Aside from the mere act of dragging myself out of bed and facing a computer screen every day, the most challenging aspect of editing The Syncopated Times is combing through each piece of writing submitted and checking the accuracy of the facts it contains. Since launching this paper, it has been my mission to Get It Right—and that pursuit has proved to be maddeningly quixotic. Don Quixote had his mind turned by Romance and set out on an extravagant quest to be worthy of the love of a barmaid; I became deranged by a passion for jazz and embarked on a crusade to tell the absolute truth about the music and its perpetrators. Battling windmills seems like the more sensible day job.
The first—and least frustrating—level of fact-checking consists merely of going through and correcting misspelled names and facts which can easily be looked up for verification. Even otherwise reliable writers throw me a howler occasionally, and if I don’t look up every single unfamiliar name a misnomer might get into print. And I have learned to detect garden-variety factual errors almost intuitively. Having a brain like a garage sale gives me a wide range of useless knowledge which—miraculously—turns out to be useful.
The next two levels offer me more bafflement—and many hours of scouring Google (or print references when elusive information is not to be found online). When no information
