cartoon!