20060716

Needless Pedantry, yet again

I was making a rare foray out of my domicile yesterday into a mecca of consumerism known locally as a mall. There, I found the following item:



A DVD called "The Presidents" from the History Channel. Note that the cover contains fewer than two dozen words, yet holds a really quite glaring error.

It talks about the "43 leaders of the United States", meaning presidents. There have indeed been 43 presidencies, up to GWB who is casually referred to as 43. But there have only been 42 people filling this role. Look carefully at the highly unauthoritative Wikipedia (unless someone has defaced it again), and you'll spot that numbers 22 and 24 are the same. Grover Cleveland is famous for being the only presdident to hold the presidency on two non-consecutive occasions.

Honestly, if the History Channel can't even be trusted to get the number of people who have been president of the US correct, how can I trust them on the more complex details they purport to tells, such as who won the war? That's not a mistake you'd find in the UK, where everyone knows that the number of people who have been Prime Minister is... sort of complicated, and rather depends on your definition, and whether you count certain exceptions, and anyway, what's the point of counting them anyway?

[I did a quick Internet search for "Prime Minister", and the following rather disturbing advert arose:

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