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Horror Stories Trust me. You don't want to know about the typo found on the menu of the "Crab Trap Restaurant." If only they had called The Message Therapist before it was too late.
This one is so sad. Plaque honoring actor instead has name of MLK's killer
"Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive.''
When the Dodi Hits the Propeller Air Zim in the 'dodi' over Bob's meal By Basildo Peta A
hugely embarrassing typographical error on a menu issued to President Robert
Mugabe during his return flight from Malaysia
this week led to four senior Air Zimbabwe officials being suspended from their jobs.
Don't worry! The Message Therapist has a yen for accuracy! Huge share price typo costs Mizuho Securities 27 billion yen December 9, 2005 Mizuho Securities Co. suffered losses of at least 27 billion yen [an amount greater than The Message Therapist’s entire annual income] following an error on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in which its order to sell one share for 610,000 yen each was accidentally listed as 610,000 shares for 1 yen. The firm said the error had been made with an order to sell shares in the human resource company J-Com Co. "At presents [sic] the losses are 27 billion yen [roughly $224,000,000]. There's a possibility this could expand to the range of 100 billion yen [roughly $830,000,000]," a company representative said. The error, which occurred during trading on Thursday, threw the exchange into turmoil. Mizuho President Makoto Fukuda apologized for the error. "We are deeply sorry for the trouble that has been caused," Fukuda said. A total of 14,500 J-Com shares have been issued already. About 3,000 of these were reportedly sold at a price of 610,000 yen per share. The accidental order was 42 times bigger than the number of issued shares, but a computer warning of the misplaced order was overlooked. Mizuho Securities Co. bought back about 480,000 shares, but since the number of sold shares exceeded the number of existing shares, there is a possibility that Mizuho may not be able to hand shares over to the investors who bought them. Mizuho reportedly plans to discuss with the TSE over whether to make cash payments instead. The new J-Com shares had a starting price of 672,000 yen, but after the misplaced order they fell to the day's trading limit of 572,000 yen each. After Mizuho Securities Co. bought back the shares, they rose to the maximum allowable single day gain of 700,000 yen. (Mainichi) Copyright 2004-2005 THE MAINICHI NEWSPAPERS. All rights
reserved.
Here's my personal favorite: Frammas Grammar Scientific Conference Falls for Gibberish Prank CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - A bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference in a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jeremy Stribling said on Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with nonsensical text, charts and diagrams. The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13, 2005 in Orlando, Florida. To their surprise, one of the papers -- ''Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy'' -- was accepted for presentation. The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the journal Social Text. Reuters News Agency
What has three I's? Police cars missing an ''i'' in ''Virginia'' Associated Press NEWPORT NEWS -- Residents with keen eyesight may have noticed something peculiar about city police cruisers. The penultimate letter in Virginia was left out of the state's name in about 30 decals on the cruisers. "We screwed up,'' said Allen Ward, acting director of vehicle services. "It's an 'i.' It's easy to miss.'' A patrol officer noticed the Commonwealth of "Virgina'' on his car and notified officials, who have ordered corrected details to replace to misspellings. Since the discovery of the missing "i,'' the department has been e-mailing officers telling them to check their decals so the "Virgina'' decals can be covered over. "We've done 30 so far,'' Ward said. "I don't know how many are still out there that are misspelled.'' © 2003 HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com
I have good news and I have bad news. Here's the good news. Mega Millions Jackpot is $20 Million and Growing MEGA MILLIONS, March 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Players from coast to coast won more than $3.1 million in prizes in the Tuesday, March 8, 2005 Mega Millions drawing. There was no jackpot winner, so the jackpot is on the move and estimated at $20 million for the Friday, March 11, 2005 drawing. Mega Millions is played in Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Washington. Officials in California have announced plans to join the fun later this year. Mega Millions drawings are held Tuesdays and Fridays at 11:00 PM Eastern Time, 10:00 PM Central Time and 8:00 PM Pacific Time. Somewhere near Atlanta on Saturday morning March 12, a sleepy man calls the local Waffle House to ask about the winning Mega Millions numbers. He hit the jackpot! Can't you hear it now??? “Bertha! Wake up! We won the lottery! I just cussed out my boss and quit my job!
March 13, 2005 The Mega Millions winning number was incorrect in the first edition. The correct number is 18-19-31-35-36; Mega Ball: 17. Dang! "Hello, boss? It's Bubba. Yeah, Bubba.
"Hello, utility company? Can you make my house hotter?" PITTSBURGH — A utility company that offers clean energy inadvertently referred customers to a service that's anything but clean. Green Mountain Energy's toll-free number was misprinted in letters sent to 93,000 Pennsylvania customers, causing those who called to be directed to a phone-sex line. About 200 people trying to reach the utility company were greeted by a husky-voiced woman offering "adventures." Company officials are unsure how the mix-up happened. The letter was proofread [but not by The Message Therapist!] and approved by company officials with the correct number, said John Holtz, spokesman for the Austin, Texas-based utility.
Cause of Death: "Typo Fever" Pennsylvania woman is informed by IRS that she's alive SINKING SPRING, Pa. A federal agency has told a Pennsylvania woman something she already knows: she's alive. Toni Lausch says when she tried to apply for a car loan, she was rejected because the salesman's computer said she was dead. Then, the I-R-S wouldn't allow her to file a 2004 income tax return for the same reason. So while money had been withheld from her paychecks, she couldn't file to get a refund. Turns out that because of a typographical error her social security number had been switched with that of a dead person. Lausch says she has received a letter from the Social Security Administration, informing her of her revived status. Copyright 2005 Associated Press.
Scratch and Stiff (Déjà vu all over again?) Scratch this! Thousands fume over game typo The Associated Press
NEW YORK - Thousands thought they'd hit the jackpot. But it turns out it was a printing mistake. The error led thousands of people who'd played the Scratch N' Match game in Saturday's New York Daily News to mistakenly believe they'd won up to $100,000 in cash and prizes. They were shocked to learn that they didn't when they read a correction in the paper. Daily News officials are blaming the agency that runs the contest for the error. The agency said it "profoundly apologizes for and regrets any inconvenience that the incorrect numbers may have caused." The paper advised people who scratched off the wrong numbers to submit a claim to the agency by July 8. Meanwhile, the paper has ordered an independent investigation into how the mistake happened. "We pride ourselves on defending our readers' interests, and this case is no different," a Daily News spokesman said. © 2005 The Associated Press.
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