Wow! This is the week for mistakes. (Ides of March and all that; maybe I should keep my fingers off the keyboard!)

Unlike the New York Times, I try to correct my mistakes as soon as I notice them or as soon as others point them out to me. That last post was written on the fly, and edited by means of updates, as I just don't have the heart to delete and rewrite posts. I'd rather have the errors staring me in the face as a reminder that I make them.

Anyway, I had to run out before I had a chance to think much about that last post, and I want to add another thought. While it's fine that the old Kerry news has finally made unburied itself and managed to get major media play, I am still struck by the scorn hurled at this Cedric Brown guy for daring to question Senator Kerry. He's been excoriated as a "heckler," as a Republican, and I am sure he is now considered a right wing nut.

But the story is not so much that he had to yell and make a spectacle of himself in order to draw attention to Kerry's supreme arrogance. Rather, the story really ought to be about why it is that some angry man had to do what it is supposed to be the job of mainstream reporters to do.

Why didn't they press Kerry for details? Why does it take a "heckler" to crash a Kerry-friendly forum to ask what it is the responsibility of others to ask? Cedric Brown is an amateur. They're the "professionals."

And I am also an amateur at this business. I am not a reporter, but simply someone who has been blogging for -- what is it? -- just over nine months now. One of the reasons I am doing this is that the people who are supposed to be reporting are doing the opposite; they often obfuscate instead. And when they make mistakes, there isn't much of an accountability system.

Blogging is more like ebay. You get positives if you're good, negatives if you're bad, and hopefully, if you get enough "positives" you'll have a little credibility. It takes constant maintenance, though, and constant correcting. Self correcting -- which the big guys don't seem to feel they have much need to do.

And I just found out about another mistake in one of my posts. I changed the sexes of the two authors of an excellent National Review post comparing Khomeini to Savonarola! I called the husband the wife, and the wife the husband, and had they not been nice enough to notice it and write to me, it would have remained that way.

Here is what I said:

The National Review features an opinion piece by Iranian activist Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi and his wife Elio Bonazzi which compares Khomeini to the Renaissance's most famous enemy, Savonarola

The National Review features an opinion piece by Iranian activist Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi and her husband Elio Bonazzi which compares Khomeini to the Renaissance's most famous enemy, Savonarola

But I did get a very nice email, titled "gender confusion":

Hello,

MRS. Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi here...The husband in the equation is MR. Elio Bonazzi! We're grateful for your kind regard in posting our article about Savonarola and Khomeini but you've got the genders all wrong!!!!!!!!

Thank you,

BZB

(I won't even try to blame my many years in the San Francisco Bay Area....)