Typo Hunt Across America

El Paso, TX

I am sad to report that this will be our last entry about Texas. Ever. Today Benjamin and I drove on for another heroic stretch of distance, getting almost all the way to the end of the state and into a city sandwiched between two mythical lands, Old Mexico and New Mexico. Tomorrow we will be venturing due north for probably the first time on this epic and thoroughly bizarre tour of the country I am just beginning to truly understand. But let’s not put the wagon before the burro, shall we?

We rose early this morning and found that our souls had not been ripped from our bodies overnight by vengeful spectres. Fort Stockton had not conquered us. Just to be on the safe side, though, we left the hotel as quickly as possible, skipping the continental breakfast if it did in fact exist. As I’d just broken three thousand miles on this trip, I got Callie’s oil changed at a gas station down the street. My father had scoffed about the 3K changing rule, believing it a profit-aimed construction by Jiffy Lube and the like, and he’s probably right, but I didn’t want to take any chances. There were and are many miles ahead through lonely places.

Then we got back on our old friend, I-10W, which we had largely followed ever since Mobile, and set off for El Paso. The hills grew into mountains as we pushed farther west, and we snapped a bunch of pictures at eighty miles an hour. It was right around Sierra Blanca that we pulled off for some gas, a piss, and a bit of lunch, courtesy of the local Love’s station. They had partnered with Subway, so we took advantage of a five-dollar footlong deal. We couldn’t take another day of peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. As we stood in line, Benjamin gestured at a guy loitering in a doorway behind the counter. “Check it out,” he murmured.

I looked over, and at first I couldn’t see anything. Then I said, “Ah! ‘Restaurant’ is spelled wrong on his name tag!”

“Oh, uh,” said Benjamin, “I was just pointing out his laziness. But yeah, you’re right. Can you get it?”

“I’ll try,” I said, and I did try. He came closer, now trying to look busy without actually doing anything. But the guy was moving too fast during his rounds of doing nothing, and so the result was far too blurry:

But it says BILLY, RESTARAUNT MANAGER. I swear.

We couldn’t figure out a good way to harass him at that moment, so we sat down at a booth to eat our sandwiches. By and by, the guy passed by us to go outside and around the building for a smoke. We considered our options.

“The problem is that this typo is on the move,” said Benjamin.

“Yes, we’ve never had a mobile typo before,” I said. Then I suggested, “We could go out back and corner him.”

During these deliberations, however, the guy returned, passing by the front windows of the place. He looked a little unnerved as we stared at him through the glass. Then he got downright anxious when he came back inside and I called out, “Billy!”

“Yes?” he said cautiously.

“I couldn’t help but notice that restaurant was spelled wrong on your name tag,” I said.

He looked down at it, uncomprehending. “…I’m the manager.”

Billy started to walk away, but I kept at it: “So do you think you could get that fixed?”

He stopped, but offered no discernible reply, so I pushed on. “See, we’re traveling around the country correcting typos. It could be a real success story if you fixed that.” I opened my wallet and gave him one of the business cards that Paula had made.

Billy looked at the logo for TEAL. Then he flipped the card over and saw the Jeff and Benjamin cartoon heads, and TEAL’s web address. He looked from the cartoon heads to our real heads. “Uh…”

“So do you think you could fix it?” I asked.

If he gave an actual reply before backing away from us, the business card clenched in one hand, I did not hear it. Benjamin and I were forced to conclude that this typo would remain untouched and unrighted, perhaps until Billy moved on to bigger things and passed the name tag to a new generation.

We passed into Mountain Time and then found ourselves rolling through the county of El Paso at the tortoise-like speed limit of 70. The highway cut through a great swath of retail, every chain store imaginable, and I realized only in retrospect how nice it had been to be free from advertising during our drive amid the desert peaks. We had given Authority the address of the city visitor center. At the last moment, I became aware that Authority was trying to send us directly into the garage of the place. “Five-dollar parking!” I exclaimed. “Screw that!” And I swerved away from the entrance.

Now we did have to figure out where we would park. We went a couple of blocks, and I had the brilliant idea that we should park in the lot charging a $3 admission fee, the notice for which was handwritten on a cardboard sign. Perfectly legitimate operation, that! We parked there and got out of the car, wondering who exactly to pay the three dollars to. Then a middle-aged man approached us. “Hello!” he said. “You come with me.” He went through a doorway, and we swallowed our hesitation and followed him down to a basement with a man behind a service window. Our guide introduced himself to Benjamin as George while I paid the clerk, and then followed us back outside.

“You want to give me a couple dollars, so I can get something to eat?” he said. “Or just a dollar even?”

I started to refuse, but then reflected on the possible subtext that he might be asking me for a dollar to not break into my car. I figured this would be a reasonable investment to prevent an assault on Callie, so I gave him a buck. Suddenly that five-dollar fee for a city-run garage sounded like a great deal.

As we walked away from the lot, Benjamin glanced back and noted that George the panhandler was still watching us. We went around the corner and disappeared from his sight, then circled back around another building for a look at the lot. George had already moved on to other people to try to shake them down for hooch money, so we figured the car would be okay.

The downtown area seemed to be a locus for El Paso’s museums, so we figured we’d check out what was going on at the science museum, maybe take in some holograms and see if they compared with the amazing specimens on display at the MIT Museum back home in New England. Nope… closed Mondays. Benjamin thought he might be able to stand a little art, so we tried the art museum. Closed Mondays too! We didn’t bother with the history museum. Apparently this was not a good day of the week for culture. Things were more lively down on El Paso Street, which was lined with bilingual souvenir shops and markets. Well, perhaps bilingual is a bit generous a term– the signs were mostly in Spanish, useless for our purposes. We left it and decided to blunder around a little more in time-honored Jeff and Benjamin fashion.

[redacted]

We came back to our parking lot, where we found Callie happily unmolested. Across the street from the lot, I had one more discovery that I must note here, though it was beyond our power to correct. Well, really we just wanted to go and hide in a cheap hotel, preferably several exits away.

We found an outpost of our favorite chain and a friendly old guy named Ron checked us in. Upon examining my license, he said, “Massachusetts! I used to live in Western Mass, before I came here, about twenty-eight years ago, must be. Heh, how are you enjoying that free health care they got there now?”

“You mean the free health care I’m paying two hundred and fifty bucks a month for?” I said. “It’s fantastic.”

“Ha!” said Ron. “See, it just doesn’t work. California tried the same thing a while back, and they just stopped their program a couple years back. Were losing money all over the place.”

“Yeah,” I said, “we need reform of the system at the national level.”

He snorted. “No, we just need people to realize that we can’t just hand out free health care. Taxes would go through the roof!”

This was a political argument that I was sure I did not want to pursue with this man. It’d be a shame to end up disliking him after he’d been so friendly. So I steered the subject back to safer zones, such as the weather. Ron told us that he would never go back to New England, no sir, he enjoyed the temperature here mighty fine.

“And some of the Hispanic women ain’t bad at all,” he added. “You know, when I first moved here, I wasn’t as old as you see me now. That was twenty-eight years ago…”

Benjamin and I departed before we were subjected to anecdotes that we were absolutely sure we did not want to hear. And here we huddle now in the safety of our hotel room. Perhaps this would be a good night to order in.

A couple of notes regarding the community of TEAL, and TEAL in the community, if such an astonishing concept can exist. First, the latter: I was extremely moved to hear that at least a few teachers out there have decided to incorporate excerpts from our adventures into their lesson plans as a way to get kids jazzed about the practice of better spelling and grammar. This is awesome, and I encourage anyone else interested in doing such a thing to go forward with TEAL’s happy blessing. Maybe eventually we’ll able to work up some sort of official material for educators. Or at least vend some personal Typo Correction Kits. Teachers, we hear you!

Totals
Typos Found: 77
Typos Corrected: 45

Back to TEAL home

Fort Stockton, TX

As a parting act of awesomeness, Paula actually designed and printed out a stack of TEAL business cards for us to take along on our quest, to lend some veneer of legitimacy to the campaign and allow people to more easily look up the website. Benjamin and I left the Austin area with some reluctance, knowing that the League’s mission demanded we press on. We paid a price for our tarrying an extra night in Buda– today we had to drive on for five and a half hours before reaching our stopping point for the evening. But that time to relax had definitely been worth it.

Callie made no protest at being worked extra long, but Authority showed some defiance at the outset of today’s trip. Lately the GPS has been refusing to stay stuck to the goddamn windshield. We’d affix the holder’s suction cup to the glass, and then some time later the thing would come clattering down onto the dashboard. This morning Benjamin said, “Let’s just try it again and see how long she stays up.” I stuck it on there, and ten seconds later Authority crashed down. Benjamin cradled the thing in his lap. Then, as we were pelting down a country road and he was telling Authority to start a music playlist, trouble struck. The consequences of the GPS repeatedly striking a hard surface had come to pass. “Uh,” said Benjamin. “Authority is frozen.”

“What?” I said. “Try hitting the button on top.”

“It isn’t working.”

I pulled over and we tried a few other tricks with the old girl until I finally thought to search for a hard reset button, which was under the flip-up antenna panel. Authority came back to life, but she wasn’t done screwing with us. As we approached a fork in the road, Authority said, “In point-two miles, make a right onto 281 South.”

That made no sense. It was either go left onto 281 South, or go right onto 281 North. As we’d encountered instances of Authority being confused about her lefts and rights before, I decided that the 281 South part was the more pertinent element of her instruction. But as soon as I’d taken that left, Authority spoke the most dreadful word in her limited vocabulary:

“Recalculating.”

We had been led astray. We had a few choice words for our mercurial navigator. When we’d finally sorted it out, and were close to getting on I-10, the major highway heading through the state all the way to El Paso, we muzzled Authority for a good long time.

West of Austin on I-10 is where the real desolate grandeur of Texas begins. We traveled through veldt-like plains of dry earth and low trees until the gradations in the land started to become more pronounced. Then we found ourselves surrounded by rocky, scrub-covered hills stretching on into the distance, with grey and threatening skies hanging over the whole scene. Large sections of the hills had been blasted away to allow the highways to run through, leaving high cross-sections of rock on either side of the road. Best of all, the speed limit had been bumped up to 80. Even some scattered rainshowers couldn’t put a damper, so to speak, on our progress.

Our mission itself, though, seemed to have stalled. Being in the middle of nowhere, Texas, has its aesthetic benefits, but there just aren’t many signs to inspect for typos. During our breaks, first in Junction and then Ozona, we found ourselves having difficulty locating civilization in general. We realized, as the unpopulated realms rolled on, that we might well have to wait until our destination, Fort Stockton, before we would have any material at all to speak of. But we’d be waltzing into town at seven p.m. On Easter. Would the town gates even be open?

As a result of the foreboding weather that seemed to have all of western Texas in its grasp, it was damned cold when we stepped out of Callie into the parking lot of a cheap motel in a bleak part of town. We’d passed a temperature readout of forty-four degrees. The dark grey skies overhead, deserted shacks across the street, and fog in the distance gave Fort Stockton a distinctly Silent-Hill-like atmosphere. Our uneasiness increased when we entered the hotel lobby and found it deserted. A cowbell marked Ring pls sat on the counter; we rang it twice to no avail.

We peered over the counter and saw a couple of card keys lying there. Maybe we could just take one, we thought. Or was that what they wanted us to do? Then a door labeled “Private” opened and a short woman in an odd robe came out. She had a look like we’d just come into her home and interrupted a Stouffer’s meal and Wheel of Fortune. “What you want?”

“Uh…” said Benjamin. “We wanted to check in.”

“Okay,” said the woman, moving toward the counter with a more businesslike air. “You have doggie?”

“No,” Benjamin said.

“No doggie?”

“No doggie,” I said.

The woman seemed to be awakening gradually from a stupor as she checked us in for the night. Maybe Wheel of Fortune had been involved, after all. By the end of our conversation, she was alert enough to note the state I had come from on my license, and to mention that her son graduated from MIT. We still had a weird vibe about the place in general, though, and Benjamin expressed his desire that we get our typo-hunting done before dark fell over the town, because… you never know what’s going to come creeping out of the catacombs, guided by a profane and remorseless hunger.

The drizzle intensified into a harrying kind of light rain, and we had still not yet rustled up our dinner. We thought the local steakhouse sounded like an enticing option, so we had Authority guide us there. We discovered that the real “main street” of the town was not Main Street at all, but West Dickinson. Here was the steakhouse, but was it open or not?

Ultimately we realized that the door sign was the truth. Then we realized that the marquee had more problems than just lying about the steakhouse being open. On its other side, we found a disquieting error.

Clearly the intensity of their need had blinded them to proper spelling… we needed to help them. It was time for an Easter miracle for this Fort Stockton steakhouse. But how could we ever reach those letters to fix them? The bottom of the sign was around ten feet high. I had an idea.

“I can pull Callie around,” I said.

“Yes!” said Benjamin. “I’ll guide you over here.”

I brought the car just under the sign. Then I opened the passenger door and stepped onto the seat, thinking that it’d add enough height for me to be able to reach the letters. It wasn’t… I still lacked about a foot. I came back down, disappointed, but then I saw the determined glint in Benjamin’s dark eyes.

“Let me go up, dude,” he said. “All the way up. We’ve got to get serious about fixing this thing.”

“But the rain,” I said. “The roof will be slippery.”

“I know.”

There are no words worthy enough to describe the derring-do that followed, so I will instead present it to you in a pictorial progression.

Remember, kids… do not try this at home. We are professionals.

We picked up some garbage from Dairy Queen, the only source of provender open this evening, and returned triumphant to our hotel room, to bar the door and wait out the long night. I can only hope that no ghouls come scritching upon our window tonight, the revenants of typos refusing the death that was ordained for them.

Totals
Typos Found: 71
Typos Corrected: 41

Back to TEAL home

Buda, TX

Even if it hadn’t been easy to reconfigure our schedule to allow for the extra night at Paula and Ben’s, I think that Benjamin and I would have forced the change anyway. We’d both liked what we saw in Austin yesterday and wanted a little more time here. Plus we couldn’t resist taking advantage of our hosts’ hospitality for just a bit longer… the novelty of budget hotel rooms and innards-grinding fast food wears off pretty quickly. Paula made enchiladas, cornbread, and salad for lunch today. Gorry, that was nice!

We visited Paula’s favorite independent bookstore and music shop this afternoon and spent some happy moments perusing the wares of folks who were clearly passionate about what they were selling. Both places had extensive handwritten staff reviews scattered throughout the displays. I confess to you, cherished readers, that I intentionally avoided reading these. I thought that it would be unsporting in the extreme to point out a misused it’s in somebody’s personal writeup about their favorite Neal Stephenson book or Okkervil River album. The CD categories were another matter, however.

A band celebrating an unappreciated yet crucial component of a door or window? That one seemed unlikely to me, so I took a look at the name of the artist on the CD. It was very clear that the name did not involve jamb. I took it upon myself to improve this sign for the customer that would, one day, perhaps years from now, enter the store in search of this album.

Paula presented me with a gift she’d bought. It was a book on the movement to Keep Austin Weird, an objective that my observations indicated was being admirably fulfilled by the worthy residents of the city. Austin is quirky to the core. One of its most famous citizens is a cross-dressing homeless man who is also a perennial candidate for mayor. I saw a couple of different stores selling packs of magnets honoring this dude. It is a place where a barbecue joint will advertise its “Free Smells” and a cafe sign might read “Sorry, We’re Open.” The book promised to capture this strange essence, so I looked at the back cover to get a fuller description. And lo! Even here, typos dare to trespass.

There was little that I could do about this one. Save for wailing and rending my clothes, which I did do a little. Then the four of us took a little walk along South Congress Street and found diverse strange shops proffering rare and precious goods. I enjoyed a candy shop decorated with olde-tyme circus paraphernalia and tried some white chocolate berry bark. All the while, though, I was itching for the next big catch. This town had fended off the commercial overtures that had homogenized so many of the communities I’ve traveled through, and I wanted its weirdness to be as error-free as possible. In a vintage clothing shop, I found an opportunity to be of service.

I figured it would be a shame if the name of this important cultural figure remained misspelled, so I brought the typo to the attention of the girl at the front counter. She accompanied me to the back to view the sign for the shirt, and then, potentially risking the wrath of her supervisor, who I assume was the party responsible for the typo, used a hook to take the shirt down so I could fix the sign. Kristina, know that I (and Austin itself) am in your debt.

Benjamin noted yet another example of what I’d like to refer to as Filene’s Basement Syndrome.

This carelessness about the apostrophe in the possessive was really becoming tedious. I don’t know if some sort of uniform glitch in the American educational system is responsible for this, but the problem is here among us and we must fix it. Listen up, my sign-producing countrymen, and listen well. When men possess something, an apostrophe is required before the s. Mens is only a word in Latin. So unless you’re talking about the motto of MIT (Mens et manus, mind and hand), pony up an apostrophe. I said pony up!

I won’t always be here, lurking like a shadow in the fluorescent-lit byways of our national system of retail, to do this for you. After this trip, you’re on your own. Buck up and embrace the punctuation you were destined to use. Make TEAL proud, mmkay?

Before our walk along South Congress had concluded, I encountered a final bit of grit in the eye. It was behind a locked door, so it shall remain incorrect, perhaps for eternity.

Totals
Typos Found: 68
Typos Corrected: 39

Back to TEAL home

Buda, TX

I’m going to treat this entry as if I were actually writing it on Friday, a small fiction that I hope you will allow for clarity’s sake. We had a few errands to run in Galveston before we embarked deeper into the mammoth republic of Texas, so this morning we veered away from the beach and into the part of town where people actually lived, worked, and bought discount paperbacks. So it was that Benjamin and I ended up at the Galveston Bookshop, a marvelous place with acres of so-called genre books. We went upstairs and were awed by the long row of shelves devoted exclusively to sci-fi and fantasy. I couldn’t help but notice a typo on a nearby shelf heading, though.

Then, in short order, I spotted another offender:

I suspected that such great hoarders of literature would have no problem, so after we’d rung up our purchases with the lady at the downstairs counter, I informed her of the HOROR error.

“Oh, really?” she said. One might say she looked… HORIFIED.

“Is it all right if I fix it?” I asked.

“Definitely,” she said, and produced a black marker for me to use. I did have my own, as I carry the Typo Correction Kit everywhere, even to baby showers and funerals, but I used hers out of appreciation for the extra step that she’d taken. I went back upstairs and fixed the sign. It looks like it might be able to rub off, but I suspect they’ll be typing out a new sign soon anyhow.

While I was at it, I fixed the other mistake up there.

I came back down and we explained that we were crossing the country to fix typos and keeping a blog about our adventures. She nodded, in favor of our mission, but then said, “You’ll mention that it was someone else that did those signs, not me…. right? I so rarely go upstairs.”

“Of course,” said Benjamin. “After all, you lent us a marker!”

“Often, people’s reactions are… less favorable,” I said.

She asked for the link to this humble site and hopefully is perusing our tales at this very moment. We salute you, guardian of the Bookshop!

On then, we determined, to the greater Austin area! It took some four hours to reach our destination, but with both Authority and Benjamin’s iThing loaded with fresh music, the trip went speedily enough. We arrived in a town just south of Austin called Buda, where we’d be staying with my friend Paula and her husband, Ben. Benjamin and Ben had a brief duel, as is required of any name-twins upon their initial introduction, and Ben won by virtue of his military training, thus we have been forced to refer to Benjamin as “Steve” for the remainder of our stay here. We had the chance to meet Ruthie, Paula’s absolutely adorable daughter, and then we headed north for some Austin action.

Paula and Ben brought us to one of their favorite dining spots, the Kerbey Lane Cafe, where we enjoyed some delicious chips con queso and Benjamin and I tried a turkey panini that turned out to be aces. My eye, by now trained to a falconlike degree of accuracy, spotted something on the chalkboard across the room.

Just looking at it made my throat parched. I leaned in and murmured to Paula that I’d seen a typo, but was she sure that it was okay for me to correct it? The Decatur chalk incident was still vivid in my mind; I was afraid that I’d ruined Abby and Eli’s standing at Dr. Bombay’s, and I wished not to do the same to Paula and Ben at one of their preferred hangouts.

“Don’t worry,” said Paula. “I’ve been coming here for several years and they still don’t know who I am. They get a lot of business here.”

“When I first joined the service,” Ben added, “they gave me a pair of what were labeled ‘dessert boots.’ But the boots were, in fact, inedible.”

Heartened by this information, I approached the sign with chalk in hand. A waitress watched as I scrawled in the extra S. When I said, “That’s better,” she giggled.

We ventured into downtown Austin. Paula and Ben were kind enough to give us a thorough tour by night of the place as they searched for a parking spot. Then we ended up hitting a couple of spots along the lively strip of 6th for a couple of drinks and some live music. At Darwin’s we encountered a master entertainer playing the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, and Jimi Hendrix. He played the guitar with his ass at two different points in the performance. Once he even set about a vigorous round of licking his instrument. “Steve” noted that the female members of the audience especially enjoyed this touch. For my part, I was starting to drift off. I hadn’t realized how tired I was.We decided to spend an extra night at Paula’s, to take in more of Austin on Saturday, which is actually today and not the tomorrow that I have pretended it to be during this entry. And here is where I leave you. If you would like to hear how the Typo Eradication Advancement League figures into this week’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” program on NPR, follow this link and click on the “Bluff the Listener” section. Saturday’s entry should be posted on the proper day.

Totals
Typos Found: 63
Typos Corrected: 36

Back to TEAL home

Galveston, TX

Reporting to you live from the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant, where we are feeding off the wi-fi of a nearby hotel. I tell you, TEAL’s exploits are the very essence of elegance. There are no two classier fellows right now on the island of Galveston than those currently sitting in a compact in the dark, the eerie glow of computer screens bathing their hairy cheeks.

We got to meet some Lafayette locals last night while cashing in our free drink coupons. The exact contents of the conversation that ensued will be better saved for a separate volume, but suffice it to say that these “Yankee boys” got plenty of free entertainment. During this Crown-Royal-splashed exchange, a hand appeared in the window above our heads and feebly attempted to close it. As our room was adjacent to the hostel’s bar, we deduced that the large, shaggy-haired German that we were bunking with had decided to go to sleep. It was around nine-thirty.

Given this early retiring, I fully expected our friend to be up with the sun. However, when I woke up around half past eight, he was still there, snoring away. All right, I thought, he had an arduous day of hanging around the hostel and checking his e-mail on their computer, so don’t make any noise to wake the poor guy up. We tiptoed around getting ready and trying to get our stuff together without waking the dozing giant. We let out a quiet hurrah on his behalf when he achieved the impressive feat of sleeping for twelve hours straight, but then we started to worry for his health. Finally he rousted himself, just as we were preparing to check out… and he asked the woman at the counter if he could check out at noon instead. He returned to his bunk, pulled the sheets over his head, and for all I know may be slumbering still.

Today we would cross into Texas, ignoring the locals’ plea to stay in Lafayette ’til the weekend for the music festival. We had to move on; such is the burdensome charge of our organization’s mission. Our journey having been delayed somewhat by tiptoeing around the eternally sleeping German, as well as a brief and fumbling interview I did over the phone, we didn’t hit the road until after eleven, and we had a trek of a few hours ahead of us. The land became flatter and drier as we approached the Texas border. We stopped soon after crossing and ate at a Waffle House, where we contemplated changing our Houston-bound plans after hearing a hostel clerk’s warning about the oft-murderous intentions of Houston drivers (an impression confirmed by my guidebook, which cited “heavy road traffic” and mentioned that “visitors should be prepared … to get lost more than once”).

So we decided that Galveston might be a more agreeable destination on the way to Austin than Houston, and we changed course. My hostel book mentioned that there was a pleasant place to stay on that island, right on the beach. After driving for some time, I received notice from Authority that we’d be coming up on a ferry portion of the trip. Instantly I became wary, recalling the last time that the capricious spirit within my GPS had tried to direct us onto a ferry, in North Carolina. Then we saw signs that indicated this ferry was actually in operation, and relaxed. We brought Callie onto the great ship plying the waters of Galveston Bay. The ride across was free, but I am sure my readers are aware of the caveats that often accompany free services. In this case the hidden snag consisted of waiting on the ferry, after we’d arrived at Galveston, for nigh on twenty minutes before they let us off. A niggling complaint, perhaps, but the delay just added to the general retardation of our schedule. By the time we hit the beach, it was already almost 5:30 pm. By the time we started on our typo-hunting in earnest, it was past seven.

Wait, Jeff. Wait. Wait. They have to know. I understand your hesitation in addressing this directly, but you owe it to your devoted readers to address the whole truth of the matter here. Fine, you don’t want to talk about it? I will. This is Benjamin, and I am hereby commandeering this entry.

Before operators/operator’s, before renourshment/renourishment, en route to the aforementioned free ferry, we two discovered evidence of foul play perpetrated by another league. No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet–no, that’s not right. Few of you would have suspected that many of the errors you stumble upon are not mere accidents but intentional changes to text that was originally quite correct, whole, and complete. I didn’t believe it at first either, but after joining TEAL, I eventually discovered that the typos we encountered could not all be attributed to slip-ups and America’s increasing lack of grammatical attentiveness. No, something sinister is at work here: another force, another league, and they are known only by the acronym FLAME (Fiendish League for Advancing Mistakes in English, or, as they write it, Feindish Leege 4 Addvancen Missteaks n Englesh). Before you snicker or, worse yet, ask if FLAME isn’t just an interesting side-plot that could give the sidekick something to write about, attend to the evidence at hand.

As you can see, the strategic removal of a single letter from an otherwise sturdy sign produces a crudely humorous effect. Mind that you follow every little ordinance and sign posting in this little hamlet, lest you be fined, chewed out, sued, or jailed for, say, parking fourteen feet, eleven and three-quarters inches from a fire hydrant! This could only be the work of the nefarious FLAME, whose changes are often more subtle; this time, though, they gave themselves away when the temptation for committing such cleverly amusing orthographic vandalism became too great.

There. Now that I’ve alerted you to be on the lookout for FLAME and their agents of destruction, I should return you to…where…did Jeff go? Fine, I commandeered it; I ought to finish. Incidentally, the letter C played tricks on us again later this very day. As Jeff and I continued our wanderings, Jeff spied a sign across the street.

He read it aloud, putting particular emphasis upon the fact that they’d only take a single application, an emphasis I failed to note. Instead, I looked up to see what he’d found now and said, “Oh yeah, it’s missing a C.” Before he could chide me for spelling applications as applicationc, he did a double-take that amused a number of rubbernecking drivers fascinated by the sight of real live pedestrians on Galveston Island. Shocked to sudden silence, Jeff turned and looked into my eyes with a look of absolute justice. I’m not claiming that makes sense; nonetheless, that was the look he gave me. We dashed across the street. How we managed waiting for the light to change, I don’t recall. The place was swarming with kids from some inexplicable field trip. We battled our way through the narrow aisles, occasionally elbowing preteens or tossing small children into displays of pot smoking alligator soap dishes. Finally, we found a sales representative, lodged between shirts and a display of mugs she was refilling with absentminded care. We explained the situation to her, and she, predictably, informed us that we’d need to speak to a manager. “He’s up front,” she said, as if being helpful, and turned away so as not to give us the impression that she’d try anything crazy, like escorting us to him. There was only one employee up front. He was running the register, so I asked him, wondering if his working here was a violation of child labor law, if I could speak to the manager. “Yeah,” he said, and then clarified, “that’s me.”

In need of an immediate reassessment of how old I and everything around me are, I fumbled. Jeff stepped up and informed him of our unfortunate discovery outside. He knew. He claimed that he’d fix it, but when pressed it turned out that he wouldn’t fix it because it wasn’t an oversight at all, but a lack of letter C’s for the marquee. They’d run out. Recognizing the futility inherent in seeking out a large, black C that could be affixed properly and expected to remain in place, we produced competing sighs and turned around to head back to our motel. They say the grass is always greener on the other side. For us, having crossed the road, the golf green was never grassier than the abandoned miniature golf place we passed on our return trip. We spotted it at the same time.

“You going to use white out?” I asked.

“Yes.”

The letters were fairly big. “Could be a lot of white out.” Then I thought about it and realized, wow, really a lot. “Does that also need…”

“Yes,” Jeff repeated. “Davy Jones isn’t a biblical figure.”

“You’re gonna use a lot of white out.” He did, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I became more worried, as he worked, about the fact that we were surrounded by road and there had been a cop only a block away. What if they mistook us for vandals and hauled us away in spite of all our claims to the contrary? Either no policemen happened by in those excruciating minutes or else the whole world really had ceased to care about an overgrown mini-golf course in the off season. Even if no one ever set foot or golf club here again, we were proud to have made the correction, for the error had been visible for all to see (or at least for all in the rightmost northbound lane to see).

“Not bad for a day’s work,” I said.

“Yeah, and you can shove it,” he replied. Well, no he didn’t, but I’m feeling like making him sound like a jerk since he left me here to finish his entry.

Totals
Typos Found: 57
Typos Corrected: 31

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