As seen on Jay Leno’s Headlines last week: It’s bad enough to have your college basketball team’s name misspelled on its jerseys. But it’s even worse when nobody notices it until the sixth game of the season.

Heh. I went and re-loaded King’s Quest 6 on my computer, and after playing through it I realized how awesome that game was for its time (and still is today). Half the fun, of course, was in the game’s dialogue; check out a few choice screenshots from early in the game to see what I mean.

The other half was that it was one of the earliest full-featured multimedia games, with recorded dialogue and narration and lip-synched video sequences. Not bad at all for 1993, you’ve gotta admit…and it still runs with only minor glitches on my WinXP machine, to boot.

I was just checking one of my old e-mail addresses, and I found this spam which, interestingly enough, was particularly addressed to me.

Hi Francois,

Are You one of the Millions of people who've switched Internet Service Providers in the past year? Maybe You opted for a cheaper service or maybe a faster connection.

Either way, You know what a hassle it is to notify all of your personal business contacts or Your new Email Address.

Did You know that You could Own Francois@FrancoisColeman.com and keep it forever!

Only one slight problem: in no way does my name resemble “François Coleman”. And no, this wasn’t one of those carbon-copied spams; the headers reveal that the mail was sent directly to my address and no others.

And if that wasn’t enough, I also had another e-mail advertising the fact that a certain ancestry site carries records for the Coleman family tree.

Enjoy the Proofreader’s Hall of Shame? You’ll probably like Human Spell Check as well. Sad that I hadn’t managed to stumble across this site till now, really…

Many toys have been released with badly-translated English on their packaging; indeed, some of them have become such classics that they’ve been repeatedly forwarded around the Internet. So, let’s all remind ourselves that Tongue of Frog is like the genuine one from the frog; that you and lady employees to play with Echo Mic together; and of course, that Goku may pre house the seamy side volitation…

To borrow a favorite phrase of Dave Barry’s, this would make a good name for a rock band.

Remember the Apple Newton, the rather ill-fated PDA which was infamous for its rather lacking handwriting recognition capability? Well, needless to say, Jabberwocky didn’t survive the Newton treatment very well. “Shred the serious bandwidth”, indeed…

I was just shuffling through my latest server logs and came across two search requests which sound, to paraphrase Dave Barry, like they would make good names for techno groups: “Better Than Vocalwriter” and “Musical Bitmaps”.

Also in the logs were two bizarre searches which sounded as if they came about through some variation of Googlewhacking: “cordless phone etymology” and “dual p3-500 chess”…

OK, I just corrected a stupid bug on the Proofreader’s Hall of Shame style sheet. Suffice it to say, I forgot to put # signs before the color codes used for text and background colors. Strangely, it only caused problems with Macintosh versions of IE, but nonetheless…how’d you like to see white text on a white background when browsing a page? Didn’t think so.

Ever had one of those instruction manuals where, no matter how long and how hard you stare at it, you just can’t get it to make any sense? Well, there’s actually a contest for such things; go figure. My personal favorites, incidentally, are the “Terrorable Hexahedron”– just remember to “rofate those 3 necesary sows of the 4 pre-arrsnged sows for several furns (without worrying abont the sotcting direction)”!– and the badly-cropped knife illustration. [Edited 2002-06-24: page was moved on TecStandards’ site, link updated to reflect that.]