Outstanding mistakes of all time

After a string of newsworthy errors, a stumble through the annals of time to choose a few favourites from history.

It has been a hectic few days for news of mistakes. Well, yes, I know that to be human is to err, but we experienced connoisseurs of the bish and the blunder look out for the ones exemplifying that to be human is also often splendidly absurd. If I might quote Puck, from the Bard's timely A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

Consider, for example, the German bank clerk who fell asleep in mid transfer of 62.40 euros while his finger was on the "2" key and ended up transferring 222,222,222.222 euros instead. Or the alleged mix-up at a cemetery in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which saw a couple being buried apart instead of under a headstone reading "Together for Ever".

Could happen to anyone. Which couldn't be said for Flt Lt Ben Plank, of the Red Arrows display team, who pushed the wrong button over Shropshire and sent out blue smoke behind him, rather than red, thus rather ruining the usual meticulously colour-coded show of red, white and blue.

Flt Lt Plank's is my favourite of those, combining as it does maximum impact, least harm and the simplest of errors. Others over time have, of course, had more consequence: one thinks of Eve and that apple; the Trojans and that Greek gift; the smouldering baker's oven in Pudding Lane; the Light Brigade and the wrong valley; Neville Chamberlain and that piece of paper; the Decca Records executive who turned down The Beatles because "guitar groups are on the way out"; and the less well-known, such as the Canadian seeking to escape the danger of nuclear war who emigrated to the Falklands shortly before the Argentine invasion.

For sheer consistency, though, I would recommend Mr Homer Simpson of Springfield, USA, the Laurel, Hardy and Billy Bunter of our day. And while we are with moving pictures, let me salute Harry Warner, of Warner Bros, for this splendid quote from 1927: "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"

Allow me now, then, to present my Outstanding Mistakes of All Time, not to mock but to sympathise, remembering the words of John Bradford (1510-55): "There but for the grace of God, go I."

1. Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden (1594-1632), disdained the steel armour offered by his aides at the Battle of Lützen, saying: "The Lord God is my Armour!" Yes, the Battle of Lutzen was indeed in 1632.

2. Dennis Laroux, a US tattooist, angered three members of an all-girl chapter of Hell's Angels when he tattooed Stan's Slaves on their breasts rather than Satan's Slaves.

3. Sophia Hadi drove all the way from Leeds to Washington, Tyne and Wear, after a friend there reported hearing a rare song thrush, only to find it was, in fact, the noise made by a fork lift truck reversing at the local Asda.

4. Peter Crawford's self-defence in a New York court suffered slightly after he asked the key witness: "Did you get a good look at my face when I snatched your bag?"

5. Maj Gen John Sedgwick (1813-1864) was unimpressed by Confederate sniper fire at the Battle of Spotsylvania. "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance!"

6. Rommell decided that he could go home to celebrate his wife's birthday because Normandy was so quiet in June 1944.

7. The Liverpool Echo, in a rare error, once described Violet, the mother of the Kray twins, as "Mrs Violent Kray".

8. This was Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the General Post Office, in 1876: "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."

9. The popularity of spinach as a health food, which resulted in Popeye the Sailor Man and generations of children staring miserably at a plate bearing the canned product, resulted from a misplaced decimal point in calculations of the amount of iron in it.

10. In Sonning Common, near Reading, in 2003, an unidentified motorist - you know who you are - collided with and knocked down the sign reading, "Sonning Common welcomes careful drivers".

Actually, to demonstrate how easy it is to err, I should mention that the story about the spinach is itself a mistake, and that there are doubts about Rev Bradford's authorship of going but for the grace of God (although it is true that he was burnt at the stake). But, as you will have noticed, human error is notoriously difficult to eliminate (as I might well have inadvertently illustrated).

What to do? There is no shortage of advice, from Sophocles to Einstein, about learning from them: Sir William Preece soon changed his mind about the telephone, for example. My favourite comment in the field, however, remains this, from the late Peter Cook: "I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly".

By Charles NevinAuthorSource: Read more on BBC News

10 fun facts about Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

Tuesday is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's birthday. He's 29. If that seems insanely young for a billionaire, remember that he co-founded Facebook when he was a teenager.

Zuckerberg has a lot to celebrate. He's amassed a fortune, inspired one of every seven people on the planet to use his product and changed how the world communicates -- all before age 30.

By comparison, when they were 29, Steve Jobs launched the Macintosh computer and Bill Gates was readying the first retail version of Microsoft Windows. And most of the rest of us were just struggling to pay the rent.

So happy birthday to Zuck! To mark the occasion, we collected these 10 random facts about the tech wunderkind:
1. Zuckerberg suffers from red-green colorblindness and sees the color blue best, which is why blue dominates Facebook's color scheme.

2. AOL and Microsoft tried to recruit him when he was in high school after he created Synapse, a program that used artificial intelligence to learn users' music-listening habits.

3. He wears the same gray Facebook T-shirt almost every day because he's busy and it saves him time in the morning.

4. Despite Zuckerberg's casual wardrobe, he said he wore a tie every day in 2009 to show that Facebook was serious about growing in the face of the global recession.

5. He is a vegetarian and once said he will only eat meat if he has killed the animal himself. But among his "likes" on his Facebook page are McDonalds and In-N-Out Burger.

6. He has amassed 220,000 Twitter followers despite the fact that he's only tweeted 19 times in four years, and not once in 15 months.

7. In October 2010, Zuckerberg took a bunch of Facebook staffers to a public theater to see "The Social Network," the movie about the founding of Facebook. In public comments afterward, he criticized the film's portrayal of him as someone who invented Facebook to gain social status.

8. He owns a Hungarian sheepdog named Beast, who has a Facebook page with 1.5 million fans.

9. He took some heat last year for giving his wife, Priscilla Chan, a ruby wedding ring that jewelers valued at about $25,000 even though he was worth about $19 billion at the time.

10. If you type @[4:0] in a Facebook comment window and hit enter, his name will appear.



Source: CNN (Please visit www.cnn.com for more news around the world)

Interesting Facts about Tom and Jerry

Tom and Jerry is an American series of animated cartoons created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, centering on a never-ending rivalry between Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse.  Hanna and Barbera wrote and directed one hundred and fourteen Tom and Jerry shorts between 1940 and 1957, before the animation department was closed.

The original Tom and Jerry series, now known as one of the most famous and longest-lived rivalries in American TV history, is notable for having won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film seven times, tying with Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies.  A longtime television favorite with kids, teenagers, and adults alike, in 2000 it was named one of the greatest television shows of all time by Time magazine.

The popular series features on-going comedic fights, usually centering around Tom’s numerous attempts to capture Jerry and the chaos and destruction that would invariably result. Though it’s sometimes unclear why Tom incessantly chases Jerry, Jerry’s eating of Tom’s master’s food (which Tom has been entrusted to safeguard), Jerry’s rescuring of Tom’s other potential dinners (ducks, canaries, and goldfish), and Jerry’s ruining of Tom’s attempts to seduce various feline females seems to be reasons enough.

Central to the Tom and Jerry comic template it that Tom rarely succeeds in catching Jerry, mainly because Jerry is remarkably clever, cunning, and quite lucky. Often seeming to intentionally perpetuate their love-hate relationship, while often extremely annoyed at each another, in many episodes there seems to be genuine friendship (as in “Springtime for Thomas“) and concern for each other’s well-being (as in "Jerry and the Lion,” where Jerry tricks Tom into thinking he has shot him, and Tom comes running with the first aid kit).

Often compared to the Simpsons‘ “Itchy and Scratchy” characters–which many consider an homage to the famous cat/mouse rivals–Tom and Jerry episodes are infamous for some of the most comically gory acts ever committed to the cartoon cell, such as Jerry slicing Tom in half, shutting his head in a window or a door, stuffing Tom’s tail in a waffle iron, plugging his tail into an electric socket, causing a tree to drive him into the ground, sticking matches between his toes and lighting them, and tying him to a firework and setting it off; and Tom retaliating by using everything from axes, firearms, explosives, traps, and poison to try to end Jerry’s life.

While Tom and Jerry has been criticized for being what many consider unnecessarily violent, in reality, there is actually no blood or gore in any of the original cartoons, and neither of the pair are ever seriously injured. (An exception is when Tom gets sliced into pieces in the opening credits of Tom and Jerry: The Movie.) Recurring gags involve Jerry hitting Tom when he’s preoccupied–with Tom only feeling the effects moments later–and Jerry stopping Tom in mid-chase–calling for a time-out–just before he does something terribly nasty to Tom.

Traditionally, music plays a very important part in Tom and Jerry shorts–since Tom and Jerry almost never speak–effectively emphasizing the action, adding emotion to the scenes, and filling in for traditional sound effects.  Most of the dialogue from Tom and Jerry are high-pitched laughs and gasping screams, which are thoughtfully provided via a horn or other musical instrument.  Additionally, musical director Scott Bradley created complex scores that combined elements of popular jazz, classical, and pop music, and often incorporated songs from MGM films like The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me In St. Louis.

Beginning in 1960, MGM had new Tom and Jerry shorts produced in Eastern Europe by Rembrandt Films.  In 1963, however, due to poor quality, production was returned to Hollywood under Chuck Jones’s Sib-Tower 12 Productions, producing forty-seven additional cartoons before it wrapped up production in 1967. The famously popular cat and mouse stars then resurfaced when Hanna-Barbera/Filmation Studios produced cartoons during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, with a feature film, Tom and Jerry: The Movie, released in 1992, and in 2001, their first made-for TV short, “Tom and Jerry: The Mansion Cat for Boomerang.” The most recent Tom and Jerry theatrical short, “The Karate Guard,” debuted in Los Angeles theaters on September 27, 2005.

Today, Time Warner (bought by WTBS founder Ted Turner for his Turner Entertainment division) owns the rights to Tom and Jerry and is distributed by Warner Bros.  In February 2010, the now-classic cartoon celebrated its 70th anniversary with a DVD collection of thirty shorts, and in June 2010 the Tom and Jerry Deluxe Anniversary Collection was released to celebrate the animated duo’s seventh decade together.  The classic episodes are also running on Cartoon Network TBS, TNT, The WB, Boomerang, and Turner Classic Movies.

Source: Factoidz