Typos and Worse

Over the past couple of weeks, I've collected some examples of poor written communication. I'd like to share a few of them now. You may get a laugh out of them.

This list of "Dos and Don'ts" for brand care on a corporate website appears to have suffered from automatic formatting.


This introductory paragraph on a SharePoint home page could have benefited from a spiel chucker.


Finally, this helpful bit of advice appears to have been dictated to speech recognition software.


Have any favorite typos or grammar errors to share? Leave a comment!

President of Estonia Slams Paul Krugman

Other bloggers have written about this, but they seemed to pick and choose the tweets they wanted to show. I created a Storify story including all the relevant tweets, excluding only the short replies to specific Twitter users.

A "Last in a Lifetime" Event

On 05 June 2012, the planet Venus was in transit across the face of the sun. That is to say, its orbital path passed between the Earth and the Sun at a planar level where we could see its shadow.

The image above is from a live webcast from the NASA EDGE (link probably good until around 9:30 pm PDT) project at the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii. It was captured about an hour in to the event. (I have rotated the image 90° counter-clockwise, because I believe that is the orientation we would see from the Northern Hemisphere.) For a slightly different perspective, here is an image captured about 2 hours into the event, from the SLOOH Space Camera project via the observatory at the University of New Mexico.

Transits of Venus occur in pairs separated by about 8 years, once every 113 years or so. At least, that’s what I gathered from the information about the last two pairs, in 1761-69 and 1874-82. That’s why this is being described as “last in our lifetime”: only someone born very recently, say five years ago, has any decent chance of living to see the first transit of the next pair.

At any rate, if I have time, I may add another image later. I just wanted to preserve these images for my own perusal.

UPDATE As promised, here is an image from Norway as the transit was just about complete:

In which I call ’em like I see ’em

 Over at Castle Gormogon, the Czar of Muscovy presented a fine example of this administration’s coherence and competence. It inspired me to write this letter to him in response.

Your Excellent Majesty,

That was a marvelous piece of Mr. Carney’s work you selected. I had thoughts on the question from which it sprang. Were I in the position of answering that question, it would go something like this:

“Well, the difference is, you see, that when the companies Bain invested in went under, it was Bain and its rich, white, fat-cat investors who lost the money. When Solyndra went belly-up, the people who got soaked were, well, you. And me. And all the poor saps who read your paper or see me on the tee-vee. That’s the difference that really matters, right there.”

Which is likely why they didn’t call me when Gibbsy called it quits.

Your minion,
ScottO