DSD

“Print num­ber 6517 and 6518 are smeared and does not define clarity.”

Another excel­lent find among my grandmother’s old doc­u­ments was a set of hilar­i­ously infor­ma­tive instruc­tions for nose-printing your dog.

When my father was young, his fam­ily owned an enor­mous Great Dane named Lady who turns out to have had a pedi­gree. Cana­dian National Live Stock Records show her mother’s name as “Duchess of Wil­low­dale” and her father’s as “Dandy of Mether­ing­ham.” To reg­is­ter Lady her­self with the Cana­dian Ken­nel Club, my grand­fa­ther had to send in a nose-print. I have no idea what the pri­mary method for tak­ing nose prints was, but it appar­ently failed, accord­ing to this let­ter from the Dept. of Agri­cul­ture: Con­tinue reading…

Per­haps the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. But prob­a­bly my oxen will haul a dozen loads of gravel just as quickly.

Going through my grandmother’s old things last night, my father and aunt came across her typ­ing text­book from sec­re­tar­ial school in Eng­land, 1934 to 1936. One of the exer­cises, about halfway through, includes a some­what hilar­i­ous list of sen­tences using every let­ter of the alpha­bet. Con­tinue reading…