The New York Times! The old gray lady! It’s a vertiable bastion of news – all the news that’s fit to print, if you consider their masthead to be true. However, even this wonderful place can sometimes get some things wrong.
If that’s the case, they issue a correction. However, the mistakes aren’t usually nuanced. They’re just stupid. Take, for example, these mad corrections which have actually appeared in the esteemed pages of the New York Times over the years.
An article on Monday about Jack Robinson and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children’s TV show “My Little Pony” that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.
The New York Times sports section could dust up on their JRR Tolkein, for example:
A report 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.)
Additionally, they don’t seem to grasp much about popular phone games either:
The Books of The Times review on Saturday, about “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson, described “Angry Birds,” a popular iPhone game, incorrectly. Slingshots are used to launch birds to destroy pigs and their fortresses, not to shoot down the birds.
Some of the corrections are the ultimate in pedantry, especially funny when combined with something like South Park.
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