The New York Times and Porgies

It can be easy to make fun of newspapers when they get something wrong. Misspellings, incorrect years, while annoying, are not alone reasons alone to condemn. Every day there  is a Corrections section that atones for the previous mistakes. And considering the sheer volume of words, ideas and facts that are in a daily paper the size of the NYT, the volume of errors is minuscule, and often unnoticed. Nearly subatomic.

As any steady reader to these posting should know by now if they're up-to-date, I took the Times to the woodshed yesterday for telling us that NYC spends $1.8 million an inch to remove snow. All you have to do is realize someone is way out there uncontrolled on a controlled substance or realize, well, they made a mistake.

That was yesterday, and in today's paper there is no correction. Please say it isn't so. $1.8 million an inch to remove snow? How many miles are there of streets in the city? You mean to tell us it costs $1.8 million an inch to remove snow? Okay, a mile? Still a number too large to fathom as being accurate. We obviously need warmer snow to fall. The kind that melts as soon as it lands so we don't run out of money.

A segue from the print edition to the online edition yesterday revealed that the word "vertical" had been inserted in the online copy, $1.8 million "per vertical inch" to remove snow. And this makes it better?

A vertical inch of what? Hold the ruler up and down it is vertical; hold it left to right it is horizontal. What the hell is a vertical inch?

It took a bit, but maybe the word they were looking for and should have found was "snowfall." $1.8 million per inch of "snowfall" would have cleared the picture up. (Maybe even the snow.) And isn't the news supposed to be clear?

Adding "vertical" to the text doesn't do a damn thing to understanding what they're trying to report. I must be dense, I guess. Revised, it reads:

The cost of clearing the city streets of snow and ice is about $1.8 million per vertical inch, according to the city comptroller's office.

Reporting like that can get you to hyperventilate about a municipality's expenses. Could create some phone calls as well.

The Times has reported they are undergoing newsroom changes. Less layers of editors (read less staff). All well and good if they can still not confuse us. Jimmy Breslin used to make fun of the Times reporters and their long sentences. He equated it to showing off that they went to college, and usually in most of their cases they did, to an Ivy League college.

Take a recipe that I once cut out of the paper that called for the grilling of porgies to be done after making "three equidistant cuts." I showed it to my fisherman neighbor once, someone who was with me the year before on Cap Cod when we hauled in an endless stream of porgies (scub in New England) in, fishing off a jetty in Falmouth,

My neighbor, an electrician, and someone who I knew never read the NYT, looked at the recipe, repeated the words "equidistant cuts" and asked me if the clipping came from the New York Times.

Jimmy should have been there.

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