The Machinery of Night

Posted 9:20 AM by Angie Schultz

Yesterday's Paper, Today!

Yesterday I had a spasm of deja vu when reading the "Outlook" section of the Houston Chronicle, but I didn't think much of it. I figured I'd already read some articles and one cartoon on the web, via blogs. But then I realized that I'd read it all before in the Chronicle. I knew I'd seen one of the cartoons before, involving three men on camels who feared they were lost. (I didn't quite understand the cartoon, but the camels---in silhouette---were pretty. I knew I'd seen it in the dead trees edition because it had attracted a letter outraged that Christian symbols had been used to make whatever point the cartoonist thought he had.)

Turns out that there was a little goof at the printing plant:

But in several hundred thousand copies, the inside pages of the section were mistakenly reprinted from the Sunday Dec. 22 section. The error, for the record, occurred when a production technician pushed the wrong button during the lengthy press run, sending the wrong pages into the computer and onto the printing press.

The Chronicle claims to have a Sunday circulation of 736,000. This means that a large fraction of the print run was ruined. I wonder if they fired that guy.

I love this bit:

One e-mailer said cryptically that the mistake, "hints at a racist attempt to control information." (Presumably because an essay about Sen. Trent Lott could not be read in its entirety.)

Remember: the tinfoil is worn shiny side out.

Today's paper came with the correct version of Sunday's Outlook, no doubt for racist reasons. However, suddenly their home page doesn't work with Netscape 4.79; obviously they're trying to control the flow of information to people too stubborn to upgrade Netscape.