Showing posts with label oops. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oops. Show all posts

Friday, June 07, 2019

Turning working girls into pretty women is our bidness


Baton Rouge: June 6, 1974.

The decision is made that if you cannot do anything about working girls downtown, you at least can turn them into pretty women.

Either that, or my hometown was the epicenter of unintentionally hilarious advertising during my youth.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Adventures in speling


Unless, of course, the incident at the New York hospital somehow involved tequila, salt and lime wedges. . . .

No, probably not.

Jeez, that's one word you'd think everyone in New Orleans knew how to spell.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Pulitzer subito!


At the funeral of Pope John Paul II, from the sea of the faithful in St. Peter's Square, banners and chants arose, all demanding a single thing -- "Santo subito!"

"Sainthood now!"

After seeing the above bit of radical truth-telling in the Rayne (La.) Independent -- even if it was by accident, a bit of exasperated prose, "dummy type" that got left in when it shouldn't have -- I got to thinking what a wonderful thing it would be if Americans could descend en masse on Columbia University to demand "Pulitzer subito!" Because this right here, folks, would be my candidate for the first Pulitzer Prize by public acclamation.

Even if it was a glorious "mistake," much like the most famous of the genre, when The Boston Globe's backshop accidentally left the joke headline "Mush From the Wimp" on an editorial about one of Jimmy Carter's speeches on the economy.

After all, in lying times like these, I'll take a little unvarnished truth any way I can get it.

HAT TIP: Romenesko.



UPDATE: You don't get Pulitzers for great journalism anymore (no matter how unintentional). You don't get them anymore for telling the truth, either -- though some have gotten them for fabricating stories out of whole cloth.

No, that's not how it works. Instead, you get fired.


Sunday, July 06, 2008

The perils of preprints

The problem with preprinted sections in the newspaper is the very real possibility something will happen between the printing and the distribution that will make you look really, really stupid.

Or worse.

Today, it's
The New York Times' turn to get bitten in the arse:

Correction: July 6, 2008
An article today in Sunday Business about missed opportunities to reduce America’s dependence on imported oil refers to a 1990 effort by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, to block higher mileage requirements for vehicles and notes that Mr. Helms did not return calls seeking comment. The section went to press on Thursday, before Mr. Helms’s death Friday morning.