While I don’t want to take any buzz away from Sarah Palin, who is in for the hockey fight of her life, I do want to write this post. A Swedish food magazine published a cake recipe with a typo in how much nutmeg to use. It should have called for two pinches. Instead, it recommended 20 nutmeg nuts. Now, nutmeg nuts aren’t easy to come by, and they’re potent. So you might think like the editors did that out of several hundred recipes, one that calls for a huge amount of nutmeg would not cause a problem. It would be an obvious error. They did the responsible thing and sent a letter to their subscribers and put a page in store copies warning “high doses of nutmeg can cause poisoning symptoms.”
When four women got wind of this and poisoned their husbands with it, the editors recalled the magazine.
In other food related news, the president of Iowa College resigned after the Des Moines Register published a photo that “reflected poorly on the college.” The photo shows him helping a young woman drink from a mini-keg of Coors Light. Obviously, had the beverage been Miller Chill no one would have objected.
Those Swedes. Always kidders.
Seriously, I suspect this was a result of a phenomenon every writer–and every intelligent reader–has understood for some time, that there is almost no serious proofreading done any more at many publishing houses. Everything is left to spellcheck, which has no common sense function.
As for the Iowa College photo, yeah, that probably wouldn’t fly very well in Iowa.
In Wisconsin, however, it’s a different story…