It couldn’t have been too busy a news weekend, because Election 2008 – Barack Obama won! – was back above the front-page fold in the Washington Post yesterday. That, and a story about how A/C – and how cold to keep it – is causing domestic disputes (for more on the weather, see below). Here’s how it works in my house, in case anyone finds it interesting: The old man sets the programmable thermostat and I leave it alone, since I don’t know how to operate it.
Michael “I Felt So Good Coming Off the Wall” Phelps broke 50 seconds in the 100-meter butterfly, stealing back the world record stolen from him a day earlier. And that was after he had slammed head-on into another swimmer during warm-up, breaking his goggles, blurring his vision and leaving his shoulder sore.
Raul Castro, the president of Cuba, says he’s happy to talk to the United States as part of the new thaw, but he’s really, really wedded to socialism, so that’s not negotiable.
The New York Times ombudsman explains how a story on Walter Cronkite, by TV writer Alessandra Stanley, got in the paper on July 22 with seven errors. Disclosure: Even City Paper makes mistakes. Still, the correction itself is worth reading:
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.
Speaking of ombudsmen, the Post‘s wrote about the flourishing life of the obit desk in “The Flourishing Life of the Obit Desk.”
The weather: Humidity. Rain. Sunshine. Repeat.