I'd like to give a shoutout to the underpaid editorial assistant who writes the corrections for the New York Times, which I really enjoy reading. They're deadpan, yet cheeky, with just enough context to give you the flavor of the article, and sometimes an extra bit of journalistic color. Really, a perfect canapé. A few random examples from today's paper:

The Patara Journal article on Monday, about an archaeological excavation of the Lycian League parliament building in Patara, Turkey, referred incorrectly to the ancient Greek historian who wrote "The Persian Wars," which mentions Patara as a port used by the Persians in the fifth century B.C. He was Herodotus, not Thucydides. The article also misspelled the name of the wife of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who accompanied him to Patara in the spring of A.D. 131, according to evidence uncovered at the excavation site. She was Sabina, not Sabine.

An article on Sept. 11 about planned events that were interrupted by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, misstated the location of Fiterman Hall, the 15-story satellite building of the Borough of Manhattan Community College that had undergone a $65 million renovation and was scheduled to open in October 2001. It was just north of the World Trade Center, not south. (By the end of Sept. 11, 2001, the hall was buried to the third floor in the debris from the 47-story building next door, 7 World Trade Center. It remains closed.)

Because of an editing error, a recipe with the Fall Cook column in the Dining section yesterday, for Plum Crumble, misstated the number of plums to be used in Step 2. It is 12, not 2.

See? Suddenly I know more about the emperor Hadrian, 9/11, and plum crumble, and I don't even need to read the articles.

I got to thinking about the Corrections page after reading this posting listing the collected errors of Alessandra Stanley, the Times television critic who is currently in a correction-related tussle with Geraldo Rivera. Yes, some of her errors are pretty embarrassing (she recently referred to a certain Emmy-award-winning sitcom as All About Raymond), but reading ten or twenty corrections in a row reveals a certain beguiling rhythm, a certain repetitive poetry: a long, disgressive buildup to set the stage, and then a quick, two-footed curtain line ("She was Sabina, not Sabine").

Anyway, someone should publish a book of these little gems, if they haven't already. (They could call it The Corrections. Or has that already been done?)