Great moments in copyediting

One of my guiding principles for journalism? The more monkeys, the better. But if you're going to slap a chimp licking an ice cream cone on the front page of your metro section, you've got to get the details down.

The Indian Express has failed us. Because check out the caption (lower right corner): "While mourning for the brother of a former Hizbul commander, this militants."

Obviously, in lieu of the full stop, the sentence should have continued, "... contemplates the politics of identity, mulls the implications of terrorism in the subcontinent, and contemplates the merits of butterscotch over chocolate chip."

Public service announcement!

Hey friends, I had to post this, because every time one of the monkey public service announcements comes out, I crack up. It's just so...foreign. I'm not saying they're irrelevant, I'm saying that, if one was to issue a "monkey menace" announcement in NYC, well...the world might stop spinning for a few minutes. Highlights of the text, in case you can't read it: "Monkeys are wild animals, don't domesticate them with bananas" -- isn't that contradicted by the happy monkey holding a banana? Let's stay on message, department of environment, forests, and wildlife; "Monkeys are monkeys" -- no, I thought they were elephants! (OK, I know maybe they're alluding to Hanuman and his monkey-ly importance in the Hindu panoply, but still.) All jests aside, seriously, don't feed the monkeys. When S and I were in Chail with my parents, we were loading food and stuffs into our car and left it unattended for a few minutes; when we went outside, there was a monkey in the driver's seat, and I ran at him with flailing fists, seriously alarming the hotel personnel, who were wondering just how they would explain a way a monkey-induced firang death in the peaceful mountain town. Just don't do it.