From the Telegraph (thanks, Mungo):

This Monday readers of New Hampshire’s Valley News were surprised to see the paper's name spelled "Valley Newss" on the front page masthead.

The following day the newspaper, which covers the Upper Valley area straddling New Hampshire and Vermont, published an “Editor’s Note” acknowledging the error.

“Readers may have noticed that the Valley News misspelled its own name on yesterday’s front page,” it read.

“Given that we routinely call on other institutions to hold themselves accountable for the mistakes, let us say for the record: We sure feel silly.”

Regret The Error had a posting about the error -- a posting that, ironically enough, had a correction appended to it. :)

A Haida Gwaii trio by the name of the Crabapple Creek Electric Jug Band has a ditty called Livin' At The Edge of the World (you can catch them at the Edge of the World music festival in Tlell this Aug. 8-10):

Here's where you can see the edge, at Rennell Sound:

Rennell Sound is reportedly the westernmost coastal place in Canada you can reach by vehicle. It sits on a latitude of 53.4 degrees North. If you shot an arrow westward from there, I'm guessing it would pass through the Aleutian islands before landing on the Pacific coast of Russia.

The above photo, taken from the campground at Gregory Creek, doesn't do justice to the magic of the place.

In old Haida villages in the Queen Charlotte Islands, also known as Haida Gwaii, the shamans had their own island (the one above is near the old village site of Skedans). Shamans were medicine men, but also a link between the world of humans and spirits (in our times, they've been busted down to herbalists).

Because the normal people feared the spiritual power of the shaman, they wanted them close, but not too close. The shamans lived, and were buried, on their islands.

After doing a boat tour around Louise Island, I spent last Friday night in Queen Charlotte at the town's Art Walk event. There were a lot of countercultural-looking people there.

One fellow who had been on the boat tour muttered to me -- and rather sneeringly, at that -- that many of the people in the crowd looked like they wouldn't wouldn't fit in anywhere else.

That had me wondering about whether I should consider Haida Gwaii to be an archipelago of shaman islands.

I mean that in the best possible way.