It's Called Fact Checking

I don't normally read Green Lantern Corps, but I picked up number 19 because it was the epilogue to the Sinestro Corps War and there was this reunion between Guy and Ice, and even though I never read the books where they hooked up, I was curious. There were some nice bits in the book, but unfortunately, a glaring error that only a New Yorker is likely to catch. Kyle and Guy are at the Statue of Liberty, which is in New York Harbor, mostly south of Manhattan island. It's a nice scene, btw. So then we cut to Times Square, which the narration says is "Forty-two blocks north." Uh, no. Just, no.

See, there are a lot of blocks between the ferry terminal at the tip of Manhattan overlooking the harbor and Lady Liberty, and the numbered streets. A lot of them. They aren't that long, but they're there, weaving through downtown and Soho, Tribeca, Little Italy, Chinatown, Greenwhich Village, the Lower East Side, some of which are next to each other, but all of which separate the harbor from the numbered streets. So Times Square is quite a bit farther north than 42 blocks. They should've just covered the distance in miles. Which would have meant getting out a map and measuring, then checking the scale thingie in the legend. Because something like this is so easy to check and so easy to get wrong if you don't bother and think that if something in NYC is on 42nd Street, it must be 42 blocks north of the harbor. It's a small thing, but it annoyed me.