Cross Words!

  I was just remarking, to myself as usual, that no one reads anymore. Of course that's a little bit of hyperbole, but it it seems all too true. The thought was inspired by my rifling through a brochure at a doctor's office, a 6-sided multi-colored edition put out by Albany Advanced Imaging, an affiliate of St Peter's Health Partners.
   Considerable thought and expense undoubtedly went into preparing the brochure, which must have been distributed to scores of offices. If each office received 100 such brochures, the total printed may number well into the tens of thousands. So wouldn't you think the printing company would have been overseen by Albany Imaging and that measures would have been taken to invest in first-class proofreaders.But obviously not.
  At one time, I worked as a proofreader for the New York State Regents Department, and am well aware of the proofreading process. Proofreading is not just a look-it-over exercise; the proofing process is composed of several formal steps and the goal is to detect all errors or redundancies and present a product that is 100% free of any mistakes or misperceptions.
  I looked through the little brochure, "Your Medical Imaging Experts," and noticed minor lapses in subject-verb agreement, omission of articles before nouns, and random sentence fragments. Nothing too striking until I came to one of the highlighted sections with the heading, "LOSE DOSE CT."
That caught my attention--what the heck is a lose dose? But the following sentences referred to LDCT, Low-Dose CT scanning which can detect disease before (ahead of ) apparent symptoms. I figured that, unless there actually is such a thing as a "lose dose" the proofer must have nodded off for a while. But to have gone to the time and expense to prepare a widely-distributed health handout and find an absurdity with such a negative connotation should be of importance to someone. But then, my point is that nobody reads anymore. An executive decision  contracts for an agency to construct  a compendium of medical advice, send it to the printer, and distribute it to the pertinent medical offices.  Nobody cares what it says as nobody reads. But the project is done. And somebody covers the cost.
  At home that same night, I was doing the Word Jumble in the paper and had the thought that there must never be an error in those words. Just imagine what would happen if those letters could not be arranged into a word. The Horror! And  that train of thought extended to crossword puzzle constructors. I remarked, again to myself, that  I'd  never encountered a mistake in either:
        UNTIL TODAY
           Bored, I turned to "The Daily Crossword" in today's July 14 T.U.  allegedly by Andrew J. Reis.  The first thing I noticed was that there is no 7 Across clue.No 14 Across.  No 13 Down  or 14 Down either. As a matter of fact, there are 121 Down Spaces in the puzzle and 127 Acrosses, while the Clues number only to 63 Across and 57 Down. Evidently someone failed to match the Clues with the correct Grid.
        Nothing is sacred anymore.