I’ve always been a fan of corrections. I think my all-time fave is from the formerly-amusing, now rather sad Tatler, and being the oldest magazine in existence it has, over the years, had to issue some doozies.

I think my favorite was the one that apologized for “errors” in a celeb schooldays reminiscence…one that characterized two boys as the sons of a “Costa del Sol gangster” and who entered said celeb’s room greasing a baseball bat with Vaseline and yelling words to the effect of “Who’s first? Bend over!”

And who were actually named by said celeb. Said later apologetic and corrective celeb. Rupert Everett, I think? If so, a much more promising debut in fiction than his subsequent unendurable novel. Everett is at his best doing straightforwardly hallucinogenic nonfiction, as some of his work for VF proves.

In any case, one of my longtime favorite sites is Regret the Error, which publishes corrections with a particularly good eye for the amusing. Amusing crow-eating warms the bitter, shrivelled cockles of my heart, and so I am going to give you an example of their choice choices in the correction field.

A correction from The Orange County Register, Sept 23:

Cannabis is a synonym for marijuana. Because of a reporter’s error, the word was misspelled in an article on Page 15 of the News section in the Sept. 22 edition of the Register.

The original sentence:

The pot growers had tapped into an irrigation line for landscaping around the gated community of Stoneridge, and had rigged up a network of white, 3/4-inch PVC piping to grow the cannibals.