The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [80]
“And hopefully without being jive-ass arrogant punks about it,” Benjamin added.
“Without rancor,” I agreed. Yes, we could offer a new voice of grammatical reason, a voice that wasn’t screaming or jeering.
I stopped short. “What about the typos then? Do we leave that all behind?”
“No,” Benjamin said. “Dude, the typos have led us into so many other things we’d never thought of … that’s what I got stuck on, why I had to come back. If I get a vote, it’s that we keep riding on this course. See what we find. I’m curious about what happens next.”
I tugged at my cowboy hat. “Yeah, me too,” I said. We’d come to a kind of koan: the path you’re on is the path you need to find. “Let’s go blog our finds. If my count’s correct, we’ve got eight for nine today, and I think that might push us back over fifty percent.” Benjamin and I stepped onto Ohio soil once more, ready for whatever revelations awaited us. We wouldn’t drop below fifty percent again.
TYPO TRIP TALLY
Total found: 328
Total corrected: 165
15 | Why Hudson Can’t Read
May 2–6, 2008 (Athens, OH, to Cleveland, OH)
Here, an Ironic tragedy brings our Heroes to a juddering halt, as wounded and wailing as foundering school Standards. The torch of Education burns low in a toy store with auspices of a loftier, educational purpose.
During a car-bound lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and graham crackers, Benjamin discovered a surprise on his voice mail. We’d parked on a residential street near Ohio University, killing time before meeting up with my sister. As he listened, a strange expression stole over his face. He hit the replay button so that I could hear the message his friend from the bookstore had left. “Hey man, this is Semajh. Uh … I don’t know if you’ve been peein’ on bushes or what, yo, but the Park Service is really wanting to talk to you. They called here looking for you. I told ’em you don’t work here anymore, but I don’t know, man. It was weird.”
We debated the merits of trying to call the Service, but we decided that the odds of finding the person who’d been looking for us, when we didn’t know his or her name or what it had been concerning, would be pretty slim. We probably should have tried anyway. Benjamin tried to call his old co-worker back, but he wasn’t around, so Benjamin left a quick message. After speculating about what interest the National Park Service could possibly have in talking to Benjamin, we honestly forgot about it for a while and headed off to typo-hunt.
The following morning, we journeyed up to the pleasant suburban town of Hudson, where my father and stepmother live. I’d planned to spend several days with them, since I passed through northeastern Ohio infrequently and I had some filial duties to catch up on. Though Benjamin and I enjoyed the respite, the town would yield one of the strangest and most appalling interactions of the entire trip. I had rarely spent much time in any one place, and a week in Hudson could have been pushing it. Realizing our proximity to Cleveland, Benjamin played nothing but Bone thugs-n-harmony during our outings, and that also made our stay seem longer. Even with plans to spend our last couple days visiting Cleveland proper and my other sister’s college, Kent State, we were scraping the barrel for fertile typo ground by our last leisurely Hudson hunting day, despite Dad’s best efforts at searching out new venues in the area. Fortunately, we’d saved a patch of the town square, and here we went into every single store, finding little in typo quantity, but much in sinister quality.
My first impression of the Miracle on Main Street shop was appreciative: a weird amalgam of office/school supplies and toys that weren’t mindless junk to clutter kids’ rooms. This place had a laudably educational orientation, with products ranging from the learning is fun! extreme back to the more natural give kids