Colombia's Capital Is No Secret

Every blogger is having a field day with allegations that a fact error debased Colombia’s capital. OK, maybe not every blogger.

In this article about a Secret Service scandal at the Summit of the Americas, you don’t have to dig too deep to find the city duplicity. Cartagena, the supposed seat of government, needs to take a back seat to a more serviceable capital: Bogotá. Actually, Cartagena can stay; we need to cart off capital. The Secret Service scandal took place in Cartagena, but Cartagena is not Colombia’s capital.

To “summit” up, Colombia’s capital is Bogotá. Cartagena is a bogus capital; it’s merely a large city on Colombia’s northern coast — a city where prostitutes were pressed into Service.

Have You Ever Spelled It?

The stall door swings open, banging against the lavatory wall as it does. Farmer Ted appears. He pauses for a second, for dramatic effect, and then … he holds ‘em high, for all to see. Behold, underpants dotted with little hearts. Ooh! Ah!

I’ve got something just as exciting to share today, and I won’t charge you a buck to get a glimpse. It’s hard to miss, given its top-of-the-page placement and all-caps, underlined-twice treatment. See it? Yep, you see it. Your eyes are wide. Your mouth is agape. It’s as if you’ve seen a ghost — or a girl’s panties. Forget the panties, geek; this is better. (Well, that’s debatable.)

The four letters at the tail end of confidential are, it’s no secret, essential. Yet the private parts seen here are not sequential.

Blame Jennifer Woods.

Jennifer, you see, gave Samantha Baker this sex test in Child Development. Samantha had to take the test during Independent Study and then pass it along to her friend Randy.

Jennifer nailed the first nine steps, but then she impersonated Farmer Ted on the dance floor and made a strange move. Did she spell confidential correctly? My answer to that is the same as the one Samantha gave to the first question on the aforementioned sex test: almost. Or perhaps, if I wanted to be a tad harsher, my answer would mirror Samantha’s answer to the 10th and final question: NO!!!

John Hughes, the director whose career-defining Sixteen Candles/The Breakfast Club/Weird Science triumvirate coincided with my youth, may have deliberately included the mistake, as a way of showing that high school kids who create sex tests with questions like “Have you ever touched it?” and “Have you ever done it?” might have trouble spelling certain four-syllable words. It’s got to be a joke, like grandparents forgetting a birthday. We’ll never know, though, so we must assume this tailspin was unintentional.

Confidentail? Nuh-uh. Confidential? That’s ideal, for sure — like Jake Ryan.

Not at Full Strength

Where did it all go wrong?

I, like Willy Loman, have an inability to accept change. Take, for example, the alteration made to the last word in the headline. There is strength in numbers, to be sure, but these numbers don’t add up. Strength has eight letters; I only see seven. The second t, like Willy’s name, was never in the paper.

The mighty continue to fall in the body copy. The writer appears to have a weakness for article repetition. How else to explain putting one the in front of the other? Perhaps the Lomans will let me borrow their vacuum — the one for which three and a half is due on the fifteenth — so I can make one the (or the other) disappear.

I’m not buying what this writer is selling. I know what I want, and I’m going out to get it. I want some t, and I want to get rid of the.

That’s it for today. I’m tired. Hey, a small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.

Or so I’ve read.