In January, it was a 25-cent increase in the cover price, from 75 cents to $1, that just suddenly appeared one day. (Home subscribers got a price increase too, although it was noted in the mailed bills.)

But leave it to a good government scandal to get people riled up. Namely, a 2010 Las Vegas conference of the General Services Administration (GSA), a government agency that is supposed to ensure that government purchases are given to the lowest bidders and taxpayer funds are not wasted. GSA spent more than $800,000 on its conference in Sin City, which included a mind reader, a clown and the purchase of bicycles for a team building activity.

The Post did that on Monday this week, publishing on page A8 a photograph of a Tibetan exile who set himself afire in New Delhi to protest Chinese rule in Tibet.

And sometimes that can lead to mistakes, such as the caption on a photo that appeared on page B5 of Wednesday’s paper in the Metro section. The photo was of D.C. City Council member (and former Mayor) Marion Barry waiting in line to vote in his Southeast Washington ward, a picture shot earlier in the day.

Though the incident occurred on Feb. 26, the death of Trayvon Martin and the role of neighborhood watch member George Zimmerman in the shooting have only recently exploded in the media, inciting controversy, creating confusion and stirring up a variety of emotions.

The first sour note was in the lead sentence: “The shooter was once a Catholic altar boy — with a surname that could have been Jewish.”

Caw, caw, caw, crunch! That’s the sound of me eating crow. It’s not the most pleasant repast I’ve had — the feathers don’t go down so easy — but it is a necessary one.

I did a blog post this past Friday that was dismissive, snarky and wrongheaded, and had factual errors too. And I apologize to readers for it and I’ll try to repair some of the damage here.

But to properly determine who did what in the multi-year, organic development of electronic messaging would take a fleet of patent lawyers months and years to sort out.

All the hysteria revolves around a steamy photograph that appeared with Joel Achenbach’s Valentine’s Day essay, “Sweet Mystery,” on the many facets of love and what they mean. The story appeared on the cover of Style, and the photo that made a few people hot and bothered appeared inside with the rest of the story on Page C9.

That was the headline on a January 30 blog post on The Fix, the Post’s very popular politics blog, by reporters Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake. The post was based on a Gallup study of the average gap between poll respondents in each party who approve of how a president is doing his job in any given year.