Ralph Lauren Will Never Sponsor Us Now

I love reading the New York Times' corrections. Call me a masochist, but perusing journalists' daily failings makes me appreciate the Gladiator-like industry I've (stupidly) chosen for myself. I wish other jobs had that sort of public face; I would buy such a publication that published every error or misstep committed by members of certain professions.

Anyway, today in the Times are two great corrections. The first reads: "The cover photograph in The Times Magazine on Sunday rendered colors incorrectly for the jacket, shirt and tie worn by Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is a possible candidate for the presidency. The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink; the tie was dark blue with stripes, not maroon."

I mean, it's not Time Magazine and OJ Simpson, but this is pretty egregious. Back when I was living on a college campus, certain things gave me undeniable first impressions. Chief on that list were men in pink shirts. Now, I own a shirt that has thin pink stripes (purchased in Delaware; don't ask) and it's currently home to a mothball farm in the closet. No, when we're talking about pink shirts, they just carry a different vibe to me -- and that's just in walking past some preppy kid in front of Kresge Hall. Now imagine you're running for president of the United States and your biggest publicity to date transforms a normal dark suit with white shirt into a maroon jacket with pink shirt? Remember Wesley Clark and the sweaters, Al Gore and the earth tones, Bush and his cowboy belt buckle and boots? The clothes make the man and the Times just told the world that Mark Warner not only wears pink dress shirts but wants everybody to know about it. Of course it's hard to really complain about the red-wardrobe coloration when the Times photographer made Warner wear Michael Richard's fake dentures from "UHF." Eh, what's up, doc?

Also in today's corrections: "An article in The Arts on Feb. 11 about the federal investigation of Anthony Pellicano, a former Hollywood private detective, referred incorrectly to computer data seized in a raid on his office in 2002. (The error also occurred in articles on Feb. 6 this year and on Oct. 19, 2005.) Investigators said they had recovered storage devices witha capacity of 3.868 terabytes of data, which they said would be the equivalent of two billion pages of double-spaced text. They did not find two billion pages of notes and wiretap transcripts." (Emph. added.)

Ha! C'mon, Times reporter! A billion pieces of paper would take, I would think, quite a number of investigators to carry. APR contest! How many people do we think would be needed to carry 2,000,000,000 pages of notes and transcripts from Pellicano's office, anyway?