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I sure do remember the Verazzano Bridge scenes in Saturday Night Fever. Don't they have a fact checker at the News? Or doesn't Hinckley bother to check his dates as best he can? Next he'll try to tell us that Ebbets Field was demolished the moment the Dodgers left town. (The park came down at last in 1960, by the way - and the same baseball-painted wrecking ball was used to bring down the Polo Grounds in April 1964.) I'm writing a book about the 1962 Mets (almost ready to make a formal proposal to agents/publishers, by the way - three draft chapters done) and I've checked and double checked multiple sources already to check dates when I use them specifically. It doesn't take that much effort.

I don't know where the fact checkers are on these things. Case in point -- I just finished reading "Basket Case," which is Carl Hiassen's new book. It's a pretty good read, but I was astonished by one glaring error in it. The story is about a 46-year-old obituary writer who is obsessed with death, and he keeps on saying that Elvis and JFK died at age 46. Well, that was true about JFK, but Elvis was only 42 when he died! I was hoping that there was going to be a payoff to this repeated error in the narrative, but no such luck.