The Corrections

On October 31 of last year I put together a story entitled

Scotland’s Joint Committee meets

. It was based on information supplied by several people, including at least one person who was actually at the meeting.

I used to be a dedicated reader of the Piping Times. I’ve mentioned before that my dad when I was kid actually collected them for research purposes, and I poured over them as an adolescent in St. Louis trying to soak up everything piping. I have the entire collection up until about 1998 when I just couldn’t be bothered to read it any longer. It had changed too much for me to want to follow it.

Occasionally, though, friends will copy bits from it and e-mail them to me. So it was yesterday that I was sent a particularly embarrassing (for it, not me) piece in what I gather is the most recent issue. An anonymous writer “corrected” the story above, taking various bits out of context and seemingly twisting the meaning of several lines in the Joint Committee meeting article.

In a style so typical of the bitterness that often spews from the little Glasgow digest, the publication tried to find the negative just to be negative. The amusing list of “corrections” seemed to be another ploy to draw people in to an argument, thus lending credibility to the whole affair. It’s not happening.

I will say that the anonymous writer was correct in his or her first point. I did get the name of the arcane “Joint Committee” wrong in that I called it the Joint Committee for Piping. I amended the story so that it lists the name of the group correctly, as the Joint Committee for Judging.

But what can you say about a publication that thinks it has a “duty” to try to correct other publications, and then can’t even get its own corrections correct? Is it worth the energy to engage it in a pissing match? No. If I’ve learned anything in my 18 years of work on the Piper & Drummer it’s that people just don’t care about that kind of stuff. It’s petty and puerile.