31 Mar 2006 Mea Culpas

I received two e-mails today alerting me to errors on the blog, and, in both cases, the e-mailers were correct. Here then, are two corrections. I apologize to the readers of this blog, and anyone else affected, for the errors:

* In my March 2, 2006 post “NAACP Cries Victim Again,” I criticized NAACP President and CEO Bruce Gordon for calling Project 21 a “white” group in a February 8 NAACP press release. He didn’t. I misread the word “while” as “white” in this sentence: “It is interesting that while groups like WorldNet Daily and Project 21 spread half-truths and lies about Bond, they offered no direct evidence of what was said.” I apologize to Mr. Gordon and the NAACP for my error.* A teacher from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s hometown wrote to tell me that the reproduction of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” that appears in the Historical Documents section of this blog has errors. Specifically, the word “theirs” in the lines

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,

should not have an apostrophe before the “s,” as we had at the time of his e-mail.Although, in our defense, we reproduced the poem faithfully from a published source, the best source is an original copy, or the closest to it one can get. This University of Virginia library scan of the poem in Tennyson’s own handwriting (written out in April 1864) not only confirms the English teacher’s contention, but shows other punctuation differences between our reproduction and Tennyson’s handwritten version as well. We therefore are correcting our version to match Tennyson’s as scanned.