Does No One Proofread Calendars?

I got a Celtic wall calendar for Christmas. Every month features a photo of a different Celtic, along with their vital stats in a column along the side. As a huge Celtic fan, I was really pleased with this. Also, as a guy who had a gap on the wall above his bureau to fill in, it worked out rather nicely (I mean, it's no Shakira calendar, but she hasn't put one out in a while). My editor eye was in full effect, though. The first thing I noticed about it was it had a couple mistakes on it. First off, there are two months devoted to James Posey. Posey is no longer a Celtic - he left before the season even started. But it was late in free agency and they probably had to go to press with this calendar a while ago and had to just hope he re-signed with the team. So, I was willing to give them a mulligan on that one.

It wasn't until I took a closer look that I started to notice other problems. For example, the picture in May one of those pictures of James Posey and it listed his number as #42. However, a 2 second look at the accompanying picture shows Posey wearing #41... which he wore all season. There is no reason to screw something like this up, let alone doing it twice (the same mistake appears in November). I guess you could chalk it up to the fact that this company had 30 individual calendars to make and that works out to be a lot of players, but still, they're right next to one another. That's a mistake any editor with eyes should have caught.

The worst offense, however, came this month when I noticed that alongside the picture of Kevin Garnett they had misspelled his name. Alright, I'm done making excuses for these people. This isn't one of those page-a-day kind of calendars with 365 pages to proof. They only have 12 pages to make sure are correct. And making sure that you spell the name of one of the most popular players in the NBA isn't asking too much, even if you do have to make 30 different versions of this calendar.

But, you want to know the worst parts?
1) it took me until now to realise that they spelled Garnett's name wrong, despite the fact they did the same thing on the January picture. Shows you how much I care about the date.
2) it made me question my own spelling in all my own columns. I had this moment where I wondered if I had been spelling his name wrong all these months. I had to go into my closet and look at one of my 4 Garnett jerseys to make sure there really should be two T's.

-Let me just say this about Roy Halladay - I love the guy's skills. He's one of the 5 best pitchers in the American League, maybe in all of baseball. But, the price to get him would be astronomical. You're looking at giving Toronto at least Buchholz and Masterson, probably also have to throw in some top-quality minor leaguers. As it stands right now, the Sox's problems aren't with starting pitching. They need some middle relievers and could use a better 4th outfielder. I say they only go after Halladay to prevent him from ending up on the Yankees.