Just so you know.
Incidentally, does anyone else's cat go sort of catnip-style nuts for the scent of bleach? Yeah, I thought not. Told you you were weird, Penny.
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Today's topic? I'm not sure there is one. I put the post title up just as a placeholder (um, thus the word "placeholder"...) while I uploaded the photo and tried to think of something to blather about.
Maybe placeholders themselves are slightly blatherable? I'm not sure, but why don't we give it a try.
It's fairly common practice in publishing to use placeholder text while the real thing is being prepared, but it sometimes leads to interesting consequences when someone forgets to replace the placeholder. One of my favourites (I think it was from one of Richard Lederer's books, if I'm remembering right) is when a newspaper had to print an apology when the placeholder text was inadvertently left as the caption for a person's photo. And the text was? Dummy head. As in, not the real head(er). Unfortunate term in that case, though.
Somewhat off-topic: I can see how that placeholder would have been missed, especially in the newspaper world where things have to be done quickly. Other mistakes aren't quite so forgivable, though. I once bought an (admittedly cheap) edition of... Vanity Fair, I think it was, only to get it home and find out that there was no punctuation in it. At all. In the entire book. How could even a minimum-wage slave from a low-cost publishing house miss the fact that there was NO PUNCTUATION? Maybe they thought that Thackery was all about the stream of consciousness thing? I dunno.
Now that we've moved from the comparatively fast world of newspaper publishing to the nearly immediate world of electronic media, placeholder text is that much more likely to escape from the backroom. I'm sure everyone's found weird-looking stuff on news sites that doesn't make sense. I mean besides the stories, of course. And blogdom? Fugitive placeholders are almost a given. My two fans see them here regularly -- any post that starts with blah blah blah or something something is me trying to get my brain into blather gear. Usually the nonsense titles are removed before I publish. Sometimes not. Sometimes the "not" is on purpose (like when I find out that I really, truly didn't have anything to talk about. In that case, blah blah blah sounds about right for a post title), but occasionally it's just me forgetting to proofread. Often I'll go back and change those titles when I notice them, but the funny thing about Blogger is that changing a post title doesn't change its published url. In other words, a post that started out blah blah blah but later became something worth reading (shut up. It happens. Occasionally) will still end up being pointlessblatherblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/blah-blah-blah.html if I've accidentally posted it that way the first time. Oh, and please do note that the (purposely incomplete) address I just typed isn't a real one. Yet. There's still enough of September available that it's possible you'll get a blah-blah-blah.html before the month is through.
Naturally, I'm not the only one who does that. One of the bloggers I follow has often joked that one of these days she'll forget to remove her usual placeholder post title and we'll all wonder what the heck it has to do with anything. Her placeholder of choice? Words. And how do her followers know this? Well, self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess you could call it. And when she noticed she'd just published a post called Words, she decided to leave it in fun and just edit the post slightly to point out why it was there.
So what has any of this to do with anything? Oh, not much. Just the fact that those of us who are into language bloopers and things like that get a little chuckle out of escaped placeholders, that's all.
Hey, everyone needs a hobby.
Even if it's blah blah blah.
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