Road Warrior can't read the calendar

Chairman Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg's boyhood home in Hackensack.

Editor's note: In his Road Warrior column on Sunday, Staff Writer John Cichowski said it has been a "full four months" since Superstorm Sandy hit on Oct. 29. In fact, the three-month anniversary passed only five days before. Earlier, Cichowski incorrectly reported the day a train smashed into a tractor-trailer in Little Falls. Those glaring errors weren't caught by six-figure Production Editor Liz Houlton or her clueless staff.

The inactivity of writing the vast majority of his Road Warrior columns from news releases, studies, reports and reader e-mails has caught up to Staff Writer John Cichowski, who rarely leaves his computer to do any legwork.

Here is part of another e-mail to management from a reader who is alarmed by all of the misinformation Cichowski passes along to readers:

"The Road Warrior continues to hand out misinformed, false, and exaggerated nonsense to commuters, who are desperate for real answers about repairs to Sandy-damaged rail stations.

"Road Warrior babbles more nonsense about how it has been four months since Sandy, when it has been a little over 3 months. This is after he babbled in his Jan. 25 column that it was 8 weeks, when it was really 12 weeks, since Sandy.

"Why doesn't The Record correct his nonsense before it is published?

"Mistaken column by mistaken column, it is becoming too much for readers to forgive.

"Instead of misinformation and false complaints, why didn't the Road Warrior notify readers about an upcoming NJ Transit commuter forum at Hoboken rail station on Feb. 12 so that they could voice their concerns directly to transit officials?"

Read the full text of the e-mail on the Facebook Bloopers page:

Time flies for the Road Warrior 



Levitating mayor

Ed Koch was such a great New York City mayor his powers apparently survived him, according to today's Page 1 photo caption.

The caption suggested the casket wasn't carried, but actually levitated out of the Fifth Avenue synagogue on Monday: 

"The casket of former Mayor Ed Koch left the funeral at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue."

On A-2, a correction tells readers a Sunday caption listed Alicia Rose, but that she wasn't actually in the photo. Oops.

After years of practicing body count journalism in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Associated Press actually supplied a photo of Kabul residents who weren't being blown apart by a suicide bomber (A-2).

Who knew there was any normalcy in war-torn Afghanistan? But I question the photo overline, "SHOT OF THE DAY." 

The doughnut hole

The morbidly obese Governor Christie actually pulled out a doughnut and ate it during taping of the David Letterman TV show on Monday (A-4).

In 2011, Letterman put Christie's weight at 400 pounds. 

Now, we know what Christie is going to do after he loses his bid for a second term: open a Dunkin' Donuts franchise.

The money game

The Record is already covering the campaign, and will accord space to Christie and Democrat Barbara Buono based on how much special interest money they raise (A-4), just as the Woodland Park daily did with North Jersey congressional candidates last November.

Four photos with one story threw Production Editor Liz Houlton's copy editors into a dither (A-7). The caption refers to a photo as "adjacent," a word that should never be used.

Those old coots

On the front of Local, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes lampoons another elderly driver who apparently mistook the accelerator pedal for the brake pedal, and backed his car out of a garage and into a stream (L-1).

After years of publishing photos of senior crashes and other mayhem, some of it fatal, you'd think Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, would realize older drivers need information on where they can go to refresh their skills. 

Five paragraphs of Hackensack news appear on L-3 today. That's all she wrote. 

Sykes and Sforza continue to mystify readers by running minor accident photos on their front, and burying the obits of fascinating North Jersey residents, such as rememberances of Guy Tozzoli and Jack Reno on L-8 today.