Eh, what's the difference?

I'm pretty sure I've written about my love of newspapers (which probably stems from my delivering the Des Moines Register every morning at a young age) before and it still saddens me to read articles about the demise of an integral part of my morning ritual.

Yesterday was a case in point. This headline says it all: "More Americans get news from Internet than newspaper or radio." Sigh. Of course, this is not news and I've been steeling myself for the day when I may have to read the news from sort of e-reader over my eggs and cereal.

But this morning, I had to cringe and laugh at the same time at an awful grammatical error in the Chicago Tribune. On the front page of the sports section, there's a headline in the lower right-hand corner that promotes the kick-off of the NCAA basketball tournament. The headline should have read, "And they're off..." Instead, it read, "And there off..." I can accept typos, but this was such a bad error that I imagined some editor at the Tribune seeing this error and thinking, "Eh, so what? Nobody reads this anyway."

One of the many reasons I love my wife is that she shared in my incredulity. Our daughter didn't quite get why we were so up-in-arms (though I think she understood the difference between there and they're), but we suggested that she take it to class and she dutifully did so. Anne noted that her mom would have given me a dime for spotting this error.

I'm all about the little things. This is so unbelievably inconsequential in the face of the tragedy in Japan, conflict in Afghanistan, etc. And yet I can't stop reflecting on it in the hopes that people will also continue to care about the little things, too.