“Remoted” – Day 440 (Sunday)

Reading the local newspaper online has more challenges than seem necessary. The byline capitalization is generally insane, and line breaks are awkward, but worse are the all too frequent occurrences of misplaced partial words or sentence fragments. It feels like being in first grade and learning to read all over again. When typing in a Word document on my own laptop, things randomly jump to another line in the middle of typing, or randomly delete, and bizarre popup boxes with weird commands appear on the screen seemingly at will. I haven’t figured out if it is the ultra-touchy mousepad, crappy typing skills, or my Bad Technology Karma causing it, but for the past year of using the “new” red laptop, it’s been a constant headache and proofreading nightmare. 

One the run!

Seeing the jumbled sentences in the newspaper daily in many articles is equally frustrating. Recipes are a nightmare because the ingredient list is always messed up in the online version, with measurements including things like 1K salt. Really? One thousand what of salt? Teaspoons? Grains? Either way seems like a huge pain to count out.  

This weekend, both the Saturday and Sunday “Daily Sunrise” emails arrived with the top headlines and a couple of them are real puzzlers. First, there is “In lifting COVID-19 restrictions, Gov. Charlie Baker declares virus “one the run”” Really, “one the run”? Is this a new expression, or another example of why it’s a bad idea when the papers reduce staff and get rid of the editors and proofreaders? Did no one see this after it ran Saturday to fix it for Sunday? Or do we just not care?

Shot with a kinfe?

Later in the listing was “DA: Officers justified when they fatally shot man with knife.” I know the headline is supposed to mean that a man with a knife was shot by police, but it could be more clearly stated, for example, “DA: Officers justified when they fatally shot knife-welding man.” This would have spared me all the time spent wondering about the mechanics of shooting with a knife and if it is also possible to stab with a gun. Neither of these possibilities are explained in the article, but the first sentence more clearly stated the content with “BROCKTON, Mass. (AP) — Two Massachusetts police officers were justified when they shot and killed a knife-wielding man during a domestic violence investigation, prosecutors said.” See, it would not have been so hard to get the headline right in the email synopsis.