Regular vistors to the new and improved evesun.com have no doubt noticed the proliferation of entries in our on-line version of the ever-popular “30 Seconds.” The ease of the point-and-click interface and the comparative anonymity of the Internet have given the reader reaction line a new life on the web – “The Bride of 30 Seconds,” if you will.

When entries first started coming in on-line, I was quick to edit each for spelling, punctuation and grammar, as I do the calls to the “traditional” phone line. But as more readers discovered the on-line version, the entries came in so fast it was all I could do to hit “approve” or “deny” in a timely fashion.

Then a couple of posters started pointing out the egregious offenses being committed against the English language by our cyberspace “30 Seconds” users. And I started feeling guilty. I thought I should really take an hour or two some afternoon and get in there and clean those up.

And then I thought, why bother?

For the past dozen or so years, you loyal readers have been denied one of the sheer and perverse joys of “30 Seconds” – actually hearing the calls in their raw and unabashedly stupid form. Once in a while I’ll try to preserve the original fractured syntax in print, but it always loses something in the translation.

On evesun.com, you’re seeing “30 Seconds” completely naked – the aforementioned spelling, grammar and punctuation be damned. In any other section of this site, that would make me cringe. On the “30 Seconds” page, it seems just about right.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Evening Sun Headlines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.