My husband showed me a headline written by CBS.com yesterday. It said something along the lines of “Osama bin Laden was Vane.” Were they trying to tell me that Osama bin Laden wanted to foretell the weather? No, they had made a spelling mistake. I can forgive this in someone’s personal blog; I don’t really mind it if someone posts something like this on Facebook (although I might roll my eyes), but CBS.com? Don’t they have people to proofread these things?

This isn’t the only time I’ve seen poor quality copy coming out of an organization that you would expect to be professional. The AP released an article about a week or two ago that my husband pointed out had spelled Endeavor five different times in one article. Are you kidding me? I’ve also seen mistakes in books that I’ve read, although that usually happens less frequently.

I don’t have a problem with people spelling the Middle East words differently. If Fox News wants to change the way they spell Osama to Usama, I don’t really care. Words like Al-Qaeda and Qadaffi are really just our interpretation of Arabic, and technically do not have an official spelling. When a professional organization can’t figure out how to use the right version of “vain”, that disturbs me.

If professional organizations want to retain credibility, they need to first learn how to spell correctly. CBS and AP should be able to publish error-free copy. In these days of scarce jobs, if whoever they have in their office can’t spell correctly and know how to use homophones correctly, perhaps they need to find someone that can.

CBS is finally releasing some of its old seasons of Survivor. I got an email in my inbox that CBS was going to release Survivor Africa and Survivor Marquesas. It’s been a long wait: Survivor Africa came out nine years ago. Marquesas was eight years ago.

I never saw Survivor Africa when it originally came out. Eventually, I downloaded a copy of all the episodes on IRC and saw them on my computer, but I never saw them on a full-size television set. I didn’t know why… I had seen Survivor Australia and really liked it. When I wrote my review of the show, I realized that it came out right after September 11, 2001. That fall, I remember going to work before the sun rose, and coming back home after it got dark. No wonder watching my favorite television show just slipped my mind.

Now you can see both Africa and Marquesas on DVD… or at least you can on October 5th, when it comes out. You can pre-order it now though. I’m short of money, so this will definitely be going on my Christmas list.

I’m not sure why CBS hasn’t done this earlier… or why they aren’t releasing Amazon or Thailand. These videos are print-on-demand, so they’re not costing CBS much to sell if nobody wants them… and I know that there are people out there that want them. I know that I would rather have a legitimate copy of the show than some .mp4 version that someone taped off the television and shared through IRC.

Now, the only sports I really pay much attention to are the Olympics… but sometimes it’s a little hard to ignore that there’s a Superbowl that people watch too. Especially as a writer, sometimes you can capitalize on things like that. Last year I wrote an article about Superbowl party foods that were easy to make. This year, my pastor has been singing a line of “When the Saints Go Marching In” in church; I’m not sure whether he is a New Orleans fan or not, but he likes to tease people about the Cardinals losing (I live in Arizona).

The only thing that I really am interested in regarding the Superbowl is the commercials. For the past couple of years, I have been Tivo’ing the game, and then I’ve been fast-forwarding through all the boring football to get to the commercials. When I lived in Italy in the Navy, we used to get a half day the Monday after the Superbowl, because the guys that wanted to watch it would have to watch it in the middle of the night. Sometimes we had the option of coming in at normal time and leaving early instead, if we didn’t watch the Superbowl (military television overseas doesn’t have the commercials, so the Superbowl was useless to me).

Sometimes the commercials haven’t been the… cleanest… I guess you could say. I was pretty happy when I heard that Focus on the Family was going to be putting on a pro-life ad in the Superbowl. But I was shocked when I heard that CBS’s “standards board” had rejected a commercial for “male dating”.

So good for them. I guess I’ll keep supporting the company by watching Survivor every Thursday, starting on the 11th (that and the Olympics on NBC… got a lot of TV coming up).

If you would like to see the cast list for the 20th Survivor Season, Heroes vs. Villains, I have published it up on Associated Content. Enjoy!

See the recap of episode 1.

More information about Survivor Samoa on Squidoo.