To err is human... To print a correction, that takes the media... And where the correction just makes the story that much more interesting? That is where Regret The Error comes in... This web site is a cornucopia of mistakes, typos, and the corrections that followed from the media worldwide, both printed and online... And this being New Year's Eve, what better way to see what 2006 wrought than to see how the stories covering it were corrected... Here are some highlights from Regret The Error's Crunks 2006 list:

• A correction from The Sun (U.K.):
  Following our article on Princess Eugenie’s birthday celebrations, we have been asked to point out the party was closely monitored by adults throughout and while a small amount of mess was cleared away at the end of the evening, there was no damage to furniture, no revellers dived into bedrooms in search of drunken romps and to describe the house as being trashed was incorrect. We are happy to make this clear and regret any distress our report caused.
• The Chicago Tribune ran this correction:
  An editorial in Friday’s paper incorrectly stated that Florida Cresswell, a candidate for state representative in the 28th District, was convicted in 1999 of battery and stealing Tupperware. In fact he was convicted of stealing a battery from a van as well as Tupperware that was inside the van.
• Reuters had a bad year for typos, publishing both a story on a recall of beef panties as well as a story on Queen Elizabeth's egg laying ability... The best part being the number of news sites that picked up the stories and printed them without corrections!
• If you like to cook, you might want to read the instructions more carefully after seeing this correction from the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia:
  A correction in this column Thursday about a June 14 Taste section recipe for French coconut pie incorrectly suggested that the recipe called for a pint of vodka. The accompanying recipe for homemade vanilla extract uses the vodka. The pie recipe then calls for one tablespoon of extract.
  If you read the comments to the story, you also find the editor thinks rum would go better with coconut pie!
• And to add insult to injury, we have the Hartford Courant:
  Chad Sinanian of Danbury has a mild brain injury with motor coordination problems, and he is an advocate on behalf of people with mental retardation. But he is not mentally retarded, as was incorrectly stated in a story on Page 1 Sunday.

And if you like these, be sure to read the rest... It just gets funnier and funnier...

Happy New Year!

It's Christmas Eve... That, you probably know... But there might be a few things about Christmas and it's traditions you don't know...

• The Christmas Carol Silent Night was written because a mouse chewed a hole in the organ bellows at a church in Obendorf, Austria, on Christmas Eve, 1818... Priest Joseph Mohr wrote the song that day so that it could be sung by a choir accompanied by a guitar rather than an organ!
• Christmas Lights were invented a mere 3 years after the light bulb by Edward Johnson, who worked for Edison's company... The first commercial lights generally available came from the Ever-Ready Company in 1903... And it wasn't until 1927 that GE invented lights that would stay lit if one went out...
• The first postage stamp to commemorate Christmas was issued in Austria in 1937...
• St. Nicholas is the patron saint of children... But also the patron saint of pickpockets, pawn-brokers and pirates... (Which might explain some of the "fun" in Christmas shopping this time of year)
• Sir Henry Cole, founder of London's Victoria & Albert Museum, forgot to write holiday letters to his friends in 1843... So he had cards printed up last minute... What he didn't use, he sold for a shilling each, inventing the Christmas Card...
• The first nativity scene was setup in 1224 by St. Francis of Assisi in a cave outside Greccia, Italy...

Now the wiser - and wise men are part of the Christmas tradition too - have a Merry Christmas!!!

There are some people who don't always believe the obvious unless it has been scientifically proven... That must explain a medical study on sword swallowing that is in the current edition British Medical Journal... The conclusion? One of the authors, Brian Witcombe of the Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, described it as "extremely dangerous..." Furthermore, the study found that people attempting to swallow swords are more likely to get hurt if they use multiple swords, swords of unusual shape, or get distracted while swallowing a sword...

(Well, Duh!)

It all started with the best intentions... Simply put a camera up to catch speeders as they zip along the M4 highway near junction 41 near Port Tablot in Wales... The result? Fewer speeders, more traffic jams! Assembly Member Alun Cairns says "Being so close to a junction it causes a lot of congestion where there is not a history of accidents... Westbound congestion of a Friday evening regularly [backs up] in excess of five miles because people brake through instinct on observing the camera even when they are traveling within the speed limit..." So they are taking the camera down early next year... There may be more speeders, but at least traffic will flow smoothly...

Next time you think you've seen or heard a weird coincidence, see if it matches up to these:

• Mark Twain was born on the day Halley's Comet appeared in 1835... He died the day it came back in 1910! He even predicted this, having been quoted as saying "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835... It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it..."
• The Columbian, a Washington state newspaper, accidentally printed the Pick 4 lottery numbers from Virginia - 6 8 5 5 - stating that they were the Pick 4 numbers from Oregon... Fortunately, the very next Oregon Lottery Pick 4 had winning numbers of 6 8 5 5!
• Morgan Robertson wrote a 1898 novella titled Futility... The book told the story of a fictional state-of-the-art ocean liner named Titan that collides with an iceberg while traveling between New York and Britain causing most of the passengers to die because there weren't enough lifeboats!!!
• Residents of Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire (in the UK), were who were watching the movie Around the World in 80 Days on local TV were surprised when their power went off during the scene where the hot air balloon was taking off... The power lines had been downed when a hot air balloon crashed into them!
• Actor Anthony Hopkins starred in the movie adaptation of the book The Girl From Petrovka by George Feifer... While he wanted to read the book before doing the film, he could not find a bookstore that had one... The he found one discarded on a bench at a train station - one with notes on the story scrawled in the margins! Then, during filming 2 years later, he met the author, who mentioned that he had lost his own personal copy when a friend misplaced it somewhere in London... Amazingly, it was the same book Hopkins had found - with the authors own comments in the margins!!!

It had been a quiet in Laguna Niguel, California, until a woman awoke from sleep hearing noises from downstairs... She went down and found a man with a sword ransacking her house! He quickly grabbed her and told her a sword-point that her husband was already tied up in the living room... He walked her to the living room - and it was empty!

"Now, this is where it gets weird," Orange County Sheriff Larry Abbott said... The man accused the husband of trying to be some kind of "hero" and left the woman to go looking for him... Outside... So the woman just locked him out!!!

By this time, the woman's daughter had woke up, heard all the goings-on, and called the police... The police quickly arrived and found the man hiding under a car a short distance away...

(The woman's husband apparently slept through the entire thing!)

Jason Klopf of Portland, Oregon, was enjoying a nice drive around town on Friday night... Except for one thing: he was speeding... In fact, he was driving all over town at speeds up to 100 mph! But that was not what upset him... What upset him was that the police never pulled him over and gave him a ticket!

Not willing to let such an oversight slip by, Jason decided he needed to do something else to get the police department's attention... So he drove over to the Northeast Precinct building and rammed a police car!

And the cops still did not give him a ticket...

So he hit the car again! Well, that got someones attention - but not the police... Instead, the police got a phone call that someone had just hit one of their cars twice and then walked away...

Well, that got the police interested... So they went outside, saw the cars, and tracked Jason down... He didn't get a speeding ticket, but he did get charged with reckless driving and criminal mischief...

(Oh well, better luck next time...)

Police officers in Hagfors, Sweden, have waited over 20 years to buy toilet paper... Ands it's not because they didn't have any... Quite the contrary - they had too much of it!

Back in 1986, someone made a mistake when ordering packs of toilet paper: they ordered pallets instead... So March 1986 saw the police chief stand in awe as truck after truck of toilet paper and other paper goods showed up at the police station... Since it would cost even more to send it back, they had to accept it... "The driver got help from some of our people... It took them from 8 or 9 in the morning until late in the afternoon to unload it all," current station chief Björn Fredlund said... "We filled 12 garages with it all, as well as all other available spaces... I don't know how much toilet paper there was but one of my colleagues worked out that there were 550,000 paper towels and 3 million plastic bags..."

But now it's finally all gone... 20 Years of 1980's single-ply institutional toilet paper... "There were times when we weren't sure we'd make it," chief Fredlund said...

(Quick - someone send them some triple-ply, ultra-soft Charmin!)

Ah, the crayon! Everyone starts with the basic 8 or 16 colors... And then you get more! I remember getting a box with 64 colors once... And it wasn't just the colors... I remember my first crayon sharpener... And now they have machines that even let you make your own crayons!

Of course, when they talk about making your own crayons, I don't think they were planning for the works of Pete Goldlust... He doesn't draw with his crayons - he carves them! Some look like twisting DNA strands... Others look suspiciously like abstract totem poles... And all of them look more like artwork than a child's coloring toy...

I don't know how long it takes to make them, but I wish I had a box of them!

If you had a Mom - and let's face it, everyone has a Mom - then you probably remember her telling you to "sit up straight and stop slouching..." Well it turns out she was only half right!

Researchers at the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada found that while slouching is bad for your health, sitting upright is only slightly better... "We were not created to sit down for long hours, but somehow modern life requires the vast majority of the global population to work in a seated position," Waseem Amir Bashir, the study author, said... "This made our search for the optimal sitting position all the more important..."

So they had volunteers with no history of back pain sit in each of a slouched, upright, and reclined position while being scanned with an MRI... Surprisingly, a 90 degree angle when sitting caused back strain as the spinal disks started to move and misalign... Slouching caused a high rate of wear and tear on the lower back... And back strain was minimized by sitting slightly reclined at a 135 degree angle...

So next time you think about your posture, lean that chair back and really take care of back...