Real life is way weirder than anything you could make up. Thanks to the wonders of modern syndication technology, the weird these days comes conveniently packaged and sequenced. Reproduced here for you mostly without comment.

So I was scanning through the NetNewsWire headlines and encountered the following:

Correction involving Chicago baseball and the lifespan of the cicada

Note that the correction has itself been retracted or corrected or something; one can only assume that the 17-year number is not to be trusted, even though that’s what I learned in high school. And on the subject of cicadas, the ones we have in North America are a pale shadow of real cicadas, which they have in Japan, and you never see but sound like an incoming squadron of F-16s. If you don’t trust me on this, go to Japan next summer and visit the Great Buddha at Kamakura. The temple complex is in a lovely pine forest well-populated with these high-decibel creatures. And there are rewards other than insects in a visit to Kamakura.

Devoured by curiosity, I followed the link under that struck-through blue text and indeed found a correction, the text of which I reproduce, I have a screen shot but don’t want to identify the (perfectly decent) publication.

Correction

An article last Sunday about personal style in Vermont misspelled the surname of an actor from there, a Calvin Coolidge impersonator, who described it as "understated." He is Jim Cooke, not Cook.

I really have no comment on this.


author · Dad
colophon · rights

September 16, 2003
· The World (148 fragments)
· · Puzzling Evidence (15 more)

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