Friday, May 13, 2011

Obama and Osama

I understand that it's easy to make a mistake and confuse the two names but people really should be more careful. I almost had a heart-attack when I saw the following in my blogroll:
So, Obama is dead.  Which is to say, he’s a martyr.  Of the many gifts the US gave him in his life, and they were many, this may be the last one.  Some say he didn’t want to be martyred, at least not right this moment, and no doubt that’s true.  But the difference between seeking martyrdom and not minding that much exists.  He didn’t really go that far out of his way to avoid death.  He could have shaved the beard, had some plastic surgery and disappeared into Indonesia.  He would never have been found.  His compound was not heavily guarded.  Bin Laden need never have been in the line of fire.
It's only when I got to the part about the beard that I realized whom the author of the post was actually referring to.

10 comments:

Sungold said...

This is embarrassing, but I made the same error not once but TWICE in a post last week. My husband later said he'd done the same on Facebook - and another friend confessed to it too. Those were the only two people I talked with about (apart from the two gracious readers who pointed out my gaffe). I realize N=3 isn't terribly conclusive, but I'm guessing it's a very, very common typo.

Upon reflection, I realized I have typed Obama many hundreds or even thousands of time since I started blogging in 2008. I'm a fast typist. I rely on finger memory. I had only typed "Osama" ONCE in over three years of blogging.

I'm sure I've still got a piece of racism planted deep within me - but I think the culprit behind my typos was plain old finger habits.

The other factor? Haste in proofreading. I was heading out the door to pick up kids, so I hit publish, and bing! Before that, I was multitasking (as bloggers are wont to do), which certainly didn't help my cause.

So be easy on this poor writer. It stinks to have to give up the moral high-horse, as I've now had to do regarding the Faux News bloviators who couldn't keep the names straight, either!

Clarissa said...

I know that the mistake is easy to make but I was seriously scared here. Blogger has been down, so I thought that maybe I'd missed some important news.

It's such a dramatic beginning for a post, too.

Lorraine said...

The reference to Indonesia suggests this one may have been deliberate. Still, I'm happy (for) to give the benefit of the doubt for the example above. But not for this.

Clarissa said...

Oh, don't do that to a person who doesn't have Facebook access!

Lorraine said...

So sorry.

el said...

I wanted to ask whether you have another blog or something from which one could see the blogs you follow. I would be interested in blogs like yours and Ian's (politics, feminism, a sense of humor is a huge plus) in English and Russian. For some reason I couldn't find any interesting blogs in Russian.

One of my favorites was Jon Swift's parody political US blog. In real life he was a journalist and stopped blogging, when he died. One couldn't stop laughing. Do you know somebody similar? F.e. he wrote "Pseudonym-Americans Fight Back" in defense of Internet freedom:
http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/11/pseudonym-americans-fight-back.html
His archives in general are interesting.

Clarissa said...

I can't publish the entire list of the blogs I follow because it's now close to 300 blogs and that will make the homepage load forever. But I can give you a list of the Russian-language blogs I follow right here.

In no particular order:

http://nnn744.livejournal.com/ - This is a blog by a woman I know from another forum. We said some really vile stuff to each other over the years. But I always recognized that she writes well and it was actually me who recommended that she start a blog.

http://valery-kichin.livejournal.com/ - A blog by a very talented film critic in Russia

http://arbatovagidepar.livejournal.com/ - a blog by a brilliant writer and feminist who influenced me profoundly. My interest in psychology and my take-no-prisoners style of arguing on this blog come from her. :-) I hate many of the things she says but the woman is brilliant.

http://becky-sharpe.livejournal.com/ - This is a blog by a woman I would have become had I not emigrated. She often writes about completely silly stuff but she writes so amazingly well that I have read every single post from her archives dating back to 2006. Twice.

http://accion-positiva.livejournal.com/ - a feminist blog. Has some very good links.

These are the only ones I follow in Russian.

el said...

Sorry, when I recommended a post about Anonymity on Internet, I thought about this reaction of his to readers' reaction to that post:
http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/11/swift-reactions-5.html
It isn't even his best.

el said...

Thank you! I'll definitely check all of them out.

Clarissa said...

I just hope you don't abandon my blog for theirs. :-)