NEW YORK.  The three major television networks issued hurried retractions tonight after their evening news anchors confused French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who died Saturday, with the inventor of blue jeans.

Couric:  "Blue jeans came to be seen not just as an article of clothing, but an article of faith."

"Journalists write the first draft of history and nobody gets everything right on the first draft," said NBC News President Steve Capus.  "Still, we ought to be able to distinguish between a pair of pants and the study of digging stuff up."  When informed that he was probably thinking of archaeology, not anthropology, Capus replied "Don't tell me what to think!"

Ann-Margaret:  Nice . . . uh . . . hyphen.

Claude Levi-Strauss was the last of an imposing generation of French intellectuals that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Ann-Margaret, among other hyphenated eggheads.  His 100th birthday last year was marked in his home country by an official state visit from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and the distribution of complimentary packages of La Vache Qui Rit snack-size cheese packs to schoolchildren.

Levi-Strauss:  "Who's Katie Couric?"

Katie Couric of NBC is the only female prime-time news anchor for the three major television networks.  The other two are Charles Gibson of ABC, a man, and Brian Williams of NBC, an incredibly-lifelike cyborg.

Ha-ha.

Couric said that Levi-Strauss had discovered blue jeans while doing fieldwork in Brazil.  Gibson asserted that Levi-Strauss invented blue jeans in a fitting room at a Gap store in Paris, shouting "Watson, come here--I need you."  Williams said Levi-Strauss had identified the blue gene while teaching at the College de France, but had exchanged it for a pair of plain-front khakis.