Errata

Introduction

I read a New York Times article about some gross-sounding cookie and at the bottom was this note:

A correction was made on April 17, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated the day of the week the reporter visited an Upper West Side Crumbl storefront. It was Saturday, not Sunday.

Intrigued by this passion for confessing their errors, I read the Times policy around corrections, which states, “We recognize an ethical responsibility to correct all factual errors, large and small, promptly and in a prominent space … Even when we catch a mistake mere seconds after publishing, we still acknowledge it with a correction. There is no five-second rule.” 

This got me thinking: I should really account for the many errors on this blog, even if that means providing corrections that are, in some cases, more than fourteen years overdue. The problem is, due to the way Blogger’s platform works, making even a tiny change to the text of an already-published post screws up the formatting when it’s viewed on a mobile device. What’s worse, for really old posts, any revision basically nukes the entire layout. So instead of making corrections to each post, I’m just going to provide them all here, in this post. I may not get to all 677 of my past posts in one shot, so this project may take me a few installments over time. I guess I’ll start with the most egregious goofs.

Errata

In “Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting A Vasectomy - But Were Afraid To Ask,” I wrote, “The nurse arranged towels around my groin until the entire area was reduced to the pink-red scrotum shrouded in white, like a sunburned toad poking out of a field of freshly fallen snow.” Upon reflection I realize that my freshly-shaved scrotum more closely resembled a frog than a toad.

In “New Cycling World Record Set in Berkeley!” I made two errors. The first I already corrected: I originally wrote that for cyclist Craig Cannon to beat the existing bicycling record of 94,452 feet of elevation gain in 48 hours, on the section of South Park Drive he had chosen, he’d need to ride about 160 miles. That did not factor in the descent required on each lap, so the actual mileage needed to be over 320 (and in fact Craig rode 339.52 miles to reach the new world record of 95,623 vertical feet). The other error, which I’ve more recently discovered, is that I said part of why he chose South Park Drive is that “he needed a route that has restrooms.” In fact South Park has only one restroom, unless you count ladies’ and men’s separately.

In “Spelling Focus - Is It ‘Kindergartner’ or ‘Kindergartener’?” I pointed out a grammatical error made by the bestselling author Mary Doria Russell but also mentioned that “I envy Russell’s ability to write good fiction.” This implies that I had actually read her fiction, which I hadn’t. (The grammatical error I’d spotted must have been in the forward to her book, which—possibly on the basis of that error—I elected not to read.) I should have written “I envy Russell’s ability to actually get published.”

In “Highbrow vs. Lowbrow” I wrote about attending a 3-D movie in an IMAX theater, and posted a photo of my wife and me wearing 3-D glasses. The obvious implication was that the photo was of the actual 3-D glasses we received at the IMAX theater. In fact the photo was from a 4-D movie we saw in London. (4D?! Yeah, that’s what the British venue called it, because in addition to providing video and audio, they added “stimulating effects like water, wind, scent and strobe lighting.” Clearly America does not have a stranglehold on cheesiness.)

In “What You Didn’t Know About Giraffes!” I made two errors. The first I acknowledged in the post itself: in claiming that giraffes engage in brood parasitism, I had confused them with cuckoo birds. The second error is that I insinuated (and, okay, to be honest, stated outright and carefully explained) that E.E. Cummings invented non-rhyming poetry because he couldn’t figure out how to rhyme anything with “giraffe.” This is not technically true. It’s not even halfway true. It is in fact completely made-up. I did admit this in the post, but not until the very end, which was disingenuous of me since I’m pretty sure nobody has ever made it all the way to the end of one of my posts.

In the introduction to “Runner-Up: A Divorce Tale” I wrote that this was “a 100% fictional story I generated entirely out of my own imagination, with any resemblance of any character to any actual person—living, dead, or undead—being entirely coincidental.” In fact, this story is completely true—that is, I told it as truthfully as memory could allow. I gave the characters fake names and declared it fiction so as not to risk embarrassing my father. (He’s dead now, so I can finally come clean on this.)

The pro bike race report “Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2020 Tour of Sweden Stage 4” contains at least 200 factual errors. This race never happened; my “coverage” was pure fabrication. I suppose I should have confessed to my deception at the end of the post (instead of adding a postscript a week or so later) but I wanted to see how many readers I could fool. I actually received emails about that post from two former professional racers (one of whom is a cycling commentator for Peacock), and neither of them spotted the ruse!

In “Corn Cob” I stated this:

The [rear derailleur of my childhood bike] was a Suntour V-GT Luxe, which my dad installed along with a larger freewheel to give me—you guessed it—lower gearing, which of course was a bit humiliating. Why me? Was I such the runt that I alone needed lower gearing? Oddly enough, the larger freewheel actually made the pie plate look smaller—but just try telling my brothers that.

In reality, the freewheel my dad installed was probably only slightly larger (perhaps a 32- or 34-tooth cog instead of a 28) and the difference in size was most likely not visible, even to the trained eye, due to that giant pie plate. Of course the freewheel looked bigger to me because I was so ashamed to have low gearing. I should have pointed out this delusion because it makes the sad story even sadder.

In “The Case for Dvorak,” concerning the more efficiently designed Dvorak keyboard layout, I mentioned the economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, who were outspoken in discrediting the layout. I neglected to mention in that post that they are both total douchebags . I sincerely regret the omission.

In “Trouble with Tire Chains” I wrote that one of my car’s tire chains, which had broken and gotten wrapped around the axle, was “dragging behind us like the Ghost of Christmas Past.” I was referring of course to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, but was clearly remembering it wrong. It was Marley’s ghost, not the Ghost of Christmas Past, who dragged chains behind him. Interestingly, this was the one correction that the Oakland Tribune made when they ran my story, as you can see here.

 In “The British Faucet Conundrum” I wrote that the Internet was an American invention. An anonymous commenter wrote below the post, “Tim Berners-Lee INVENTED THE INTERNET WORLD WIDE WEB AND HE IS BRITISH NOT AMERICAN... so stick that in your hat and smoke it. In typical fashion of most americans you try to take credit for most when you don't have a creative bone in your bodies..” I neglected to reply “USA #1 let’s roll! These colors don’t run!” I also missed an opportunity to point out that Berners-Lee was educated at Arizona State University (which isn’t true, but would have goaded this anonymous commenter quite effectively). I didn’t need to point out that the Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing.

In “The Lotion Sniper” I asserted that holiday season shoppers are easy prey because they’re dazed by the Christmas music playing in the stores, and I provided as example the song “Sleigh Ride” that seemed to have acquired new lyrics such as “Giddy-up giddy-up giddy-up it’s grand/ Just holding your hand.” I should have written “Giddy-up giddy-up giddy-up don’t barf/ Just look at your scarf.” This would have been completely inaccurate, of course, since I totally made it up, but it would have been truer to the spirit of the post.

In this very post, “Errata,” I asserted that I never read Mary Doria Russell’s fiction, and that her grammatical error must have been in the forward. Actually, I did read The Sparrow. I totally forgot that I had done so until just now, when doing some routine (yes, believe it or not, routine) fact-checking. However, given that her book was so clearly forgettable, I stand by my earlier correction: I cannot truly say I envy her ability.

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What You Didn’t Know About Giraffes!

Introduction

Back in the ‘80s, a friend of mine tried to set me up with his girlfriend’s sister.  I thought the whole double-dating thing was kind of corny, plus it didn’t seem like this girl was the sharpest tool in the shed.  For example, she wrote a report for school on the topic of goats; it was basically a list of goat-related facts.  (I know, I know ... what grade-school kid hasn’t taken this approach?  But this was a high school junior!)  I enjoyed watching her friend try to help:  “Shouldn’t you have a thesis?” To which she replied, “It is a thesis!”

Well, I probably should have dated her, because I now realize that a well-defined thesis actually limits you intellectually.  Had she declared something specific—e.g., “goats are assholes”—then she’d have had to ignore all the great things about goats when conducting her research.

With that in mind, I’m not going to try to reach some neat conclusion as I pursue the topic of giraffes.  What I will say is this:  though there are many neat things to learn about giraffes, some of the most fascinating things are curiously—perhaps suspiciously—obscure.

Some amazing facts about giraffes

The giraffe is the tallest animal in the world.  Newborn giraffes are taller than most humans. 

A giraffe can stand up within half an hour of being born.  NASA has studied this to help understand how to strengthen astronauts’ leg veins.

A giraffe can gallop along at 35 mph.

A giraffe’s kick can actually decapitate a predator.

A giraffe’s tongue is 20 inches long, and prehensile.  The giraffe can and does pick its nose with this amazing tongue.

Giraffes have very high blood pressure:  at about 300/200, it’s twice that of humans.  A giraffe’s pulse rate, at around 170, is also twice ours.

A female giraffe can only mate for two weeks out of the year, and indicates her readiness by urinating in the male’s mouth.  This odd practice is called flehmen and is related to that weird smelling thing cats do.

Can giraffes be evil?

Of course it’s silly to assign moral responsibility to animals, but when an animal exhibits a behavior that’s sufficiently dastardly, it’s tempting to call that animal evil.  Consider the abominable practice of eating one’s young.

“But wait,” you protest, “giraffes are herbivores!”  Well, yes, mainly.  But they are also known to eat the bones of dead animals, and even carcasses.  Is it a stretch to assert that they also eat their own young?  Probably not.  Try this:  go to Google, and type in “do giraffes eat.”  Google’s auto-fill feature immediately suggests obvious search strings, like “do giraffes eat apples.”  Fourth on the list:  “do giraffes eat their young.” 

Now, the responses you’ll see are of course quite varied.  There are more than 1.5 million hits on this search, and I for one do not have time to chase them all down.  Bottom line:  there’s probably something to this, and I think it’s deplorable.

Giraffes are also known to lay their eggs in other animals’ nests, in a move called “brood parasitism.”  What’s more, the baby giraffe, once hatched, will push the other animal’s eggs out of the nest, to get all the food to itself!  Watch this video if you don’t believe me.

Okay, I just realized I screwed up.  I somehow confused cuckoo birds with giraffes.  I guess giraffes don’t technically engage in brood parasitism, which should have been obvious because of course giraffes don’t lay eggs.  I could go delete the previous paragraph, but any attempt to “revise the past” can get you into legal trouble.  It just makes you look guilty.  And with the Wayback Machine, of course I’d get caught.

More on evil in giraffes

I’m not the first person to explore the notion of evil in giraffes.  Eddie Izzard, who in addition to being a zoologist and historian does some stand-up comedy, pursued this question when pondering, onstage, why (in the Noah’s Ark tale) so many animals had to endure the great flood that God brought about to punish evil in the world.  Among other animals, Izzard investigates the giraffe: 

What in fact is an evil giraffe?  How do they ... [here he mimics a giraffe voice and pantomimes chewing:]  “I will eat all the leaves on this tree.  I will eat more leaves than I should.  And then other giraffes may die.  Ha ha ha!  I am an evil herbivore.”

You should talk about this with your children.  Share with them your best rendition of Izzard’s monologue.  Use it as a jumping-off point to discuss the nature of good and evil.

Did giraffes ruin poetry?

Of course I won’t be so absurd as to assert that giraffes have done anything deliberate—whether acting collectively or individually—to ruin poetry.  But it’s an unfortunate fact that their very name has caused poets no end of grief, with many critics convinced that poetry itself has suffered.

The problem stems, oddly enough, from the simple fact that almost nothing rhymes with “giraffe.”  Of course the modern reader thinks nothing of this, since rhyme has all but disappeared from modern verse—but that’s actually the point.  For most of poetry’s history, rhyme did matter.  It was actually this animal—or rather, its name—that started the trouble.

Believe it or not, no prominent poet had managed to rhyme on “giraffe” until T.S. Eliot, in 1920, wrote “Sweeny Among the Nightingales.”  It opens thus: 

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,      
The zebra stripes along his jaw    
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

Critics immediately noted two things:  one, Eliot rhymed on just one syllable, which doesn’t really count and is fairly weak for a poet of his caliber; and two, “maculate giraffe” is kind of a stretch.  As a verb, “maculate” means “to mark with spots or stain” and is a transitive verb.  The poem takes place in a restaurant so obviously there’s no giraffe around.  (That would turn the whole poem into a weak joke, like the one where a panda strides into a bar and shoots the piano player.)  So “maculate” must be an adjective, meaning “spotted or stained.” 

Since when is it okay for a noun to modify an adjective (i.e., for “giraffe” to modify “maculate,” since what is being described is not a giraffe but the way that Sweeney’s sideburns are spotty)?  This line really makes no sense.  If you ask me, the mental effort of rhyming with “giraffe,” even on one measly syllable, simply threw Eliot off his game.

(The difficulty of rhyming with “giraffe,” by way, is related to where the stress falls in this word.  Most English words are trochaic—that is, the stress, or emphasis, falls on the first syllable; e.g., “zebra,” “swelling,” “letting.”  The word “giraffe” is iambic, meaning the stress is on the second syllable.  This is very common with French words, but a French poet runs into the problem of two different words for “giraffe”:  “la girafe” (feminine) and “le girafeau” (masculine).  How can the poet choose which form of this word to use, when the sex of a giraffe is so hard to determine?)

That Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” was well received really irritated another poet of the era, a certain E.E. Cummings.  Cummings attended Harvard shortly after Eliot, and it’s widely known he disliked living in the older poet’s shadow.  So he set out to write a poem of his own that would not only rhyme with “giraffe” on two syllables, but would actually make sense.

The only problem was, he couldn’t do it.  The only obvious two-syllable rhyme, “carafe,” was off the table, because it was too obvious.  A popular knickknack of the day was a carafe actually shaped like a giraffe, which made the association far too twee for a sophisticated poet.  (If you’re lucky you can still come across a vintage giraffe carafe at a thrift store.)

Countless crumpled-up drafts of Cummings’ giraffe poetry efforts were found by historians, but none still exist (they were destroyed in a fire, which some say was arson).  We know through accounts from Cummings’ friends that, for weeks at a time, he would convince himself that words like “agrafe,” “piaffe,” and even “Luftwaffe” counted as proper “giraffe” rhymes; each time, he eventually acknowledged he was only slipping into self-delusion.  This effort almost drove him insane, and finally he abandoned traditional poetry altogether, not only eschewing rhythm, rhyme, and spelling, but most other poetic conventions as well.  He would never write traditional poems again.

While E.E. Cummings continues to be a household name, many critics dismiss the actual quality of his work.  But whether or not he was any good, his influence cannot be denied.  To this day, most poetry lacks rhyme (along with meter, etc.).  It’s not fair to scapegoat Cummings for this ... the problem was with “giraffe” all along.  Sure, other words are hard to rhyme with too, but they aren’t attached to creatures as compelling as giraffes, which practically cry out to be celebrated in verse.

Are giraffes political?

Many primates are known to build complex political structures within their communities.  But do giraffes?  Not exactly, but once again, something about these strange animals seems to inspire humans.  If we ever manage to put together a credible third political party, don’t be surprised if its symbol is the giraffe.

The use of the giraffe in pictorial political metaphor is as old as the metaphor itself.  The giraffe first makes its appearance, oddly enough, in the first cartoon that represented the Republican party as an elephant.  I’m talking about Thomas Nast’s drawing, “The Third-Term Panic,” which ran in Harper’s Weekly in 1874:

I think political cartoons have gotten simpler over the last 140 years.  It’s worth pointing out here that the donkey doesn’t actually represent the Democratic party (as has been reported elsewhere):  its collar reads “N.Y. Herald.”  The Democratic Party is represented in this cartoon by the raccoon, which retreats from the chasm of chaos even as the elephant flees the lion.  Almost every other animal flees the lion as well.  Notable exceptions are the owl, whose meaning I can’t grasp; the ostrich, predictably burying its head; and the giraffe.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this cartoon in establishing the elephant as the symbol of the Republican party.  Likewise, other Nash cartoons cemented the relationship between the donkey and the Democrats (even though this one didn’t).  Nash didn’t follow up on the giraffe theme—but other cartoonists did.  Check this out:

The big problem with the giraffe’s ascendance in political cartoons is that the giraffe isn’t yet symbolic of anything specific (“independent” being something less than a political party with specific values).  Consider the following pair of pictures:

The caption of the first cartoon translates, “April goes as it entered, the end will be the beginning.”  The second, near as I can figure, is something about a wind farmer being pissed about a June hailstorm.  I don’t grasp the point of either cartoon, and I’m no expert on German politics, but since Merkel and Beck represent opposing political parties, the giraffe cannot be thought to symbolize either one of them.

If you’re about to ask “so what?” I will ask you to pause and reflect on something:  isn’t it possible that the failure of a viable third party to emerge is actually the giraffe’s fault?  Think about it.  The donkey first came to symbolize the Democrats because Andrew Jackson’s opponents called him a jackass, and he embraced the symbol because it represents stubbornness.  Nash characterized the Republican party as an elephant because this party was too big, he felt, to cower in fear, even when confronted by a lion.  Stubbornness and fearlessness are sound characteristics on which to base a party’s mascot.  But what are giraffes?

Giraffes, alas, are just kind of weird.  What party wants to be associated with weirdness?  But this timidity is the whole problem.  If you’re going to take on the big established parties, you’re going to have to embrace your uniqueness.  Figure out how to tune your metaphor to include a strong heart, a clever tongue, and a strong kick, and you’ll be on your way.  (Needless to say, it’s best if you leave out the bit about urinating into your mate’s mouth.)

For the record

As I hope you’ve gathered, all that stuff about Cummings and Eliot was pure malarkey (though I suppose it’s possible I unknowingly stumbled on some truth there).  Everything else in this essay, however, is completely true(-ish).

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