Category: Errors and Omissions

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PHOTOGRAPHER MISSING

Another anomaly from the Times today–the big setup and the even bigger letdown. We see a tantalizing array of photographs. Easy chairs? Barcaloungers? What’s the underlying theme? Our eye immediately finds the caption, unoriginally titled in that it is based on a big Hollywood movie title, and learn that it is from a photo exhibit by an artist named Saul Robbins. Brilliant idea: therapists’ chairs! I want to know more! Which gallery reps Saul, so I can go see the hilarity in person? Well, we’ll never know, because Saul or his work or the exhibit is not mentioned again. Sure, the article tells us a lot about shrinks and their offices, but what is the tie-in to this artwork? How did Mr. Robbins come to this project? Has he been in therapy for 20 years and finally confessed that he typically never listened, instead focusing on the office decor in his endless stream of experiences with various and sundry psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers? No, nothing like that. As has been the wont of the Times for the last few years, as it slips into decline, the pictures don’t really match the articles, or the captions don’t match the pictures, or the caption is misleading, or the article doesn’t bounce off the picture… you know, high school stuff. It reminds me of the story about the tall guy below.

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New York Times Comes Up Short

Here we go with another annoying goof. In Friday’s edition (August 24, 2007), the failing paper’s front page “Inside” box had yet another screw-up. There were six teasers for articles inside the paper, and the one titled “The Fun and the Fearsome” boasted an intriguing photo–a man who appears to be The Tallest Man in the World next to a woman who is presumably a visitor to the newly opened Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium in Times Square. She is about 5′ – 7″ and he is clocking in somewhere south of 9′ – 0″ — pretty amazing! It’s a good teaser! I can’t wait to read the article!

So I rip open the paper to page B25 and read… and read… and read…

NOTHING!

Not a word about the tall man! Now the questions begin to articulate themselves in my mind: is he a wax figure? Is the girl a wax figure? She’s dressed like such a NY shlub she must be real… or perhaps too real, like she’s an actor with a forced grimace and the all-too-typical touristy shopping bag and oversized purse. Then again, is this just a posed photograph? Maybe it’s the actual guy, visiting the museum to participate in its Grand Opening?

Most puzzling, once again, is why the editors don’t remember simple rules, like “Set it up, and pay it off.” That’s the purpose of the tease. That’s the raison d’etre for the tease in all aspects of advertising, promotions, PR, publicity, and media. Sure, the movie teasers might lie, but the public quickly catches on that the movie stinks and they’re only showing the 3 best scenes. And again, isn’t the NYT supposed to be a shade above the sleaze level of the movie and TV world? Have they completely given up on the idea of setting the standard for print journalism worldwide? Get it together people! It’s bad enough you shrunk the size of the actual paper. Please don’t appear as tiny as the poor woman in the picture. I know it’s hard, but all this simply heralds the ultimate demise of this once-fine paper, which suddenly, sadly, seems inevitable.

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Fiery?

A really ridiculous typo from the nation’s most important newspaper The New York Times on page A22 of the Los Angeles edition. Here’s the quote:

But Mrs. McCain is clearly not interested in having her husband take a beating at the expense of his family or enduring accusations about his briery temperament.

“Briery?” What the hell is that? Is that a word? Could it mean “thorny,” as in a brier patch? Nah. I think it’s just a really bad misspelling of the word fiery.

Well, my favorite dictionary tells me there actually is a word briery! The root word brier is defined as “a prickly plant or shrub,” so it could actually make sense. Is the NYT being super clever and willfully obscure? Impressive!

Strangely enough, there’s a 2nd definition of brier which Cindy McCainis “the woody root of which is used for making tobacco pipes.” Okay, I remember those pipes. My father even tried to sell them at some point in an ill-fated mail-order business scheme. The attic was filled with unsold pipes, boxes of tobacco packets, and some pretty impressive preprinted sales materials. My Dad took on the persona of fictional “Lou B. Meyer,” not a great name in the world of sedentary pipe-smoking. In fact, I’m picturing a fat, cigar-chomping 1930s show-biz mogul for some reason… In any case, isn’t a guy named “Lou” not to be trusted at all?

This 2nd definition has no adjectival variant. So I guess it would be untoward to take a leisurely drag and utter, “Hmm, this pipe is a little too briery for my tastes. I’m more of a Meerschaum man myself.”

Even stranger, there’s the other brier, which is spelled briar. I recall this because of some cartoon character who was associated with the Briar Patch. Was it Br’er Rabbit? What was Br’er Rabbit? Some of these things are just on the thin edge of memory. A friend of mine recently jogged something loose in my subconscious about a cartoon character named Odie Cologne. I obsessively watched this character in my young childhood, but it was laying inert at the very bottom of my soul until now. I certainly couldn’t tell what the context was until she told me. It was a show called The King Leonardo Show, later called The King and Odie. It ran from 1960 to 1963. She was asking me if I recalled Mr. Wizard, which rang a bell but is such a generic name, I imagined there have been hundreds of Mr. Wizards throughout television history.

When she showed me the images, especially Tooter Turtle (I didn’t remember his name) I almost got sick. It was like I was slammed back into age 4, sitting on the cold black-and-white checkered tiling in my basement in Colonia, NJ. It was such a precise and deep memory, that it effected me physiologically, causing me to shudder. I saw the pictures of Leonardo and Odie and remembered exactly their voices, clear as a bell in my mind. The images of the detective, the cop in the tiny helicopter, the elephant who could fly by dint of his rotating tail… go to this web page to see what I’m talking about. My stomach is hurting right now looking at those images, but it is an ecstatic pain, bittersweet that I had forgotten these cartoon friends but have now recovered them. Impossible!

Where were we? Oh, yes. The Briar Patch. So Wikipedia tells us the 1946 Disney movie Song of the South was based on three Br’er Rabbit folklore stories, one called The Briar Patch. So perhaps they showed that movie on TV when I was a kid. Who knows?

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A Mess ‘O Potamia

Look. I’ve been pissed lately (but I kept it to myself).

The New York Times keeps using the word “Mesopotamia” with regard to Iraq. Are they being cool-retro, as in thousands of years cool-retro? Or do they honestly not know that the place has been called “Iraq” since about the 6th Century? Or am I the dumb bell, not knowing that one of the Iraqi provinces had recently been renamed in honor of the Ancient Near Eastern empire? I had to find out.

I had last circled the June 22, 2007 front page where the Inside feature blurb stated, “But only one American soldier has died in the operations in Diyala Province, where 300 to 500 fighters for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia are believed to be hiding.” I felt like this was the last straw, so I circled this one and tossed it on the To Do pile on my desk. Actually, my entire desk is one big To Do pile. So I finally got around to it tonight.

I went to the Times’ website and ran a search. There were lots of hits on the word, so I narrowed the date range. The first hits that didn’t seem to refer to Mesopotamia, the ancient kingdom, seemed to be coming in around 2005.

I then noticed the phrase “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” kept coming up, not the word in isolation or in different contexts. The NYT of October 25, 2004 was the first use I could find of this term: the abstract tells me it is the new name of aMesopotamian Icon militant band led by Jordanian fighter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”Mesopotamian IconMesopotamian Icon

Aha.

I wanted to see if this usage was what triggered the Times’ barrage of Mesopotamias everywhere.

It took almost 8 months for the revitalized empire’s name to catch on. In fact, it turned up twice on the same day, July 10, 2005. First, it turns up as:

Representative government may, just possibly, still take hold in Mesopotamia, but neither Larry Diamond, a researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who was called by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to temporary service in Baghdad in early 2004, nor David L. Phillips, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as an adviser to the State Department before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein, are at all optimistic.

And in the very same issue, a letter to the Editor states:

The only kind of democracy that will flower in Mesopotamia will be some variety that is native to the place and that has been patiently nurtured by local cultivators over many decades.

Okay, here we go. (Never mind that the first is a 74-word run-on sentence). Now everybody’s misusing the word. But I was wrong. These two were about the only usages to date. It has rarely been used that way again.

I grabbed the copy of the newspaper I’d saved and sure enough, it was indeed used as the name of the ugly group “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” Sadly, because of the NYT standards, there is no way to call this out with either quote marks or italics. So I will probably continue to misread it and get annoyed. Here’s a case where the Times is following their traditions and I can’t fault them. Yea for following your own rules for once, but Nay for the rule itself. The ancient paper needs to find a way to clarify phrases like this in the future. J’accuse! — but in the humblest way possible this time.