#rsrh My PitA observation for the day.

Having watched Soylent Green again recently*: sometimes it seems that the people most exercised over the entire ‘greenhouse gas’ thing seem to have completely forgotten what it is that we use greenhouses for.

Moe Lane

*A shaping-up-to-be-quite-comprehensively-wrong film which was based on Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! – a novel that was equally (and equally hysterically) wrong in its predictions.  I mention this largely because it is apparently required that we take seriously the predictions of 2010 for 2050… and ignore the pesky detail that the equally-dire predictions in 1970 or 1985 for 2010 (and increasingly-likely, 2020, or 2025) turned out to be, frankly, crap.  Not to mention the other pesky detail that in 2030 I’ll probably be able to write the same damn post about all those people out there fear-mongering 2070…

“Spelt tagliatelle is black people*!”

Spell-checking is simultaneously the greatest boon and the greatest burden of modern publishing: it used to be you actually read text before you sent it to the printer.  Now you just look for the wavy red lines on the screen, and never mind if you used the wrong (but properly-spelled) word:

SYDNEY — An Australian publisher is reprinting 7,000 cookbooks over a recipe for pasta with “salt and freshly ground black people.”

Penguin Group Australia’s head of publishing, Bob Sessions, acknowledged the proofreader for the Pasta Bible should have picked up the error, but called it nothing more than a “silly mistake.”

Via the Corner.

Here, let me save you time looking for it:

Moe Lane

*Classical reference.