Manuscripts Burn


MANUSCRIPTS BURN

"Manuscripts don't burn"
- Mikhail Bulgakov

Hi, I'm horror and science fiction author Steve Kozeniewski (pronounced: "causin' ooze key.") Welcome to my blog! You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Amazon. You can e-mail me here, join my mailing list here, or request an e-autograph here. Free on this site you can listen to me recite one of my own short works, "The Thing Under the Bed."

Thursday, January 12, 2012

The Archaeopteryx of Magazine Articles

This is pretty hilarious.  (And if you can't be bothered to read it, don't worry, I'll do a much better job of summarizing the whole story in two sentences a few sentences from now.)

The CONTENT is not hilarious.  The content is decidedly banal.  Let me summarize this article for you in two sentences: "You know what's inaccurate about the Journey song 'Don't Stop Believin'?'  There is no South Detroit."

There, I just saved you roughly seven minutes if you're a slow reader.  Now, here's what's hilarious.  Scroll down to the bottom where online articles print their retractions.  I'll just reprint this in its entirety without the permission of the copyright owner, because this retraction is by far more amusing than the entire article:

This post has been corrected to note that Eminem was from the East Side, and Motown is in the West, not the North. Also, the midnight train in the song goes "anywhere" and not, as we had it, "nowhere." In our erroneous version, the train is far less useful, and we hope nobody attempted to book tickets.

Did you catch that?  So, long story short, this asshat goes to the trouble to write a full-length, 650-word magazine article in order to point out a single, trivial error in a decades-old song that is almost certainly due to nothing more malicious than artistic license.  Then, IN THE COURSE OF THAT SAME ARTICLE the author himself makes THREE trivial errors that were almost certainly just due to bad research.

This is somewhat akin to me saying, "Whales aren't fish.  They're extinct, bipedal birds."

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