h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What the actual heck?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Ellum,_Dallas

To begin with, I got to this amazing page - from what planet it comes, I know not - by way of needing to answer Elektra's questions about Deep Ellum, Texas. Deep Ellum is a historic neighbourhood in Dallas. It is also the home of the world-famous GTOger parking lot. The parking lot belongs to an IT company. It is small (the parking lot, that is) and therefore tows illegal parkers to leave room for employees and paying customers. The signage is well-posted. A bored tech manager spends his downtime editing surveillance footage with suitable music. He has many, many fans, and we are two of them. Here's a sample:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsFicRK_Z5A

After laughing at this video, Elektra mused, 'Where's Deep Ellum again?'

'Dallas,' I said. 'Wait...' I looked it up on Google and, predictably, got the W*k* page. 'Ah! The name is a corruption of Elm Street,' I said. 'That explains it.'

Elektra gave me a Yankee look. 'How?'

'Nobody in the South, or Texas, can pronounce 'elm',' I explained. 'They either say 'ehm', or, as in this case, 'ellum'. To let you know they're not ignorant, and know that word has an 'l' in it. Like that Irishman in Pittsburgh who kept talking about 'fillums' when he introduced David Hammond. Most of my relatives said 'fims', instead.'

There followed way too much linguistic discourse on my part, I blush to say. Including my reminiscence of the preacher at the Richmond Baptist Church in Surrey in 1975 who confused me by talking about the 'Pam tree'.

'Pam as in a girl's name?' asked Elektra.

'Pam as in it was 'Pam Sunday',' I replied. After several more minutes of this erudition, I decided to read the rest of what the W had to say.

I wish I hadn't. At first, the earnest tone and bad syntax had me convinced an American teenager's school report had been pasted in. A Texas teenager, it must be, I thought: who else would start with 'After independence from the Mexican-American War, Texas became a part of the United States in 1845,' when Dallas wasn't founded until after the Civil War? Reference to the Alamo is obligatory in all Texas utterances, just like Lenin was to a Soviet schoolkid.

Then I hit upon these gems:

'In 1912, the concept of highway first came into people’s life.' ['I'll let that sink in,' I told Elektra.]

Based on the support from the government of Dallas, highways were constructed like mushrooms after rain.' [Picturesque imagery.]

That was definitely written by a foreigner. Or a space alien.

I suspect an interplanetary conspiracy on the part of the Centauran Alliance, bent on galactic domination, to undermine intelligence levels on Earth by infiltrating W*k*p*d** with illiterate trash. I've got news for them:

1. This is unnecessary. Have you been following the news lately, X'Zhenghis?
2. An editorial policy of 'hey, you've got five minutes and got past third grade, you can edit this,' encourages this kind of writing.

I have two requests: first, if anybody reading this is a W*k*p*d** member, would you please do something about this entry? The rest of you: fight the alien menace! Support Peer Review today!

... the one with the mushrooms was maybe a German. A quite common expression.

Aah, I'm not gonna read all of that! But I must say, I think I'd like to work for a mushroom construction company.

Fungus Hydraulics, Ltd?

You may be right, Tav. There's a way to use 'mushroom' in that context in English, too. But this isn't it. You can say, 'X sprang up like mushrooms,' but that's pretty flowery for a W*k* entry, methinks. Also, highways springing up like mushrooms doesn't make a lot of sense. BBQ places, maybe.

It's definitely very flowery, yes.
I think in German almost anything can 'wie Pilze aus der Erde schießen'.

An all-purpose expression.

"An editorial policy of 'hey, you've got five minutes and got past third grade, you can edit this,' encourages this kind of writing. "

Yes - W*k*pedia has an update log, which is useful, but only in the sense that it shows the article was 'updated' (using the word loosely) on 17 October, and the next person merely added to it

"fight the alien menace! Support Peer Review today!"

Yes indeed!

Not to mention the bias wars that go on in their chat.

Drop in on PR once in a while, folks. It won't kill you, and it will save you showing up when my thingy's on the Front Page and telling me I forgot the most important detail.

Ah, PR. I miss real Peer Review.

I've just had a submission to an academic journal accepted and the two peer reviewers' comments were:

Reviewer 1: You need to do something about all the spelling errors such as [list of words that would be misspelled if they were American English, but it was in BE]

Reviewer 2: Please add these three references [which all had one author in common] - so much for anonymous review!