_ A few days ago, we saw how sometimes the most obscure fact errors make for the biggest outcry in the corrections column. Conversely, rather significant lapses can kind of quietly fall through the cracks.

On Oct. 30, 2008, The New York Times ran this rather amazing correction:

_ Corrections: For The Record
An article in some editions on Wednesday about Fordham University's plan to give an ethics prize to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer misspelled the surname of another Supreme Court justice who received the award in 2001. She is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not Ginsberg. The Times has misspelled her name at least two dozen times since 1980; this is the first correction the paper has published.

_ Generally, a misspelled name isn’t considered a huge error, per se. It doesn’t alter the reader’s understanding of the fact. It’s more embarrassing than anything else, sloppy. Anybody could misspell Ginsburg, and apparently everybody has. But more than two dozen times? It’s the sheer volume that stands out. And even more astounding was the fact that it had never been addressed.

I found it extremely interesting that The Times would acknowledge this lapse seemingly unsolicited, but I think it’s a testament to how seriously the paper takes mistakes. Accuracy is the lifeblood of the newspaper, the foundation of its credibility. And the copy editing staff is loaded with astute, critical thinkers, who make unbelievable saves on the most sneaky of fact errors under extreme duress.

But those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. And on June 28, 2010 — nearly two years after the big Ginsburg mea culpa —there was this embarrassing gaffe in the obituary of her husband, Martin D. Ginsburg:

_ Just Some Guy is in its third week, and I don’t want to get into the exact numbers because of a pending sponsorship deal, but let’s just say that its daily readership is well into two figures. I understand that some people don’t yet know what to make of it, because frankly I don’t quite yet know what to make of it. While obviously I enjoy when people read the site – it’s meant to be read – its main purpose is to be a place for me to collect my thoughts.

_ It’s like suddenly waking up in the middle of “Once in a Lifetime,” you get to a certain point where the trail behind you has grown over and your footprints have been washed out by the rain. From 1972 to 1987, I had
one address and one phone number. In the 25 years hence, I’ve had 17 addresses, in three time zones, and about as many phone numbers. I’ve held at least 20 jobs and applied for about 80 others. As I scroll through my Facebook friends, I see the worlds of my personal universe colliding — family, grade school, two high schools, summer camp, college, career. At some point, you may ask yourself: Well, how did I get here?

So how does that differentiate me from any of you? It doesn’t. If anything, I bet I’m on the low end, or at least in the soft middle, of the life-changes scale. We’re all information-age nomads, 21st-century Tom Joads loading up our hard drives with all our worldly possessions and setting off to wherever we think the world will treat us more kindly. My sister wrote a whole book on the premise of seeking your place in the world.  (Buy it here.) I guess this Web site is my little attempt to make a plaster print of my footsteps before the next rain comes.

So while the site may seem at times to be a form of extreme navel-gazing, all I can say is that it’s my navel, and I’ll gaze if I want to. Some people post pictures of their kid’s breakfast online every morning; I get up and do this. It’s pretty much the same thing. I write between 200 and 1,500 words about myself every day, which is equal to about 2 to 12 tweets. And some people tweet about themselves much more than that every day.

And if the subject matter seems disparate from day to day, well, that too is intentional. It’s the reflection of a disparate mind that can oscillate from superficial to sincere, maddeningly immature to mildly profound, excessively cocky to excessively self-loathing. … Am I schizophrenic? No. (And neither am I.) Am I bi-polar? I wish! I’m like octo-polar. The architect of my psyche cut a lot of corners. Instead of building separate superiority and inferiority complexes, he just built a duplex. My superiority and inferiority share a wall.

To borrow a Buddhist image, consider the links on this page — My Funny Hometown, Tales From the Newsroom, The Hall of Happy Birthday — to be like the spokes of a wheel. They start at a central point in my being and extend infinitely outward in different directions. Yet bound together, it forms a wheel rolling toward a greater understanding of myself. Or something.

Is the wheel Buddhist? Or am I thinking of a triangle? Or is that Hindi? Whatever. Long story short: This blog is like some kind of shape from some kind of exotic religion that I know nothing about. I hope you're enjoying it.

_If you want to flood The New York Times with complaints, just confuse two “My Little Pony” characters. If you want to crash the servers and bring the place to a grinding halt, however, confuse your “Hobbit” facts. Seriously: Make one mistake about “The Hobbit,” and every middle-aged Comic Book Guy from Mordor to Tatooine will fire off a viral missive on ListServ faster than you can say “WTF” in Klingon.

So all the world is abuzz about a correction that The Times ran on Dec. 30, some even calling it the greatest correction of all time. (Other are saying what a shame it is that a silly correction is overshadowing what was otherwise a really well-done story by Amy Harmon.) Now I’m a huge fan of corrections, especially at The Times, where we go to incredible lengths to ensure accuracy and even greater lengths to explain ourselves when we falter. This Web site will devote a lot of space to breaking down corrections.

Anyway, here is the one that has everybody all a-twitter:

_
Now that’s an awesome correction. But best of all time? I’m not ready to go there yet. It may not even be the best of 2011. To wit, here’s a correction from May that is just as surreally obscure:

_
Corrections
An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in ''The Hobbit;'' Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins's sword was called Sting.)

_If you want to weed out the nerds in the room, read that correction out loud. I guarantee that somebody will say, indignantly, as my friend Tony Gervino said to me: “Sting isn’t a sword! It’s a dagger!”

_At the Imperial War Museum in London this summer, my daughter and I took in the amazing WWI exhibit, which includes a walk-through trench complete with muddy, bloody Brits and the sounds of war. On the way out, I couldn't help but notice the doughboy in this picture: Is that not Chris Parnell of "S.N.L."?

Once again, I'm late to the Internet meme, because I am now learning that finding celebrity doppelgangers in antique photos has been all the rage for a while now.




While looking into this phenomenon, I found a site that will take your photo and use facial-recognition software to tell you which celebrities you resemble. Of course that made me curious.

Here's the picture I used, and below are what were presented as my top matches. Now, I realize that everybody has a faulty self-image when it comes to their looks, but I think these results are a little dubious ... to put it mildly.

Do I look like any of these people? Even remotely? Cuba Gooding Jr.? I'm at least two inches taller than him, to steal Miller Lite's old Brooks and Frank Robinson joke. And frankly, I think the Web site owes Renee Zellweger and Anna Faris an apology.

Have you ever been told that you resemble a celebrity? Tell me who and I'll compile a little Wall of Resemblence.

_I had no sooner finished writing about Bob Leavitt, who taught me to live through the mistakes I made in print, when I found that just last week I made a mistake in print. Every week, The New York Times issues an internal bulletin, as well as a public blog, called “After Deadline,” which chronicles the week’s failures and successes of the copy-editing desk. The goal, ultimately, is to help us all become better at our jobs, but the immediate impact is more like being put in the stockade in the public square as people throw the rotten fruit of grammar at you and call you awful names. Here was my offense:

_So who knew! If you had asked me, I would have said that “soft-peddling” makes more sense than “soft-pedaling.” But whatever. You learn something new every day around here. I’ll get it right next time. The really funny thing is that this isn’t my first visit to the peddle-pedal wormhole. Here’s “After Deadline” from December 2009:

_
Pedal pushers? What the hell do I know of girls’ shoes? Or pants, as they actually are, I guess. These kind of mistakes — homophones — are actually pretty common, mostly because spellcheck won’t catch them. And if it’s a reasonable exchange of words, you’re even more liable to read right over it. Not that "peddle pushers" makes much sense, but it did at the time, somehow.

Which brings me full-circle to Bob Leavitt:

One of the Peoria high schools was getting ready to play a football game against the fabled East St. Louis program of Bob Shannon, which had recently been the subject of the book “The Right Kind of Heroes.” I was to interview Shannon over the phone about the book, his success and the upcoming game, about which he said, in my story, “We have a tough road to hoe.”

Enter Leavitt, who didn’t even put his briefcase down on his desk before he came over to where I was sitting.

“Now, look Vecsey, I’m going to forgive you this one, because you’re a city boy. But what Bob Shannon probably said was ‘We have a tough ROW to hoe,’ as in it’s a farming metaphor. All right? The only tough ROAD to hoe I know is SW Adams Street when the Shriners are in town.”

This comes from my friend Bill Liesse, the former sports editor of the Peoria paper: "The signs on I-74 approaching the Murray Baker Bridge say, 'Eastbound traffic move left.' What they don't say is 'OR ... FUCK-ING ... DIE!' "

_By now, perhaps you've read about Baron Davis's "herniated dick" in The Charlotte Observer. Yes, these things happen, too. One errant letter can make the world of difference. The Observer's sports editor, Mike Persinger, exonerated his reporter Rick Bonnell ... and threw the copy desk under the bus. Just kidding. The paper is showing an appropriate mixture of remorse and humor over the matter, as is Baron Davis himself via Twitter: "Excuse the person from the Observer who made a Typo. I was Just having fun. My Goldmember is not herinated. Lol."

In my many years of working on sports copy desks, I've seen my share of "game-winning shits" in both basketball and baseball. My friend Jeff Shelman, who interned at The Peoria Journal Star before moving on to a nice career at The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, recalls once having a kid "pissing a pair of free throws."

Which you can't do with a herniated dick.

_I don’t claim to be the biggest R.E.M. fan, but my wife has loved you guys for years and I certainly respect your place in the pantheon of rock’n’roll immortals. I recall an interview some years back in which one of you, Mike Mills, I think, said that when you were starting out in Athens that one of the goals was something like, “We wanted to be the band that weren’t assholes.” If I’m wrong, or misheard it, I apologize, but it makes for a good story nonetheless.

In any event, I have two reasons to express my gratitude:

_
1.     Finally saw you live three years ago at Jones Beach, ponying up for expensive seats in the fifth row and then bribing a guard for access into the VIP beer garden (we had no idea that Jones Beach was a dry venue). It rained like crazy that night — to quote Levon Helm, “Like a cow pissing on a flat rock” — and they had to evacuate the arena because of the lightning. For a while we hunkered down in the beer garden and tried to drink out the storm, but eventually we decided that standing under metal tent poles was not the best idea we ever had. So we sprinted into the parking lot, which by now was a foot underwater, outrunning the lightning bolts to our car. We sat there listening for updates on the radio. About two hours later, you took the stage and kicked into CCR’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” Everybody was just soaked and cold, but you guys brought it full bore and gave us one of the greatest concerts …no, one of the greatest nights ever.

_2.     When my daughter was about 4, she latched onto “Nightswimming” as one of her favorite songs. We put it onto a cassette for her and would play it in the car, listening to her sweet, little voice singing along wistfully from the back seat. Your version is beautiful, too, but hers was a tear-jerker, man. R.E.M. may be no more, but this song will forever warm my heart.