words / myth / ampers & virgule

No comment department

2008-07-24T09:19:00.000-04:00

Coulda happened to anyone.

A little font humor

2008-07-22T16:31:00.002-04:00

Maybe that should be a very little font humor. Thanks to colleague Geoff Hart for the link.

Author Bob Kline on Radio America today at 3:30 ET

2008-07-18T13:14:00.004-04:00

UPDATE
Never mind. Apparently the interview was yesterday.

To the bottle quickly

2008-07-16T09:05:00.002-04:00

An author’s take on the book publishing process, with this memorable line: “Copy editors check each and every little fact, and whatever they come across the make a note that the authors have to respond to. Going through a copy-edited manuscript will send one to the bottle quickly.”

In all the old movies it was the editor who had the bottle and two glasses in a desk drawer, not the author. And there are days when I understand why. It’s nice to know the feeling is mutual.

Giving a fig, or life beyond the reach of the Internet

2008-07-08T07:54:00.000-04:00

Editors do not live by bagels alone. There’s babka*, too.

We used to have a bakery in the neighborhood that made an excellent babka. They even set up a mail order babka business and a website. Alas, they closed their doors last year. I mostly managed to avoid indulging in their babkas, as they would have been the ruin of me. So I don’t particularly miss them.

Last week, though, someone sent my wife a thank you gift for her office consisting of eight babkas, two each of four different fillings. It was decided (passive voice to protect the identity of the decider) that one of these had to come home, and the one my wife picked out had a wonderful fig filling. This is something I had not encountered before, and search engines confirm that it is not a traditional filling.

I thought, well, this bakery must have a website. But no, Google can’t find that, either, beyond a directory listing (if I guessed correctly at the name of the bakery).

Anyway, if you’re anywhere within an easy drive of Newton, Massachusetts, check out Blacker’s Bake Shop, 551 Commonwealth Avenue. The chocolate babka is just so-so, but the fig is to die for. In addition, the woman who asked a relative to buy and ship the gift to my wife was distraught to learn that the package had not included any apricot-almond babkas, suggesting that might be a winner, too.

And if you go there, ask them why they don’t have a website.

* There are several sweet goods called babka, but I’m referring specifically to the fairly dry but rich sweet dough with a rolled-in filling and a streusel topping, made up as a high, rectangular or round loaf, found in Jewish bakeries. Common flavors are chocolate and cinnamon.

Editing the garden

2008-07-05T12:55:00.002-04:00

I just stepped outside to take a break and enjoy the cool back yard after a rain. I found myself stooping to pull the occasional weed, and the parallels between gardening and editing suddenly struck me. (Why this never occurred to me before I have no idea.) I’m not quite sure where this is going, but indulge me for a few moments and maybe something will strike you as instructive.

Weeding

A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds.

I get manuscripts in all conditions. One might have just a handful of errors, like a well-tended garden with just the occasional small weed that managed to escape the gardener’s eye. Another may look more like an abandoned yard, with weeds everywhere and just a hint of what was once cultivated there.

In the former situation, a visitor with a practiced eye can stroll through the garden and stoop occasionally to remove the offending plant. In the latter, it may be necessary to destroy the garden in order to save it. And even then, “one year’s seeding is seven years’ weeding”: it will take many passes over a long period to make the plot manageable.

Structure
A couple of weeks ago, I was standing in my kitchen, drinking a glass of water, when there was an enormous flash and simultaneous crack of thunder. I knew something had been hit, but it wasn’t until the next morning that I saw the damage. A large tree in our yard had exploded (there was no charring; the lightning had apparently superheated the water inside the trunk). Clearly, the tree had to come down. However, the bones of the garden were so well planned (several owners ago), that after the tree’s removal, the structure of the garden remains. The gap is not even noticeable, as the adjacent trees still define the wall of that particular room.

There are times when a book suffers a corresponding injury: A passage the author wanted to quote has to be eliminated because the rights are not available or affordable; events overtake the book and the thesis of a chapter or section turns out to be unsupportable; a co-author’s contribution fails to materialize. And, as in the case of the well-architected garden, the well-structured book survives the excision.

Choosing plants
The skillful gardener has a theme in mind to apply to each room—perhaps it’s a succession of bloom in a single color; perhaps it’s a riot of nighttime fragrance; perhaps it’s a colorful hodgepodge designed to attract hummingbirds; and so forth. Plants that are tried but don’t work to advance the theme are ruthlessly extirpated.

Similarly, the editor is on the lookout for sudden and awkward shifts in tone or mood that bring the reader up short.

Cultivation and fertilization
Gardening is a dirty business. Spading, fertilizing, planting, watering, hoeing. Wear old clothes and leave time for a shower before you show off your handiwork.

Producing a book can be just as messy. The art is in producing a finished work that doesn’t show where you ripped out and reset a brick path or where you uprooted a large rhododendron. The goal is to have the reader marvel at how easy it must have been to edit such a well-put-together finished book.

You would know all this if you had been a contemporary of Shakespeare

2008-07-01T21:15:00.002-04:00

A virtual acquaintance of mine, a long-time denizen of a couple of mailing lists I’ve been on, turns out also to be a big shot in the world of Renaissance Faires and Elizabethan-era re-enactors. For a number of years Maggie Secara has been the proprietress of the elizabethan.org website, where she gradually accumulated hundreds of little tidbits that help lend authenticity to the speech and actions of re-enactors.

A few months ago, Maggie approached me about printing her Compendium of Common Knowledge 1558–1603 as a book.

The book is out and available. I learned all sorts of fascinating details while I was working on it, and if you’re as enamored of trivia as I am, you’ll enjoy it too. And it’s a perfect gift for a history buff.

Maggie that document
Maggie is also the eponym of the ultimate corrupted Microsoft Word document rescue technique that has come to be known as maggieing the document. Or maggying the document. Nobody really knows how to spell the gerund. Nonetheless, if your Word document starts to behave badly and you’re afraid it may be irretrievably corrupted, you should maggie the document. (This applies to version of Word up through Word 2003; Word 2007 documents are constructed quite differently and should not become corrupt in the same ways older documents can.)

Here’s how you maggie a document.

Open a new blank document.
In the problem document, ensure that the show/hide ¶ button is turned on so that you can see paragraph marks. Track Changes should be off.
For each section in the document (it may only have one section, which is fine), select all of the text except the final ¶.
Copy to the clipboard (Ctrl+C).
Switch to the new document and paste (Ctrl+V).
In the new document, recreate section breaks as needed and recreate all headers and footers, which will not have transferred over.
Save the new document with a new name and close the old one.

Note that you would not have known this procedure had you been a contemporary of Shakespeare. I just thought I’d toss this in as a bonus so that you could puzzle over the sort of mind that can repair Word documents Monday through Friday and transform itself into the countess of Southampton on weekends.

Verizon's designs on me

2008-06-23T14:21:00.002-04:00

My cell phone died. I could place and receive calls; the display worked fine; but I could not hear anyone and no one could hear me. Kaput. No point asking about repair, because repair consists of tossing in the scrap pile and replacing with a new phone. Except phone models are obsolete about five minutes after they’re introduced, so replace means upgrade. Lamentable as this state of affairs may be, it is not news and it is not what this post is about.

No, this post is about the design of Verizon stores and the design of their entire customer-facing operation.

Let’s start with the stores
I purchased my now-defunct phone nineteen months ago and the store has been remodeled since then. So I assume my local store is up to date in terms of Verizon’s corporate design standard. Understand that I’m over sixty and a very light telephone user, not the heart of Verizon’s target market. Nonetheless, cell phones are pretty much a necessity these days, and I think a company of Verizon’s size ought to be able to serve a broad market, not just twenty-three-year-olds.

Here’s how I experienced the store. Initially I felt as if I were walking onto the set of a dystopian futuristic movie. Cold. Black. Evil. A small display opposite the front door invited me to put my own name on a waiting list. However, my eye went first to a human face behind what appeared to be a service counter, and I did not notice the check-in stand until later. The young man I spoke with, to his credit, put my name into the queue rather than telling me to go back to the entrance and type it in myself. He then told me I’d be called from the technical service counter at the back of the store.

The store is vast, with a large amount of open floor space. I assume that on weekends, the place fills up with customers waiting (futilely, for the most part) for service. On a weekday morning, it’s suitable for getting some exercise running laps. The people who think this is a good idea are mostly under five, and they quickly find that there are numerous gadgets within easy reach, leading to a lot of yelling by parents to “leave that alone” and “put that back.” Between the shouting, the elevator music a tad too loud, and the constant ringing of phones, all bouncing off hard surfaces, hearing a clerk call your name is a challenge.

Arrayed around the store are identical-looking displays that probably have different groups of products—or maybe not. It was hard to tell. Nothing told me how one item was different from another except as to price. And the posted prices seemed to have little to do with what one actually pays. It was all very confusing, to be sure. The other visual features consisted of signs listing services but pointing nowhere and counters with personnel sitting behind them, apparently engaged in something not involving customers at all.

So here are some design tips for Verizon, if they’re listening, which we all know they’re not:

Warm the place up (introduce some colors other black, gray, and red).
Quiet the place down (use softer, more sound-absorbent materials; lower the ceiling).
Use signs to direct people to what they need and to identify the different sections of the store. And put them where people can see them without craning their necks.
Kidproof the store.
Don’t seat employees behind what look like service counters if they’re not there to provide service.

Now about that customer service…
I have no inside information on how Verizon trains their customer-facing employees. I only know that as a customer I feel ill-treated, ill-informed, and disrespected. The friendly and extremely helpful technician who eventually called me over and looked at my phone was quite knowledgeable. But she was not empowered to complete a transaction with me; she had to send me back to the sales vultures at the front of the store. The technician explained to me, later, when I returned to her to upload my contact list to the new phone, that the technicians take pride in their personal integrity and try not to swindle customers, but the reason is that they don’t work on commission.

All I can say about the sales staff is that they do not smile, do not answer questions, do not explain the features or benefits of one model versus another, assume that the customer knows as much about the many choices on offer as they do, and withhold as much critical information as they legally can, in order to induce customers to make bad decisions. Whether they come by these traits naturally or have to be motivated to express them, I have to blame the company, not the individual salespeople, because my experience has been the same on every visit to the store, and I’ve never seen the same person twice.

Here are my customer service training tips for Verizon, again offered in full knowledge that nobody who can do anything about them is reading this blog:

When a customer walks into the store, someone should approach and say, “Welcome to the Verizon Wireless store. How may I assist you today?” They should be smiling, warm, and genuinely interested in hearing the answer to that question. They should then walk with the customer to the correct destination and hand the customer off to someone who can directly assist the person.
At no time—ever—should there be both an unassisted customer wandering the store and an employee visible behind a counter and not waiting on a customer. Employees should be trained to set aside what they are working on and offer assistance.
Employees should be cross-trained in store operations so that any employee can complete a transaction once it begins.
Deceiving customers or withholding information to get them to buy more than they asked for should be cause for dismissal on the spot. Bait and switch is illegal.

What’s it to you?
Design encompasses more than great graphics. And design matters. How do people of different ages experience your store? How well do your employees treat your customers?

Observed...

2008-06-16T13:37:00.002-04:00

I’ve been traveling the last few days, and I was rewarded with a bit of entertainment at the security checkpoints, both outbound and homebound. I find security procedures as frustrating, ill-conceived, bureaucratic, and annoying as anyone. But I figure the people who work for TSA are doing the best they can in the jobs they have and deserve as much courtesy and respect as anyone.

On the outbound trip, I overheard one TSA employee telling the party behind me about his recent experience patrolling the passenger pickup area. He saw a woman park her car and get out of it to walk into the terminal (not allowed). He approached her to tell her she had to move the car, and she laid into him. “No rent-a-cop is going to tell me what to do.”

“Ma’am, whatever your experiences may have been in the past with contractors working airport security, I’m a federal agent and I’m ordering you to move your car.”

“Well, I pay your salary, and you can’t make me move my car.”

“No, ma’am, I can’t.”

At that point he wrote her a citation and had the car towed and impounded while she fumed. She continued her tantrum to the effect that she makes two hundred thousand dollars a year and won’t be treated like this.

“Oh,” the agent replied (in his retelling), “I didn’t know the street corner was that lucrative.”

The woman stormed off, and the crowd that had gathered by that point applauded spontaneously.

Okay, he’s probably told the story a few times and buffed it a bit. On the return trip, though, I was a first-hand witness.

The players: A pleasantly pretty TSA agent with a low-maintenance hairstyle and a friendly mien, the sort of person you might run into at a neighbor’s barbecue, with kids in tow, and with whom you’d easily strike up a conversation; and a nineteen-year-old (or thereabouts) looker with straight, shoulder-length, perfectly trimmed platinum hair.

The scene: The passenger had passed through the metal detector and her bag had gone through the X-ray scanner. The TSA agent was holding a bottle—of perhaps five- or six-ounce capacity—of some sort of spray.

The line overheard as I walked by: “No, miss, a hair product is never a medical necessity.”

Novelists, dramatists, and short story writers fill notebooks and journals with snippets of conversation they hear when they are out and about in the world. Careful observation of real interactions seen in the wild informs and enriches fictional dialogue and description. Writing naturally is built on such artifice.

Max Palacios on Voice of America

2008-06-09T12:27:00.001-04:00

Novelist Max Palacios will be interviewed Tuesday by Rod Murray, on Voice of America, about his latest novel, Nikola’s Predicament, a great summer read. The interview will be at 9:05 am PDT, 12:05 pm EDT.

If Max keeps getting great interviews like this, I won’t actually have to think of something original to post about for quite a while. Way to go, Max!

Max Palacios on Jordan Rich

2008-06-05T06:37:00.002-04:00

Novelist Max Palacios will be interviewed Friday night (or Saturday morning, depending where you live) by Jordan Rich, WBZ, Boston, about his latest novel, Nikola’s Predicament, a great summer read. Listen live online if you’re up that late. The interview is scheduled for 11 pm Friday PDT, 2 am Saturday EDT.

Kinky corporate logic strikes again

2008-06-03T09:24:00.002-04:00

Great news for Sir Speedy and AlphaGraphics!
Kinko’s, a household name (or whatever the cubicle farm equivalent of household name is) was bought by FedEx a few years ago and has been operating under the FedEx Kinko’s name since then. If you type www.kinkos.com in your browser, you’ll be redirected to the FedEx site, but the Kinko’s brand name is still displayed prominently.

Today, FedEx announced they’ll be dropping the Kinko’s name in favor of FedEx Office. Uh huh. Brilliant move. Store closings to follow.

File under: Peter Principle

Every Good Bird Does Fly

2008-06-01T07:39:00.002-04:00

There are memoirs and there are memoirs. These days, the word is usually associated with what are called literary memoirs, generally angst-ridden confessions of youthful transgressions seen from the mature side of the statute of limitations.

And of course there are political memoirs (tell-alls like Scott McClellan’s new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception as well as quieter reflections on recent history).

And then there are the puff pieces of retired corporate chieftains, successful trial lawyers, and other masters of spin.

But there is an older tradition, still very much alive, of professional memoirs—personal explorations of a particular craft by a master practitioner. One such master is Bob Kline. Bob was a pilot for four decades, for the Air Force and for TWA. Bob’s book, Fasten Your Seatbelt: A Pilot’s Memoir, is chock full of great stories sure to delight anyone who ever harbored the fantasy of flying big birds. It’s a fast-paced book where you’ll learn a lot about flying at the same time you’re reliving scenes with Bob that range from the terrifying to the side-splitting.

Bob came to me for editing (he’s a good writer and didn’t need much of that) and design, as well as a website for the book, which just went live a few days ago. He’s about to launch a publicity campaign, but meanwhile the book has been selling well through word of mouth.

With the price of airline tickets going up daily, reading Fasten Your Seatbelt may be the only flight you take this summer.

Language Log moves

2008-05-23T16:40:00.002-04:00

Announcing the renaming of PMA to IBPA a week ahead of time does not make up for being six weeks late to announce Language Log’s move. Truth be told, I’m not sure Language Log announced the new URL before two days ago.

In April, their old server gave up the ghost. Posts accumulated, and if you want to start reading (as I do) with the first cached post from six weeks ago, start here. The main page is here.

I’ve updated the link in the sidebar.

PMA is dead. Long live the IBPA

2008-05-23T16:26:00.002-04:00

PMA, the Publishers Marketing Association, is officially changing its name to IBPA, the Independent Book Publishers Association. If you are reading in the blog archives and come across references to PMA, you will henceforth make the mental substitution and access the organization under its new name. Yes, you will. That is an order.

The official switchover takes place in another week. But I got a postcard about it today, so it’s not a secret. The new URL is www.ibpa-online.org (still showing the PMA logo until the switchover, though).

Name changes are always problematic, whether for corporations, brands, or nonprofits. Old friends can’t find you anymore. People are confused as to whether there are now two entities where there used to be one. What feels to the insiders involved like a statement of a clear new vision can seem like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to everyone else, though.

A fault of editors

2008-05-23T10:02:00.002-04:00

By which I mean to suggest a term of venery for our august profession, not to point out any particular flaw that we share.

We tend to be a solitary lot, more so in this day of independent freelance editing and telecommuting (saves gas, for one thing). So it is always a particular pleasure when we gather face to face.

Yesterday, half a dozen of us gathered for dinner and conversation in New York, on the flimsy excuse of showing hospitality to a Californian in town to give a workshop. New York City is quite capable of keeping a visiting Californian entertained without such a pretense, but we all agreed how nice it is to be able to put a face with a name and have a real person to conjure when one of us contributes a post to an email list.

What I found fascinating was the wide variety that we described, particularly in such a small and random group, of types of editing, categories of clients, methods of managing our one-person businesses, and methods of doing the work itself. In a very real way, it became obvious that we do not compete with each other. This is not because we conspire to avoid competition. It is rather because no two of us do quite the same thing.

What does this mean to the potential client in need of an editor? It means that finding the right editor for a given situation is more complicated than sending off a bunch of emails and requesting a price quote. Matching the editor’s skills to the job at hand is a subtle task, one made easier when a fault of editors gather and learn enough about each other that they can make appropriate referrals.

A good tip on approaching a book reviewer

2008-05-17T15:40:00.001-04:00

David J. Montgomery spells it out for you.

Weak link

2008-05-09T21:10:00.002-04:00

I’m casting about for a printer to handle a particular book. Because of the nature of the job, I may end up using a printer I haven’t used before, and so I’ve sent off requests for quotations to several companies. One that I contacted because they came recommended by people on a publishing list came back with an attractive price quote. So I followed up by requesting they send a sample of a similar book.

The sample arrived today.

The question I have for you is this: If someone—a sales prospect to whom you had gone to the trouble of quoting a price—were to ask you for a sample, would you make an effort to send a sample of your best work, or would you take a piece from the reject pile, rescuing it before it went to the shredder?

I’ve got to think you’d send a sample that at least met your minimum quality standard. Maybe you’d go out of your way to send your best work.

So I’m always mystified when I receive a sample such as the one I got today. I assume the person who packed it thought it was a good enough example of the company’s work. But if that’s the case, does that mean their customers accept shoddy goods without complaint? And why was the company recommended to me? Does that mean there are large numbers of people in the publishing business who are incapable of judging well made books from badly made books?

Problems vary. But in the case of today’s sample, the book was actually printed quite well (there were several problems with the design, but I can’t blame the printer for those). The weak link was the bindery. In the first place, the perfect binding equipment, which glues the cover to the book block, was out of adjustment. As a result, there was barely enough glue on the spine to hold the cover on, but there were great gobs of glue squeezed up between the cover and book block, front and back, top and bottom (but not in the middle). In the second place, while the book was trimmed square (as opposed to being trimmed askew), the dimensions were not what they were intended to be. I’m really not sure what they were intended to be, but I’m quite certain that 5 9/32 × 8 3/8 is not right.

I’m glad I requested the sample. I won’t be ordering from that printer, now or in the future.

Price matters, but not as much as quality.

Fun with Dick and ... whomever

2008-04-28T13:27:00.004-04:00

Viewing the news from every angle, the Telegraph reports on a titillating hazard of typographic design. They've also assembled a small but excellent gallery of other examples (sorry, link expired; you're too late).

May but May not

2008-04-23T19:51:00.002-04:00

I noted in passing not quite a year ago, on May Day 2007, that the following trees and shrubs were all in full bloom in my yard:

Bradford pear
Magnolia
Weeping cherry
Forsythia
Azalea
Quince
Andromeda

Today is April 23, and all of the same plants are again in full bloom, with the wisteria again hot on their heels. I would not suggest that spring has advanced eight days in the course of a single year: obviously, there is normal variation in weather from year to year that does not measure an equivalent change in climate. Nonetheless, this year it is March showers that have brought forth April flowers.

How to find a literary agent

2008-04-22T06:25:00.002-04:00

Well, not really. But read this fascinating interview with veteran agent Nat Sobel, published on Poets & Writers. Thanks to Brian Dana Akers for the tip.

Free fonts

2008-04-17T05:53:00.002-04:00

If you’re not a professional designer, you may be under the impression that all fonts are free. In fact, fonts are licensed intellectual property. Some individual or team of individuals put a significant amount of time into designing and implementing every glyph of every font, and those people generally want to be paid for their work. The reason you have many fonts on your computer that you don’t recall purchasing is that they were licensed in bulk by the company that published software you did buy—your operating system, your office suite, your graphic arts applications—and those licenses are included in what you purchased. Nonetheless, despite the widespread availability of pirated fonts, giving copies of your fonts to friends is a violation of the license terms; and professional designers don’t do that—nor do they accept gifts of fonts from friends—lest they find themselves on the wrong end of an enforcement action by a font company.

Jessica Hupp has assembled a collection of 101 fonts that she says are legally available at no cost or, in some cases, with a small charge for commercial use. These are display fonts, not text fonts. They might be useful in web design, advertising design, or for book covers, however. While her links all look the same on her page, you should know that some lead to pages on other sites; some download zip archives directly; and some need to be right-clicked so that you can download a naked font file. I didn’t check all the links, but some may turn out to be Mac-only fonts.

I am not vouching for the accuracy of the claim that all of these fonts are legitimately free. You should verify that yourself for any font you intend to use.

The rather difficult font game

2008-04-16T08:23:00.001-04:00

Kill time. Feel stupid. Learn something, maybe.

Gatekeeper vs. team member

2008-04-08T00:36:00.000-04:00

You are likely aware at some level of the grand battle line undulating across the hyperplain of terra cognita, with the forces of light arrayed on one side and those of darkness arrayed in opposition.

I refer of course to those who celebrate the ability of anyone, anywhere, to publish anything at all, unmediated by any filters, whether on the Internet or in book form, as the dawn of the age of true freedom, on one side, and those who decry this same phenomenon as auguring the end of culture, on the other side. As to which side constitute the forces of light and which side constitute the forces of darkness, I’ll let you pick sides. I’m just sitting in the stands watching the battle unfold. I’ve brought along field glasses and a picnic basket and hope you’ll sit with me a moment to enjoy some wine and cheese.

This battle has been going on for some time now, and it will continue long into the future. What I find most interesting about it is not the ultimate outcome, over which I have little or no influence, but the way the rhetoric of the combatants filters down to the individual author.

An author is someone with something to say to the world—a story to tell, an opinion on a controversial subject, knowledge to share—who now confronts the question of how to reach an audience. Shall we look to the large publishing houses? The small presses? The subsidy presses? A self-published book? Or just blurt it out on a web page?

Interesting question. I think the personality type of the author has a lot to do with the initial answer.

There is all this talk floating over the battlefield about gatekeepers—people who assert their expertise to judge the validity of what the author wants to say and to prevent publication of what they, in their narrow, elitist view, consider wrong in some way. There is the whole gauntlet of agents, acquisition editors, executive committees, lawyers, development editors, copyeditors, production editors, marketing people, distributors, and retailers whose sole purpose is to quash freedom of speech and maintain the cultural and financial domination of a wealthy elite.

On the other hand, there is talk floating over the same battlefield of this great network of agents, acquisition editors, executive committees, lawyers, development editors, copyeditors, production editors, marketing people, distributors, and retailers whose sole purpose is to help the author produce the best book possible and achieve broad success with it.

And the only difference between the gauntlet of gatekeepers and network of team members is the perception of the author, which is influenced by the author’s personality type.

So some authors, trusting no one but themselves, will put out what they have to say, untouched by any other person. Sometimes this works. Usually it doesn’t. Others will reject the criticism of experts but accept the flattery of a subsidy publisher. Others will embrace the traditional publishing process and accept the input of those who have more publishing experience than they. Others fall along the full spectrum in between.

The ones who are skeptical of the deal offered by traditional publishers or not up to the challenge of gaining access to that world but who still want input from others may end up self-publishing. Some of those people find their way to me.

It’s all good.

Have a bit of Brie. It’s just right today.

Chimera spotted in the wild. Or spotted chimera in the wild. Whatever.

2008-03-31T04:38:00.002-04:00

Thanks to Karen Lew for the heads up on this headline [ti]gaffe...