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lands to come”. The AP concluded its article by noting that our website contained only that message …“without a period.” Get it? The grammar guys forgot to punctuate their own sentence, hyuk hyuk. What baffles me is that someone at the AP apparently can’t differentiate a sentence from a nonsentence. My announcement followed the same conventions as news headlines, which do not take periods (e.g., an AP headline from that very day, “Seinfeld to be pitchman for Microsoft”). More specifically, you’d think that the AP would be familiar with the common journalistic placeholder “to come”. It even gets its own abbreviation in newspaper page galleys, marking places where text or photos will be filled in later: TK (no periods required for the acronym). When did reportage became synonymous with the cracks made by the class clown from the back row?

Still, the AP had nothing on the professional loudmouths from cable news; Keith Olbermann ranked us as two of the worst people in the world. Olbermann was the master of ending on a punch line, favoring style over substance in a way that would make Hortense from Miracle on Main Street proud. A former producer for Walter Cronkite said once that Olbermann was “not a newsman. He’s not a reporter. I’ve never seen anything that he’s done that was original, in terms of the information. It’s all derivative.”* Which explains how, as a picture of us appeared, he said, “The silver [medal goes] to Jeff Michael Deck and Benjamin Douglas Herson, two self-proclaimed, twenty-eight-year-old grammar vigilantes—and you’d never guess it by looking at them.” There it was again, “self-proclaimed grammar vigilantes”—he’d yanked that misstatement right from the Republic piece. Having finished his rip ‘n’ read, Olbermann concluded in his own riotous way, “Our sources say the judge was also going to order them to get a life, but apparently it’s too late for that.”

“Get a life? That O’Reilly wannabe needs to get a fact-checker,” Benjamin said.

To be fair, the media couldn’t exactly ask Benjamin and me for clarification, never mind our side of the story. Our court-issued muzzles were firmly in place. Of the many stories about the case, however, not one bothered to include “before” and “after” pictures of the watchtower sign. A side-by-side comparison would have shown how tiny our correction had been.

After temping around for a couple months, I found myself a new job in mid-September. Benjamin and his girlfriend decided to try life on the West Coast and began saving up. We paid our resitution with weeks to spare. As the weather turned cold, we settled into semi-hibernation. The country slid deeper into recession. For the first time, the guy we voted for won the presidency. We could do nothing but wait for the year to pass, but I knew I’d been onto something. On Inauguration Day I silently vowed that the president wouldn’t be alone in bringing change, even if I had to come late to the fight.

TYPO TRIAL TALLY

Total found: 3

Total corrected:—1

* Concealed weapons are now allowed inside National Parks. Any panther that tries to sneak up on your granny in a dark gully is in for a surprise.

* The rest of the quote (this is from a New Yorker piece): “I like him, I agree with his perspective, and I think he’s very, very good on television. But he’s not a newsman. Ten years ago, if he had done at CBS what he does every day on the air at MSNBC, he would have been fired by the end of the day.”

19 | A Place for Starting Things

September 13–15, 2009 (Divers locations in and offshore from the Boston, MA, area)

Our Heroes, post-probates that they are, return to the Quest once reunited. Out to sea and back to school, they race to wherever Adventure calls them as they begin the bold task of charting a Course for TEAL’s future exploits.

Remarkably, neither of our girlfriends abandoned us for returning from Arizona as debt-saddled criminals. Then again, every girl loves a bad boy. More than a year after our courtroom debacle, when Benjamin and I finally received notice in the mail that our probation had ended and