Hey! Lynn Spencer Got Married and Moved to Michigan!

I was so excited when I heard the news! I found out when I visited her Girls With Wings web page and suddenly realized the text said she and her husband moved to Michigan!

But I started to get a little confused. I first met Lynn on this Girls-with-Wings web page, where she was a single mom of three kids who put herself through flight school to became a pilot, then penned a just-published book called Touching History. Since the two versions of Spencer's life story have only minor differences--I'm not calling a husband minor, mind you Lynn!--I wondered if that one was an update that superseded the other. But what if the other one came first? I started to get more confused. Had I made a faux pas? Glancing quickly over the texts, I couldn't tell with assurance which was which: the happy authoress Fed-Ex-ing her husband-buttressed paragraphs eastward, or the recent divorcée, her gay Michigan years now a fast dimming memory as she flung herself around the Virginia countryside spending book royalties like a drunken sailor?

Several obvious clues seemed contradictory. I quickly made cached, cached, versions so I could avoid any monkey business later on, then I decided to do a textual analysis.

I highlighted in red all the deletions and insertions--even the most minor-- occurring between the two, using "my" original text as foundational, with the enhusbanded text as the variant. Then I posted them side-by-side in two table columns on a Google web document, accessible here: http://docs.google.com

Deciding which version was the a priori, and which, a posteriori, has become an intriguing passion. I suspect the text I came across later is latterly in conception, which biases me to place it later in the timeline. And this version has the horribly obvious manipulation of using an early working title for Spencer's tome in the body of the text, then appending a "progress update" at the end. Har, har.

But could I find the smoking gun, the "Dan Rather mushroom cloud," which would prove this version to be fraudulent--the elegant and inarguable point which would humble even a JREFer?

Would goodness triumph over evil? It's getting heavy folks.


I shall dally no longer here--to it forthwith. Draw a line and be on.

________________________________________________

On