2005-01-14 - 3:53 p.m.

Google News is a pretty neat little website. Basically, what it does is spider through about 4,500 news sources and groups together stories by topic. Most of the time, it works astoundingly well, though sometimes a bizzarre rogue story will show up, and sometimes the "headline" story will be something from Joe-Bob's Completely Nonauthoritative Herald-Tribune instead of, say, the AP or the New York Times.

Yesterday, the lead story on the un-banning of America (The Book) was a not very well-written piece from The Daily O'Collegian, the newspaper of the Oklahoma State University. Go ahead, read the article! Does anything jump out at you?

The answer is: 12 Supreme Court Justices. Now, I'm not expecting anyone to be able to name all of the Justices (Rehnquist, Scalia, Ginsberg, O'Connor, Breyer, Souter, Kennedy, Thomas, Stevens!), but there are nine of them. There have never been twelve Justices. If one is in doubt re: the number of Justices, it takes about three seconds on google to find the Supreme Court's webpage, and then you can just count.

But anyone in college should know the number of Justices. Anyone writing about the Justices should definitely know this. And anyone editing a publicly-accessible newspaper should extremely know this. See, this is exactly the reason why America (The Book) should not be banned: it'll at least teach people the correct number of Justices. Also, the offending pages are about the least pornographic pictures of nude people I've ever seen, including those in medical texts.

Hilarious quotes from About The Daily O'Collegian:

- "Errors of fact reported to the editor will be corrected promptly."

- "The Daily O'Collegian is a member of The Associated Press, Oklahoma Press Association, Associated College Press, College Newspaper Business and Advertising Managers Inc. and College Media Advisers."

Weep for your country, dear readers.