Having always been of a somewhat literary bent (i.e. the production of it, if not necessarily uncritical consumption), I have a thing for spelling and grammar (not a word, Rohn).
Writing and other forms of communication are also important to me in the day job as a science professional. After all, there’s no point doing all this stuff if you’re not going to share it, and if you’re going to do that it makes sense to be just as professional. This is not news, but I do have an eye for spelling mistakes and apostate apostrophes, etc. I often get asked to proofread manuscripts and slides, as well as for help with ‘the best way to say’ something.
It’s all right Gee, I’m not angling for a job as an editor at Nature (not yet, anyway). But I thought the community might enjoy this little jibe from Stuff White People Like . If you laugh half as much as I did, I will have laughed twice as much as you.
Quite amusing, Richard – but the funniest bit was the Google ads at the bottom, which when I checked out the entry read:
Ads by Google
Bury Grammar School
Thinking of buying? Compare 100s of retailers’ prices at Shopping.com
Spell And Grammar Check
Free Spell Checker, Thesaurus & More w/the Free Dictionary Toolbar
Brush up your English
The UK specialist in writing skills training. Public/private courses
Grammar School at Leeds
Two premier independent schools join forces – for girls & boys 3-18
… I just loved the idea of buying a Bury Grammar School at shopping.com (I nearly went to Bury Grammar, but that’s a different story.)
Incidentally, the ‘Stuff White People Like’ blog is not popular with everyone. See this quote:
Random House has purchased a book based on a blog called Stuff White People Like for $300,000, a sum that many in the publishing and blogging communities believe is an astronomical amount for a book spawned from a blog, written by a previously unpublished author.
Stuff White People Like – the website, not the as-yet unpublished book – includes such side-splitting witticisms as:
“The No. 1 reason why white people like not having a TV is so that they can tell you that they don’t have a TV.”
What makes this deal even more surprising is that this kind of book concept is far from new. For example, “The History of White People in America” came out some 20 years ago, and principally poked fun at stereotypes about WASPs.
“I was shocked and amazed that they got that much money for a concept that Martin Mull had written a book on back in 1985,” said Ron Hogan, who writes GalleyCat, a blog about the publishing industry.
Random House has purchased a book based on a blog called Stuff White People Like for $300,000
Bloody hell. There’s hope for me yet.
I didn’t know your grandma was unwell. Please give her my best wishes.
ScienceBlogs might buy you out for a fiver, Richard.
Meanwhile, I assume you noticed the typos in that piece.
A lot of the tyops have been corrected :)
Funnily enough, from dating someone who ticks the box “other”, some of those really do ring true!
When the cricket commentator the late, great John Arlott was travelling to South Africa many years ago, he was asked by customs there to fill out a from which included a field “race”. He wrote “human”.