Petty Revenge

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that one does not piss off one's copy editor. I mean, why risk it?

What the Onion doesn't seem to understand, however, is that this is not comic exaggeration: there are copy editors out there who would leave out a hyphen to punish a wayward author for her unseemly use of commas or her unreasonable privileging of "grey" over "gray." Not that I've ever had one personally, of course. But I did work in Production for a couple of years and, in the words of Ernie Hudson, "I seen shit that'd turn you white." Especially involving the serial comma.

You Win Some...

So Sarcasm Girl's Mock Trial team won the city finals. This is a good thing. The school she goes to is what is euphemistically referred to as an "inner-city school," although it is not located in some dark slum, but on a quiet residential street in the Mission Terrace neighborhood (I think it's Mission Terrace...San Francisco neighborhoods still confuse me a bit). Ten years ago, her school was failing: gangs, high drop-out rate, crime, etc. The school has been in turn-around, as they say, for the last eight or nine years, and they're doing well. But there's still this whiff of "inner-city school with all the baggage" that comes with it--the sort of thing where, if SG tells a peer where she goes to school, that person may say, half joking, "Oh, I'm so sorry."

So they win Mock Trial finals and will go on to the state level. Since this is like one of those tedious movies where a Dedicated Teacher Turns Around the Disadvantaged Yout' of an Inner City School, leading them to Basketball or Violin or Dance or Mock Trial Glory, one would think there would be joy all over. And there mostly is. The kids at her school (those who even register that Mock Trial is a competitive thing, like basketball) are justifiably proud, especially since the teams they beat--in particular Lowell, the high-achievement HS for the city--and School of the Arts, have had a lock on the city competitions for some years. Unfortunately, this has led to some loose, hot-headed talk from some of the kids at Lowell and SOTA (particularly SOTA) who view jubilation on the part of the kids for SG's school as gloating, saying that the competition was rigged in some way, that the kids from SG's school must have bought the judges or cheated somehow. It got so bad that officials on the Mock Trial board online had to step in and shut it down, and the principals at the various schools have been apprised of it. It's tempting, of course, for SG and her buds on the team to want to rebut--as a matter of fact, the child wrote a two page screed in response, which she then (quite sensibly) did not post--but I think they're mostly taking the high road. No one in authority seems to feel that anything untoward was done: the team that won did so on its own merits. It's a shame it has to play out this way. Or, as SG said the other day, "I feel like I'm in a bad episode of something on the N." I would have said an Afterschool Special, but she's too young to remember them.

And they're still going to the state finals.