JABbering Stooge

Nearly two weeks after starting, I am now slightly less than two-thirds of the way through Monkey Girl. Although it’s been a very good book so far, I do have two complaints:

• Whoever did the copy editing for the book needs to be fired for incompetence. I have found several typos, copy/paste errors and other grammatical atrocities that wouldn’t pass muster in a college newspaper (especially the further I got into the book) — but given my experience with the college newspaper editing process*, I guess that would depend on the college newspaper.

• Humes twice makes the false claim that Bill O’Reilly works for CNN. First on page 211:

  Many residents of Dover began to feel a similar urge to run. They had liked seeing their neighbors quoted in The New York Times and seeing Dover featured as some sort of buckle on the Bible Belt on Bill O’Reilly’s talk show on Cable News Network, but once the novelty wore off, it was hard to feel good about where all this notoriety was taking the township.

  And then he did it again on page 224:

  This would prove to be an uphill battle, as the confusion — if that’s what it was — was national in scope. Within days after the lawsuit was filed, Bill O’Reilly, CNN’s most popular and highest-paid pundit, dedicated a segment to the controversy in Dover. He likened the ACLU to the Taliban, “infringing on the rights of all American students” by trying to keep ID out of schools.

  Note to Humes: Bill O’Reilly works for Fox News, not CNN. In fact, O’Reilly has never worked for CNN, to my knowledge. And given how frequently and vociferously The Lord of the Loofahs denigrates the rival network, it’s pretty safe to say that his head would explode if he ever discovered that someone claimed that he was employed by Ted Turner’s brainchild.

As I said before, in spite of those two issues, Monkey Girl has thus far proven a very enlightening and valuable read. Perhaps the most interesting parts of the book is the rather unflattering portrait painted of one of the key school board members at the time the decision to put ID in the curriculum was made: Angie Yingling. She was so clueless about what ID is, and so cowed by Bill Buckingham, that she flip-flopped more than a landed catfish on this one issue. Her voting record throughout the course of the controversy was so inconsistent that at one point, my reaction to her was “Angie Yingling? More like Angie Ding-a-ling!”

* I’d put up a link to one of my editorials at the University Star here to illustrate my point about college newspapers, but the paper’s website seems to be down for maintenance at the moment. Incidentally, in searching for the article in question on T3h Google™, I discovered that my good friend Bartcop linked to it. The title of the article, “Christian Right use religion for personal gain,” was not mine. My title for it was “Loathe Thy Neighbor.”