The Great Western Shopping Center, Columbus OH doesn’t look like this anymore, but most people would probably like it a lot better if it did. Shopping was much more fun when you could see the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Taj Mahal from the front door of Penney’s or Kroger.

You kids play nice now. Don’t make me close down this freeway.

Is the following hilarious tidbit about pious mechanical mammals taken from The Onion, or from a major metropolitan daily newspaper? You be the judge:

Take Sally Ledford of Columbus, Ohio. “I just started crying when I came in here and saw the Scripture (on the trusses),” she said.

She even liked the museum’s animatronic cow, which looks real and quotes from the Bible, too.

“I just love to hear an animal praise the Lord and use Scripture.”

If you guessed “major metropolitan daily newspaper”, you’d be right.

Aa s side note, why is the word “scripture” capitalized here? The tendency of local newspapers to capitalize any pronoun referring to “God” really annoys me, but I could still understand capitalizing “Bible”, or maybe even “The Holy Scriptures” because they could be seen as book titles. Is it necessary, though, to capitalize the mere word “scripture”?

If I worked for the Observer and I were writing story about God blowing “His” nose, would I have to capitalize the word “handkerchief” every time I used it? How about “snot”?

Random Friday stuff:

• This is pretty telling on several levels: NBC’s Thursday night lineup was beaten by a telenovela on Univision, a Spanish-language network that doesn’t even have over the air affiliates in several large US markets.
• Had breakfast in the now smoke-free Lighthouse Grill this morning. It was really nice, but we still sat in the (former) non-smoking section, because that’s where the windows are.
• I’m now officially registered for classes in the fall. Yer Humble Host has begun the transition from part-time, amateur information geek to full-time, professional information junkie with a Master’s degree. I just hope I don’t wind up leading story time for the kiddies at some suburban branch library.