I recently bought a bottle of Liquid Paper, to cover over some mistakes I'd made in in tax forms I was filling out. I hadn't used any white-out in over a decade, and I wondered: Who the heck still uses this stuff? Then I realized that, of course, bureaucracies worldwide are still mostly uncomputerized, and generate vast amounts of forms every day -- which means gallons and gallons of Liquid Paper are still needed. And indeed, in our age of Enronian paper-shredding, sneering corporate mendacity, and Nixonian secrecy on the part of the federal government, what could be more quintessentially modern than a bottle of fluid that helps you hide things?

So I opened up the business section of the Sunday New York Times and discovered that they, too, had recently wondered about the fate of the white-out industry. Turns out it's growing by 2 per cent a year; not a huge amount, but not bad either. My favorite detail from the story:

An enduring drawback of correction fluid is the solvent vapor. That could be fixed, but not without damaging the psyche of faithful consumers, said Mr. McCaffrey of Liquid Paper: "People who have grown up using a product tend to equate its smell with quality, and you don't want to change that -- whether it's crayons or correction fluid."