Immoral spelling!

Leave a 't' out of immortality and it becomes immorality.

Thanks, Sally.

Oh, and I spotted a good slogan today. Garofalo: "Pasta You Can Taste With Your Eyes". Ouch.

And I was recommended this T-shirt. I rather like it.

A Wednesday poem

Wednesday morning
Stifled yawning
Data being questioned
By a person here unmentioned.

A sneaky little edit
Brings facts into discredit
Ball comes to protest
At Kit's URGENT behest.

'Someone' writes in Latin
His ego so to fatten
Snow is back
Thick and fat
Hope it traps me
In my flat.

I haven't forgotten...

... my promise to do just this...

The hokey pokey

You put the hyphen in you put the hyphen out
In out in out shake it all about
You do the hokey pokey and you turn around
That's what the style guide is all about...

Whoaaa the hokey pokey!

etc etc

Office musings

Today, through fingers clamped over bleeding ears, I overheard Kit and The Bastard having a proper geek-out:

And the white woman was just annoying, who was she? She might as well have been June Whitfield just in a different dress
The subtext that he was somehow the doctor's father was totally contrived
The doctor's never made such a fuss about regenerating before
Absolutely
Then they're zapping each other
Giant planet in the sky
Zappy zap zap
Master just disappears
Flying around with missiles chasing them was sort of okay
He falls through a ceiling
Plunging out the thing and smashing out the thing. That would have broken a few bones
And where was all this radiation coming from?
The timelords destroy the immortality arch, so how come there's still radiation around? And detained by a dodgy glass door.
Reset button and very ill-thought-through plot
Dr Who can do a lot better than that
And the last 20 minutes of saying goodbye - I mean he'll see them all again. He sees Sarah Jane again.
And what's Martha doing with Mickey now? Presumably he's not her type, is he?
Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.
And all this argument about not changing history and suddenly it's alright again.
I love Captain Jack in the Star Wars style bar.
The bit with Rose is good. How many times has she come back? And her teeth get bigger every time. It's cos she's ageing. They can bring her back as the Lady Cassandra next time.
And then the gay pickup scene. At dinner time on Christmas day. Unnecessary.
Good stuff though. Yeah.
Just like Lord of the Rings really. Return of the king. Tearful goodbyes for half an hour. But at least it only happened once.
The worst part of the David Tennant years was the bit where he zapped his hand and it went phhhew.
It's produced more good films, if you like, than...
Generally speaking the last two years have been pretty poor really.
I liked Catherine Tate.
It became so good in parts you wanted the same standard. That's the trouble really. I mean series four. The fires of Pompeii did quite well. The doctor's daughter. The unicorn and the wasp. The silence of the library, forest of the dead.
I really really like midnight as well. They're both Russell Davis as well. He's a funny writer like that.

Art desk interjects. Silence.

I have learned a new word

probity:
The quality of having strong moral principle

Does that mean I probe? Am I probish? Thought not. Boo!

Prodded into action

Fine, fine, I'll write something. But I warn you I'm in a rather humourless mood, what with being back at work after a nice long holiday and also quivering in the shadow of the landmark birthday that is soon to crash down upon me.

But while cheer is scarce, I will admit to having found a small scrap of satisfaction in a stray capital A in Sally Baker's column today. Unless it is there for a reason I haven't picked up on, in which case the last laugh is on me and I shall go and stick my head in the oven (it's alright YES THAT'S RIGHT I'M WRITING ALRIGHT AS ONE WORD, following a leaving-the-gas-on incident during the Christmas period, the offender assured me that gas was no longer poisonous). First line, third word.

Dearest reader Another set of rude retorts from the early 19th-century Times to its readers under the heading “To Correspondents”, courtesy of www.timesonline.co.uk/archive: “In answer to several correspondents, we have to state, that the Irish earl alluded to in yesterday’s Mansion-house report is the Earl of Glengall.

After that moment of self indulgence, I went on to laugh my head off (though gritted teeth) at her offerings of the Times' best typos of 2009. Here are my favourite two and the rest are here.

I’m still bemused by a not so much mixed as entirely misused metaphor in October, when we said that a tennis player’s wife who had made matters worse by slapping an umpire after an on-court row had “poured oil on troubled waters”, when we clearly meant to say that she had added fuel to the flames.

And finally, we rather took the edge off our Italian Christmas feature in December with a sub-head insisting that it consisted of “fish, foul and the very best of winter produce”.

Although neither compare with this one, which I found while plotting how to put my new year's resolutions into action. Salsa classes at The Coalition begin with a worm up, don't you know. How liberating!

And from the Chief: essential information for all spelling offenders courtesy of theoatmeal.com.

3pm update: from one of our own:

The markets would be cited in population-dense areas with easy access for both businesses and shoppers.

Substuff is now back

And subbing a story about improving the emotional resonance of dog food.

I'm not quite ready to talk about it.