(click to enlarge—what's that comma doing there?)
Above is a screenshot from The New York Times. I took it* because I figured (or hoped) someone would fix the caption before long. There seems to be a hierarchy of copy over at the Times: apparently no one bothers to proofread the captions.**
Anyway, the article is, in large part, fairly enjoyable (I must add the caveat or disclaimer that I'm abnormally amused by the question of animal self-awareness), and the picture below (see preceding parenthetical) is plain hilarious:
* Do you "take" a screenshot? You do, right?
** More on the hierarchy (and my reasons for feeling I needed to take a screenshot*): When Donnie Darko came out, I read the review online and wrote the following letter to the editor, very soon after which the error was corrected and indeed erased from all records:
"In his review of 'Donnie Darko,' Elvis Mitchell makes a point of saying that Duran Duran's 'Notorious' was not released until the 1990s. I couldn't care less about Duran Duran, but my memory and a quick check of www.allmusic.com inform me that their song 'Notorious' was released on the album 'Notorious' in 1986. Does your fact-checking department not bother with film reviews?"
2 comments:
I was so distracted by the correctly used apostrophe that I didn't even notice the comma at first.
I don't understand the logic of your complaint about the review, though. If Mr. Mitchell said that "Notorious" didn't come out until the 1980s, and it came out in 1986, isn't he correct?
Oh yeah...that's a typo I made when retyping the letter; I just corrected it. Thanks, Dr. Math. You're so good with numbers!
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