Butchered column clearly the work of gremlins
To those who thought my column was even more convoluted than usual Saturday: you were right.
Somewhere between computer and press, the first 150 words of the piece simply disappeared — poof — just like Amelia Earhart or the guy who played Kramer on Seinfeld.
Instead, the column began (on the front page, no less) with the second 150 words, which — apparently for emphasis — were repeated when the article, which was about the future of Island View beach, turned to page A2. The result was utter nonsense or, as one reader put it, “the best thing you have written all year.”
How this happened, I don’t know. I tried feigning comprehension when someone with knowledge of information technology explained it to me, but I merely succeeded in looking like Donald Trump faking his way through a foreign-policy briefing.
Anyway, I would be in high dudgeon, which is like low dudgeon only with a better view, had I not once done the same thing to Les Leyne’s column during the editing process, butchering it like a fatted calf before it reached the printed page. No computer error there. It was all me. That robbed me of the licence to get selfrighteous Saturday.
Besides, it’s not the first time technology has betrayed us. A quarter-century ago, when the Times Colonist broke in its new colour press, we were plagued with delays, prompting visiting journalist Charles Lynch to say something like: “Funny town, Victoria. You have a weekly called Monday that publishes on Wednesdays, and a daily that comes out whenever it damn well wants.” Soon after that, when breaking in a new photo-handling system, we ran a picture of farmer and a pig where a husband and wife were supposed to be (the wife was identified as the pig). When we switched to electronic pagination, we were bedevilled by stories that abruptly ended in mid-sent
Alas, we can’t always blame computer gremlins. Just like forest fires, many of our errors are human-caused. Frequent readers will know that I never, ever pass up the chance to repeat our “Woman who beat off cougar hailed as hero” headline.
When wrong, we try to correct our errors with as much dignity as we can muster, though our collective cheeks flush if we then need to correct the corrections. It took us a couple of goes to get the Welsh flag right during the 1994 Commonwealth Games. We also ran through photos of most of the fish in the Atlantic before finally coming up with a picture of a turbot. In our defence, neither was in the same league as this classic: “The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wish to apologize for our apology to Mark Steyn, published Oct. 22. In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Steyn published Oct. 15, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction.”
The only truly funny corrections are, of course, the ones published by other newspapers.
One from the southern U.S. once spun the arrest of a man named Fnu Lnu into an essay on the spreading influence of Vietnamese drug smugglers on the Gulf coast. The next day came the correction explaining that Fnu Lnu was not Vietnamese, but a police acronym for First Name Unknown, Last Name Unknown.
Then there was this, which has been attributed to both U.S. and British publications: “Dianne K. Merchant, 38, was incorrectly listed as being fined for prostitution in Wednesday’s paper. The charge should have been failure to stop at a railway crossing.”
Sometimes it’s a simple case of mis-hearing. A Tampa Bay Times reporter unfamiliar with Star Wars quoted the moderator of a Comic Con speed-dating event as asking “Are you ready to find love in all the wrong places” instead of “Alderaan places.” Similarly, after quoting the chairman of the Wolverhampton Wanderers as saying “Our team was the worst in the first division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League,” Britain’s Guardian had to change “team” to “tea” (the chairman had just been served a cuppa). An Australian story that quoted a man as seeing “30,000 pigs floating down the Dawson River” was corrected to read “30 sows and pigs.”
Sometimes all you can do is say sorry and move on.