Typo Hunt Across America

Bloomington, IN

Jane had been upset over the way I savaged the Missoula Pita Pit employees in an entry a week ago or so. I still thought that they’d deserved a verbal beating, but I promised her before she went back to New England that I wouldn’t trash anyone else in the space of this blog, regardless of how much they had it coming. I wonder if this applies to states. I will say that the specific impression that Indiana made upon Benjamin and me as we drove through it for four hours was not a good one. We got taken on a ridiculous and time-consuming detour south due to construction, and the other folks on the road were either crawling up my rear or holding up traffic the whole time. Sometimes the same people alternated between the two.

My friend from high school, Michelle, had kindly offered her place as a Bloomington crashpad. She is doing important things in the local laboratory. She came along with us for a little while to experience the wonder and stimulation of typo-hunting. Downtown Bloomington is cute and stroll-worthy, but unfortunately a lot of shops were closed by the time Benjamin and I rolled into town. We’d lost an hour coming into Eastern time. We did, however, find a souvenir shop in need of our assistance. This error looked familiar– hadn’t it been embroidered into a pillow in L.A.?

I brought the sign to the girl at the counter and pointed out the typo. I asked if she’d be able to contact the company that had supplied them with the signs, and she looked up the information; apparently an operation called Quotable Quotes was responsible. Hopefully a change can be made at the manufacturing level to avoid any further manifestation of this scourge.

On a few bulletin boards around town, someone was advertising a class on herbalism. The content sounded intriguing, but I counted three typos that marred the presentation:

With these fixes in place, I imagine their enrollment will skyrocket:

She brought us to her favorite neighborhood Turkish restaurant, and then we returned to her apartment to watch her roommates beat each other up through means of electronic avatars. Tomorrow we will cross into Ohio and spend a few days in “The Heart of It All,” as the state bills itself due to its slight resemblance to a heart, albeit a much malformed version of the organ.

Totals
Typos Found: 305
Typos Corrected: 152

Back to TEAL home

Chicago, IL

This morning, we left Katie and Lisa and their playful cats (one of whom I may have inadvertently shut into the laundry room overnight) and crossed the state line, into Illinois. Immediately I sensed a change in the air, as driver after driver rode my ass when such a thing was not strictly necessary. Were we driving into the pulsating heart of some epic evil? No– we were just approaching Chicago. It wasn’t snowing, at least, though the temperature remained a bit bitter. I tensed as we drove into the Wicker Park neighborhood, haunted by remembrances of parking difficulties in Seattle and Los Angeles, but as it turned out, I was able to pop into a diagonal spot right off. We grabbed sandwiches and read for a little while (Benjamin carries a book around wherever we go, which is a great motivator for me to do reading of my own), then met up with a reporter and cameraman for the Tribune.

These gentlemen accompanied us as we walked the tranquil streets of the area. Actually, before we even started walking, we spotted something, thanks to Benjamin’s hawklike vision. Observe an advertisement in trouble:

We hesitated to even bring the typo up to the keepers of the tarot, given that it occurred outside a second-floor window and it would have taken acrobatics beyond the abilities of either of us to reach it and fix it. But I decided that they should at least be made aware of the foul presence lurking outside their place of business, and so we went upstairs to let them know. The woman who met us there was baffled by our comment, but then her daughter shrieked from the other room, “I know these guys!”

She came in and said, “I saw you on Good Morning America!” Then, to her mother: “They’re going around the country fixing typos!”

I believe she meant the Today Show, but still. We couldn’t have planned a better response to get with a reporter in tow. We were happy to chat with her for a couple of minutes and give her the autographs she requested (!!). They would, unfortunately, not be able to get the typo fixed anytime soon, but they seemed happy that we’d let them know, anyway. Or maybe the woman was just glad that her daughter got to meet a couple of faux celebrities.

Shortly after, we found an error on the window of a clothing shop. You know, the kind that cameramen love because they can shoot you making the correction through the glass (see ABC, BBC).

They’d been doing so well with the Women’s… so what had happened after that? Benjamin and I went into the shop and alerted the two white-blonde clerks running the place to the typo. We told them of our mission, which delighted them, and so they were willing to let us put in the missing apostrophe. What a favorable reaction! my companion and I thought. And again, what excellent timing. I did not have a spare apostrophe sticker handy, but I did have my white-out, and I felt confident it could make a reasonable approximation.

Farther down the street, we found an identical error. This one, however, would be much harder to reach:

Benjamin and I went in and spoke with a middle-aged gentleman. He received the news of the missing apostrophe with equanimity, but then when we asked if we could borrow a ladder to insert the necessary punctuation, he balked. “No, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’re going to repaint the sign anyway in a couple of weeks. It’ll just say Clothing. No Mens.”

Right, and I’ve just been declared Pontiff of the Elemental Planes. Benjamin pointed at another sign. “Could we fix this one, at least?”

“No,” the guy said. “Sorry, that’s a prototype.”

We had pretty conclusive proof at this point that the guy was not being honest with us. But we could do nothing to persuade him, so we left. The reporter stuck around to talk with the gentleman for a few minutes; doubtless the thrust of the guy’s testimony was devoted to detailing what pricks we are. But hey, sometimes you get an excuse and you move on, with the anthem of TEAL still piping marvelously in your heart.

This was a press release taped in the window of a local purveyor of Italian goods. Apparently it wasn’t the final draft:

Turned out that the guy at the counter already knew about the mistake but refused to have it fixed. Dommage!

Our next find was on the door of an ice cream place, where an ad mentioned a program that the shop runs. I almost felt bad about pointing out the extraneous punctuation in this, because they seemed like they were trying to do good stuff for the community. But then again, these are the people that we really do like to help, because they deserve to look good.

An older guy and a girl were making ice cream at the counter. I told the girl about the apostrophes and asked if I could fix them, and she said sure. Her reaction was almost too positive; where was the catch? As I started to walk back over to the sign, she asked a follow-up question: “Are you just going around doing this?”

“Actually, yes,” said Benjamin, and told her about the cross-country nature of our campaign. It didn’t take me long to banish the apostrophes from this realm.

The ice cream girl was an academic, studying history, and so after we knew that, we weren’t so surprised that she would be interested in letting the corrections go forth. It was not a dissimilar episode to the one back at UW-Madison’s Union Building. I wrote down the TEAL URL for her, and maybe she’ll stop by someday.

We were riding high on the tide of positive reactions, a more effusive swell than anyplace since probably New Orleans. And then we came across a copy shop offering this service:

The folks running the shop had to be made aware of this grievous error. But all we could find inside was a guy who insisted that as long as we knew generally what he was saying, there shouldn’t be a problem. This can be a very hard line to walk sometimes, though, the line of intention. Why not just say exactly what you’re trying to say? Perhaps print out a new version of the sign if you’re a copy shop?

Moreover, the shopkeeper told us that there was still another typo outside, higher up. And there was!

We walked a bit farther with the reporter and arrived in a furniture district on Milwaukee Ave. I believe it was Benjamin who spotted the typo on the awning of one store:

But this typo, egregious though it was, was not the worst part of the store’s self-promotion. I glanced up at their main sign and became aghast at what I saw.

The name of the store itself, misspelled! Had Benjamin and I ever seen anything so horrendous? Surely this had to be among the worst typos unearthed on my long and arduous journey around the country. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know how to spell Milwaukee; it was rendered correctly on their awning. But something had gone abysmally wrong during the creation of that sign. Some dark pact had been sealed. We told the store of the profound typo, and all the salesman could tell us was that his boss would need to be contacted instead.

We received a similar reaction from the woman we told about this sign, at another furniture outfit on the same street:

Oh, we had started off so well, but now our correction rate had once again taken a plunge. I could see the disappointment in Benjamin’s eyes, and I wished that I could make the hurt go away. But I could not. We wrapped up with the Tribune and then went to Hyde Park, where we entered my friend Jon’s apartment and met his seventeen roommates. It was a refuge for lit-obsessive grad students, the kind of place where Finnegans Wake is bathroom reading. Jon and I had worked together on the newspaper back at Dartmouth. We spent some time catching up on our adventures since those dusty days, and then the three of us went out to visit the local bookstores and then grab some dinner and beer.

I’ve had time to glimpse only a sliver of Chicago during my sole night here, and so I know I must come back at some point and give America’s third-largest city the attention it deserves. This is true of many places I’ve visited throughout the course of this journey; a day or two or even three affords one only the most superficial understanding of a city. For now, it’ll be off to Bloomington in the morn.

Totals
Typos Found: 301
Typos Corrected: 149

Back to TEAL home

Madison, WI

Benjamin and I had gotten a hot tip from a commenter yesterday, so we headed over to Brennan’s on University Avenue. It was a combination of produce market and fine local foods store, and pretty much everything there made me hungry. Most of the signage was in good order, but I did spot a letter dropped out in the apples section:

There were many employees hard at work moving fruit around and so forth. We decided we would bring the typo up to a girl nearby dicing up produce samples. Her response was frosty, and didn’t get much better when I proposed to fix the typo by simply adding in an n. I did, after all, have my Typo Correction Kit with me, since I carry it at all times, even to diplomatic interventions and bocce tournaments. She said, “Oh, no, we’ll take care of it. We have a special marker for the signs.”

Finally Benjamin employed the classic tactic of asking Daddy after Mommy says no. He got permission nonchalantly granted by someone else, and did the necessary work.

Meanwhile, the girl we’d first asked muttered aloud to herself, “Oh, whoops, looks like I spelled ’strawberry’ wrong. No wait, I didn’t.” And cast a baleful look at your humble protagonists.

Elsewhere in the store, I spotted a typo that surprised me not.

This one couldn’t really be fixed, due to the lamination and size of the type. We must instead sigh loudly at it and hope it will right its wrongful path on its own.

We then exited the place, cheese style. Katie and Lisa had recommended State Street as a pleasant place to stroll, and indeed it would have been if not for the snow, hail, and rain. Benjamin was cold. At first it seemed a decent temperature to me, compared with, say, South Dakota, but then it got colder and I wished for the balm of New England. Still, we had our appointed rounds to carry out, and maybe we could get some cheese curds someplace.

I saw a familiar error in the window of a salon. One I’d found just a couple of days ago, in fact:

We were doubtful that they’d allow us to fix the sign, but we went in anyway. Amazingly, the hairdresser said to go right ahead and fix it. I think she had her hands in someone’s hair at the time, so perhaps it was the path of least resistance for ending the conversation. The letters were stickers not easily removed; we had to be careful not to destroy them in the process of switching them around. Fortunately, the operation was a success:

Benjamin found a typo at the back counters of another store. He asked the cashier nicely if he could fix it, but apparently peeling the sign off the window momentarily would have been too much effort. I got a picture of the typo and was scolded for it– wish I could have captured the misspelling of millennium in an adjacent sign.

We came upon a video and music store, and Benjamin noted a disturbance, a lack of consistency. Without even taking a stance on the issue of whether or not to use an apostrophe in cases like this, you can recognize that one of them must be wrong.

So we went into the store and spied another typo on the board of coming releases that have already come. Apologies for the darkness of the photo– I had my camera on the wrong setting.

Before pointing out the error, I made a circuit through their CD listings, and found two goofs. The first one is dark because I still hadn’t realized that I had the camera on the wrong setting:

Some quick work with a pen ensured that Jimmy and the Captain would not be troubled further by misspellings.

Once these tasks had been accomplished, we asked the store manager if we could take a look at the new Bette Davis collection. He found it in the box sets for us. “Are you a Bette Davis fan, then?”

“Uh, well… no.” I pretended to be interested in the titles that the collection included. “But we did notice that centennial was spelled wrong on your board up there.”

He glanced up, then back at us. His tone was defiant, his eyes steely. “I can tell you, I’m not going to go up there and fix it.”

“I could take care of it,” I offered. “I have dry-erase markers right here.”

“No, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’re erasing that stuff tomorrow, anyway.”

“Sure, all right,” I said, though in my heart I doubted. Oh, don’t trouble your lil’ head, we’re renovating that anyway in a couple of weeks. We’re changing the display anyhow in just a hot second. We’re upgrading. We’re redoing. We’re revamping. We’re taking down. O fibbers and delayers, strike down the errors in your midst NOW! The League demands it, for the good of virgin eyes everywhere! DO NOT LET THEM STAND!!

Hack, cough. What? What was I saying? Where am I? Sometimes the rage possesses.

We went into a vintage clothing store and found this on the wall. I didn’t have the heart to point it out to the proprietors, who had obviously taken a great deal of care to give their store character. Note that my conscience does not forbid me from sharing it with you, though.

Benjamin and I wandered a bit more and then headed over to the Union building on the Wisconsin campus to meet up with Katie and Lisa. As we waited, I spotted a leetle typo in the listings at the ice cream booth.

As my cherished readers are aware, cappuccino seems to be a perennial problem for people. Do I do one p or two? How about c? When will the pain end? I pointed the typo out to the folks serving ice cream, and they were happy to let me fix it. This was an institution devoted to learning, after all.

I like the way the existing P huddles protectively over the new, baby P, keeping it safe until it can grow to full size.

We headed out for some dinner, and then returned to Katie and Lisa’s place. Tomorrow Benjamin and I are venturing onward, to a city known for its excessive wind. Surely it can’t be any more intense than the gusts of Minnesota. The Midwest feels less alien to me than other regions I’ve encountered in my journey, probably because I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years visiting my dad in Ohio. Still not quite home, but we’re getting there.

Totals
Typos Found: 289
Typos Corrected: 145

Back to TEAL home

Madison, WI

After I saw Jane off at the MSP airport, I may have gotten a little weepy. Certainly it was a strange feeling suddenly being alone in an unfamiliar state, after so many adventures with companions over the last seven weeks or so. I went back to the hotel, fell asleep for a little bit, and before I knew it, check-out time had arrived. What would I do, all by my lonesome? Then the answer came as if by clarion: I needed to go to the Mall of America.

The place is monstrous, both in the sense of size and that of inspiring terror. Here commerce has grown into a great snapping beast that can only be sated by copious amounts of currency and energy. Oh, the spectacle. I had not been aware until I arrived that there is a rollercoaster in the middle of the mall. I did enjoy the large-scale Lego sculptures on display, but then I remembered my sacred duty to the League and put on my Typo Tracker 3000. I visited many stores that did not have typos, so the examples that I will present to you should not be taken as indicators of a dire facility-wide problem.

In one of the stalls in the west wing, I discovered a t-shirt with a moving message.

Reminds one of the “your still ugly” t-shirt in Seattle, does it not? These t-shirts, if worn by the unsuspecting consumer, could very well have their intended insult backfire upon the wearer. How is anyone supposed to take this bon mot seriously? The stall was unmanned, and I preferred not to mark the shirt itself, so the error remains.

As for this one, found in a shop called Le Gourmet Chef, I really hope that the dip doesn’t put the augh in Bragh:

This perplexing plaque adorned the wall of a shop full of Minnesota-themed souvenirs. I worried at it with my mind for several seconds before bringing it to the attention of a clerk. Maybe it really could mean that… no, no it couldn’t.

The guy I got to look at the sign was young and had hipster hair, but when he opened his mouth he produced a perfect specimen of the Minnesotan accent that had delighted Jane at dinner last night. “Which one were you looking at?”

“Up there… see how it says fall in the deed instead of fail?”

“Oh, yah.”

“Would it be possible for me to fix it? I can make that l into an i. I’ve got some markers right here.”

“Not unless you buy it.”

I falled in my deed, so I moved on. This was at another souvenir place:

And at yet another souvenir shop, I found this:

A sales guy with earrings approached. “Can I help you with anything?”

“No, thanks, just browsing.”

He waited a few seconds, and then said, “How about now?”

“All right,” I said. I indicated the sign. He started in with a spiel on how proceeds from these products would benefit the Love Your Life foundation, but I interrupted with, “Did you guys make this?”

“No, it was distributed to us.”

“So there are multiple copies of this floating around?” I said. I pointed out the extraneous apostrophe.

“Ah… I never would have done that.”

“I’m going around the country correcting typos.”

“That’s funny,” the guy said. “I’ve been planning on writing a book about something like that. Fiction. The main character is traveling around the country correcting bathroom graffiti.”

“That’s a subset of what I do.”

“It’ll be the third book,” he went on. “First two are factually based, but that one is completely off the wall.”

“What are the first two books about?” I asked politely.

“Hitchhiking,” he said. “I traveled from Oregon to Virginia. I thought I owned the world then, but… I was wrong.” He shrugged. “They’re going to be fictionalized, mostly because alcohol has turned my brain to mush and I can’t quite remember everything.”

“All right.”

He got called away by a customer, and I ventured onward. I went into a store called A Simpler Time, filled with nostalgic knickknacks made from fake bronze. There were a lot of little descriptive signs, and most had a good handle on spelling. Just a couple went wrong:

Then there was this commemorative sign:

I went to the girl at the counter and said, “I noticed your sign over there says ‘Deadliest weapon in the world’ but then has a semicolon instead of a colon.” I gave her a winning smile.

She summoned a chill to the air. “We don’t make the signs, we order them in…”

“It should just be a colon because the first clause is describing the second clause, rather than being a standalone thought–”

“I’ll be sure to bring this up,” she said, and then went back to her perfunctory cleaning.

I hesitated, then said, “See, I’m going around the country correcting typos…”

“Well, that sounds like a fun time,” she said haughtily. And I knew not even to bother bringing up the typos the store itself had made, considering how defensive she’d gotten about the typo brought in from outside their production.

I wandered around a little longer and then left the Mall of America. That’s eight with zero corrected. Granted, I tried to convince a few people and was stymied each time, but I think also I might not have been in the optimal mood for fixing stuff so soon after Jane went back home. I hadn’t been able to get in touch with the Minneapolis friend I’d been planning to stay with. I checked in with Benjamin about his planned arrival in Chicago on Tuesday, and mentioned that I was thinking about driving a little farther east to some town between Minneapolis and Madison, perhaps Eau Claire.

“You should just ask Katie and Lisa if you can stay an extra night with them,” he suggested, “and go all the way to Madison tonight. Why not, right? They’d be down with it, I’m sure.”

It sounded like a pretty good idea, and he happened to have their number, so I checked with my pals and they approved arriving tonight. I was itching to hit the road again, so I did the four and a half hours with only a short gas-and-piss break in the middle. Around 8:30 in the evening, I got to Madison. I came into Katie and Lisa’s apartment and greeted them and… Benjamin?

Surprised again by that sneaky devil! He’d been secretly planning to meet me in Madison instead of Chicago all along. Then when I called him about moving on from Minneapolis, he’d been able to convince me to Madison early. So I am treated to the company of Benjamin two days earlier than I expected. Pretty cool. I’ll put his head on the map starting with tomorrow’s entry– just didn’t want to ruin the surprise for you. If you tend to read all the way to the end of my ramblings, that is.

The League is now at less than fifty percent correction rate. Hopefully Benjamin and I can whip that into shape in downtown Madison tomorrow!

Totals
Typos Found: 277
Typos Corrected: 138

Bloomington, MN

We kicked off our day with a visit to the Corn Palace. “The one in Mitchell, South Dakota?” you ask, and you are right, because it is the world’s only corn palace. Marvel at the frescoes created from different varieties of corn! What I liked about the place was that it wasn’t just an absurd monument to a crop, but a community center as well. Jane and I saw a bunch of six-year-old girls having some sort of dance recital on the stage in the Palatial auditorium. Above them were corn-fashioned murals depicting the history of the West. The soul of a region was bared to us.

Even the Corn Palace is not immune to error, though, sadly. They had some paraphernalia relating to a nearby university, Dakota Wesleyan, and I spotted the following poster:

In the service of education, I left my mark.

The place was lined with photographs depicting the various manifestations of the Palace throughout the ages. It seems that in certain times of economic hardship, the structure was dismantled to feed the populace. Then, once famine had passed and the town was able to grow enough of a surplus, they used more ears of corn to build a new Palace. All right, so I just made that up.

At the gift shop across the street, they were selling official Corn Palace corn. Punctuation, however, apparently cost extra:

I alerted the girl at the counter to the error, and she said that they’d just ordered a couple thousand of the damn things. O friends, I have not the time to apply so many apostrophes. All I can give you is one.

In an area of other gift shops that appeared to be closed for the weekend, I found this sign:

I used Josh’s trick, texting the dictionary function of Google, to check my feeling that “mandella” was not the right spelling, and I was vindicated. Unfortunately, the sign was under glass, so I couldn’t change it to mandala. Now that I look at it, I’m not sure what a “ponco” is either. Poncho, perhaps?

We left snow-caked Mitchell, continuing to head east on 90. Though it was cold, the skies were clear. We crossed into Minnesota and almost immediately it got windier. The buffeting forces of Boreas would continue to dog us all the way to the Minneapolis area. I stopped for gas in Mankato and found another goofed-up plaque inside the station (you’ll recall there was one yesterday, too).

Jane and I got to the Minneapolis area in the early evening and checked into a hotel near the airport, in Bloomington. We decided that we’d just stay in for our last night together, as we’d have to get up around five to get her ready to fly back to Logan. Convenience of conveniences, there was a promising restaurant attached to the hotel, so we could even eat right here. Their menu was enclosed with the other hotel “literature.” Damn if this dessert doesn’t sound good… but that extra letter might give us indigestion, no?

Tomorrow, early in the morning, I’ll be bringing Jane to the airport for what she refers to as me leaving her rather than the other way around, since I’m not hopping the plane for New England with her. I imagine it’ll really only hit me as we’re saying goodbye that I’ll have three more weeks without her before I arrive in greater Bostonia at last. I will revert to the state of being without a cuddle partner. It looks like Benjamin will rejoin the adventure in Chicago, but I’ll refrain from asking him to cuddle… I don’t think that’s really his thing.

Totals
Typos Found: 269
Typos Corrected: 138

Back to TEAL home

Mitchell, SD

Jane and I began the day in a rebellious mood, deciding that we could wait to give Callie any further assistance until tomorrow. After all, we had a busy day ahead of us, with sights aplenty and a long drive to Sioux Falls, even with throwing Mount Rushmore out of our itinerary (too much of a detour, and Jane had already seen those noble noggins anyway on a previous trip). So suck it up, Callie! We already had someone give you the business yesterday. Why would we let that little yellow light interfere with our charted course?

Well, then she made the noise. Jane said it was like the trumpeting of a pained elephant. We turned the car off, and started it again. Same noise. The sound of something that we really didn’t want to mess with. I could see my carefully wrought schedule evaporating into the prairie air. As it happened, there was an auto repair place right near the hotel we had just vacated, and they were able to take Callie into their tender care right away. They ran some diagnostics and found that she required both a new O2 something-or-other and a new muffler. The work would take a couple of hours, though, so they suggested we take a walk around the nearby mall, the same place that we mistakenly drove to last night while looking for the hotel. A capital idea! Especially for typo hunters.

Jane was ready to track down some ripe specimens, and I felt confident that we would be able to do so. Some of my long-term cherished readers will recall that there have been a few malls along the typo trail. They are often home to dark lingual tendencies. And sure enough, we came away with a decent haul. The first was when we happened upon a car in the middle of the mall thoroughfare, promoting a local dealership. I noted a small but crucial discrepancy in the sign behind the car.

I figured that if the dealership had gone to the trouble of putting one of their cars in the mall, they’d probably appreciate knowing that they’d spelled their website wrong, so I dialed up the cell number of the guy listed as the dealer contact. He listened to what I had to say, and so hopefully they’ll get rid of the testy, which is of course thoroughly at odds with courtesy.

We saw an unmanned engraving services display cart, and read the following message behind the glass:

Sounds like just the folks you’d want spelling out a sentimental message for you in metal, huh? The stand had a comment book, helpfully enough, and so I left my corrections in it. Note that I was not enough of an ass to fix the spelling of the comment above mine:

It can be all too easy to pick on the mom-and-pop engraving outfits, but I must point out that folks at the major chain stores also have problems from time to time with spelling. As Jane and I were leaving the mall through Sears (eternally and universally a portal between this world and the next), I found this typo, repeated about eight times in the space of twenty feet:

I took one of the signs and brought it to a carefully coiffed blonde at the nearest sales counter. “Hi there,” I said. “I just wanted to point out that Clearance is spelled wrong in this and other signs.”

She gave me a vacant look. I was terrified; for a moment I glimpsed something like a depthless abyss of apathy in her eyes, and I could picture it engulfing the universe. “Do, uh… do you think it could be fixed?” I prompted.

The blonde looked over at Jane, as if expecting empathy there. Jane said later that she’s gotten this look more than once from people when I bring up typos to them. They expect her to be the normal one and rein in her lunatic boyfriend. Jane just tends to beam at them, though, which does not allay their anxiety. Finally the woman said, “Thanks for letting us know,” and that was it.

We headed back to the auto repair shop to see if our guy was done yet with Callie. He screamed something unintelligible from the adjoining workroom, which another mechanic translated to “Give me another half hour.” So Jane and I went and sat in the adjoining convenience store and let our brains putrefy to the strains of commercial radio blaring from a boombox next to my ear. It was not the pleasantest waiting room, so I scanned the place for signs of distraction. Oh, here was a panoply of pamphlets for area wonders. Surely there wouldn’t be any typos here… right? Right?

All right, that’s just a freak occurrence. There couldn’t be anything else, could there?

Nope, all clear there. Moving on to– wait, this just in: there’s more than one Black Hill in South Dakota? There’s a whole series of them, in fact? Who would’a thunk.

I looked up at the wall and something else caught my eye. It was an almost twenty-year-old error, but it still made me sad. Aren’t plaques like this supposed to honor an organization? If so, why not start with spelling that organization’s name right?

Here’s a hint… the name of the place was inspired by that big road running all the way across the country.

Finally our mechanic emerged, reporting success. It was sometime after three in the afternoon. He gave Callie a free car wash and then we were on our way east at last. We knew a trip through South Dakota would not be complete without a visit to the relentlessly self-promoting complex of stores known as Wall Drug, in the town of Wall. So we stopped there for a little while, quickly becoming mesmerized by the high heaps of souvenirs and other junk everywhere we turned. We passed through a cafe with an unpleasant smell and stopped only long enough to note the following dual-typo fudge:

We figured we’d tell them later, when the questionable aroma cleared out. In the next gift shop, I came upon some shot glasses with little figurines at the bottom. I knew I was new in town, but even so, I could tell that theses glasses contained something vile, worse than even tequila. Look! And fear!

I brought one of the glasses up to the cashier, an old lady who seemed willing to listen. “Hello,” I said. “I was looking at the shot glasses, and they put an apostrophe in Badlands.”

She looked at the glass. “No, that’s a prairie dog.”

I made myself be patient. “Yes, I see that,” I said, “but there’s an apostrophe in Badlands, and there shouldn’t be. It’s not a possessive.”

It turned out that, in fact, the old lady did not want to listen. “I don’t know, man–sir,” she said.

“‘I don’t know, man’?” I echoed, incredulous. At this point I just wanted her to acknowledge the error, or give some hint that she knew what I was talking about.

But all she said was, “I didn’t make them,” and then went off to have a smoke break or something. I found this sign elsewhere in the shop:

Finally, something I could fix with little to no resistance.

Finding historical typos is interesting but also a bit of a downer. You know in a visceral way that you are far, far too late to do anything about them. Benjamin and I had this feeling upon seeing a typo in a newspaper the Wright Brothers published almost a hundred years ago. Now I felt it again when I spotted a sixty-year-old Wall Drug menu on the wall:

We had yet more to see in the many chambers of the Wall Drug manse. We entered an art gallery where photography was expressly forbidden, but that has certainly never stopped the League before. Here’s one that I found:

And Jane bagged herself a double shot of typos:

This next one may be a typo because I just don’t get it. Who the hell is Clifford?

It reminds me of hacked-up Associated Press articles where a mysterious, last-name-only character will give a quote halfway through the article, his true identity having been erased due to deletions farther up in the article. And here’s another Jane find; she picked it up while I was eating an immense slice of blackberry pie.

Finally, here’s a sign that I believe was not written by an Englishman, therefore accounting for one typo, and the other typo’s existence depends, I suppose, on how fast their coffee beverages really are.

From Wall Drug, we headed south on 240, along the Badlands Loop. Our delayed schedule had one benefit: we got to view the landscape during an optimal time of day, by the setting sun. This made the subsequent hours of nighttime driving that poor Jane volunteered to do kind of worth it. Sioux Falls was still so far away, and it was getting pretty late, so we lined up a hotel room in Mitchell instead. We figured that we’d get to visit the Corn Palace in the morning, at least.

En route to Mitchell, we stopped for gas and a bite to eat in Murdo. In the diner restroom, they had an old article above the urinal about Murdo’s antique car displays. I noticed something that made me pause mid-splash. I believe there’s an extraneous e present in one word here.

Although you might be able to find some frightening definitions of “autodome” on the internet if you look hard enough.

We arrived at our hotel quite late, and didn’t even realize we had crossed into Central Time until the middle of the night. My next dispatch will be from Minnesota, detailing Jane’s final adventures on this trip before she flies out on Sunday. If I let her leave, that is.

Totals
Typos Found: 262
Typos Corrected: 135

Back to TEAL home

Rapid City, SD

Jane and I met with a guy this morning who is keeping eastern Montana–and indeed the World of the Webs at large– a rewarding place for language enthusiasts. The interview should be up on his blog. Afterward, we strolled around the downtown Billings area to take in the sights. Jane needed some breakfast, so we stopped at a cafe in the basement of an odd little office building that wanted to be a mall, or perhaps vice versa. Most of the spelling in their signage was spotless, but a tiny typo tugged at my trousers.

I pointed it out to the staff and asked if I could fix it. Their response was that the sign had been up for four years, but sure, go ahead, have a proverbial ball. So while Jane ate her potato soup, I did the best I could to implement an aesthetically pleasing modification, or solution, as the business world would have it.

Jane’s verdict: “You did a good jarb!”

A Montana-souvenir shop featured the following typo. Unfortunately there’s little to do about this one, save harassing the manufacturer. American Expedition, wilt thou fix thy bear?

By the way, what does that quote have to do with a bear, besides a tenuous connection to nature? Bears have never changed the world for the better. Not that I know of, anyway. Maybe this bears further investigation.

Another shop featured framed poetry by a local dude, and I almost hate to point out a typo in such a case. Especially when the verses in question have a Whitman-like cadence. Nevertheless, here you go.

This next one I figured might be artistic license. Best to check inside the theatre and ask them. Observe the marquee and ask yourself what happens to a punctuation mark deferred. Does it migrate to a plural?

I waited behind a woman ordering tickets and then asked for a pamphlet about Tracys School of Dance. The attendant said that none existed. I asked if there was an apostrophe in Tracys. She maintained that there was, and when I pointed out the lack of such in the sign outside, she claimed that they just didn’t have apostrophes. Oh. All right. I went outside to take another look at the marquee. Jane observed that Workin’ had an apostrophe in it. Why must we be continually confronted with prevarication when a simple brushoff would do?

As a parting gift for Billings, I attempted calling the general manager of our hotel to inform her of the extra apostrophe in the hotel maps, but was unsuccessful in reaching her. We departed the town in a timelier fashion than yesterday, thinking to avoid repeating our late arrival into civilization. My original, unresearched plan had been to go through North Dakota, stopping at Bismarck and Fargo, but we realized, thanks to Frank’s advice, that the route through South Dakota would be somewhat more interesting, featuring the Badlands and Mount Rushmore, as well as that icon of American ingenuity, Wall Drug. As a bonus, we might get the opportunity to correct a few Wyoming typos along the way, as we’d be cutting through that state on our way to Rapid City.

That was the idea, anyway. Soon after we set out, though, it started to snow. We’d experienced intermittent snow flurries yesterday traveling through Montana, so initially I wasn’t all that concerned. Now, however, it was snowing harder. And just before crossing the border into Wyoming, Callie’s “Service Engine Soon” light came on. I wondered, briefly, if this was a kind of jealous feint brought about by Jane’s presence. Surely there were too many females clamoring for my affection in a confined space. What would happen next? Would Authority suddenly announce that we had arrived in Luxembourg?

Regardless of Callie’s motivations, we needed to get her checked out, and so we coasted into Sheridan, the nearest big dot on the map. Miraculously, Authority cooperated in helping us find a source of aid for her rival, giving us the addresses and phone numbers of the nearest auto repair places. Still, we had a hard time finding someone who had both the tools and the time to examine our ailing friend. We ended up at a shop a couple of miles outside the central business district. They ran an electronic diagnosis of Callie while we waited. I present to you the sole typo the League had time to uncover in Wyoming (click to make big):

They replaced the fuel filter and hoped that was all that was wrong with Callie. We consumed a couple sandwiches back in town and then set off again into the driving snow. All told, our Sheridan adventure cost us about two and a half hours. So much for a good start on the day. The remainder of the trip I won’t spend much space describing here, except to say that it was less than pleasant driving through the snow of the plains, especially when it eventually got dark.

We didn’t get to Rapid City until almost nine. Authority steered us wrong when we were trying to find our hotel, and so we overshot it and ended up at the entrance to a mall. I had to make a creative turn to get us back in the right direction, cutting off a couple of cars thanks to my decreased visibility through the fogged side windows. A cop car showed up out of nowhere and put on its flashing lights, and I pulled over. An officer of perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age shone his light on me and politely requested my license. When I explained that we were looking for the hotel, he pointed me in the right direction and let me off, provided that I “stop driving so crazy.”

Just as we pulled into the hotel lot, Callie dismayed me by turning on her Service Engine Soon light once again. This was offset, though, by the discovery we made upon checking in: our hotel has a waterslide. I think that represents Rapid Rock City pretty well, or at least the part that I glimpsed in darkness tonight: a tourist haven for those about to venture to Rushmore, only some thirty miles south of here. Tomorrow we should have a little time to wander about Rapid City, if getting Callie back into shape doesn’t take all morning. That is an if of tremendous proportions.

Totals
Typos Found: 238
Typos Corrected: 130

Back to TEAL home

Billings, MT

After tomorrow morning, I think I’m going to declare a moratorium on interviews for a few days, until Jane has headed back to New England. ‘Twouldn’t be fair to subject her to any more of this media stuff. Our sleep was broken up in the middle by a brief bit I did for New York public radio at 4:30 am. Then we had to stop partway through our long jaunt to Billings and hang out in the little town of Drummond for a while as I did a radio interview with a Sirius talk show. There’s also material we’re coordinating with the Billings paper. She’s been extraordinarily patient and supportive, but I would like for the journey to return to a pure and childlike state of typo-hunting for the remainder of Jane’s time with me.

So because of our sleep schedule getting thrown off, and the length of today’s drive, and other excuses that will inevitably bore you, today’s typo haul is extremely light. Just two, in fact, and one of them was literally handed to me (not that I’m complaining about that one). When we checked in at the hotel, they gave us a map that made me sad.

I will report this to the management tomorrow morning when we’re heading out– not that it’s likely to do any good. Today’s other typo is of a familiar breed, unearthed when we were strolling the downtown for something to eat at an advanced hour (we ended up at Hooligan’s, which had decent food, as well as local brews for two dollars… score! The meat market therein, as well as at Montana’s next door, indicated more of a “scene” than Jane and I expected for the town. We were a little too tired to socialize, though).

We should have a little time tomorrow to poke around in the shops downtown before we start on our way to Rapid City. They were all closed by the time we got in. So maybe a more engaging presentation tomorrow. In the meantime, feel free to peruse the recent items added to the Press section, and amuse yourself with my on-air fumbling.

Totals
Typos Found: 232
Typos Corrected: 128

Back to TEAL home

Missoula, MT

Josh wrote in to let us know that he’s still on the typo hunt. Even at 30,000 feet:

He says, “When can I go to The Dallas again? Some unknown month, but on the 7th day of that month? Awesome.”

The hotel clerk, upon handling our checkout this morning, informed me that in his thirty years of living in Washington he’d never seen the weather this strange. It was far too late in the season for snow, even at Spokane’s elevation. Today looked like it’d be better, though; the skies were blue and clear and remained so throughout the day. Jane and I were headed for Missoula. First, though, we had the neck of Idaho to cross.

We stopped for gas in Coeur d’Alene. Prices were in the $3.30s, the lowest I’d seen since somewhere in Texas. It seemed like an incredible bargain. An old man nearby, filling up his sedan, said, “You got cheaper gas out there in Massachusetts?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I haven’t been back in a while.”

“Well I tell ya, can’t be any more expensive than this.”

“You should fill up in California sometime,” I replied.

Isaac, our waiter at the greasy spoon in Spokane, had mentioned something that I vaguely remembered as being Indian ruins in Cataldo, Idaho. Jane suggested that I ask my new friend here about whether the Cataldo ruins were worth visiting, and his response was ambivalent, so I took it as a yes. About twenty miles down 90, Jane and I saw a sign for the Cataldo Mission and pulled off there.

We found ourselves at a historical site devoted to some missionaries who had traveled out to the mountains to bring The Jeebus to Native Americans. The state had preserved the church and living quarters, and had some exhibits about life a hundred and twenty years ago. That was all well and good, but where were my Indian ruins?!

“Indian ruins?” said a ranger greasing up some sort of torture implement outside a shed. “We got a couple of cemeteries. You want Indian ruins, try one of the casinos.”

All right, so maybe I’d misheard Isaac, or just hadn’t been listening. We figured we’d stick around and look at the exhibits. Oh, and it also happened to be the perfect place for gorgeous views of snow-dusted mountains on all sides. So screw the ruins. Before we went inside, I spotted a sign that featured an unwelcome visitor carved in with the letters:

Restroom’s what, I ask you? What belongs to the restroom? Perhaps the state of punctuation in America? I was hoping I wouldn’t find any further typos in the lovingly crafted simulacra of the zealot life of yore, but alas:

And this chiseled into an expensive-looking mineral surface. I wouldn’t even bring this one up to the rangers; I could already hear the minute swish of shoulders being shrugged in indifference. Jane and I left the house and followed paths through the grounds, reading the helpful signs along the way. One gave me pause. I wasn’t sure about it, but… wasn’t that wrong?

I had definitely encountered this particular error many times before. I recalled an incident back in elementary school, when an otherwise very intelligent classmate proudly showed me the handmade cover for the report he had done on ISSAC NEWTON. So I resolved to research this point when next I had access to the rushing creek of information known as the InterWebTron. And yes, I was right: observe.

Before we left, I paid our visitors’ fee and alerted one of the rangers to the error besmirching their outhouse area. She agreed that it was a mistake, but forbade me from taking my marker to it, saying that they’d be renovating the bathrooms anyway in a couple of weeks. I could not argue further with her. I know not to mess with a woman who has the power to call bears and elk to her aid. Still, I wonder if this “we’ll be rebuilding stuff anyway” excuse, which I’d also heard a couple of times in Seattle, was the new “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”

So there you are, folks: three Idaho typos. We crossed into Montana and Mountain Time not too long after, and the revelation-inspiring panoramas continued. Jane said, “I want some mountains of my own.” And I resolved to somehow, someday give her a few, maybe even a range. Is there a craigslist category for that?

We arrived in Missoula in the evening. I have to say that I was spoiled by the trip over; even though the natural area surrounding the town is nice, it’s not as nice as the scenery we drank in on the way. Or maybe it’s just all the houses and casinos spoiling the effect. After checking into the hotel, we ventured out into town for a few errands. I needed to refill a prescription at CVS, and this one was the first I’d seen in a while. Apparently it is a center of commerce in town. This isn’t a typo, but I have to share it anyway:

Our schedule was a little off thanks to the lost hour and some computer business I’d pursued at the hotel, so we struggled to find a good place to eat that was open past nine. We drove down one of the main drags of town, Brooks, and marveled at the abundance of casinos. The place was choking in them. It was rare to spot a restaurant without one attached. This was no flashy Strip, either, just a series of grubby-looking outfits where you could throw your money away, as if they actually acknowledged the sordid nature of their trade. Finally Jane and I ended up at a Pita Pit, open late for our convenience.

The Pit did its best to live up to its name. It was staffed by a bunch of college freshman airheads who took our order and then forgot to make our food. Only after much waiting and then me going up to harass them about it did they finally create our pitas. I’ve learned my lesson: apparently merely ordering food and paying for it is no longer sufficient to set the wheels of food service spinning. You must stand at the counter and stare at your sandwich artist until he physically puts meat onto the grill and turns the damn thing on.

It did give me a certain amount of satisfaction, then, to point out to them the risible typo in their midst. One that they admitted they’d never even noticed.

Jane pointed out that this was the second bathroom-related typo of the day. As she is a connoisseur of poop jokes, she appreciated this. Her fine work with the brown marker (!) from my Typo Correction Kit provided the following correction, more aesthetically pleasing than these guys deserved:

O Montana. I am sure we’ll provide you with further assistance in the next couple of days.

Totals
Typos Found: 230
Typos Corrected: 127

Back to TEAL home

Spokane, WA

The TEAL team once again became a duo this morning as Jane and I saw Josh off at the airport, where he flew back to New York to close out his chapter in the saga. I did feel a moment of trepidation. Until this point I had traveled many weeks with at least one companion of bedrock competence– first Benjamin, then Josh. Benjamin’s skills as a navigator were unparalleled, and Josh had automotive nerves of steel after doing driving errands through New York for a living. My darling Jane, on the other hand, was a little too much like me in the life skills department.

My first trial did not take long to arrive. I had to re-park Callie on a street near the hotel so we could finish packing and figure out where we’d stay the night in Spokane. This entailed negotiating some unpleasant downtown Seattle traffic as well as a paucity of available spaces. Could we do as well as Josh in A) finding a spot and B) actually squeezing into it?

It turned out that yes, we could. Jane made some helpful suggestions about where to look, and I was able to not screw up parallel parking for once in my sheltered life. On a steep hill, even. Team Jane and Jeff was off to a promising start. We finished our business at the hotel and then took off on the beginning of 90 East, which, as any astute traveler knows, runs all the way to Boston. I won’t be on it the whole way back, but certainly a good portion. It makes for a convenient symbol of returning home.

As we headed through Snoqualmie Pass, Washington threw its weirdest array of weather yet at us, featuring a series of five-minute snowstorms, intermittent rain, sun, fog, and hell, maybe a torrent of frogs somewhere in there. The combination of all this with majestic icy mountains and evergreens thoroughly entertained Jane, who took pictures while half-hanging out of the car. We stopped in Ellensburg to meet with Gary, an unshakable supporter of this blog. He treated us to lunch at a local soup-and-sandwich place and talked a little about his area of expertise, the philosophy of the mind. I must now read some Chalmers and Dennett.

After parting ways with Gary, Jane and I decided to take a little stroll around downtown Ellensburg, as long as we were there.

In the front window of a cafe, I spotted this error:

Why? Oh God, why?

Jane and I wandered into a shop that was less an antique store than a painstakingly crafted shrine to the past. Displays meshed artifacts from different decades, creating simulations of times that never actually were. Postcards were on sale for three dollars– postcards already written and stamped eighty or ninety years ago. I felt an acute ache to write some fiction, but where would the time be for that?

After picking up two more discount speculative fiction books at the great bookstore down the street, Jane and I continued on our way. The land was a little less interesting on this leg of the trip than it had been before Ellensburg, so we put on some music and talked about pressing teleological concerns. Some farmland passed.

“Don’t you want to be cows?” said Jane.

“I’d rather not end up somebody’s hamburger.”

“You would escape with me.”

“What would we do?”

“Just be cows.”

We arrived in Spokane and soon it was time for dinner. Remembering Josh’s tendency to use Yelp to identify the good spots in each neighborhood, we did the same, and ended up at a diner downtown for some agreeably greasy food. Well, agreeable to a certain point, after which no more fries could be eaten for fear of permanent cardiac damage. Next door was a bar with the following sign outside:

The place was dark and uninviting. I hesitated at entering just to criticize their spelling. Jane said, “I’m not going to kick your ass to do it,” which of course led to me having to go into the bar to prove myself worthy to her. There were only a couple of other customers in the place, and the music was plenty loud enough to go around. A big dude manned the bar inside. I approached, and he said, “What can I do for you?”

“I… uh… I noticed that your sign outside for margaritas spelled it M-A-R-G-I instead of M-A-R-G-A.”

“Yeah, and?”

“I was wondering if you had an extra A, so that the sign could be corrected.”

“Does it really matter?” He had a kind of threatening joviality in his responses, like he was either amused or ready to explode or both.

“Yeah, it does. I’m actually going around the country fixing typos, and thought I could… help you out.”

“Well,” said the bartender, still perched on the edge of volcanic emotion, “I don’t have any extra letters, or the key to open that sign. I’ll let my boss know that he can’t spell, though. Is this really what you came in for? You’re not going to order a drink?”

“Noooo,” I said, and it was time to skedaddle.

Totals
Typos Found: 225
Typos Corrected: 126

Back to TEAL home