Schwanksta :: Fuzzy Journalism

Not me personally, of course; I actually sort of like public records (yeah, I know, make fun of me).

One of my classmates, however, was annoyed enough with our fact finding assignment on the book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case” that he or she posted a short rant on angryjournalist, a new blog where the beleaguered members of my chosen profession can bitch:

Angry Journalist #414:

I HATE FACT FINDING. I hate book reports. We know they screwed up the Duke Lacrosse case. Let’s not beat a dead horse.?I also hate MLA format. Who the fuck needs a works cited? Seriously? like, what the fuck? Who cares? It’s freaken fact-finding — like we’re going to try and forge our sources with a lady who spends her waking hours finding facts.

I agree though, wanting standard works cited page was weird for an assignment in j-school…I got around it by, um, not following directions.

There’s long been a rule, known in some circles as Cheez’s First Law of the Internet (no doubt other communities have codified it in different forms), which states that while talking about someone else’s grammar or spelling, you have a nearly 90% chance of making an error.

Apparently, even the venerable New York Times isn’t immune to the natural rules we’re all governed by. In a bizarre article engaging in a little literary celebration of the semicolon and its use by a public service announcement on the subway, the article mentions Lynn Truss’s “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” a humorous book on grammar. At the bottom of the article, however, a correction appears:

Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

I can see where the writer probably made the mistake: the book’s title is based on a joke, in which a Panda shoots up a restaurant because a poorly-punctuated wildlife manual says that the mammal “eats, shoots and leaves.” The proper construction would be without the comma, as was apparently printed, but clearly the book title leaves the comma in for a reason.

I just find it amusing that the NYT would mis-punctuate the title of a grammar book in what would appear to be a slightly snobbish article on punctuation — if only for the fact that, in some circles, the use of a semicolon is probably considered snobbish in and of itself, celebrations thereof doubly-so.

And yes — this article’s title is on purpose.

I’ve just made the Gainesville Crime Map much more useful by adding links to the incident reports if available. Check it out here, Gainesville Crime Map

I’ve started a new section of the site called Visualizing Gainesville. Using public records and a little (lot) bit of code, I plan on using the page to provide automated representations of various statistics for the area. The first project, the Gainesville Crime Map, is currently in a preliminary phase, but still places a point at the most recent arrests and incidents reported by GPD. Clicking on a point will bring a popup bubble with more information. Check back, as new features will constantly be cropping up. [Visualizing Gainesville]