Turns out Ryan Seacrest isn’t the only idiot

I’m issuing a mea culpa here. Not that anyone is going to give me a pass just because I’m willing to display contrition.

My apology involves a couple of errors that I made, one on Friday, the other on Sunday.

On Friday, I wrote the following line in a review of the film “Amazing Grace” : “Abraham Lincoln didn’t free the slaves until 1963. Every American primary student knows the story.”

Oh? I think that what every primary student knows – or should know – is that Lincoln freed the slaves (which is what he did when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation ) in 1 8 63.

It may be possible to argue that the Proclamation didn’t arrive at its full effect until 1963. But that doesn’t change the stupidity of the error – which, to be specific, was a typographical mistake that didn’t get corrected.

But if that weren’t bad enough, on Sunday in my books column, I wrote that Spokane author Jess Walter was nominated for a 2006 National Book Award “for nonfiction.”

Doh! Since Walter was nominated for his novel – say again, novel – “The Zero,” the nomination clearly was for fiction. Again, the distance between what I knew in my brain to be true simply didn’t make the couple of feet to my fingertips as they pranced across the keyboard.

Anyway, thank those of you who called and e-mailed to point out my flaws. I would have preferred not to have had to read (or heard) the insults, much less the jokes at my expense. And I certainly would have appreciated it had everyone followed the example of reader Jon Freitag, who at least included his name.

But, then, if I were all that thin-skinned, I wouldn’t write for a newspaper. And I would work just a tad harder to make sure that my right middle finger hit the 8 key instead of the 9.

So, as I wrote above, mea culpa.

Below: This is how I feel.

Fox publicity