Climb Every Mountain

Hello World,

Well, the month is certainly charging along like a morning commuter running late to catch a train at the other side of the terminal, and not letting anything stand in the way, that's for sure. In fact, it's only because there are five weekends in October that we're not already at the last weekend of the month, and those of us (who shall remain nameless, but look suspiciously familiar) who have not assembled all of their costume parts yet would be in very big trouble, I can tell you that. Also charging along is the World Series, which has been narrowed down to the two remaining teams from the championship playoffs, St. Louis and Texas, giving the mid-west something to cheer about, as they battle it out in the best four of seven. At least we can be sure that the fans won't starve to death, between the brewery-fresh beer in St. Louis and the famous barbecue in Texas, this may well be the best tasting Fall Classic they've ever had. (And to the partisans of Philly cheese-steak and Chicago deep-dish pizza, I look forward to your letters.) On our TiVo, we're still watching old Mets games from the end of the season, so as far as we're concerned, the Mets will be winning the World Series again this year, and if nothing else, they've got the bagels to prove it.

In the local haunts, the time finally came, and there was no avoiding it, when the contractors working on our porches had no choice but to tackle our unfathomable crawl space head-on, in order to replace the underlying support beams, the originals of which had long since stopped living up to their name in a big way. To their credit, the crew didn't shirk from this daunting task, but promptly cleared a path through the countless generations of detritus, and turning up a few curious tidbits along the way. There was one old wooden ski (one supposes for an old one-legged skier) and a very old brown one-gallon glass jug that is still filled with some no doubt extremely hazardous liquid. There's one ornate metal candlestick that has the heft and appearance of raw lead straight from the ground, and a small vintage ride-on metal truck that seems to be made entirely out of rust. So far, the piece de la resistance is the large metal poster of the dearly departed leader of the most populous Communist country in the world, Chairman Mao, preserved in all of his socialist glory, so apparently no freedom-loving marksmen were using his poster for target practice or anything of an ironic nature. Of course, every day, I'm fielding calls from the Justice Department concerning the whereabouts of Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa, but I told them they would just have to wait until I finish learning to ski on one leg.

I find it hard to believe that they could have replaced the staff in the local newspaper's TV Best Bets section, and somehow come up with people who are even less competent than the previous crew, but that certainly seems like the case, at least if last week was any indication, where the typos came in eye-rolling bunches that would be enough to spoil anyone's breakfast - or maybe that's just finicky fuss-pot face control freaks like me. This first one from the hit ABC show Gray's Anatomy really had me going, and I had to read it several times before I even got in the ballpark with what they were trying to tell me -

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The hallways of Seattle Grace are filled with

interesting individuals after a stamped mars

a comic book convention

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Well, we all know by now that the spell-checker is never going to help you in a case like this, if you're going to use the word stamped in the place of stampede, and leaving the rest of us to wonder, what the heck is a "stamped mars" anyway? At least if they had spelled it phonetically as "stampeed," the spell-checker would have caught it and presumably given them the right spelling - although knowing their spell-checker, it probably would have suggested "stamped" as the correct word instead, thanks not. They had the same problem in this synopsis of Law & Order: SVU on NBC -

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A dancer is followed him and assaulted

by a man with a distinctive tattoo

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Now, I'm thinking that it shouldn't take a whole suitcase full of brains to come up with the right word (home) and put it right where it belongs in that sentence, instead of "him" which makes no sense at all - and which would have been patently obvious to anyone who bothered to proofread that after it was typed, and not even have to rely on the poor overworked spell-checker. I mean, it's not like "home" is such an arcane or challenging word, or even that it sounds anything much like "him" that the two would be widely misused on a regular basis. I just don't know what they were thinking, unless they let the Horoscope Computer loose in the TV section again. That was the only explanation I could come up with for this next entry, from TLC network's Dateline: Real Life Mysteries -

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A family outing turns into a crisis when a

man's wife and son slip from high surface

but a friend suspects it was no accident

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I'm sorry, I don't even know what that means. Is "high surface" some sort of mountaineering jargon that is nothing but unfamiliar territory for a flat-lander like me? It seems to me that in a page full of capsule reviews that average about 40 words each, it shouldn't be necessary to resort to any kind of specialized terminology that you would need a degree in Orography to understand it, for heaven's sake. After all, we can't expect to dig up the late and lamented Sir Edmund Hillary just to help us understand the local TV section, I shouldn't think.

Meanwhile at work, one of our new department heads complained about mail being mis-delivered by our Mail Room staff, in spite of the fact that they have been short-handed, and even at the best of times, is comprised mostly of volunteers and developmentally-disabled adults trying their hardest. When the situation didn't improve fast enough for her tastes, she sent the following memo to our Senior Vice President:

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Today was a really bad day in the mail room.

Tricia brought me so much mail I think they were hiding it.

However, when I look closer 10% was addressed to the hospital.

I just opened an interoffice from the path lab and there was mail in.

As I told you, I will be more than happy to her.

When she had to go back to her cart for another pile, I go nervous.

She was a little nervous also. But she did.

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Mind you, this person is not only in charge of one of our departments, but is the President of the company that the department has been out-sourced to, believe it or not. I guess this only goes to prove that illiteracy is no obstacle to success, such as it is, and even someone with absolutely no concept of punctuation or capitalization can still get the big bucks - well, at least from the employer of last resort in our fair city anyway. Normally, I would think that an actual business person running their own company would be way too embarrassed to send this sort of immature and ungrammatical doggerel to anybody, much less the Senior Vice President of a healthcare organization, even the likes of ours. But frankly, I was glad she did, if only for her wonderfully quixotic phrase, "I will be more than happy to her," which evokes such blissfully benevolent feelings, that it makes my heart soar to dizzying new heights of ethereal grandeur, or as we alpinists say, high surface. Say, was that Sir Edmund Hillary that I just saw up here?

Elle