Jan. 14th, 2006

layla: grass at sunset (Default)
If you have to print retractions, as all news sources do from time to time, the least you can do is make it interesting.

http://www.regrettheerror.com/2004/10/never_a_dull_co.html

And a round-up of the Seattle Stranger's best corrections can be found here. Some of the errors that they regret include:

Music editor Jennifer Maerz is a shitty headline writer, and we regret letting her write so many of them.

and...

The Stranger regrets that Jim Compton won reelection in this year's Seattle City Council race, despite the best efforts of our news team.

and furthermore, regarding one of their stories ...

This is the most incomprehensible lead paragraph ever published in The Stranger. We regret it deeply.

Ah, nothing like newspaper humor when you work in the newspaper industry.

EDIT: Aha, I just found this year's error roundup.

I really need to stop reading this and get some work done...

As the book section of the September 15 Stranger was going to press, a chunk of text in a wonderful audience review by author Dave Eggers was inadvertently highlighted by a production staffer, who then inadvertently typed the letter "z," replacing an entire paragraph, and then some, with that final letter of the alphabet, followed by a space. We will never stop regretting this.
layla: grass at sunset (Default)
The book signing on Friday night went well. I sold about half of the books I'd brought with me, talked to some nice people (who hopefully didn't notice how much of a zombie I was by the end of the evening), handed out full-color previews of Kismet (courtesy of the new laser printer Orion bought a few weeks ago) and even had one guy buy a full set of GNs from me even though he already owned them just so he could get them signed, which was the COOLEST THING EVAH. The store asked me to come back and do it again for a spring-sale event that they have coming up in a few weeks. Overall, it was very good.

I've been getting good feedback on Freebird. Several of my co-workers loved it and I talked to a lady on Friday night who wasn't that interested in my existing GNs but said she'd definitely buy Freebird if it was available. (Incidentally, the first of this week's two Freebird strips is up at www.freebirdcomic.com.) I also got a very nice email from a guy in town regarding the Kismet preview pages in the paper.

Also on Friday, I was commissioned to do a fairly large project for a local company's office party ... which happens to be NEXT Friday, so I've been working on it nonstop all day, aside from a walk with the dogs and a brief (well, not as brief as I might have hoped) break to make dinner and web-surf this evening. This means I still have to do next week's Freebird strips tomorrow, as well as coloring Monday's Kismet page. I'm starting to despair of getting a Kismet backlog done before I leave for Kodiak. (Assuming I can even GET to Kodiak, considering that all of Alaska Airlines' flights were grounded yesterday due to the ongoing volcano eruptions from Mt. St. Augustine.) On the other hand, I'm getting fairly compensated for the extra work, and the thought occurred to me that if I could just get a handful of freelance jobs like this every month, I could actually quit my day job without taking too much of an income hit. Of course, the problem is digging up the work; this one just fell into my lap out of the blue sky. Maybe it will lead to other things. Maybe I will be able to do that and work full-time and not lose my mind.

I'm behind on my emails/general correspondence again. Big surprise. I think I will go get caught up on that, see if I can get some Kismet colored, and then sleep.

On the real-world side of things, it's been colder this weekend, down to about -15F out here in Fox, and around 20 below in town. But the sunlight has made it to the mailbox! The days are getting longer and I've been eagerly watching the sun creep down the hillside across the valley, week by week. Today when I walked the dogs to get the mail -- the mailbox is about 3/4 of a mile from the house, so it's just about as far as I can walk in this cold before I get uncomfortably chilly -- the sun was shining on the mailbox and I stood there for a little while, "sunbathing" my face in the light. I wished I'd brought my camera, because the trees are still covered with frost. Tonight, when I went out after dark to stoke up the boiler, there was the oddest sound off in the trees ... like a tinkly "shwoosh" sound, repeated every now and again. I think the frost load has gotten so heavy on the trees that it's spontaneously sloughing off. The dogs barked at it. Silly dogs.

Very little wildlife around. I've been seeing fresh tracks of fox and moose when I walk the dogs, but no actual living animals. Zero birds whatsoever. One of my co-workers (an avid hunter) asked me last week if I'd had any grouse around my area, and I told him that I hadn't seen any sign of them -- whereupon he said that this sort of weather (cold, but not much snow) tends to be a killer on grouse, and then he told me why. Grouse burrow into snow to sleep in the winter, and with so little snow cover, they are unable to hide and get caught by predators. According to him -- and I've heard this before, elsewhere, but I've never seen a grouse actually do this; it should be quite amusing -- the way that grouse hide themselves in the snow is by diving, head-first, out of a tree into a snowbank. Apparently they occasionally kill themselves by landing on a log, rock or other obstruction. The thought occurs to me that this may explain a lot about general grouse behavior: massive brain damage! It's all becoming clear! With our shallow snow cover this year, I now have a mental image of grouse killing themselves by the thousands, landing head-first in 3 inches of snow...

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