Whoops!

Newspaper corrections columns sometimes raise suspicions that the papers are trying to cover up their really egregious screwups with a smokescreen of trivial "skinbacks," presenting an illusion of journalistic candor and honesty.

Case in point is this from yesterday's Los Angeles Times:

"Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday's Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday."

I'm so glad that's been cleared up. Now I can get on with my day.

(Thanks to Regret the Error for the tip.)

Meanwhile, in today's Washington Post, pundit George F. Will commits the run-on sentence of the week:

"Three years before Rep. Wilbur Mills, the Arkansas Democrat who then chaired the Ways and Means Committee, had his fling with a stripper named Fanne Foxe, a.k.a. "The Argentine Firecracker" (Mills joined her on stage at Boston's exquisitely named Pilgrim Theater, which specialized in what Time magazine primly called "ecdysiast exhibitions"; this was after he had a fracas with Ms. Foxe that provoked her to jump into Washington's Tidal Basin across from the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, who really believed that democracies could behave rationally), he decided to seek the Democrats' 1972 presidential nomination."

Umm . . . Maybe someone stole the period from Will's keyboard.