We dropped by the Leader office recently to pick up some back copies of issues we missed while crashing through campgrounds in central Arkansas, specifically the June 18 issue. We were looking for information on who the top graduate of the 2010 Howe senior class would be (Paige Potter) and our Managing Editor Jeremy Corley pointed out that he was in Houston accepting an award for the paper that week and any errors should be accredited to Rodney Hays.

Now Rod is the editor of the Prosper Press, a wildly humorous columnist for that paper and a licensed Texas motor vehicle operator.

Our personal error needle had gone to the top in recent articles and we couldn't lay that trip onto Rodney although that thought did cross our mind.

As an aside, other things that have crossed our mind lately have been: A family of ducks, a hard-to-solve Sudoku game and a feeling of despair after Maria Sharapova was eliminated at Wimbledon.

One of our more egregious errors that made it into the Sherman paper I think came in our article on the new Lady Panther basketball coach, Timothy Bryant. And I made the error in a quote no less, attributed to coach Bryant where I wrote,

"We new...". How in the blazes did I get so dimwitted to forget the K? Well, I will just have to do laps, stadium steps or forgo cold beverages for a mutually agreed to length of time to pay for that mistake. One that didn't make the final edition came in a KJ column about my golf outing in Arkansas. I wrote that the old guys playing ahead of me would stop and right down their scores. Gosh, is there a mind at work here today or is it vacation time for the brain as well?

All that talk about the blame game reminded me of a long-ago day at the Dallas Morning News. On the front page of that paper every weekday there was a column, and forgive me but I forget the title, but the byline read Lorrie Brooks.

The column was catch-all thing about certain events that had occurred the previous day but they did not warrant sending out a reporter to cover the action. Usually some newbie would be picked to write the column for there was no Lorrie Brooks at the DMN.

When an irate reader would call in complaining about some misspelled name or erroneous score for a ball game, an alert phone person would lay the blame right at the nonexistent feet of Lorrie Brooks (Lorrie would be a guy if the complaint was about sports and a girl if the beef was over some society misprint).

That's a plan we should initiate here at the Leader in my opinion. We could create this fictitious person, Norm D. Plume, to come up with a short column each week and fill it with misspelled names and other errors of fact and presto, Rodney, Ken and most importantly Jack would be off the hook.

With spell and grammar check functions available on most PCs, you would think that most of those errors would be highlighted and corrected before reaching the final stages of publication. Spell check doesn't know write from right nor knew from new and apparently neither did I.

I bet Paige Potter never made those mistakes.

Jack Walker is a staff writer for the Van Alstyne Leader.