Hi, my name’s Dave and I’m probably the worst speller you’ve ever met.
That’s not because I’m bad at spelling, mind you. Sure, I likely wouldn’t have lasted long if I’d ever gotten into one of those national-level spelling bees on TV with words so long and obscure they wouldn’t make the cut for a pocket dictionary.
But friends and family will remember a child who was absolutely insufferable about pointing out people’s typos and was driven to despair by any spelling mistake he’d ever made. If I got less insufferable as I grew older, it must have been because I discovered better things to do with my time and energy, but typos in my own writing still pain me.
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All that is to say I still don’t know how it happened, but we wound up misspelling the word “resistance” in the headline “Rising restistance” right on the front page of our Sept. 9 issue. In a word: ouch.
Now, anyone seeing it would have known the intended word was “resistance” — it was subtle enough that no one so far has complained or even mentioned it to me. If I’m honest with myself, if it had happened anywhere else in the book I might not have even noted it in this space, but this week’s column is devoted to errors and I don’t want anyone to think we somehow didn’t yet see that big glaring one. It definitely was not the fault of the author of the article, so may I just say “Sorry” again to Jay Whetter — and to you?
As hard as we work to avoid them, errors can and do happen, in this paper and others. One of the books by my desk tells the story of a managing editor at the Courier-Journal in Louisville who offered up money for a staff party if they could get through a week without any error that required publishing a correction. Needless to say, he knew the publisher’s cash was pretty safe in a business that called for 100,000 words to be put to paper, day in and day out.
And as I said in this space many months ago, whenever we find errors in your Grainews, I want to make a point of mentioning them up here on this page rather than tucking them in the back of the book somewhere. Here goes.
Corrections
In the Sept. 23 print issue (“Benchmarking soil health in Alberta,” page 7), we listed a colour key for the three graphs that appeared with the article, in which the colours changed every 20 per cent as a given quantity or quality increases on the Y axis. In that colour key, “0-20” was meant to denote “red, very low,” while “80-100” would denote “blue, very high.”
Somehow, though, “0-20” in that list got replaced by a weird chunk of what looks like computer code. We regret the error, which has now been fixed in the online version of the article.
That one’s a bit ironic, because there’ve been jokes lately on social media about how people my age or older have been known to blame something wrong in an online article on “coding error” — never mind that with the rise of platforms such as WordPress, writers filing content online haven’t had to write any of the accompanying code for many years now. But in this case, although the error was in print, it actually looks like it might have been a stray or incomplete little piece of code. How’d it happen? I have no idea. But we regret the error and we apologize to the writer, Leeann Minogue, and to you for any confusion.
Last but not least, in the Sept. 23 print issue, in Peter Vitti’s column in the Cattleman’s Corner section (“Creep feeding pays good profits in 2025,” page 20), you’ll see where a table was included with the article comparing gains from creep feeding to a no-creep program. Certainly a 6,814-lb. weaned calf would be a pretty darned amazing, and very frightening, gain from creep feeding — but come on. The numbers for creep feeding clearly aren’t the correct numbers and they definitely do not correspond to the numbers in the actual spreadsheet file we got from Peter Vitti.
Again, I’m at a complete loss as to how that happened and I don’t know where that weird line of numbers came from in the first place. We’ve got the correct figures in the online version of the article and I’m now also putting the correct table here in this column for your reference. If you’ve saved the Sept. 23 issue for future reference, you’d be doing us a huge favour if you’d clip this out and glue or tape it down over the table on that page.
Seriously: we regret the error and we apologize to Peter Vitti, and to you as well, for any confusion.
Hopefully all this wasn’t as painful for you as it is for me; I may be signing off now to go chug some Alka-Seltzer. We’ll keep putting up a strong resistance to errors, but if you see any in this issue of Grainews that warrant a correction in this space, or if you have any questions, comments or concerns, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via email.
