The New York Times Again betrays its ignorance

Sometimes I wonder: does the New York Times even bother to check its own stories?

Or does it even care, so desperate is its editorial DNA that every story between the Hudson River and the Los Angeles Resevoir has to be placed in the big picture, the notion of What it All Means?

Because every foray into flyover country has been a disaster.

There was a murder/suicide in Houston Monday. This was bad. What was--well, let's not say worse so much as disgraceful--was the thumb-sucking story in the Times, which somehow linked the shooting to the murder/suicide at NASA, as in third murder/suicide in Houston in four days.

Now, leaving aside the monumental stupidity of implying a trend between three completely unrelated murder/suicides within one geographical area--can it be too much to ask that when you make the connection, you make sure the pattern you're claiming is confined to a certain geographic location is actually confined to a certain geographic location.

They call Houston "Space City," sure, and everyone knows "Houston, we have a problem," but anyone who knows Southeast Texas knows NASA is located thirty miles to the south of Houston, in the area including Kema and, especially, Clear Lake. To a head-scratcher in Manhattan, the distance must seem negligible, but imagine if, on the night John Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota in Midtown, another person had been killed 30 miles away, down the Jersey Shore, imagine if the Houston Chronicle had run with "Lennon, one other gunned down in New York City."

Cost of living in flyover country, I guess.