Lettters: Best NYT Correction Ever, Pretty good Australian Correction, Dan Grobstein File

Daniel Dern sent me the best New York Times correction ever:

 

An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor.No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.

A listserv I am on distributed this via The Media Blog: a correction that ran in Australia's Morning Bulletin. The gist of it; the farmer said 30 sows and pigs, the reporter wrote that "30,000 pigs" were floating down the river. Talk about not applying common sense! Of course, no one who had either heard or read the morning farm report on the radio would mistake "sows and" for "thousand" nor wonder what "barrows and gilts" are. It appears the Bully has scrubbed the correction off its web site--if it ever posted it.

Dan Grobstein File

• Frank Rich: News-starved American have 'no idea' what's going on in Egypt
• TOP TALENT The whole argument behind bloated executive compensation is that companies must pay big in order to attract the very best people. In reality we find that many of them – and Wagoner will be the poster child for years to come – are world class idiots. . . .If the one trick they seem to have learned in their expensive educations (cut costs + something something = PROFIT!!!) doesn't work they are dumbstruck. They stand around like deer in headlights until someone fires them.
• AOL HuffPo AIL HufPo Huffintgon AOK
• Blue Shield is Trying to Kill Me
• The Super Bowl and supersized excess | Michael Tomasky
  Politicians are a) afraid to turn down any sports team's request because if the team moves they'll never win another election & b) they're jock sniffers. The high point of their lives seems to be hobnobbing with sports stars. In Newark, NJ they built a facility for the NJ Devils. It's a few blocks from Penn Station and is on Broad Street which is the main drag in town. City Hall and the Courthouse is on Broad. There used to be major department stores. Prudential insurance has their headquarters there. The front of the hockey building faces Penn Station so the commuters feel safer walking from the train and the back faces Broad Street which just brings down the area.
• Ken Olsen, Who Built DEC Into a Power, Dies at 84
  By GLENN RIFKIN
  Mr. Olsen helped reshape the computer industry as a founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, at one time the world's second-largest computer company. (Note: a beloved son of MIT)
• LOW HANGING. AND DIMINUTIVE.
  After months and months of prodding, the House Republicans have finally coughed up a list of specific things they want to cut from the budget. The hit list totals…wait for it…$58 billion.
• SLIDESHOW: The Future ... Just Not Here How Europe and Asia are utterly kicking our butts in high-speed rail. We tell the story in fourteen photos.
• If you read Steve Wozniak's memoir it's chock full of descriptions of his science fair projects. A teacher should get the students to think. Teaching to the test makes a class of robots. I once read a science fiction story (have no idea of title or author -- could have been a comic book) about a famous inventor whose education was very innovative and out of the mainstream. He suffers some sort of accident in an experiment and is turned into a baby. His new guardians, wanting him to grow up and repeat his life of accomplishment decide to get him the best teachers available to educate him. Of course the reason he was so inventive is that he wasn't taught by the best teachers. We're not even letting the best teachers teach. (And I wish homeschooling could be outlawed. If everybody had to go to public school then public schools would be excellent).
  The Importance of Making Things
• Texas drives Amazon out of state over dispute
• Your liberal media at work Harry Reid Is Majority Leader of the US Senate