Copy Editor's Lament

A lovely mixture of melody and lyric brings the tragedy of the dying copy desk home at Christopher Ave's site, Music for Media.
"Copy Editor's Lament" makes you laugh and cry at the same time, especially if, like the protagonist, you've been laid off! (And, if you're like me, you met your future wife on the copy desk in college).

An excerpt:

"I'm a human safety net...I can provide punctuation, appropriate for publication, make the capitalization right. I was there to fix your grammar when you thought it wouldn't matter, cut all your extraneous blather down."

Copy editors are among the tens of thousands of reporters and editors who have been cut loose in the past year or two in North America. As Ave puts it in the song, "with only Web sites and TV, nothing really there to help you see."

Yeah. Good luck with that.

In any case, here's to Christopher Ave and all of you who understand the difference between a colon and a semicolon.

Where have all the editors gone?

Sports writer Dave Albee writing in this morning's Marin IJ on local rower Mike Altman in the Olympics:

IN ROWING, the focus usually comes from within rather than from outside visuals. That's how it is when your back is always turned away from the finish line.

Funny, I thought in rowing your back was always facing the finish line.

S.F. Chronicle Science writer David Perlman had his own problems today. He wrote about rampant rumors of cover-ups over Mars research:

The latest heady rumor: that the spacecraft Phoenix now analyzing soil and ice on the arctic plains of Mars had discovered chemicals so startling and so relevant to the search for life on the Red Planet that the White House and the president's science advisers have been secretly briefed, even though NASA would not share the information with the public.

The logical structure of the last clause doesn't work. NASA's not sharing information with the public isn't at odds with the White House having a secret briefing. They're part and parcel of the same thing.

To the two Davids: We're concerned about your copy desks, but the good news is we're still reading.
(As for the photo, it's a beauty, and it's from a fine photographer, Kevin Sargent)