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Petite Erreur

We all make mistakes from time to time, even the New York Times:

Editors’ Note

Early this morning, we posted a letter that carried the name of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, sharply criticizing Caroline Kennedy.

This letter was a fake. It should not have been published.

Doing so violated both our standards and our procedures in publishing signed letters from our readers.

We have already expressed our regrets to Mr. Delanoë’s office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers.

This letter, like most Letters to the Editor these days, arrived by email. It is Times procedure to verify the authenticity of every letter. In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the email and did not hear back. At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoë’s office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us.

We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed.

We are reviewing our procedures for verifying letters to avoid such an incident in the future.


Here’s the “letter” in question:

To the Editor:

As mayor of Paris, I find Caroline Kennedy’s bid for the seat of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton both surprising and not very democratic, to say the least. What title has Ms. Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton’s seat? We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling.

With all the respect and admiration I have for Ms. Kennedy’s late father, I find her bid in very poor taste, and, after reading “Kennedy, Touring Upstate, Gets Less and Less Low-Key” (news article, Dec. 18), in my opinion she has no qualification whatsoever to bid for Senator Clinton’s seat.

We French have been consistently admiring of the American Constitution, but it seems that recently both Republicans and Democrats are drifting away from a truly democratic model. The Kennedy era is long gone, and I guess that New York has plenty of more qualified candidates to fill the shoes of Hillary Clinton. Can we speak of American decline?

Bertrand Delanoë
Paris, Dec. 18, 2008

Admitting your mistake comes first. Not repeating it follows.

Learning never ends.

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What's That Smell?

Remember the old Rodney Dangerfield joke? “My wife said ‘kiss me where it stinks’ — so I took her to Jersey!”

Taking the counter-point, I thought New Jersey got a bad rap (I live in N.J. now) and needed a new tag line. One to be used for tourism and economic development. Thought “what’s that smell?” had legs — use it for The Shore and restaurants, and so many other attractions you could attach a scent to. Kind of grows on you, doesn’t it? Pokes fun at all the refineries along the Turnpike. So what? Since when did “Jersey Girl” become a positive?

Look, there’s now a town in Iowa that smells like garlic. The local spice producer donated garlic salt for use on icy streets, so they mixed it is with the standard rock salt:

City crews in the Des Moines suburb of Ankeny are using garlic salt to melt snow and ice on streets from Tuesday’s storm.

The salt was donated by Tone Brothers Inc., a top spice producer headquartered in Ankeny.

Public Works Administrator Al Olson says the company donated 18,000 pounds of garlic salt to use on its 400 miles of roads.

Olson doesn’t have details, but he says the salt would have ended up in the landfill, so the company donated it. A telephone call Wednesday to Tone Brothers wasn’t immediately returned.

Olson says the city mixed the garlic salt with regular road salt and it works fine. He says some road workers say it makes them hungry, but Olson doesn’t recommend it to spice up lunch or dinner.

“New Jersey: What’s That Smell?” — gotta nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

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