Nation: Rand’s Year

Santa Monica’s Rand Corp. is home to some of the nation’s most intimidatingly intellectual precisionists. But Rand has left itself open to the burlesque of, say, a Jerry Lewis abstracted-professor routine. Rand mailed out some 20,000 calendars for 1970 festooned with the thoughts of William James, T. S. Eliot and others. Such were the distractions that some of the calendars came out with no June and two Julys, or no January and two Februaries. Rand, which is busy plotting America’s future course in dozens of areas, had a programmed explanation. “It was a random collating error,” said a spokesman, which resulted in only one mistake in every 450 calendars.