Spell Check A Racist

In which the ever-so-slightly smug Facebook group post an update with the inevitable spelling error...

Translated from...

There's a particu'ly dark place in my heart

for wise-ass spelling-and/or-grammar-type jokes

that have mistakes in them.

[UPDATE: Hereafter, 'The Nth Circle'.]

Zaftig vs Sidebottom

Extraordinary interview with Erica Jong in last Saturday`s Times. According to Jong a lot of the 'bad boy' writers who gave her books bad reviews had more than literary criteria on their minds. "I was too zaftig [curvy] to get a good review. Look at all the women who are praised. They`re either very, very skinny or very, very fat. Some of them are hunchback, and some of them enormously fat" - offensive remark about Hilary Mantel omitted [LOLZ] - "Not one of them is a woman you would want to f***." 

Some years ago I gave Jong`s Sappho`s Leap a very bad review in the TLS. At the time I thought I did this because it was a very bad book. Now I know differently. 

Glad she cleared all that up.

- Harry Sidebottom, on Facebook

In other news, I've just looked up a boozy interview I did with Dr Sidebottom. 1) I note Ms Jong was referenced; and 2) I can vouch his books have since also made it to Afghanistan.

The lives of other writers

Or - Two friends record their recent experiences in the book 'business'.

William Brown, author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age



Howard Male, author of Etc Etc Amen

Fair dos to Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg has started a book club, and the publishers are running out of nominated books already.

Oh, I have *totally* arrived...!

"Disrespected and dicked around"*

The staff of The New Republic quits out of solidarity with their former editors.

Good lads, themselves. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, this is what a sense of honour looks like. And, most probably, what it costs to keep it.

(That said, as I recall, the king in 'The Red Wedding' did not 'stab everyone in person'. Or indeed anyone. In fact I don't remember him even being there. But the affair does very much resemble the new-media-buyout plot currently unfolding in The Newsroom. So props to Aaron Sorkin for having his finger on the cultural-political pulse, as usual.)

--
* She's paraphrasing.

Come in, Van Wilder - your time is up.

[courtesy Yamille Wickramanayake/Menaka Ashi Fernando/'Sri Lankan Spelling' Facebook group]

Although a bit gutted

that, thanks to an old schoolfriend's click-baity Facebook activities, I was compelled to go and look up the word 'emacity', I confess I did feel somewhat better when I read '3 matching dictionaries'...

[problem caused by Nathalie Gwilliam]

InDefinition - GUEST ENTRY

Pokemon, n. Jamaican proctologist

[with thanks to Gareth Teece]

Yes!

Coming soon. Or sooner.

Mistake!

The other day, in order to facilitate a bit of Facebook banter, I had cause to look up Madeline [sic] Miller's Song of Achilles on Amazon... with the result - notwithstanding every other perfectly erudite volume I have ever purchased from the great book supermarket in the sky - that I am now being bombarded with offers for watery-looking paperbacks by authors called Georgina, Victoria, Cynthia and Ann.

G-damn.

Dickensian status update

Cartoon above the old subs' desk at the Sinde. At one end of a long oak table is Charles Dickens, head in hands, sobbing. At the other, a Victorian sub, his quill raised above a manuscript, saying, "Come now, Mr Dickens, it was either the best of times or the worst of times. It surely can't have been both."

- Nick Cohen, Facebook.

Ohhh super!

Just on Facebook, from Hugo Schmidt:

The next editor who jerks me around like this will find himself cocooned to a wall in Habsburg so that German females can lay eggs in his brain.

 I don't know if one can technically be cocooned to a wall; but you have to appreciate the sentiment.

Facebook thinks I should be Friends with Duncan Fallowell.

Facebook is wrong.

It's National Book Week

... and - as far as Facebook is concerned, anyway - the rules of the game are as follows:

1) Pick up the book closest to you.
2) Turn to page 56.
3) Copy the fifth sentence as your status (without mentioning the book [which raises some context-based questions about the whole point of NBW, surely?] and also appending the above rules).

A dilemma. Page 56 of the book I am currently reading (The Summer Without Men, by Siri Hustvedt) begins with 'Boris wrote back:' followed by a lengthy - and indented - quotation.

Under normal circumstances, of course, I would not consider a colon an impediment to the accurate enumeration of whole sentences. But here, somehow, it seems to upset the applecart.

Worse still, if I count the colon-ised pre-sentence, the fifth (full) sentence on that page comes out as 'There was no love to my love' - and I ain't having that.

If I don't, it is, simply, 'Boris.'

Solutions sought.

The Facebook comment I SO wanted to Like

Surely "Pak 'n Save" should be "Pa'k 'n' Save"? Or do they do that so they can pass the savings from the two dropped apostrophes onto we canny consumers?

[With thanks to AH, who didn't give his permission for this in any way.]

The wisdom of the many...

Lately I have been particularly enjoying the plug for several of Facebook's Recommended Pages: 'Many who like Anything like this.'

The first time I saw it, the full inscription ran: 'Fishing - Many who like Anything like this.' And I assumed it was a joke.