"Throughout the morning, law enforcement officers stood on the perimeter of the five-acre field. At no point did the protest turn violent, though officers escorted Heywood Jablome away after he held up a sign directly in front of Burk that read “Make me dinner” before shouting “Oprah rules.”
While proofreading, I once caught a textbook author referring in complete seriousness to (I paraphrase) “the kite company founded by Ben Franklin’s brother, Dowe Cheatum and Howe.”
(I traced the passage’s source to a Web page that used the name as an obviously fictional example – but my author fell for it. And so did the copyeditor and everyone else who had read the passage up to that point!)
We once had a caption in my paper of a high school kid who told the photographer his name was Mike Oxbig. No one thought anything of it, and the reporter [it wasn’t me, I swear] captioned it and the photo ran. Then the phone calls started, I think there were only three or four calls.
Embarassing? Sure, but it was funny as hell. If nothing else, we sold a few extra copies to the kid and his friends that week.