… or, catching the internet with its pants down.
It's pretty hard to capture the ephemerality of hilarious spelling mistakes and typos on well-maintained websites. But I did it. And with only a little bit of guilt, I post the result here. I mean no disrespect to Max Fisher of The Atlantic, where I found the error – in this age of automatic spell checking, errors of this sort are easily made and missed – I'm guilty of much worse ones, myself. But I do find a delicious irony in the specific error made, given that he used to be a food writer.
So having said that, the absolute best part of his article about last year's secret nuclear standoff between the US, Russia and Libya was the serendiptous typo that allowed him to write, "U.S. officials worried about the security of the casks. It would have been easy for anyone with a gun and a truck to drive up, overpower the guard, use the crane to load the casks onto the truck, and drive off into the vast Libyan dessert."
I so enjoyed the poetic image of a gang of terrorists driving truckloads of enriched uranium around a Candylandified Sahara.
Sadly, the error was very rapidly corrected. In the time I took to write this post, the delightful dessert was Orwellianly transmogrified into a workaday desert. But I had the amazing fortuity to have done the page "refresh" in a different window, and hadn't closed the original. Consequently, I am able to present, with great pride, exceedingly rare "before and after" screenshots of the error in question, below. [Click thru images to view original full size]
Before:
[broken link! FIXME]
After:
[broken link! FIXME]