"The report of my death was an exaggeration."
Mark Twain
New York Journal, June 2, 1897
It is mid-September, always a depressing time in North Texas. Summer shows few signs of abating, with our humidity and temps creating heat index levels over one hundred degrees. Students are still wearing those *@#%! flip-flops and spaghetti strap tops. The hummingbirds are gone, but the rats are happy and healthy. I've spent half an hour trying to track down a television public service announcement I remember from childhood. It was a very dismal black and white video of a small child calling, "Here, kitty, kitty" to the rat in his crib.
I assumed that rats were something found only in folk tales and ghettos for most of my life. In recent years I learned that large rodents don't just flee the sinking ship. They live equally at home in our lower middle class condo complexes and in your hoity toity country clubs. Rats will be living large on Earth, along with cockroaches, many millennia after we humans have ceased choosing between paper and plastic. Still, that's not as personally depressing as the delay of corduroy weather, and the death of proofreading.
If it's too hot for spectators to wear corduroy pants to the high school football game, the season has started way too early. If the Dallas Symphony Orchestra website has spelling errors, again the season has started way too early. Shostakovich did not compose "Word War II" symphonies using Scrabble tiles. He wrote symphonies about World War II.
Most of the early childhood teachers and care-givers attending the Appelbaum continuing education workshop at the Mockingbird/I35 Radisson today were unmoved by the typographical errors in the workbook for the session. What is going on? Guardians of the arts and education can't put a professional product out there for we itty-bitty, mighty tired parents and customers?
I'm hoping the reported death of proofreading has been greatly exaggerated. Probably can't fit in my corduroy, anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment