I have linked cool 3-D sidewalk art before. But not this cool 3-D sidewalk art. (Via Pej.)

I always love it when bloggers warn you they won’t be blogging, or that blogging will be light. I’m guilty of it myself. So:

Warning: blogging will be light to nonexistent tonight between 9 and 10 p.m. Pacific Time.

Sopranos, you know.

Regular readers will remember that I recently wrote the L.A. Times requesting a correction of a letter making a false claim about President Bush and Hurricane Katrina. It has taken a full week, but my request has finally resulted in the following correction:

Levees: A March 3 letter said the Associated Press reported that before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, President Bush was warned that the levees protecting the city could be breached. AP later clarified that, on Aug. 28, before the storm hit, Bush was warned that the levees could be topped by floodwaters, not breached. The Army Corps of Engineers uses the word “breach” to mean a hole developing in a levee, AP said.

(My emphasis.)

The distinction between a “breach” and “topping” was significant, because Bush had said that nobody had anticipated the “breach” of the levees. After the publication of the AP story, poorly informed people across the country claimed that Bush’s assertion had been been a lie, because they thought that Bush had been warned about a possible breach. But the AP story proved no such thing.

I don’t really blame the letter writer, though. He was simply parroting what he had read in a front-page Times story, which had falsely claimed that Bush had been warned about a concern that the levees might not “stand up against the storm.” Having read this story, the letter writer can hardly be blamed for thinking Bush had been warned of a possible breach — after all, that’s clearly what The Times article was trying to imply.

On second thought, I do blame the letter writer — for relying too heavily on the AP and L.A. Times as primary sources of news. As incidents like this one show, that’s a recipe for ignorance.