Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

The same rookie Herald reporter who gave us Boo-Boo #13 a few days ago has now given us #14. It was located on page A4 of the August 28th issue. The article was about the dedication of a bench by the Carmel post office to honor the late Carmel cartoonist Bill Bates. As every Carmelite knows, some of Bill Bates' cartoons have graced the walls of the Carmel post office for decades, save for a brief period of time in 2006. On Thursday the Herald printed this explanation for the hiatus: "Bates' cartoons were taken down from the post office when an art gallery complained it should have the right to hang its artwork there." I don't know where the reporter got that information, because that's not what happened. To my knowledge no commercial business in Carmel ever claimed the right to display its merchandise at the public post office.  What really happened was that a US Postal Service "retail standardization team" visited the post office and set pl...

Hey kids! We went one whole day without finding any careless errors in the Herald, but today we found a doozy. There are three problems with this article from page B1 of Saturday's paper.  Let's start with the headline. It's just plain wrong. The gas explosion in Carmel last March was not a pipeline explosion. Gas leaked into a house and the house exploded, not the pipe. Second, the article says "An electric crew was working nearby on a natural gas pipeline." (See the red underline above.) Wrong again. I'm pretty sure PG&E doesn't assign electric crews to work on gas lines or gas crews to work on electric lines. According to reports written at the time, it was a "welding crew." It's a sad state of affairs when the reporter doesn't know his subject well enough to know the difference between electricity and gas. That goes double for his AWOL out-of-town editor. The third issue I have with this article may put me on sligh...

Careless errors keep rolling off the Herald presses like water off a ducks back. Today the Herald ran a story about the Monterey Downs EIR on page 2, and continued on page 4. The segment on page 4 said it was continued from...wait for it...page 4. And while we're at it, the AWOL editor missed this typo from Kenneth Peterson's financial advice column on page A7. Of course, the writer made the error, but this is the sort of thing editors are supposed to catch, the mistakes spell-check can't. (Note to Mr. Miller: sight=vision, site=place.) These two Boo-Boos were in the A section. I haven't even gotten around to reading the B section yet.

I thought I might overlook the Herald Boo-Boo I saw on Tuesday August 19th. It was just a small formatting error and I didn't think it worth pointing out. I changed my mind when I saw Wednesday's paper. Letters to the editor normally have the name of the writer at the end and the name is in italics. This is followed by a blank line before the title of any following letters. The first letter Tuesday had neither italics nor a space. Here's how it looked. Click image to enlarge. Then on Wednesday a letter had more than just the name italicized, but the last two and a half lines of the letter, too! Click image to enlarge. It would appear that the people who put the paper together aren't checking their work - probably because they're spread too thin and don't have time. And it would seem there's nobody to double-check their work to ensure that careless errors don't make it into the final product. As we've seen over the past weeks and mon...

One of the biggest news stories last week was the tragic suicide of comedian Robin Williams. There is no question that the world lost a great comic genius . His improvisational skills were unparalleled, and he made a lot of people laugh, including me. Many of his fans, along with other Hollywood stars he preformed with, have talked about his warmth, passion, and humor, and they were uniformly stunned that a man who was so delightful and had everything one could want, would just kill himself like that . But when I read the news, I wasn't the least bit surprised. Sad, definitely, but not surprised. Although Robin Williams could make me laugh, he also creeped me out a little bit. Not intentionally, of course, but whenever I watched him I always felt a little uneasy. I sensed he had a dark side. It was nothing I could put my finger on or in any way define. Just a vague sense that deep inside of him something was terribly amiss. So while I found him to be entertaining, I never...

This was just a little Boo-Boo , the kind that might slip by any writer from time to time. It was in an August 14th story about a new ordinance in Sand City prohibiting camping on the beach. In one paragraph was a double negative reference to the "no anti-camping law."  I've done this sort of thing before. I'll start to write something one way, then go back and write it another way, and forget to delete the unneeded words. So the writer probably started with "no camping law" then decided to make it "anti-camping law" but he forgot to delete the "no" resulting in a double negative that means the opposite of what was intended. It's quite understandable that the writer missed his mistake. That's one reason why newspapers have editors, to catch mistakes before the news is printed. But as I've noted in previous Mental Notes, the Herald doesn't have its own editor anymore, and things like this are slipping through the crack...

This promo was in today's Herald on page B-11. "Is that a phone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" Click image to enlarge.

When I started this Herald Boo-Boo Watch I didn't really expect to be posting entries more than once a week. But the Herald's careless errors keep rolling off the presses with disturbing regularity. I suspect that Dismantle-it First Media's consolidated production staff in Chico is spread way too thin to do adequate proofreading, or even automated spell checking, as we see below. Boo-Boo number 5 comes from the Monday August 4th Opinion page. Two of the three commentaries that day had headlines, but for some odd reason, one headline went missing. Click image to enlarge. And Boo-Boo number 6 was also on the Opinion page the very next day. Just a simple typo, but a glaringly obvious one that should have been caught, by spell check if not by the human eye. Click image to enlarge.  

I didn't expect to be back here so soon, but mere hours after I posted the last Herald Boo-Boo another one fell into my lap. On the Herald's Opinion page the newspaper occasionally prints comments that readers post online. In the print edition this feature is called "Sounding Off." A quote is printed in a black box and the screen name of the individual is printed beneath it along with the title of the article they were commenting on. As an example, here is one from July 30th that is properly formatted. Click to enlarge image. The Sounding Off printed on August 1st, however, was missing its credits, except, curiously, for the last four words of one article title.  Click image to enlarge. But it could be worse. A month or so ago there was a silent "Sounding Off." I wish I'd saved that one. The space was there, but it was completely blank . So I suppose partially blank means they're improving. Progress, I guess.

I had intended to post this several days ago but Blogger wasn't playing nice with the picture. Anyway, part 3 of the Monterey Herald Boo-Boo Watch is from the July 22nd issue. In Herald math 22 x $1,000 = $220,000! Click image to enlarge.