he did not directly indicate his level of satisfaction with that article, but put that magazine on my coffee table shortly after he arrived, cautioning me, as i reached for it, with a disparaging comparison that went over my head, "it's probably no better than --"
and here, well, i cannot recall whether he said jet or ebony, but whichever he actually said, what i heard was the voice of aaron mcgruder's huey freeman invoking cable network BET. there ensued an interesting discussion of magazine publishing, and how our impressions of the reputability and social significance of certain periodicals have changed since our first childhood exposures to the brands and the esteem they commanded among adults in our environments, but i eventually did thumb through that magazine.
this provocative table appeared in an item concerning criminals cooperating with investigators:
you will notice, as i did, that the row titles most requiring explanation have little superscript enumerations suggestive that further explanation might appear, elsewhere, within the manuscript adjacent to those indicated enumerations.
dear reader, no such explanation was to be found for those rows titled Fireantis and Environmental aooenses: there was neither a footnote 1 nor a footnote 2. alas. Antiirust, Robbety and Lorceny, at least, can be read: they are almost exactly the right shape.
on reflection, these must not be typos in the proper sense, but optical character recognition errors, by consideration of which, it may become apparent that "aooenses" must be "offenses", a similarly-shaped word appearing in two other row titles and sharing a majority of letter positions, and "fireantis" must be "firearms."
but distinguishing egregious typo from ocr hiccough doesn't save the [cribbed-from-what-can-only-be-Don-Diva's-cache-of-Edward-Snowden-leaked-N-S-A-documents] table, and, by extension and synecdoche, the author, and the magazine's entire editorial staff, any credibility with its would-be reader, for the layers of proofreading that all simultaneously failed or the failure in production management to establish sufficient layers of same. and ocr does not explain the missing footnotes. robbety indeed. i put that magazine down.
in fairness to Don Diva, i have never looked (and hope never to look) so closely at Maxim.
some time later, spotting a nice photograph of forest whitaker next to a couple columns of text in a periodical, i told him there was an "interesting article in ebony," to which he replied, with grim certainty: "no. no there is not. not in ebony."
'twas lorceny and robbety aooenses did antiirust in the fireantis
all murdelaunder synecdoche and ocroofreed mantgt 'putay standards!