The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [83]
I mused on the cultural trend toward style over substance, and the more I thought about it, the more pervasive it seemed. Movies don’t need a plot so long as we get lots of explosions and/or enough topless women. The whole idea of a fashion industry, offering clothing for their visual appeal, has somehow supplanted the actual utility of clothing. So much glitz and glam, so much money spent on marketing, and I wonder if that number correlates to what’s spent on actually improving the products or services. I remembered in Las Vegas, we were visually stunned by the whole effect. “Looks like fun,” we’d agreed, not realizing we’d captured the true spirit of the city. Yeah, it looks like fun so it can distract you as the greenbacks fly out of your wallet. What would a Las Vegas of substance over style look and feel like? Charlie Rose Land?
I forced myself to lay these thoughts aside for a while and grabbed the volume of the complete works of Shakespeare I’d somehow left here the last time I’d been at my dad’s. I’d have to remember to bring this along when we left Hudson.
The next day we headed into Cleveland and began our hunt at the Great Lakes Science Center, located between the Browns Stadium and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yesterday’s troubles had inspired us to check out other educationally oriented sites such as this. I confess that we got a little lost in the fun of hands-on activities aimed at scientific minds somewhat younger than our own. We shouted echoes through tubes, balanced beach balls on air, set rubber rings spinning in place on a rotating metal disk, and sent puffy clouds of sublimating dry ice up to the ceiling. A couple times I had to turn myself around, saying, “Wait, I forgot to check for typos.”
Having then checked, the place reassured me. For all the text we scanned, we uncovered only three mistakes, all of which could have been true typos in the typographical error sense, missing a key or hitting the wrong one. The emphasis on being a science center hadn’t kept them from performing better than average on the English front. I think I expected a certain rivalry among the core subjects. I don’t care about multiplication tables—this is civics! The Center gets an A in English for finding room for copyediting while journeying through the many steps of the scientific method.
We found, encased in glass, a plaque announcing a winning “eight-grader” ’s science project. That one we couldn’t touch, but the other two we amended. A simple mark indicated “no where” should be brought together, elsewhere. Finally, “Galileo Galilel” was an extremely easy fix, as we merely converted the top of that final 1 into a dot, making it an i. For spelling one of their main dudes wrong, Benjamin votes that they get an A-minus instead. Of course, my A rating could be too generous for a different reason. We made the corrections ourselves since no one seemed to be anywhere around to ask. I shudder to think we might have gotten the same reaction we’d gotten at Miracle on Main Street; the discovery that another education-oriented environment disdained our similarly intentioned efforts would have cut too deeply. The context was different here, though. The Science Center had a strict focus on content. No one here could have produced anything similar to Hortense’s final remark without being laughed out of the halls of science. I could hear her now: “I’d rather misspell Galileo and confuse hundreds of children a day than have an ugly-looking exhibit explanation.” “I’d rather have a broken flight simulator than a homely-looking flight simulator.” No, I expected that the minds behind these accessible, effective exhibits wouldn’t have much trouble using a dictionary.
We strolled around Cleveland and found a few more typos before heading back to my dad’s, Bone Thugs blasting all the way. That night we shot some pool in my dad’s basement. Benjamin, still riled up from the Science Center, explained the physics behind each carom. Eventually I went to bed, but not to sleep. I’d put off going to bed because I knew that I couldn’t