From Sridhar Pappu’s latest column.
While perhaps a reasoned, well-thought basis for a beat, The Times assigning a reporter to cover conservatives still feels strange, if not off-putting?a little like Judd Nelson peering through the bathroom window at Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Sorry, Mr. Pappu, that was Judge Reinhold.
Update: I e-mailed Sridhar and he assures me it’s being fixed. Then I felt like a complete idiot for being one of those people whose only commnent about an otherwise worthwhile column is that he got some meaningless pop culture reference wrong in a throw-away line … and that I went to the trouble to flag the error when it’s a certainty in a city the size of New York, he’ll have been told a hundred times by the time I’ve gotten to it.
Note to the rookies out there: This a good lesson for just doing your job and not making a nuisance of yourself every time you find a fact error in somebody’s copy. They hate the mistakes just as much as you do … the polite, decent reporter says “oops, thanks for the catch” and does not say, “well, you know, my fallibility is why you have job, so get over yourself.”