Cephalogenic

or, stuff that I dragged out of my head

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Location: Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

Friday, August 19, 2011

Keep Calm and Carry On

I thought I thought of this myself but as you can see, someone else beat me to it

Yeah, I'm still alive. My perpetual state of umbrage at a world filled with typos, egregious misspellings and grammatical errors seems to have abated, possibly because I'm basically a pure carnivore* these days and as everybody knows, eating colossal quantities of meat turns you into a dreamy-eyed pacifist. (It's the vegetarians you have to watch out for. They're brutal.) My Blogger archive is studded with literally dozens of drafts, which is to say abandoned posts, because I started to write them and then realized that I just didn't have enough fury in me to even bother finishing them.

This is what prompted me to post, a BoingBoing bit called "Muphry's Law: The Inevitability of Typos in Discussions of Proofreading" (which they got from here):

1. if you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault in what you have written;

2. if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book;

3. the stronger the sentiment in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; and

4. any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.


It's not completely true: if I'm going to post complaining about someone else's typos you can bet that I'm going to proof my own text over and over again so as not to give anyone a stick to batter me with in turn. But it's near enough to the truth.

*Not really. But after two months on South Beach, virtually no carbohydrates but tons of meat, eggs, and low-fat cheese plus bucketfuls of salad greens and other low-glycemic-index vegetables, I'm down almost twenty-five pounds, and people have started to notice: "Your face is narrower!" And my blood pressure is down from 130/80+ to 120/78 (last time I checked). Also, is there a polite, discreet way to say that my, uh, how shall we say, gastrointestinal...activity...in the form of flatus is drastically reduced? This thing works.

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