71–80 of 85 posts
I'm curious about the two numbers recorded every second Saturday: 242/119, 246/85, 183/78, 187/84, 207/76, 115/197, 121/201, ... Maybe it's obvious to Americans? Is it related to sports? I sure hope it's not their blood pressure!
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You really think someone's gonna go back and do this for nine years of calendars? Look up something that happened every day to see if there's anything to make a doodle about? Imagine: It is 1981. You are working deep inside a bureaucracy. Social media does not exist, there is no equivalent to checking Hacker News for "a few minutes" and blowing an entire hour on it. Usenet barely exists - it was established last year…
You almost certainly didn't have a computer on your desk in 1981. The IBM PC was released in August.
It wasn't cheap, but still not a huge investment for a small company.
The person with the calendar seems to have worked at a large defense related operation?
It wouldn't have been a financial stretch for them to have VT-100 terminals on their desks connected to VAX 11/780 superminicomputers as early as 1978.
Nowadays, I would be finding some excuse to check the internet. And I'm less likely to have scrap paper to hand.
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Liz might be his SO?
I would wager that Liz is the female author's younger sister. In the calendar period, the author turns 32 and has an 8th wedding anniversary, meanwhile Liz graduates with a 4.0 GPA. Second guess: Liz is female author's father's second wife. Ailing, but finishing college as an older student. Absolutely nothing about the content, lettering, or drawing suggests a male author to me. FWIW!
Is there a particular reason to believe that the unnamed employee was male? The article refers to them as "he" multiple times and compares them to a monk (traditionally male): > Like a monk, he labored over his document every day, adding carefully crafted letters and elaborate drawings to what became, over nine years, a remarkably full chronicle of the decade.
Maybe it was some one else later who wrote that.
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“He” comes from the description in the original posting on the rare books site selling these: https://web.archive.org/web/20221205191022/https://bostonrar... - possibly they knew exactly who it was from? That said, I got a femme vibe off the handwriting too. And the inclusion of cartouches around the lunar phase drawings plus a lovingly illustrated entry for Samhain suggests the artist is a neopagan of some kind, whi…
A neopagan in 1987? That's not so likely.
Also, the 1st of January is described as "civil new year", which implies there's some other new year on a different day, which could be samhain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would wager that Liz is the female author's younger sister. In the calendar period, the author turns 32 and has an 8th wedding anniversary, meanwhile Liz graduates with a 4.0 GPA. Second guess: Liz is female author's father's second wife. Ailing, but finishing college as an older student. Absolutely nothing about the content, lettering, or drawing suggests a male author to me. FWIW!
1984-01-21 is "sixth anniversary of introduction to Liz". Doesn't sound like sister.
So the author was introduced to Liz on 1978-01-21, and married someone on 1979-05-05. It's possible that's Liz, but that's fairly quick, even for the 70s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would wager that Liz is the female author's younger sister. In the calendar period, the author turns 32 and has an 8th wedding anniversary, meanwhile Liz graduates with a 4.0 GPA. Second guess: Liz is female author's father's second wife. Ailing, but finishing college as an older student. Absolutely nothing about the content, lettering, or drawing suggests a male author to me. FWIW!
1984-01-21 is "sixth anniversary of introduction to Liz". Doesn't sound like sister.
Maybe Liz is her younger half-sister from a temporarily estranged parent. :)
I realize I'm plumbing the depths of statistical likelihood to support my intuition of a female author.
Two other things occur to me. In the 1980s, there was a wider variety of what was considered "ordinary" in the expression of stereotypical male traits within gendered males. It was much less expected for any in the gamut to follow a non-stereotypical path, of course, and for better or worse.
But more directly relevant, the author is "anonymous" but certainly not "unknown", so it probably makes sense to assume that the auction house / article writer got it right in the first place!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A neopagan in 1987? That's not so likely.
It looks like the author went to Wales for the Eisteddfod in 1982, which suggests some degree of interest in Celtic traditions. Also, the 1st of January is described as "civil new year", which implies there's some other new year on a different day, which could be samhain.