Author: Quinn
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Head to Toe
Blue Angel. 1930. Before most of our parents were born. In Europe, lusty lust was not lost, but America diluted its fire water into warm milk. I’m gonna try to capture the spirit of Frederick Hollander’s lyrics made famous by Marlene Dietrich. Apologies to the dead for this poor man’s rendering of “Falling In Love Again”.
Some side-wise beauty flickers,
Some “je ne sais-pas-quoi”.
Like fool’s gold, a glimmer,
but the shine is faint and dull.And then my eyes catch yours,
and then we’re face-to-face,
and now we’re falling forward,
down into wordless space.Always, from head to toe,
I’m aching for your touch.
Beyond the dream of us,
there is nothing.All things we are we’ve made–
together all there is.
All that’s hers is his,
and I’m helpless.Others flit ’round me,
like moths drawn to the flame,
and they will all burn soon,
but you’ll always remain.Always, from head to toe,
I’m aching for your touch.
Beyond the dream of us,
there is nothing.Trembling beneath my hands,
with urgent burning want,
I’m haunted by the terror,
that you’ll be going away.Not one precious drop of you,
would I dare to waste.
I starve for just a taste,
and I love it.I am from head to toe,
so aching for your touch.
Beyond the dream of us,
there is nothing.All things we are we’ve made–
together all there is.
All that’s hers is his,
and I’m helpless.Others flit ’round me,
like moths drawn to the flame,
and they will all burn soon,
but you’ll always remain.I am from head to toe,
so aching for your touch.
Beyond the dream of us,
there is nothing.I’ll be updating the lyrics sporadically, as the whim strikes me. It seems each time I do, I wander further from the proper meter. Do add your thoughts in the comments.
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Why 80 characters?
Searching for reasonable values for the
*.vt100.geometry[5-6]xterm menu font-menu options in my ~/.Xdefaults file, I re-stumbled a gem of computing history as the top-answer to a question on StackOverflow, and this pretty picture of an old IBM punch-card.
Inspired by a perl script within the comments, I ran this shell pipe:
2015-07-23 10:30:00 :: ~ rons@rons-VM$ find /usr/share/terminfo/ -type f -printf '%f\n' | xargs -n1 infocmp | egrep -o 'cols#[0-9]+, *lines#[0-9]+' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head 489 cols#80, lines#24 58 cols#132, lines#24 55 cols#80, lines#25 27 cols#80, lines#34 15 cols#80, lines#40 15 cols#80, lines#31 14 cols#80, lines#33 12 cols#126, lines#24 10 cols#85, lines#64 8 cols#80, lines#42
Unsure if infocmp normalizes its output such that the cols and lines entries will always be adjoined, but this is good enough for my purposes.
80×24 wins by a landslide, with 132×24 a distant second. Then I found a Gnome help page which added 80×43 and 132×43 as options for its gooey{sic} terminal. Next, a quick stop at the SVGA documentation in the Linux kernel with another list of common geometries.
Finally, the Wikipedia Text Mode entry which included a neat table of common text modes:
Text res. Char. size Graphics res. Colors Adapters 80×25 9×14 720×350 B&W MDA, Hercules 40×25 8×8 320×200 16 CGA, EGA 80×25 8×8 640×200 16 CGA, EGA 80×25 8×14 640×350 16 EGA 80×43 8×8 640×350 16 EGA 80×25 9×16 720×400 16 VGA 80×30 8×16 640×480 16 VGA 80×50 9×8 720×400 16 VGA 80×60 16 VESA-compatible SVGA 132×25 16 VESA-compatible SVGA 132×43 16 VESA-compatible SVGA 132×50 16 VESA-compatible SVGA 132×60 16 VESA-compatible SVGA I think I’ll go with 80×50 and 132×60.