It's a whale of a story!

Have you ever been to Central Florida? It's where I grew up. Sure, there are theme parks aplenty. I grew up closer to the coast, near Kennedy Space Center. I saw every shuttle launch from my backyard! That was pretty cool. Also, the beach. I prefer the Atlantic to the Pacific, which I now live near, since the Atlantic is both warmer and the coast is less rocky. There are some drawbacks, though. It's super, super hot 95% of the year. It's a damp, moist heat, too. There are thunderstorms every afternoon that can rattle your windows right out of your house. There are tourists everywhere with no regard for the rules of society or traffic! And bugs like you have never seen. The bugs there have, like, their own culture. They live by their own laws, and clearly, their initiation rites involve scaring you TO DEATH in the middle of the night by walking across your hand when you go to the kitchen for a glass of water. YEESH.

A few years ago, one of those local 24 hour news stations started up in Central Florida, and, well, they try really hard. I think. I mean, it's on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Someone has to be trying, right? They've gone through some growing pains over the years. One of their anchors appeared to wear the same dirty suit day after day, for weeks on end. He would change his tie sometimes, but the tie was spotted and dirty, too. Another anchor was really very good, but her neon makeup was distracting, to say the least. It seemed sometimes as though they'd recruited stellar radio newspeople for the anchor spots. These people had AMAZING voices, and maybe a bit of trouble with his or her appearance. One of their reporters used to do that thing where, if a person's name was Spanish, she would give it the THICKEST accent ever, but then immediately return to her boring American accent with the next word. It was a thing to behold. My point is, for the most part, they looked to be putting in some real effort to get that tiny little news station off the ground.

You know who's still not trying? Their graphics people.

74 degrees at 10 AM? Mercy.

All they had to do was copy the statement sitting in front of them. In googling, it looks as though SeaWorld's statement was spelled correctly, as it's referenced in a few other articles I found. So, this is a problem with the graphics person. They probably could have just copied and pasted this in, but who knows? Perhaps that left too little room for error. I'm working on a theory wherein there are so many letters in the world each day, and it is up to us, letter consumers, to burn them off. Sometimes we don't, and there's a surplus, and they sneak in where they're not needed. Sneaky letters. They, like spellcheck, just want you to look dumb in front of as many people as possible.

I might have also put a comma after Mr. Atchison's name and before his title. But that's just me, I guess.

(Many thanks to loyal reader and sibling JG for sending this to me, with the vaguely threatening subject line. I suppose that's what siblings get to do when they're doing you a favor!)