There is still something about thumbing through the pages of a newspaper that you can not replicate online. It is that unexpected moment of stumbling upon a snippet of text that unintentionally explains a lot. True, you can stumble onto a lot of interesting bits following links–but there is something about turning the page and stumbling upon it that is just enjoyable in an old school way.
Very often you find these moments of joy when you read the Corrections. Today’s Washington Post had a fine example as they printed a correction to their 11-27-10 Names & Faces gossip column:
This was a perfect little bit about so many things and it made me laugh out loud (it was even sandwiched between two corrections to puzzles).
OTOH, the class sounds like it would be a great one to take.
Consider this an open thread.
Cheers
Bnut
That the creator of the Wire would have a rosy outlook on things proves the Post has no one who has actually seen the Wire.
Yutsano
You can also minor in Klingon at Berkeley.
alwhite
I miss the old days, before computerized typesetters. Newspapers used to contain all kinds of really interesting things to fill up the spaces at the end of stories. The oddest was the alphabet in order of usage in English:
etaoinshrdlucmfwypvbgkqjxz
Oh I also see no reason for optimism.
Bob Loblaw
That is hilarious. Though I wish Simon would use more of his time making Treme more watchable and less being such an emo all the time. I’m surprised he hasn’t gone on a shooting spree with David Chase riding shotgun…
Xecky Gilchrist
There’s plenty of reason for optimism – the youngsters can’t possibly be as stupid as us.
Martin
I’m encouraged that Assange is going to do corporate data dumps as well, starting with a bank. Part of what kept my dad sane at his job was whistleblowing on his employer to the IRS. He’d have had a fucking field day with Wikileaks today. The IRS finders fee is what helped him retire early.
There are all kinds of golden parachutes out there if you are resourceful.
WyldPirate
Rachel Maddow excoriates the Obama administration for their shitty negotiation tactics.
Let’s hear the excuses Obot excuse makers….
General Stuck
If you take every third letter of every second word of every six syllables, it says “Obama Sucks”. And you thought it was a correction. Bwaa ha.
I want my cookie for breaking this code before widlythang.
srv
SSSSHHHIIIIIIIIIIT! A correction to cherish.
I’ve been so uncomfortable that everyone else is more pessimistic than me now. Really disturbing. So I’m an optimist now. Pretty soon I’ll be quoting scripture.
As move always says, there’s a silver lining to every hurricane.
Yutsano
@Martin:
Part of what I do at the IRS is locate folks who have dropped off the radar. I don’t get an extra bonus for finding them however.
Dennis G.
@Bob Loblaw:
Being the ‘man without hope’ is part of his brand. It takes a lot of complaining to get a correction and David was just protecting his image. Also, too,the difference between the print and online corrections is part of the fun.
And it is great to see a local boy get rich monetizing sentimental presentations of doom. Is this a great Country or what…
freelancer
@WyldPirate:
Do you ever gag from being so consistently intolerable and relentlessly sanctimonious?
Martin
@WyldPirate: If you can’t negotiate with the GOP, then what’s the complaint? By your own reasoning, the only thing Obama can do right here is to do nothing.
srv
@Yutsano: At AUSC, we used to celebrate when a 1040 came in from Louisiana. I suggest starting there.
Dennis G.
@WyldPirate:
Stop the presses.
Do you mean to say that somebody on the teevee said something critical about Obama. Well, shut my mouth that’s some real news you’ve got there sport.
Thanks for keeping on top of that stuff. If you’ve any free time there is a bear shitting in the woods with a real scoop for you. Be sure to put ‘breaking’ in all caps when you share it.
Cheers
WyldPirate
@freelancer:
ahhh. Not hopey/changey enough for you, huh freelancer?
It’s ok. You can put your fingers in your ears and sing “la-la-la-la-la, Obama is wonderful.” It’ll make it all better.
WyldPirate
@Dennis G.:
Yeah, that Obama. He’s just kicking ass and taking names, isn’t he?
Keep telling yourself that….
WyldPirate
@Martin:
What’s the complaint?
Doing ineffectual shit that reinforces the GOP’s lies for one.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@WyldPirate: There’s a different between a groove and a rut, brother. You are stuck deep in the latter.
Martin
@Yutsano: Oh, cool, I didn’t know you were working for the man. Good on you.
Yeah, he was a tax analyst for his company for a run. Was responsible for telling the VPs when they were out of compliance with the tax code. They never considered that the million in taxes they were dodging would amount to the biggest bonus some middle-staffer would ever see by turning them into the IRS.
US executives are fucking stupid.
My dad would have drowned Wikileaks in documents. All the shit that the IRS wouldn’t have cared about. He was a responsible employee but hated that company with a white hot passion.
Ash Can
As a Johns Hopkins grad, I just want to say…I quit.
jl
@Yutsano: Don’t come after me, don’t come after me Yutsano. I’m clean. I don’t make near 250K even if I do read this lefty blog! I swear, honest.
And I need my yacht for work. I commute. Honest. It’s complicated. I can explain.
Sly
@WyldPirate:
The Used Car analogy for legislative politics doesn’t hold water when the salesman you’re haggling with doesn’t care if he or she actually sells the car.
Don’t worry. Shit makes sense when you begin to realize that 95% of American politics is theater and that people with any identifiable political leanings are not members of the audience.
freelancer
@WyldPirate:
You’re exhausting, and you’re just text here. I can’t imagine what it would be like to actually have to listen to you incessantly hate hate hate on the President in real life, when the real enemies of progressives are Republicans, the financial lobby, and the Super-Rich.
Yutsano
@jl:
Believe it or not, we’ve been told this. And we’ve actually allowed it. But the yacht owner did harbor tours rather than simple pleasure cruises. So yeah as long as you can prove that it’s actually okay.
@Martin:
Large business is where folks really get to have fun mucking around in other peoples’ business. You can literally go through everything trying to find out where they’re shelling the profits and such. International is even more entertaining, especially since we’re getting more cooperation with foreign governments. It’s where I’m trying to aim my career path. I hear Paris is nice this time of year…
Sly
@freelancer:
You’re safe so long as you don’t frequent any White Pride events.
WyldPirate
@Evolved Deep Southerner:
Perhaps it’s because I’m highly pissed at the buffoonery coming out of the White House and out of the Democrats. Maybe I’m a tad ticked because the Dems are getting played and don’t have the fucking balls to call out the Rethugs for being lying sacks of shit.
Maybe I’m tired of seeing the country circling the toilet bowl. I’m sick of seeing Obama and the Dems not only lose the argument of the economic situation of the country, but fucking concede to the Rethugs cocked-up lies and BS by conceding out of the gate or blowing the message entirely before the goddamned election out of sheer fucking spinelessness.
Most of all, I’m sick of all the bullshit excuses and “eleven-dimensional chess” horseshit.
I may be in a rut, but the whole goddamned country is too and that rut is turning into a fucking sinkhole.
I appreciate your concern though, EDS.
Dennis G.
@WyldPirate:
He may or may not be. I suppose it might depend on the given issue and the facts, but going that deep into any topic is not your cup of tea–as it were.
In your black & white binary world or opposites everything is all bad all the time or all good. But very little can be good because anything and everything will fail–will always fail–your binary litmus test.
You are correct that there are negative signs in the world. Truth is, that has always been the case. Your consistent failure is that you always try to force all information into your black and white world so that you can sort it quickly and easily. It is very Bush-like of you regardless of how you define your politics.
Good luck with that, but thanks for the constant and reliable level of amusement. Such consistency in an ever changing world must take a lot of work and I salute you for it.
WyldPirate
@Sly:
That’s simply bullshit. Race has nothing to do with how I feel about the job Obama is doing.
jl
@Yutsano:
Thanks for the tip… I mean, yes, right, that’s it exactly. Yes. Harbor tours. I can prove it.
Sly
@WyldPirate:
So I take it you don’t enjoy being trolled. How amusingly predictable.
WyldPirate
@Dennis G.:
Oh thank you for deigning to condescend, dear Zen master.
Fucking asshole…
Martin
@WyldPirate: So, if he gave all federal employees a 5% raise, that’d have been the greatest political move of his presidency or something?
I don’t think most people have the slightest clue what relationship exists between what Obama did and what the GOP is spouting. Sure, the villagers are all a flutter about this, but nobody else gives a fuck. The folks that at least bother to vote saw Obama recognize that the deficit is a problem and freeze wages, just like, well, every state has done and quite a few businesses. None of those moves were ‘reinforcing GOP talking points’. They were responding to a lack of revenues, and that’s about it.
I think the problem here is that you and Beese and the other firebaggers can’t accept an apolitical act. You see a war, where every action is a bullet fired in some direction, and a bullet not fired at the GOP is a bullet wasted.
A lot of us voted for Obama because we recognize that if everything is a political act, then nothing gets done. It’s pretty clear that federal revenues aren’t going to suddenly rebound. It’s additionally clear that a GOP House isn’t going to allow the Democrats to get anything at all done.
What, exactly, do you think Obama would be able to get in negotiation for any of this? Virtually all of the negotiating that took place in the last 2 years took place with *Democrats* and you don’t think he’s gotten a fucking thing done in the last 2 years. What do you think he’s going to get in exchange with Majority Leader Boehner? A 50% reduction in Defense spending? A higher corporate tax rate? A return of the estate tax?
Martin
@Yutsano: Fuck, Paris is nice every time of the year… good aim there.
WyldPirate
@Sly:
No. Just a correcting a load of shit that fell out of a horse’s ass.
James E. Powell
@Martin:
What do you think he’s going to get in exchange with Majority Leader Boehner? A 50% reduction in Defense spending? A higher corporate tax rate? A return of the estate tax?
Being a firebagger means believing that Obama, acting alone, could get all those things, and more, if he would only talk like Alan Grayson.
WyldPirate
@Martin:
No. I didn’t say that. Nice strawman, though.
That’s a no brainer. It was bullshit, meaningless political theater. It does nothing to the overall level of deficit just like cutting earmarks doesn’t either. It’s symbolic chickenshit.
But the real problem is that it feeds into the GOP meme that the deficit is the problem when it isn’t the problem at all. It’s doing the GOPs dirty work for them and reinforcing the horseshit they have been spewing since Reagan.
WTF? You’re an 11-dimensional chess guy I see.
If Obama really believes that, no wonder he and the Dems are getting creamed. It’s ALL politics and Obama and the Dems have entered a gun fight with rubber knives if they think otherwise.
He’s not going to get shit besides getting punked from here on out unless he starts banging the fucking Rethugs over the head with their nonsense. If he keeps on like he is, he’ll get routed in 2012.
Yutsano
@WyldPirate:
Assuming this is true, isn’t that a positive for you? It seems like you’re rather heavily emotionally involved in Obama’s failure. If he does get defeated in 2012, don’t you get pretty much what you want? And then the Republicans REALLY cut loose?
Sly
@WyldPirate:
You see, the reason why you find yourself unwelcome here is not because of your political opinions. It’s because you’re completely obtuse. Granted, your political opinions likely arise from the fact that you’re completely obtuse, but I’d rather get to the root of the problem because I’m a helpful helper guy. In that vein, I’ll offer you this bit of advice:
If you hang around here long enough, you’ll notice the regular trolls are more of the hit-and-run variety. They’ll give a nice lacquer of gibberish to one thread and then move on, not caring who responds to it or how they do so.
There’s a reason for that, and its likely not that all the regular trolls are DougJ’s spoofs.
A troll’s purpose… your purpose… is to provoke a hostile reaction by playing on the insecurities of their targets. The problem trolls face here is that the regulars are often more capable of gutting a person like a fish and leaving them dead on the floor than your average troll. For instance, your whole shtick is to caricature people as members of a personality cult. And you often fail. Yet here I am, calling you a racist, and you fall the bait. Twice!
So my advice is for you to move on. If you wish to continue with the personality cult line, you’ll find more credible targets at GOS and FDL. They just won’t be cults centered around the President.
WyldPirate
@Yutsano:
Not at all. I’m not pleased with him at all, but he’s by far the lesser of two evils.
My problem with Obama and the Dems in general is that they get walked over by the Rethugs. They have zero fight in them and they won’t come out and call the Rethugs exactly what they are–a bunch of fucking liars that are looting the country.
I expected too much, I suppose, because I expected (or maybe a better term hoped) that “our” side–the Dems–weren’t completely bought off. The way Obama and the Dems are behaving, though, tends to make me think that they are.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Dennis G.:
While looking for that bear I hear there’s a tree falling in a forest somewhere that needs listening to.
Nice catch on the correction…lol!
Yutsano
@Martin: Either Paris or Canberra. Not sure I want London. And being a gaijin is more fun on vacation.
Martin
@WyldPirate:
No, it was a $2B reduction in projected federal spending. Yeah, it’s small relative to the size of the problem, but it’s not nothing.
And yes, the deficit is a problem because it affects the ability of the government to address future problems. You do realize that we pay more in debt service than we receive in corporate tax revenues. We can no more pretend that deficits don’t matter than the GOP can.
No, actually it isn’t. It’s only all politics to the activists like yourself. At least half the country doesn’t give a fuck how it gets done, just that it gets done. That’s why they voted for the GOP this year in spite of disapproving of the GOP agenda more than the Democratic one. Voters generally just don’t care about either party’s narrative. And you can’t validate a narrative that you don’t care about.
It’s not an 11 dimensional chess answer. I don’t think Obama is rope-a-doping or planning some kind of flanking maneuver here. I think he feels saving $2B is in the nations best interest so he did that. Let’s face it, the tea bagger narrative is the one that carried the day earlier this month. You seem to think that there’s some masterful grand narrative that the Dems can roll out here. They can’t. The 2012 narrative is 5% unemployment and less talk on the news about the deficit and Medicare going bankrupt. It really doesn’t matter how we get there or who says what along the way.
Ok, let’s say he does this. Let’s say he goes all Grayson on their asses and calls them Nazis and shit. Give me an example of what more will he get over what he’s getting now? Factor in that the public already disapproves of everything the GOP wants to do. What will he get?
MattR
@Ash Can: How long ago? Class of 96 here.
Joseph Nobles
Just heard that The Hobbit will be shot in 3D. I’m now depressed about this movie again.
“Would you like… an ARKENSTONE!!??”
Ash Can
@MattR: Class of ’83, SAIS. Just before Libby and Wolfowitz.
::puts brown paper bag over head::
alwhite
You know, I am very very very unhappy with our current Presidents tactics and strategies but even I am sick of Wyldprirate’s endless bullshit, OT or not (and this one is wyldly OT) it really does just seem to be trolling. So he goes in my ignore file with Brick Head Bill & ED. This thread would have been a lot more interesting if everyone just ignored him instead of engaging in these pointless masterdebates.
Dennis G.
@WyldPirate:
Clean your rice bowl grasshopper
Hedges Ahead
I can think or no more ironic a target of misquote than Simon. The entire 5th season of ‘The Wire’ was a critique on modern media (particularly print) disguised as a story about the hazards of fabricating quotes from ‘un-named sources’ and making up news whole cloth because it’s more readable or exciting. Adding a single word to entirely change the message content of the quoted is precisely the kind of hackery the reporter villain used, getting the ‘too-perfect quote’.
Oddly enough, Simon seemed to show respect for the Washington Post when they showed said hackey reporter character the door when he applied for a desk. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if Simon himself had caught the error and urged the correction himself; who else would be privy to the exact wording of the quote? Unless it is all, really, just an honest mistake.
Haven’t watched any Treme, but from my point of view, I would much rather have Simon doing more of a full bore assault on media buffoonery; it’s his area of background expertise, and an arena sorely lacking anyone seriously calling out the hacks and professional stenographers.
Eli Rabett
If you want holiday joy, there is always Frank Fenner, one of the principal folk who wiped out smallpox
and then there is Sunny Ottmar Edenhofer