In this article:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/041210.html
The last sentence seems truncated, did one of the Gerbils have a heart attack, mid publish?
I think perhaps Little Ed was researching the dozen taverns of York and returned not quite able to live up to his usual editing standards. 
What we got here … is a failure to code our HTML properly. The source code on that page shows the article should end:
There are some half-open <th tags confusing your browser. And just about everybody else’s, I’d guess, since the text doesn’t display in IE.
Ha. Thanks for solving the mystery.
Aha! You’re right. To hazard a guess, I’d say someone meant to type in the character entity between the periods of the ellipsis, and somehow entered those half-finished <th tags instead.
Every bit as grand as Philadelphia?!
Pshaw!
Washington in now dead.
Glad to be of help!
