There's another one, shewolf!
Bloody spammers!
Archive212,
buzz off! 
Diane wrote:Boita, how many times have I asked you to write a book about the books and authors you edit? Oy, the times I have asked and does she do anything about it? No. What am I, chopped liver? Hmpppff.
Finally, a vent that doesn't leave me super-ventilating.
Hey Diane, Did you forget about the other idea for a book you gave me? A guide to ladies' rooms in Manhattan. Not a bad idea, actually. But did you actually expect me to pee my way around Noo Yawk like a dawg marking lamp posts?
msolga wrote:There's another one, shewolf!
Bloody spammers!
Archive212,
buzz off!
I reported him.
I am grumpy... I've burnt the tips of two fingers and they hurt.
I am so sick of living round here and having to put the shutters on my windows up and down everytime I come in and go out in case some chav bastard robs me. And I'm sick of having a bedroom window right next to a ******* motorway roundabout so I cant have the ****** open cos it's too ******* noisy and smelly.
Dorothy Parker, I had to look up Chav Bastard online in order to understand the depths of your rant... thought you'd be interested in this description:
<!> Ick. Keep those shutters closed & be safe.
There's an inversion this morning (rant it) and the smell of cars is in the air.
Wow, there have been some very good rants. Just one thing, where is here in terms of the bear? Is it always up to here or is it sometimes there in case of a different type of rant worthy event? Got that?
Reyn, yes, life is grand, but it is also very fun to rant about the not so great things.
Roberta, being as formal as possible, I would love to go peeing all over New York City then reporting back to you regarding the best places to pee--meaning best places for women who aren't equipped with such handy devices as men. All I ask is for your publisher to give you an advance for this high-labor job. You must realize that it will take enormous amounts of pee which means enormous amounts of drinking at a variety of watering holes.
Ah, what I have to put up with. Sigh.
Piffka wrote:Dorothy Parker, I had to look up Chav Bastard online in order to understand the depths of your rant... thought you'd be interested in this description:
<!> Ick. Keep those shutters closed & be safe.
There's an inversion this morning (rant it) and the smell of cars is in the air.
Yep, that's pretty damn accurate.
Excuse my ignorance but what's an "inversion"?
x
An inversion (had to look it up since I wasn't sure either) is more precisely called a "temperature inversion." What happens is that one of the localized layers of atmosphere is not in line with the expected level of temperature basaed on its altitude. This effectively creates a physical barrier which plugs up the natural mix and distribution of pollutants so that they stay close to the ground and seem even worse than usual.
Roberta wrote:I'm sick and tired of editing books written by people who can't write. I'm currently working on one that gives me the impression that the author had actually never seen a book, let alone read one. Then I see the author bio. She went to Yale. Don't they require that you at least pretend to read a book at Yale?
How interesting! I often want to rant about the crap writing that manages to get published. (I'd like to know how Dean Koontz gets away with his dreadful purple prose, for one example.)
It seems like I notice more dumb mistakes-- grammatical errors, butchered phrases, that kind of thing-- than I used to. Are publishers skimping on editing more now than in the past, or are writers just getting dumber? And I always wonder-- if what I catch is what got past the editor, then how awful was it before they fixed most of it?
cyphercat wrote:Roberta wrote:I'm sick and tired of editing books written by people who can't write. I'm currently working on one that gives me the impression that the author had actually never seen a book, let alone read one. Then I see the author bio. She went to Yale. Don't they require that you at least pretend to read a book at Yale?
How interesting! I often want to rant about the crap writing that manages to get published. (I'd like to know how Dean Koontz gets away with his dreadful purple prose, for one example.)
It seems like I notice more dumb mistakes-- grammatical errors, butchered phrases, that kind of thing-- than I used to. Are publishers skimping on editing more now than in the past, or are writers just getting dumber? And I always wonder-- if what I catch is what got past the editor, then how awful was it before they fixed most of it?
I think there's a combination of things happening. From my little corner of the publishing world I see pressure to publish more, more, more. This tends to force people to accept what once might not have been acceptable and to get authors who may be experts but who can't necessarily write.
When I proofread, I see what the author did and what the editor did. Within the past year, I've been outraged--at what the editor didn't do. No training? Never mastered language skills? Who knows?
So if you get an author who can't write, and editor who doesn't know how to edit, and an inexperienced proofreader, you're gonna end up with a book that's riddled with mistakes.
One other thing. Within the past year, I've been asked
not to fix certain kinds of grammatical mistakes. The authors think that the correct way doesn't sound right. (Thud) I cringe.
Diane wrote:
Roberta, being as formal as possible, I would love to go peeing all over New York City then reporting back to you regarding the best places to pee--meaning best places for women who aren't equipped with such handy devices as men. All I ask is for your publisher to give you an advance for this high-labor job. You must realize that it will take enormous amounts of pee which means enormous amounts of drinking at a variety of watering holes.
Ah, what I have to put up with. Sigh.
Uh, Lady Di. How about drinking
water. The object of the book would be to let people who aren't at a watering hole know where they can go to pee. Let's say a woman is at the jewelry exchange at 47th between Sixth and Fifth. She's trying to decide between the two-carat earrings at the International Exchange and the three-carat pendant at the National Exchange. Then nature calls. Where's she gonna go?
If you're sitting in a "watering hole" when nature calls, you just go pee.
Ah, what I have to put up with. Sigh.
Let's just go with this
Quote:Police Stations
Any police station will happily let you use their bathroom. They are located throughout the city.
a link to
all locations is kindly provided.
Excuse me, officer, but I need to wheeeeeeee.
Now!
Argh, the new guy at work (this is IRL work, not A2K) I am training. Smarter than a bag of hammers, but not by very much. I am trying very, very hard not to wring his neck. Thank God for the weekend.
Hey Roberta,
Speaking of publishing, who does the final proofreading of galley pages before they go to print?
I've noticed an ever increasing and annoying number of glaring typos, missing words and incorrectly used words in quite a few books I read lately. My assumption is this is due to computer spellcheckers being used as the final read rather than a human.
If it is still a human, who does the final read through, the author or the publisher/typesetter? Do either of them care about having such errors reported back to them by readers, and what's the vehicle for doing so?
Butrflynet wrote:Hey Roberta,
Speaking of publishing, who does the final proofreading of galley pages before they go to print?
I've noticed an ever increasing and annoying number of glaring typos, missing words and incorrectly used words in quite a few books I read lately. My assumption is this is due to computer spellcheckers being used as the final read rather than a human.
If it is still a human, who does the final read through, the author or the publisher/typesetter? Do either of them care about having such errors reported back to them by readers, and what's the vehicle for doing so?
I haven't seen galley proofs in a month of Sundays, Butrfly. I suppose they still exist in some forms of publishing, but not in the forms I'm seeing. Page proofs are read by two to three humans. The author, the typesetter (at least in theory). And the proofreader. However, many projects are being outsourced. India is where a lot of the outsourcing is taking place. I've known of a few projects that have been outsourced to China. If a publisher has the outsourced company handle everything, the professional proofreader and the typesetter may not be entirely comfortable with the language. This leaves the author, who woulda spelled stuff right in the first place if he or she knew how.
I believe that some publishers care greatly about the quality of what they publish; others, less so, but they still care.
I know of no standard vehicle for reporting errors. Textbooks generally list the people who worked on the book. Also, you can write to the author via the publisher; that will get some attention. Or you can check out a publisher on the Net and see if you can find out what department or editor was involved.
Roberta, woman does not live on water alone. No, no no, certainly not just water even though NYC's tap water is the best and certainly not this woman. My highly valued opinion would have to be based on generosity of drink and food. Alcoholic beverages make me pee much more often than unexciting water. Add a little food and you also add a little more to do in the can. That needs to be a factor. It is one thing to be able to do the women's pee hover and quite another to manage something far more complicated. As you know, older women have a harder time with the hover. Add to that the scarcity of places to put their handbags when taking a seat is a neccesity, and you've got the terminal case of hover 'till you're shaking syndrome.
Then, as no one has mentioned, are there one seaters, two seaters, three seaters or a unisex, in which case the men are simply out of luck. Also, I might want to go into the protocol of unisex. For instance, should a woman put the seat up after she is finished, for the benefit of men, or should there be a general seat-down understanding?
Is the establishment in danger of rioting by angry women standing about with their legs crossed? One, two or three seats can make a huge difference in the general aura of the place when urgencey is not respected by the establishment in question. Men tend to get very nervous in such joints, understandably so. There is nothing quite like a woman who needs to pee in the worst way. She becomes a dangerous amazonian tigress in her urgency, willing to push and shove and force her way in before all others.
I guess you could call this an urbanity of uranity, which involves strategic placement and availability.
Sigh. I give and give and what do I get? Not enough damn bathrooms, fer Pete's (and Diane's) sake.
This is a complicated issue that can, literally, dampen one's enjoyment of the City.
There, end of rant and reply to Boidy.
Well, I could contribute to the follow up, bathrooms in Rome...
Diane, I couldn't believer the massive watering going on at the golf course the other day. What?
Well, you know I agree with you. Golf started, if I remember correctly, at or around St. Andrews in Scotland, where rough was rough.
If Saudi Arabia has naturalesque golf courses, those would have been designed by some smart people. One of my landscape architect teachers worked there, but I didn't like him so I didn't follow what his projects were.
Anyway, it is my opinion that all golf courses don't have to be near manicured fantasylands requiring vast watering. Further, one of my mentors was involved in designing a course that was used for some sort of filtration land, and naturally I forget the details.
