Showing posts with label Peter Porter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Porter. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Typo brides and unacceptable downtown

Peter Porter's poem 'Brides come to the poet's window' presents the serendipitous typo; the first lines are:

Birds it should have been, but pleasure quickens
As the white and peregrine performers land -

Glancing at a recent paper called 'FISMA Compliance and Cloud Computing' I came across the following sentence ...

If the cloud goes down then organizations will have unacceptable downtown that their IT departments can not control causing a stop to the critical services that the organization uses to conduct its daily operations.

'Downtown' instead of 'downtime' suggests the malign influence of spellcheck. Nevertheless there is something poetic, in a sort of robotic or aleatoric way, in this language with its talk of clouds going down and downtowns that IT departments are unable to control.