Sunday, February 07, 2021

Who Knows Why?


Merlina
Tower of London
May, 2014
Photo by Lisa Hirsch

To clear up the issue I was getting at in my earlier post: I remain puzzled as to why the Gentle Author, who writes the Spitalfields Life blog, hasn't corrected a gross error on his blog.

There's a post at Spitalfields Life that went up on January 21 called "Merlin is Missing!". It's about one of the Tower of London ravens, who went missing some time in December and is presumed dead.

The problem in the GA's posting is that the bird's name is Merlina. Every other report I've seen, such as this one from the NY Times, got her name right. Her name is in the Tower of London's official Twitter feed. It's in Ravenmaster Christopher Skaife's charming book.

It's bad to get the name of your subject wrong. It's compounded when you fail to correct the error and ignore multiple prompts with the correct information: I made two blog comments, sent a couple of tweets, and sent an email to the Gentle Author, and the post hasn't been corrected. At least one other person on Twitter said the same.

And still, no correction. It would be easy to do, but somehow, not important enough. Or something.

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