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snarkophone July 9 2006, 15:19:30 UTC
ticker-tape is that stuff that looks like adding machine roll stuff.

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nuncstans July 9 2006, 16:47:59 UTC
Yay!!!
But does it have something to do with, like, the stock market? Do people throw rolls of stock prices exuberantly down upon returning troops, or isthat just my fantasy?

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pomo_drunkard July 9 2006, 17:57:12 UTC
Ticker tape used to be how stock prices were communicated. You ever see an old movie where there's this weird little device chattering away? It's the stock prices being sent and printed off. It goes in alphabetical order, looping over and over and over again, constantly telling the stock broker asshole whether he needs to jump out of a building or buy a new Latin American country.

Like everything else in this country, it was "invented" by Thomas Edison. Which is to say, he designed some of it, stole the rest of it, and patented it.

I'm not sure why they throw this in parades, though. Maybe it just falls nicely. It's incredibly thin and light and fluffy, like, the width of your little finger, and, presumably, very thin and cheap.

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pomo_drunkard July 9 2006, 18:00:40 UTC
Oh, I should have thought about this more before commenting, but I realized why it was probably used as confetti. Ticker tape is outdated about five minutes after it's printed off. But everyone insists on it running all the time. So they probably just threw it out in parades because they had all this extra confetti-type stuff just sitting around that no one needed to archive or anything. So they tossed it at triumphant soldiers and the like.

Reduce, reuse, recycle!

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pomo_drunkard July 9 2006, 18:29:59 UTC
Or i could have just skipped all that and gone to wikipedia for their article about ticker tape and ticker tape parades.

That probably would have been much easier.

New information from that article that I didn't know? The "ticker" part of "ticker tape" comes from the extremely irritating ticking that the machine made as it prints. Everyone old enough to remember typewriters or dot matrix printers should be able to picture it. Or, ummm, what's the aural equivalent of "picture it"?

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snarkophone July 9 2006, 18:34:42 UTC
Aaaaaaaahhhh. Now I know. It's so much more deeply satisfying to be told the answers to questions than to go looking for them.

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nuncstans July 9 2006, 19:28:47 UTC
Yes it is.

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astronomick July 10 2006, 18:56:14 UTC
Everyone old enough to remember dot matrix printers

Oh dear.

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