Oops!

The Texas Board of Education announced in November that it had made its selections of approved math textbooks for the next school year, even though the group of chosen books contained a total of 109,263 errors. Books of the industry giant Houghton Mifflin accounted for about 86,000. All publishers have guaranteed to correct the errors by the time the books are shipped. [Dallas Morning News, 11-16-07] In October, rescue crews in Pittsburgh freed a woman who had become stuck underneath an SUV in front of another woman's house. She told police that she suspected her husband was having an affair with the woman and had crawled around to get a better vantage point for spying. She said she inadvertently fell asleep and, when she awoke, could not crawl out. [WPXI-TV (Pittsburgh), 10-17-07] Spectacular Errors: In November, a 77-year-old man in Jacksonville, Fla., intending to help his daughter by riding his bicycle to Long Branch Elementary School to pick up her 4-year-old son (his grandson), arrived back home with a kid on the bike but did not realize that he had picked up the wrong boy. Said the picked-up kid's frantic mother, "(The two boys) don't even look alike." [WMTW-TV (Auburn, Me.), 11-8-07] The Rhode Island Department of Health fined Rhode Island Hospital $50,000 in November because three doctors so far this year have performed neurosurgery on the wrong side of the patients' brains. (Two patients survived.) [San Francisco Chronicle-AP, 11-27-07]