Wonderful Confusion

A wonderful example today of just plain sloppiness.

Page 1, under Today, down the left column. Under sports, Mao Asada....is a close second after the short program at the world championships.

See page 11.

But in the right lower corner we see a color photo of Mao showing her gold medal after winning the women's title at the World Figure Skating Championships. Asada captured her first world crown after finishing second in the short program on Tuesday. (We get the coverage in Niigata on Saturday, after watching the competition on TV on Friday night!)

See page 11.

But on the page 11 there is just the story about Mao winning the entire two-day event, which of course consisted of the short and long programs!

Guys!

But this was nothing compared to the TV coverage of both days of the championships. TV decided to cover the competition after everyone knew the results. After the first day it was clear that Asada and Ando and Nakano were still all in the running to win. That evening TV showed several commercials featuring all three of the Japanese contenders. But on day two, after Mao had already won, ALL of the commercials showed ONLY Mao.

But they are probably all represented by the same ad agency. Just guessing. Wouldn't surprise me.

In Weekend Scene today Burritt Sabin has a good special to the Japan times about the Uraga shipyards. The story is excellent but whoever wrote the headline must be a fan of The Ring movies because "Then there were ghosts" refers only to a single sentence about a haunted light house and a local resident who doesn't answer the question about whether the light house is haunted or not.

Gregory Clark's article, as is often the case, could have been cut by 95%. A single question is "does Tibet justify the calls for a boycott of Beijing's planned Olympic Games later this year?" is his subject.

I think Clark wanted to ask if Tibet would justify an actual boycott, not merely the call for one. In any case his answer to his own question is "no" and if Clark had just answered his own question in the first paragraph the whole piece would have played as a decent contribution to the Readers in Council Section.