In my work-life, I'm currently marking up in HTML articles from the influential Romantic-era journal The Quarterly Review. The texts I'm marking up were the results of OCRing the original journal pages. Most OCR programs are notorious for their strange transcriptions based on the shape of the letters (and the image quality). I just came across the following digital transcription, which is from an article reviewing Robert Southey's translation of El Cid:
"The introduction and notes are full of the most ample and extraordinary details concerning the state of Spam in the middle ages, from works of equal curiosity and scarcity."
So that can of dusty Spam in your pantry that you've been afraid to open may indeed date from the middle ages.
An auspicious (synchronicitous?) mistake on this day in which Spamalot, the new musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, opens on Broadway...
Anyway, I needed to take a break. Back to work.
Posted by jeb at March 18, 2005 2:54 PM | TrackBack