A MISTAKE TO MAKE ONLY ONCE

Or, how I learned that (AWHEN (AND (BLOG-COMMENTING-P) (PASTING-P) (STRING-UPCASE-P IT) (NDOWNCASE IT))).

I cut capitalized page titles from an EconLog web form and an EconLog posting-delay-notification screen and pasted them into my remarks in two blog comments. OOPS!

I have spent a lot of time working with program comments and plain ASCII documentation files like this, using a convention where ALL CAPS indicates not yelling but quoting of fragments of computer programs, rather like italics can indicate not emphasis but quoting of title text like The Wealth of Nations. This seems to've created a blind spot in my proofreading skillz, since the yelling interpretation wasn't glaringly obvious to me. The yelling interpretation was certainly glaringly obvious to EconLib Ed., though: "If you can't wait so much as five or ten minutes before griping and screaming and yelling, you are pretty hair-trigger, eh?".

Sadly, perhaps EconLib Ed.'s assessment that I'm a ranting loon is uncontroversially true. More positively, though, perhaps I should take this a sort of double hint from fate (first that this occurred in my comment about how it's technically easier to do something on my own blog and second that this occurred in a blog post advising "Get Your Own Blog") reminding me that even if I am a ranting loon I can still post here! (What could possibly go wrong?)

Meanwhile I should probably try to remember to proofread more carefully the next time that I need to identify a web screen URL-suitable global meaning so that I am tempted to identify it by giving its title and furthermore its title happens to be capitalized. Too bad the brain is too inexpressive to support OAOO implementation of this as (DEFMETHOD MAKE :AROUND ((M MISTAKE)) (UNLESS (ALREADY-MADE-P M) (CALL-NEXT-METHOD)))...