Tag Archive for baseball

The Maddest New York Times Corrections…Ever

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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The Worst Celebrity Endorsements Ever

Celebrities love money. That’s why they go into the business of being a celebrity, after all. Someone has to pay for their Cadillacs, their Rolexes and their bitches on call all night long (a boy can dream…). So they often take up endorsements, associating themselves with brands that want to get some of the magic sparkle dust that’s bound to come from Kristen Cavallari endorsing your product. Right? Right?!

Not quite. Sometimes those endorsements can backfire spectacularly. Want proof?

Two Popes Endorse Cocaine

Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius X liked an occasional tipple. So what? They’re Catholic! Their favorite brand was Vin Mariani, and Leo liked it so much that when they asked him to appear on their advertising literature, he said ‘why not?’.

Well, because Vin Mariani was made with coca leaves, which means that these two representatives of God on earth were pretty much encouraging Catholics like to me cut loose with coke.

Jose Canseco Got Big From Eggs

Protein’s a major part of any sportsman’s diet. It makes them grow big and strong, which is why Jose Canseco was a perfect fit for the California Egg Commission. After all, that’s how he got big, isn’t it?

Oh, you mean that once he was fired by the Egg Commission for being caught in possession of an illegal handgun he fessed up to everything, including steroid charges? Bullet dodged there.

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