Proofreading Doesn't Take a Holiday

[Because I recently learned that one of the Poet-Accountant's colleagues has actually never even heard of the movie Sleepless in Seattle, I feel obliged to mention, as a kind of public service, that the title of this blog post refers to the 1934 movie Death Takes a Holiday. It is a classic movie. You should go watch it (and then let me know how it is).]

Ruby Hazelnut, the Poet-Accountant and I just spent a lovely weekend in Charleston. It's been some years (some many many years) since the Poet-Accountant and I have been there, but it's still lovely, and Kaminsky's is still there.

It does appear, though, that since I stopped frequenting the city, it has become the Typo Capital of the World. Check this out:

On Saturday evening, we went for a sunset sail on the three-masted Schooner Pride. After we motored away from the pier, the crew got ready to set the sails. Which is when I saw this on the t-shirt of the crew member untying a rope in front of me:

Look at that very last line. It's USCG licensed for what? Forty-nine passongers. Awesome. I pointed this out to the crew member, and he rolled his dreamy eyes. Yeah, he knew, and what was worse was that the owner of the boat had recently ordered a new batch of shirts. Without fixing the spelling. I was apparently the only person ever to notice, so he gave me my very own shirt for free. I am proud to sport the Schooner Pride's licensing for 49 passongers. So proud.

Next up was on Ft. Sumter, home of the first shot of the Civil War and of a typo on a National Park Service sign. I'm very sorry to say I don't have a picture of that one; we had spent too many wonderful minutes listening to Ranger Antoine give his park spiel (he was a total tie with the guy at Alcatraz who was our previous holder of the title Best Park Ranger Ever). But the typo was along these lines: The canon at this spot was was a 92-pounder.

That afternoon, we came back over the Ashley Bridge from seeing the very cool (and very empty) Drayton Hall plantation, and right there on Cannon Street was a bright yellow triangle that read CONCTRUCTION.

When we went back the next morning to get a picture, all the construction signs had flung themselves face down on the sidewalk overnight in absolute mortification.

Then, because the drop of ink doesn't fall far from the red pen, it was Ruby Hazelnut's turn to get into the typo-finding action. That night we had dinner at the Charleston Crab House, which has a fantastic shrimp po-boy and this description of the Black Grouper on their menu:

(It's there in the phrase characterized by its has firm.)

And finally, because the rotten stepchild that is North Charleston couldn't bear to be left out, there was this gem as we left town:

Fabulous.

One place we didn't see any typos? The wonderful Hyman's Seafood, where we sat at a table that had previously hosted the band Phish, the actor Matthew Broderick, the super-dreamy Timothy Dalton (if you don't know him, please please go watch him eat up the screen as Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre) and the amazing (and amazingly modest) Neil Armstrong. The man who walked first on the moon.