Tough to tell a funny story when the key word is “sodomy.” But I’ll try.
So, I no sooner wrote about corrections yesterday than I woke up this morning to see a correction on an article I had worked on. This was on a very rare appearance on the Foreign/National Desk, where sometimes I will fill in if they are shorthanded. You hate to fill in on a desk, like you’re some kind of savior, and make a correctable error. It’s like, And for my next trick …
So imagine my dismay when I saw this correction:
So, I no sooner wrote about corrections yesterday than I woke up this morning to see a correction on an article I had worked on. This was on a very rare appearance on the Foreign/National Desk, where sometimes I will fill in if they are shorthanded. You hate to fill in on a desk, like you’re some kind of savior, and make a correctable error. It’s like, And for my next trick …
So imagine my dismay when I saw this correction:
Because of an editing error, an article in some copies on Monday about the acquittal of the Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on a sodomy charge misstated the action taken by the Kuala Lumpur High Court in 2004 in connection with an earlier conviction of Mr. Anwar on charges of sodomy and abuse of power. The court overturned the conviction for sodomy, not the entire verdict.
Now, I remembered the reference clearly, but I did not remember trimming the word “sodomy” and creating the fact error by implying that ALL the charges were dropped. Of course, when you’re on deadline and the story is too long, sometimes you make trims that seem logical at the time but later turn out to have altered the meaning in some slight, or not so slight, way.
Infuriated with myself, I called downstairs to apologize to the editor who worked on the story, and to my surprise, she, too, was mystified by the correction. “Every version I see in the paper has the correct wording,” she told me. A few minutes later, another e-mail pops up. “Oh wait – I think it happened in the article of Monday’s paper. The one we worked on was for Tuesday. So yay, it’s not on us (I think)!”
Yay is right. Another tragedy narrowly averted.
And that’s what my life boils down to sometimes — worrying about whether Malaysian politicians have been acquitted of JUST sodomy or acquitted of sodomy AND abuse of power.
Infuriated with myself, I called downstairs to apologize to the editor who worked on the story, and to my surprise, she, too, was mystified by the correction. “Every version I see in the paper has the correct wording,” she told me. A few minutes later, another e-mail pops up. “Oh wait – I think it happened in the article of Monday’s paper. The one we worked on was for Tuesday. So yay, it’s not on us (I think)!”
Yay is right. Another tragedy narrowly averted.
And that’s what my life boils down to sometimes — worrying about whether Malaysian politicians have been acquitted of JUST sodomy or acquitted of sodomy AND abuse of power.
His Funny Hometown, Too
In response to the My Funny Hometown entry on the Beacon Theater, I got an e-mail from Pete Heinz, whom I've known since kindergarten, recalling his own funny Beacon Theater adventure. (Folks, I encourage this kind of participation. Feel free to write in with your own tales of Port Washington hilarity.):
Back in high school, some of us were drinking beer and booze in Giagu's attic before going to the Beacon to see “The Three Amigos.” We were stewed by the time the movie started and were shouting and throwing beer cans at the screen when, for whatever reason, I left my seat and moved to the back row, right off the aisle, and passed out. I woke up at 3 in the morning — alone and locked in the theater. I had to climb out the bathroom window and scale down the marquee to escape. In school the following Monday, more than one student told me they saw me asleep as they were departing the theater.
When I was trying to figure out how to get out of the theater, I noticed that the emergency exits were chained shut. Any theater employee locking those doors after the show would have had to walk past me — twice.
More Leavitt-ations
Finally I leave you with yet more sage advice from the great Bob Leavitt, which came back to me the other day after I wrote about how easy it is to misspell names, even famous names.
This was when I was covering high school sports, where the potential for misspelling names is greater because, for one thing, they’re not famous, but also because the uniforms usually don't have names on them and usually the game programs are littered with typos and wrong uniform numbers. I've covered entire basketball games thinking that Jones was having a great night, only to learn after the game that the kid's name was Anderson. And let’s face, every 5-foot-5 white kid from Tremont, Illinois, looks the same as every 5-foot-5 white kid from Dunlap, Illinois.
And when you get to girls’ sports, you encounter a whole other phenomenon of Jenny vs. Jenni vs. Genni vs. Genny, which Leavitt described thusly:
"Remember: No two girls want to go to the prom wearing the same dress or with the same spelling of their first name."
This was when I was covering high school sports, where the potential for misspelling names is greater because, for one thing, they’re not famous, but also because the uniforms usually don't have names on them and usually the game programs are littered with typos and wrong uniform numbers. I've covered entire basketball games thinking that Jones was having a great night, only to learn after the game that the kid's name was Anderson. And let’s face, every 5-foot-5 white kid from Tremont, Illinois, looks the same as every 5-foot-5 white kid from Dunlap, Illinois.
And when you get to girls’ sports, you encounter a whole other phenomenon of Jenny vs. Jenni vs. Genni vs. Genny, which Leavitt described thusly:
"Remember: No two girls want to go to the prom wearing the same dress or with the same spelling of their first name."
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