[WARNING: If you're tired of hearing about Dan Rather and 'old' memos, skip the first three or so paragraphs, but you may want to read the rest of this, since I'm outlining a handy feature of MS Word that might save you some time. OK, it's not an exactly hidden feature, but hey, some seem not to have heard of it. Just click here to skip to the useful stuff.]

Wow, the whole Ra^thergate story is getting quickly ridiculous. We could solve this whole thing quite easily: CBS could put up a very high definition scan (say, in TIFF format instead of PDF) of their 'original' photocopies for casual consumption, and invite in the experts currently critical of them to review the actual physical evidence. Not tough at all, but it ain't gonna happen. Meanwhile, the guess, counter-guess, and speculation continue apace.

Ok, I'll admit, watching Dan Rather get his arse handed to him by a bundle of 'guys in pajamas' gives me a great big internet-inspired grin. In the meantime, though, the wild guesses and counter-accusations are getting absurd. I'm only going to join the fray insofar as it's useful to teach my readers a handy little trick in Microsoft Word 2002, especially nifty if they ever want to fake old documents. From Dan Rather's defense tonight (from the transcription at Ratherbiased.com, since I can't find one on CBS's website):

RICHARD KATZ (Software Designer): If you were doing this a week ago or a month ago on a normal laser jet printer, it wouldn't work. The font wouldn't be available to you.
RATHER: Katz noted the documents have the superscript th and a regular sized th. That would be common on a typewriter, not a computer.
KATZ: There is one document from may of 1972 which contains a normal "l" th at the top. To produce that in microsoft word, you would have to go out of your way to type the letters and then turn the th setting off or back over them and type them again.

The most common explanation for how to get around 'auto-superscripting' is also one of the most annoying. Say you want to type '187th' without a superscript. Wizbang, among others, has suggested that what you should do is type '187', then a space, then 'th', and then go back and delete the space. Well, this is annoying, and in my impatience, it normally doesn't work: I do all that, then hit 'end' to go to the end of the line, and having forgotten to put a space after 'th', hit space. Which as many frustrated Word users know, just superscripts the thing again.

OK, superscript isn't normally where I have this problem. It's where I'm typing something like U.S.C. §185(c), and the (c) becomes a ©. But the solution's the same. Try it with me.

Open a document in Word 2002 or later. Just type '187th', hit space, and if you still have the autocorrect function on, it'll transform to the infamous ^th. Now, hold your mouse over the '1', and if you let it hover for half a second or so, you should see a little blue bar underneath it that looks like this:

Pull your mouse over the blue bar, and a little lightning bolt should pop up. Press the arrow next to that, and a menu drops down. The whole thing looks sort of like this:

The cunning among you will notice that the first option--Undo Superscript--does exactly what it says on the tin. Click the button, and the likelihood of you getting caught at a forgery goes down by... well, a bit, anyway.

The really cunning among my readers will note that the next option, Stop Automatically Superscripting Ordinals, will keep this little 'helpful' feature from ever darkening your door again.

Does this bear upon whether the documents are forgeries or not? Well, no. To really tell if they were forgeries, you should test the paper for age, give documents that are as close to the original as possible to real experts, hand them over to your opposition for verification, and... well, all the things that someone who hopes to learn about the truth would do. For that, go gripe to CBS, who really are the only people who could settle this problem. But unlike their 'software expert,' I know that you can easily turn off or stop Autocorrect on an occurence-by-occurence basis. And now you do too.