Uwe, as always, your posts are a wealth of information and insight, and could spawn novel length replies! I will, however try to restrain myself to essay length. If that much.

Regarding Maria Callas: I clearly was skeptical but I was by no means certain that could not be the singer: it seemed out of character for my admittedly shallow stock of mental tags attached to "Maria Callas" and it didn't really look like the photos I found of the unequivocally genuine Maria Callas, like the one you posted. But a thousand plausible explanations of these discrepancies could be invented based on my minimal starting data set - she looked different in profile, she was a stage performer and adept at changing her appearance, this was a posed shot taken as part of a gag roll by a photographer friend, it's a still from her little known foray into Film Noir... Also on the plus side, the woman in the photo is noticeably deep chested and plausibly an opera singer (I am referring to the size of her rib cage).

Regarding skepticism and fact checking in general, I don't think the seeming absence of this in the average human being is something limited to the internet. In real life I work in the security industry, and one thing experience pounds into my head again and again is the seemingly unalterable facility for people to give credence to almost anything they hear if said with conviction. Is there a suspicious person? One just saw him over by the entrance! Another saw him going into the subway! He asked "C" directions and seemed off! And etc. If you stop and speak with the witnesses and ask some more details and you may find the physical descriptions are completely different, or one of the sightings demanded virtual teleportation, and so forth. You may find several different people have been merged, but all seemed sure at the time that HE was seen in all places. I could multiply examples. Even with experience and preparation I am still taken in sometimes by confident assertion.

I would say skepticism and fact checking are not baseline human psychology. We tend to believe what we read and what we hear, and the internet is just a continuation of Rumor by other means. Not sure why we are wired this way. You would think more critical thinking would have survival value. But (speculating wildly), maybe on the hunt rapid exchange of information without a lot of cross examination (are you SURE that was the tiger you saw?) is an overall better strategy. People are eaten by tigers either way, but less often when they think and react quickly as a group, accepting a higher error rate, than when they stop for questioning and gain accuracy but lose speed. Our ancestors spent many more millennia hunting in groups then we have spent in civilization, and old habits die hard.

So that's my cracker barrel explanation of why the baseline human seems to believe everything they hear, and why critical thinking is an overlay. This is now completely off topic and not a typewriter in sight! As for Alice Denham - a centerfold AND an intellectual? I am smitten.

Repartee, I have to acquiesce to your observations concerning human nature, which are of course absolutely correct. Beak's points are just as valid. The majority of us tend to take the easiest route regardless of the destination, and there's nothing easier than believing everything you're told, or in the case of the internet, everything that you read. I suppose that I became target fixated on the internet because it is such a front and center medium, an imminent fixture of our digital world with infinitely deep pockets and the power of a black hole. 

Where I will disagree with you is the question of this being off-topic to the discussion of typewriters. On more than one occasion I've read blogs by revered typewriter experts in which assumptions were made, sometimes nothing more than wild speculation in the form of an offhand comment, and observed how what they've written is absorbed by their faithful readers as if it was the product of hard research, as if they had been presented with absolute facts chiseled into stone tablets and carried down from Mount Olympia. Some of these readers - in particular those proficient in copy and paste techniques - will parrot the statements in their own blogs (and in forums too), disseminating and repeating these theories until they’ve become an unassailable truth. In such situations I blame the writer for not making it clear when they are simply guessing about something, and the reader for not applying the "critical thinking overlay," as you so eloquently put it. 

Okay, so maybe none of this has to do with intellectual Playboy bunnies, or sopranos belting out a cappella renditions of Leroy Anderson's The Typewriter, but I assure you that there is a typewriter in the room - somewhere.

Repartee wrote:

Well, I shall go to sleep and dream now of Alice Benham leaning down to look over my shoulder as I type, leaning very closely indeed as she reached around my neck with a pencil to make some point about my punctuation... 

Stop that, unconscious, stop that I tell you! 

 
...But not to disturb your dream, let's hope she doesn't drop a cigarette ash down your shirt!

~Joe

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