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He marched over to the woman at the front desk; I hurried to follow. Thinking that his problem-solving approach might involve a quick jab to her face, I subtly shouldered him to the side and took over, asking to speak with the curator of the “Sex and Sensibility” exhibit. I explained that typos riddled all their biographies. Her eyes narrowed and she opened with a self-defensive maneuver. She said that they’d had a high-school intern type up most of the signs, as if it were acceptable to lay the blame on that poor kid.

“Why don’t you come and take a look at the errors?” Josh said. He had decided to go with verbal pugilism rather than physical, so he added, “FYI, you’ll need a good ten minutes to see them all.”

She walked over to the exhibit with us. I pointed out the “I became kind of a bif fishas flounder” one as an example. Before I could catalog the other mistakes for her, the museum associate changed tactics. She might have seen that these textual sins were too heavy to lay exclusively on the thin shoulders of the high-school intern. She now said that all the biography signs had been copied from a book that had inspired the exhibit. She claimed she’d done a couple of the signs herself and had noticed errors in the book biographies.

Hmm. “So you faithfully copied the errors over into the exhibit signs?” I said.

She didn’t respond to this, perhaps realizing that whatever answer she’d give would make her look even worse. Instead, she directed my attention to the book (itself titled Sex and Sensibility), which was in the museum gift shop. Josh and I leafed through until we found the biographies.

“Aha!” Josh said. “Look, it’s right here—this woman was ‘kind of a big fish as founder of Kirshenbaum’. Not a freaking flounder!”

A flounder is kind of a big fish, but I was sure the correlation was coincidental. We read on, realizing that the museum had to be the culprit for the mistakes. The book version of the biographies, the source material, was error-free. Only by reading them could we understand what the exhibit versions had been trying to say.

We went back to the associate and I explained what we had found. For the integrity of the exhibit, and respect for the cartoonists themselves, could the museum fix the signs?

The woman sighed. “You’re the first person who’s ever said anything about the mistakes. Here’s the name of the curator.” Then she added, “I really doubt that they’d get fixed even if you tell him about them.” With that, she delicately removed the gauntlet from her slender hand and threw it to the floor. I bent down and picked up the damascened steel glove, accepting the challenge, and Josh and I walked out. Given the hostile response from the museum associate, I didn’t hold out much hope that the curator would listen to little old me.

So I set my readers on him. My minions, cropping up in ever-greater numbers each day on the TEAL blog. I’m not sure how many people harassed this poor caretaker through beseeching e-mails and phone calls, but from the reports that readers sent me, I’m guessing that the guy had a full in-box. The curator popped up on the blog a couple of days later saying that he’d had the signs corrected and begging that I call off the TEAL devotees, who apparently were still inundating him with “vitriolic and speculative” messages. I did, satisfied that justice had been wrought. When certain factions online questioned my judgment in loosing the pack in the first place, Josh stepped in—acting as my second in comment-section duels, on my blog and elsewhere—and vigorously defended me.

We left San Francisco, raring to tackle the rest of the West Coast. But man, was there a lot of it left. North of San Francisco, the coast’s population drops sharply, and doesn’t pick up again until halfway into Oregon, somewhere around Eugene. We weathered six hours’ worth of driving—including a single typo correction at a remote deli—up to Klamath, California, where the very last hostel of the TEAL journey awaited us, a lone wooden house tucked in among endless