The Great Typo Hunt by Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. HersonNPR has an article on The Great Typo Hunt: Two friends cross the country with a Sharpie pen, correcting grammatical and spelling errors in road and shop signs. And there’s a book.

I may need this.

When I was in college in the mid-1990s, I kept a “Bent Offerings” newspaper cartoon on my bulletin board. One person was scrawling “I before E…” on a wall. Another was correcting a menu, muttering, “It’s Brussels Sprouts, not Brussel Sprouts!”. A third was examining someone’s T-shirt, disapprovingly asking, “Is that how they taught you to use an apostrophe?” The strip was captioned, “Roving Gangs of Rogue Proofreaders.”

The appeal hasn’t stopped. You may have noticed I have two categories on this blog devoted to weird/funny signs and mistakes in signs.

Yeah, this sounds like a good bet. Update: I finally read it.

Wheel of Time: The Gathering StormThis weekend I finished reading the new Wheel of Time novel, The Gathering Storm. Now that I’ve read it, I can definitely say that Brandon Sanderson was a good choice to finish the series from Robert Jordan’s notes, and that splitting the final book into three was the right approach. It may be a doorstopper, but it would be difficult to cut more than a tiny amount without diminishing the impact of what remained.

Read more…

Justice League New Frontier DVD.One of the highlights of WonderCon this weekend was the premiere of Justice League: The New Frontier. I really liked Darwyn Cooke’s original mini-series, DC: The New Frontier, and I’d been looking forward to the animated adaptation. Overall, I’d say the film succeeds.

The story links the dawn of the Silver Age of comics, and the formation of the Justice League of America, with the dawn of the Space Age, set against the political background of the Red Scare. It focuses most heavily on Green Lantern-to-be Hal Jordan and on the Martian Manhunter, but touches on Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and the Flash as well.

Read on…

Character collage: Portraits of two women, looking downward to the left and right. Behind each is another woman standing, one regally in an elaborate blue dress with a necklace and hair ornaments, the other in a plain white dress. They are also looking away from the center. In front are three men standing, two in armor with swords drawn. The man in the center is holding up his sword, dividing the image in half. The man on the right is holding his sword pointing downward. The man on the left is wearing middle-ages-looking clothes and balancing the point of a dagger on a fingertip.The first issue of the New Spring comic book was surprisingly good. I wasn’t sure how well Robert Jordan’s writing would translate to the medium, and of course a lot of details are lost, but Chuck Dixon has done a good job adapting the story, and Mike Miller’s art is incredible.

The book opens with a brief description of the world, then a series of splash pages showing the scope of the Aiel War, starting with thousands of Aiel pouring over the Dragonwall. From there it moves to Lan’s story, then to Moiraine’s. Two pages stand out for me: The panorama of Tar Valon, and Gitara’s Foretelling, the latter of which is most effective because it contrasts with the very realistic style of the rest of the book.

Believe it or not, I’d recommend this. Who would’ve thought I’d be excited about The Wheel of Time again?

(Spoilers for last night’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer finale)

EARTHQUAKE DESTROYS CALIFORNIA TOWN

By Kelson Vibber, staff writer

A 5.9 earthquake struck the Central California town of Sunnydale Tuesday morning, rattling windows as far away as Los Angeles and San Francisco and triggering a massive sinkhole which appears to have buried the entire town. In an amazing twist of luck, however, the death toll may turn out to be zero.

Emergency workers dispatched from neighboring communities have reported the scene is one of eerie silence – largely because many of the town’s residents had left over the past few weeks.

Keep reading at Reflections.