… far from Harvard Square
I wish I had something wildly amusing to go with this… but maybe
someone else will find it useful at Thursday’s Berkman-bloggers
meeting…
The thought of inverting this shield has crossed my mind at every
Harvard conference or Memorial Hall concert I’ve attended, so I assume
something like it exists in doodles on hundreds of satiric or dyslexic
students’ notebooks.
Getting things wrong is one thing; fixing them is another. One of the strengths of the Web is that words are just bits of electricity that can be changed, unlike ink on paper. I’ve written about that in my blog before,
This time the person getting things wrong was a university president — wrong enough to be accused of plagiarism, and the ink on paper was in the newspaper where I used to work. Since the Courant has an online edition, the story set me thinking about the way online editions handle corrections.
Just in time for the Seusscentennial, my e-mail brought a poem titled, “The Grinch Revisited (with thanks to Dr. Seuss).” Maybe you’re seen it. It begins like this…
The Whos down in Whoville liked this country a lot,
But the Grinch in the White House most certainly did not.
He didn’t arrive there by the will of the Whos,
But stole the election that he really did lose.
Vowed to “rule from the middle,” then installed his regime.
(Did this really happen or is it just a bad dream?)
Like so much “have you seen this…” or “I heard a good one…” e-mail, the copy I received didn’t say who wrote the original. Always looking for new ways to eat up a few minutes online, I decided to find out…
The result was an extended essay on e-mail forwarding, authorship, Google, liberalism and (by implication) Attention Deficit Disorder, but it at least has a few good links. If you’re more interested in just reading the whole poem, here it is.
Otherwise, here’s my longer version of this story, which I wish I’d titled “Grinch brings an epiphany,” as odd as that might sound so far from Christmas. At least a green Grinch would be the right color for St. Patrick’s Day.
I’ve been neglecting the Red Liner lately, but in case anyone uses this
as a “site summary” (rather than full-length “simple syndication”) RSS feed for my
online scribbling, here’s what’s been going on in the “Other Journalism” blog recently:
