Humanity's less than a century old, according to New York Times tech columnist David Pogue. He blogged Tuesday morning: "Late tonight—specifically, 123 seconds after 1:00 a.m.—the time and date, for the first time in all of humanity, will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. And it will never happen again." But as a reader later pointed out to Pogue, '06 comes up every century. Maybe he knows something about global warming that the rest of us don't.

I mean, I can't say I'm not now hoping to try to catch the moment, and appreciate the heads-up. But man, that's ugly. Just another example of a journalist putting bravado before brains, and forgetting there's pretty much always something from the past that's exactly the same as what's happening today. (The Associated Press was more level-headed about the clock-watching.)

Maybe the moral of the story here is not about journalism, but about blogging. Stupid blogger puts something up in a hurry, without thinking about it, because that's what blogging is and there's no editor involved to check him (or at least, I hope there was no editor involved on that one). But it gets quickly corrected, thanks to reader participation. Maybe after someone else starts blogging about the error. And the moral is…
blogging is good, it's bad, and, in the wrong hands, it can waste the time of many people. Then again, what else is going to keep me distracted until 1:02 a.m.?