Tomorrow is a big day in The Province newsroom. We’re having an in-house open house — meaning that employees from other departments get to come into the newsroom to see how we do things. I get to talk sports, nod mindlessly when people start launching into anti-David Booth invective or telling me how Martin Rennie should have run the Whitecaps. It will be fun. There will be Xbox challenges. Snacks. And I have exactly 20 hours to get my pigsty — sorry, office — cleaned up.
There will also be a spelling bee. This should be fun, since I pride myself on my spelling. My partners: librarian Carolyn Soltau and news reporter Sue Lazaruk. I’m worried that Solty (yes, hockey nicknames apply even in a newsroom) claims her spelling skills are poor. “Aren’t you a librarian?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you know how to spell?” “I know how to Google,” she replied. And, of course, Google does its best to correct your spelling errors in your searches. I think Google shouldn’t do that. It should shut you out until you get it right. And shouldn’t I be worried when our librarian isn’t too confident in her spelling, but loves the Google machine?
So it shouldn’t surprise me that our spelling bee team is called The Autocorrectors. You know autocorrect. That’s when you’re texting someone, and it changes “Want to grab a drink after work?” to “Rant and stab a dink afterward?” Totally does not make sense. Drives you insane because you now have to delete that whole thing before your textee thinks you’ve gone into the deep end. The autocorrect drives me crazy, on a personal level. After all, I have a little boy named Matty. Every single time, autocorrect changes his name to Marty. It’s become such a regular occurrence that I now often send out my messages with his name as Marty. Eventually we’ll have to change his name to Marty. Because autocorrect says so.
OK, a few quick hits here on the 2 O’Clock:
Ted Berg of USA Today thought it was a fine idea to preview today’s start of the World Series (SNP, FOX, 4:30 p.m.) by highlighting what everyone’s talking about: the beards. Mike Napoli, Jonny Gomes, Dustin Pedroia … and so many others who must be getting pretty itchy by now. I particularly enjoy how Berg refers to catcher David Ross, “whose own thick, greying beard merits comparison to Civil War generals.”
Want one man’s take on the most insufferable fans in college football? Mike Foss of USA Today happily serves up a few, including Notre Dame (“Remember the last time Notre Dame won a national title? Reagan was President and U2 was relevant”) and the University of Miami (“They stammer on and on about their program’s history, even if the Hurricanes were a laughingstock prior to 1980″).
Is Yasiel Puig the new Kobe Bryant? Or as Los Angeles Times columnist Chris Erskine puts it, has he become “the Fresh Prince of L.A.”? Writes Erskine: “Puig is the new Kobe — brilliant, vainglorious, petulant and a bunch of other words I probably flubbed on my SATs. And, occasionally, our own Cuban missile crisis.”
In this morning’s 10 O’Clock, I told you about how New York Giants running back Brandon Jacobs had received at least one threatening tweet, and at least one other just plain nasty tweet, and decided to fight back. The New York Post’s George Willis has weighed in, poking fun at fantasy football owners (“Clearly, some people don’t understand the word fantasy, which means make-believe”).
Finally, back to baseball, with the New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson weighing in on Boston Red Sox closer Koji Uehara. I was unaware that Uehara has, since Aug. 3, struck out 44 batters and walked none. “In one stretch,” writes Thompson, “he retired 37 batters in a row — and threw 25 balls during the whole time.” I thought, how did he retire 37 batters on 25 balls? Then I realized he meant “balls,” not “pitches.” Wow.
Enjoy Game 1 of the World Series. We’ll be back Thursday morning for the 10 O’Clock.
