site: copy edit — 2 pieces tightened, 3 cross-piece inconsistencies resolved

daily-finds.log.md

@@ -4665,3 +4665,22 @@ Amazon: n-a (a manuscript in a museum).
 - **saint-olafs-church-wasdale-head** was the fourth-ranked candidate and the closest call. Held on the same principle that held `mac-racken-bridge` on 07-29: the piece rests on "England's smallest active parish church" and on the Viking-longship roof beams, and the source for both is an Atlas Obscura entry. The church has a real parish and the Lake District has no shortage of published local history, so this is a good candidate for a thin day with time to dig — but a review that can only cite the entry it came from is a paraphrase.
 - **fulton-steamboat-willie-playing-cards** clears the bar and was held for a duller reason: the interesting review is about the printing — the holographic foil process, the English handmade tuck stock, why no two emboss alike — and none of that is on the product page. It wants a second source or the deck in hand.
 - **chipbuilder** and **chronos-terminal-games** both hold up as finds and both would need to be *played* through to review honestly, which is not something this run can do.
+
+## 2026-08-01 — copy edit
+
+Fresh-eyes sonnet subagent over all 28 pieces of prose written this run (19 find bodies, 6 bundle blurb-plus-intro pairs, 3 review bodies). **Two prose changes — the first non-clean run since 07-25 — and the pass earned its keep twice over, because it also caught three cross-piece inconsistencies and correctly declined to fix any of them.**
+
+The two prose edits, both accepted:
+- `fulton-steamboat-willie-playing-cards` — cut "this is one of the more charming things anyone has done with it" and put the fact back where the praise had been: "this twenty-dollar deck puts the 1928 mice and their shipmates on the court cards." Exactly the principle-1 fix the charter asks for — generic praise replaced by the specific thing. 74 → 62 words.
+- `agloe-paper-town` (review) — "airtight and rather beautiful" → "airtight", and "a very good story" → "a good story". Two vague intensifiers, neither carrying information. 367 → 363 words.
+
+**The three catches, all resolved in the main session, because all three were factual calls rather than prose ones:**
+1. **`champion-lodgepole-pine` contradicted itself.** Subtitle said the tree "germinated fifty years before Plymouth Rock"; the body says it started growing around 1560. That is sixty years, not fifty. The error came from compressing Atlas Obscura's "more than 50 years before the Pilgrims landed" into a round number that then read as exact. Subtitle now says sixty.
+2. **The `archimedes-palimpsest` subtitle undersold the body, on both the find and the review.** It read "the only surviving Greek copy of three Archimedes works", which is a weaker and different claim than what the bodies actually support: two of the three (*The Method*, the *Stomachion*) survive in no copy in *any* language, and only *On Floating Bodies* is a Greek-only survival. Both subtitles now read "the only known copies of two lost Archimedes works" — precise, and the three-work nuance stays in the bodies where there is room for it.
+3. **`praia-de-santa-monica` and its bundle cited opposite ends of the same range.** The find's subtitle says eleven kilometres, the bundle description said eighteen; the find's body explains that sources disagree and gives the range. Nobody reading one page would notice, but the two are adjacent in the feed. The bundle description now says "eleven-to-eighteen kilometres", which matches the body and keeps the honest uncertainty visible.
+
+The subagent's reasoning for escalating rather than fixing was right in all three cases: which end of a disputed range to cite, and whether a subtitle's claim is weaker than its body's, are editorial-fact decisions, not wording ones.
+
+**Spot-check honoured rather than skipped**, per the standing 07-25 instruction. The subagent reported measuring rather than estimating and gave per-file counts; four were re-counted by hand in the main session — `saint-olafs-church-wasdale-head` (81), `archimedes-palimpsest` find (82), `cheapfoodmap` (77) and the `archimedes-palimpsest` review (405) — and all four matched its figures. Every find body lands in 62–82 against the 40–90 budget; the three reviews at 367 / 363 / 405 against 250–450, none of them reaching for the narrative extension the charter allows history subjects.
+
+Format exception recorded again so it is not re-litigated: `joke-two-eyes` is 14 words against a 40–90 budget. Flagged, judged, left alone — the joke-find format is the setup and the punchline and nothing else, as with `joke-broken-pizza` on 07-29.