Yeah, I get that. It's just funny to me that the narrator just... went ahead and said it that way.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

--
dbrandon

I was imagining the Clam of Peace as a mysterious culinary delicacy, the recipe long lost to time.

Probably something involving wrapping shelled clams in cannabis leaves and other seasonings before roasting.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

In that case, surely you would bake it?

--sofaspud
--now I know where the phrase 'happy as a clam' came from

ouch.

You have a good point.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Man, Geoduck the Elder was such a dick.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Would that make them Geodick?

EDIT: Also, needed to put this in that I ran across literally moments ago.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

*hits up YouTube for "Short Skirt, Long Jacket"*

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Upon reflection, I wonder if that particular audiobook publisher has rules about sticking to the provided text no matter what. I took a class in voice acting once, believe it or not, and that was one of the things the instructor mentioned can happen--sometimes the director/producer welcome input from the talent when something in the text doesn't make sense, but sometimes they really, really don't.

The thing is, all of the glaring errors I've spotted in the text so far (of which "the clam of peace" is the funniest, which is why I posted about it) read uncannnily like Optical Character Recognition errors. The Russian history course I took as an undergrad was largely taught from a book that was long out-of-print, which the professor got around by distributing PDFs of lengthy extracts from a scan of the book. Whoever did the scan mistakenly left Acrobat's crappy OCR on, which caused many... interesting... misinterpretations of the text. After a while the scan engine's habits started to become so familiar that I stopped even noticing the weirdness and just parsed what was meant rather than what was actually there in most cases.

Whether he voiced the weirdness inherent in such a thing because of reader trance or because the recording personnel (who you would think would have noticed it too) insisted on following the provided text exactly, I have no idea, but with that experience in the back of my head, I can't shake the suspicion that Griffin was working from a similarly janky scan of Decline and Fall.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I think they would say that OCR errors are to be expected in audiobook scripts for books published more than about 10-15 years ago.

That stands to reason. In the days before digital storage, there would've been no economical, or even physically possible, way to do that. Physical type is heavy! And expensive! Never mind keeping a whole book's worth, once the plate for a given page was made, the master type would have to be broken up and reorganized into the next one. As for the days after digital storage when they still didn't do it, well... the publishing industry is famous for the glacial pace at which it adopts new technologies, which is kind of funny for an industry that was literally founded on fast-paced technological innovation.

>They might keep printing plates in case they needed to do another print run,
>but if they were gonna bring out a new edition, audiobooks included, the
>procedure was to go back to the author for a fresh copy of the manuscript.

Mm, and that would be tricky in this particular instance, since Edward Gibbon died in 1794.

>And if the author was no longer available or
>didn't keep a copy, they'd have to hire someone to transcribe what
>they'd printed.

Or just forego editability altogether and photographically reproduce an earlier edition page by page! That happens even today. The people who republished Edward Jablonski's Flying Fortress a few years ago seem to have literally just... scanned an existing copy of the 1968 edition, printed it out, and stuck it between a new set of covers. Maybe they didn't even scan it, it might just be a stack of photocopies. The reproduction of the photos from the original (of which I have a copy, but it's falling apart, hence why I bought a copy of the repop) looks exactly like you would expect a photocopy of a book page to look.

>I think they would say that OCR errors are to be expected in audiobook
>scripts for books published more than about 10-15 years ago.

Well, yeah, but what I don't understand is... it's an audiobook. Why didn't they just have him... like... read the book?

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

They wanted to send him an electronic file instead of a paper copy of the book? It's awkward to put a paperback book on a music stand unless you're OK with cutting off the spine? The typeface was too small for comfort? I dunno, it does seem weird.

Well, that was a click move.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.