View from the North 40: How it's funny and not funny

Not that I was hyper-critical before, but now that I'm hyper-sympathetic to errors, I find myself thinking - far too often - "Ha, ha, haw, hmm, ooooh, man, I feel your pain." It really is pain I feel in my heart-guts-brain area - even if it's a 6,835-mile-long error that lands you, your crew and 212 paying airline passengers on the wrong continent.

But we'll get back to that.

For a good handful, or two, of years a significant part of my job has been not only to not-make errors, but also to help the editorial team find and correct other people's errors (and pray to the gods of mistakes and...