I always read the Corrections column, as you never know when something good is going to crop up:
I wish *The New Yorker *still ran those great little “Ho-Hums” on the bottom of the page!
<Emily Litella>“That’s very different. Never Mind.”<Emily Litella>
That’s a good one. I liked this one, from an article I read Friday:
Darrell Hammond was a long-time cast member of Saturday Night Live who was famous for his impression of Bill Clinton, not a LulzSec hacker. That would have made for a slightly different story.
I still recall fondly back in 1993 when the *Times *had to correct the title of a Whoopi Goldberg film: “The correct title is Made in America, not Maid in America.”
I’d be more apt to go to the art show if they were featuring “The Tribute Monkey II”.
Wednesday evening, I heard NPR make several corrections to Tuesday’s newscast.
Details, mostly, but the fuller stories were kinda cool.
Things like Belarus is not a part of Russia.
And questioning whether Sherman(?) should be remembered as a Disney songwriter (and pointing out that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was not a Disney production).
Out of curiosity, if nothing else. Is the monkey being offered as tribute? Is it collecting tribute, perhaps on behalf of some mafiosa organ grinder? Whatever happened to the first monkey, anyway?
“We apologise for a misprint in last week’s column in which we inadvertently described Major-General Sir James Farquharson as as ‘bottle-scarred veteran’. This should of course have read ‘battle-scared’.”
The New Yorker does, very occasionally, use these corrections as column fillers. March 12 has one, page 81. They used to do it regularly and I always enjoyed them. My favorite was someone wrote to Dear Abbey complaining that some TV host always signed off “For xxxx and me” (I don’t recall who xxxx was). Abbey went on a riff how grammar was becoming less prescriptive and the person should cool out on the error. The New Yorker printed the exchange without comment, IIRC.
This one is supposedly true: “The map of Europe, North Africa and the Arab nations published in Monday’s editions contained the following errors: Libya was labeled as the Ukraine; Bulgaria and Romania were transposed; Bosnia-Herzogovina was identified as Bosnia; Montenegro should have been identified as a separate state bordering Serbia; Cyprus and the West Bank were not labeled; Andorra, a country between France and Spain, was not labeled; the Crimean peninsula appeared twice on the Black Sea; Kuwait was not identified by name - instead, the initials of the Knight-Ridder News Service were in its place.”
I want to see that map now.
Virginian-Pilot, November 1992.
No, no, it’s a Tribute Monkey, as in, it evokes the act and sound of the original as it plays its hits. And it being the ***second ***Tribute Monkey that means the first Tribute Monkey could have been a tribute to an entirely different act and this one’s a tribute to the tribute…
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The correction was made without comment, if I recall correctly, but years ago Reuters once released a brief piece about a meat recall due to contamination. The only problem was that the editorial staff was apparently snoozing on the job, so the lede about a significant recall of beef patties turned into “…recall 94,400 pounds of frozen ground beef panties…”.
Which still makes me giggle, and I’d have loved to see an actual correction clarifying that your frozen meat underpants are probably perfectly safe for human consumption.
No, no, the first Tribute Monkey got shut into Davey Jones’s locker.
Yeah, what happened to those? I often cheated and read those first. Is “ho-hums” just your name for them, or is that what they were really called?
They really were called Ho-Hums: I have two collection books of them, from 191 and '32. I miss them, too! A few years ago I even write to The New Yorker and proposed collating another collection book, but they weren’t interested. From the 1931 volume:
Neatest Trick of the Week
[headline in the Long Island Daily Star]
WOMAN FALLS 3 STORIES AS SHE WATERS FLOWERS
A stray dog with the name E.G. Caldwell has been about the village for a few days.–Carroll County NH Independent
–Not old Eddy Caldwell?
I read something about E.B. White and I thought that he called them news breaks. They still appear, but rarely.
It’s the sequel to his original work, “The Surrender Monkey”. The full and correct title is, “Surrender Monkey II: The Tribute”.
The Oregonian has to “clarify things” about how one of their editors died. He didn’t die in a car outside an apartment, but inside, during a “visit” to a young lady friend he had a peculiar relationship with.
Of course all the usual odd news web sites picked up on this. So, not exactly being kept quiet.
(Link is to OregonLive, the Oregonian’s web site. Same thing.)