Do stupid articles ripped off the Internet count as journalism?

Thanks to those who answered the call for stupid questions in this week's column. As promised...

Why do we say our nose runs and our feet smell? Is it because our nose has feet and our feet a nose?
James Ramsey

How come Teflon sticks to a pan but nothing sticks to Teflon? How hard would it be to nail jello to a wall? Why would one do such a thing?
Anonymous

Do stupid articles ripped off the [I]nternet count as journalism?
Anonymous

Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways?
JC

Do stupid questions advance modern civilization?

Published 1/24/06

Here’s an answer to the individual who once said, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” I found the following in the universe of the Internet and then was compelled to write a few of my own…

Did shaved ice have whiskers before it was shaved? What’s a synonym for “thesaurus”? When cows laugh, does milk come out of their noses?

When dog food is labeled “new and improved tasting,” who tests it? What do sheep count when they can’t go to sleep? Can you get indigestion from swallowing your pride?

What happens if you take No-Doze and wash it down with Nyquil? How come wrong numbers are never busy? Do people in Australia call the rest of the world “Up Over”?

After they make Styrofoam, what do they ship it in? Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to? Why are there flotation devices under plane seats instead of parachutes?

Whose cruel idea was it to put an “s” in the word “lisp”? Why are America’s parks administered by the Department of Interior? Has the winner of a Miss America pageant ever wished for world anarchy?

Why does an alarm clock go “off” when it begins ringing? Why doesn’t onomatopoeia sound like what it is? Why don’t you ever hear of “gruntled employees”?

Why is it called a building when it’s already built? Why is it called a bust when it stops right before the part it is named after? Why is it called a TV “set” when you only get one?

Why is it so hard to remember how to spell “mnemonic”? Why isn’t “acronym” spelled “A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.”? Why is it that when you’re driving and trying to find an address, you turn down the volume on the radio?

Why is it when a door is open it’s “ajar,” but when a jar is open it’s not “adoor”? Why is Mickey Mouse bigger than his dog Pluto? Why is the word “abbreviate” so long?

Is it possible for a fish to drown? Should the insert of an a cappella CD list all the studio musicians? Is it true that a Type A personality is a human doing and a Type B a human being?

Why isn’t the word ennui spelled “n-u-i”? Is it really possible to specialize in general studies at college? What do people who have blue jeans jobs wear on “Casual Friday”?

Why does the dashboard of my van have a button for a “rear wiper”? Is having children an exercise in fertility? Why do we sit in the stands? If we want to stretch our legs, can we go stand in the sits?

When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say for the photographer? Why do people always remember where they were when someone famous was killed unless they feel they might need an alibi? Why do people tell you when they are speechless?

Why do they report power outages on TV? If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest have to drown too? If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?

Why isn’t phonetic spelled the way it sounds? Is it true that cannibals don’t eat clowns because they taste funny? If you send me your dumb questions, will I post them at jackwilliams.blogspot.com?

Log on and see.

Giving the death sentence to famous first lines

Published 1/17/06

I have always enjoyed playing with words, particularly other people’s words. Call it editing. Call it misquoting. Call it tweaking the text of famous front lines of literature. I like putting a little twist on the tales of Twain, Thoreau, Dickens and Melville. And some of these immortal words just need a modern makeover. Like…

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and I was feeling a bit bipolar myself.”

“Marley was dead, to begin with. This according to CSI—the Christmas scene investigation.”

“Call me Ishmael. Or call me Izzy. You can call me Ray. Or you call me Jay. You can call me R.J.”

“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer;’ but that ain’t no matter. I can still learn ya the rudiments of English grammar.”

What if Henry David had disclosed this up front in his popular beach book?

“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands as a desktop support technician for a shopping mall developer on the outskirts of Boston.”

Think of how that classic stray dog story might have opened…

“We called him Old Yeller. So old that he constantly peed all over himself. Yep, he was old and he was yeller.”

This author was asking for it…

“It was a dark and stormy night. The clichés fell like rain.”

A movie based on this book is out there in theatres right now…

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ And when Truman Capote, an eccentric New York writer with a high-pitched lisp, arrives to research the story of a murder performed in cold blood, Kansans agree that he, too, is ‘out there.’ ”

Dostoevsky’s underground memoir might have begun…

“I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I am a lobbyist for the oil industry.”

If I were ghost writing for Jane Austen, she would have admitted this in the first words of “Pride and Prejudice”…

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife—or tickets to the Super Bowl or a wife with tickets to the Super Bowl.”

In light of today’s intelligent design debate, maybe Moses and his editorial staff should have gotten straight to the point…

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Charles Darwin would evolve much later.”

For affect, the Apostle John might have written…

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Any questions so far?”

Let me help Mark Antony out here a bit…

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I seemed to have lost mine in the Gallic wars.”

There’s always a quote somewhere that needs an appendage of explanation or refutation…

“Only the educated are free,” said Greek philosopher Epictetus. “Although many go deep into debt to get there,” I might add, knowing the adverse cost of college tuition.

“Nothing exists in a vacuum,” someone once said. “Once you’ve emptied the bag,” I would clarify.

I’ve always puzzled over this quote which has appeared in a couple different literary settings: “The victor belongs to the spoils.” Who is Victor, anyway, and why does he get the spoils? And if they’re spoiled, why would he want them?

Well, so much for these favorite passages from the pages of time. I meant to give them new life. But I fear I may have given them the death sentence.

Shoppers: Cough up the cash and take a Message

Published 1/10/06

When I read recently that the Bible is one of the most frequently stolen books, I immediately thought of the time Jay Leno asked his Tonight Show audience to name any of the Ten Commandments. They couldn’t come up with one.

Apparently bookstore shoplifters—like the Tonight Show audience—have never heard of the 8th commandment, the one that discourages criminal activities ranging from petty theft to grand larceny. Little wonder then that last year the Bible Literacy Project reported that biblical illiteracy is widespread in America.

So if you must break the law and steal a Bible, let me recommend one that was written expressly for people who have never read the Bible or thought it was a impenetrable tome along the lines of, say, Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

I’m referring to The Message, a version written single-handedly by author Eugene Peterson beginning in 1990 and published in 2002. Sections of the Bible—like the New Testament or the Psalms—were released as they were finished throughout the ’90s.

Proficient in Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of the Old and New Testament, Peterson tried to capture the tone and rhythm of those renderings in everyday language.

For example, in his introduction to the New Testament, Peterson notes that there were two levels of language in the Greek-speaking world at that time. Formal language was used in texts and decrees while letters, bills, shopping lists, receipts and menus for Greek restaurants, I assume, were composed in an informal language. In other words, the stories, letters and apocalyptic poem of the New Testament were written, as Peterson says, “in the street language of the day, the idiom of the playground and marketplace.”

When I was first looking for a good translation, like any good Biblical researcher, I turned to Rolling Stone magazine and a December 6, 2001 interview with U2’s Bono. When the interviewer asked the Irish rocker what he was reading at the time, Bono responded:

“I don’t want to come off wrong in this most unholy of wars, but there’s a translation of Scriptures—the New Testament and the Books of Wisdom—that this guy Eugene Peterson has undertaken. It has been a great strength to me. He’s a poet and a scholar, and he’s brought the text back to the tone in which the books were written. A lot of the Gospels were written in common kind of marketspeak. They were not at all highfalutin like the King James Version of the Bible, from which the Goths get their inspiration…But it’s not representative of the original writings.”

It’s a pretty good summary of the Message.

Although Peterson admits to reading the Scriptures daily in their original Hebrew and Greek, he calls The Message a “reading Bible.” He wanted new readers to see that the Bible was, in fact, read-able and give it new life to old readers for whom holy writ had become a cliche. And he omitted verse numbers that were never there to begin with.

All the same, Peterson once said in an interview that he didn’t recommend that his “paraphrase” be read from the pulpit. For oral reading, he apparently prefers the “highfalutin” King James.

Even though The Message has become a bestseller and now claims seven million readers, Peterson does have his critics—those who say that his Message sounds too American, too middle class, that it’s just one man’s interpretation or that in some place, he’s altered the meanings of the text. You’ll find some interesting swipes at Peterson at Amazon.com.

All of which brings me to this point. Jay Leno needs to remember that the Bible, whether the Message or another translation, is not just an exposition of the Ten Commandments and other things you’re not supposed to do for the fear of Hell. It’s actually a work of art, an anthology of lyric poems, acrostics, epic cycles, orations, dramatic anthems, war anthems, festal hymns, elegies, litanies, sonnets, epigrams, rhapsodies, parables comedy, tragedy, satire and gospel narratives, not to mention the ten pesky injunctions of that Mosaic decalogue.

One of which the King James renders, “Thou shalt not steal.”

The Message wastes no words: “No stealing.”

Don’t expect a miracle with your bulk mailings

Published 1/3/06

A bulk mail pamphlet from a local church finds its way to my mailbox from time to time. If you’ve received one, you could have easily overlooked it.

With all due respect, the flyer looks like the work of a mimeograph machine, an exhibit from a time capsule. Black type on white paper, the pamphlet is long on copy, devoid of visuals and, interestingly enough, appears to have been produced on a typewriter. (A typewriter is an office machine that was invented in the early 1800s, saw widespread use by the mid 1800s and was doomed for obsolescence, thanks to the introduction of word processors, by the late 1900s.)

Now there is a place for junk mail, which I’m going to define as a printed piece that lacks a creative strategy to establish reader rapport, contains typos and misplaced apostrophes, and ultimately fails to move me—to action. There is a place for junk mail and that would be the 30-gallon drawstring trash bag.

I will refrain from labeling this mass mailer as junk mail since I’m sure the sender means well. How can I knock an organization that points out in its pamphlet that it’s interested in my “eternal destiny”?

The reason I single this mailer out from the others I receive is because it provides an interesting case study in the way organizations, businesses, retailers or churches target their messages to audiences—or simply send them out on a postal permit and a prayer.

For example, this flyer will inevitably hit me cold since I have never attended this church and am not conducting a church search. In other words, it will have to work hard to connect with recipients who are not part of this particular faith community. And for those who have no interest in congregational life and did not ask for the mailing, well, the sender has a number of communication obstacles to overcome.

The flyer will also hit me cold because I am a member of the church at large, and this printed piece projects an image that I know the church has fought for years—that it’s in a time warp and, therefore, irrelevant.

Also questionable is the flyer’s use of a language which is foreign to most, a communications approach that fails to understand that, like it or not, we live in a post Christian world. Having grown up in the church, I can speak Christian-ese as fluently as anyone. But to those outside the sanctuary, this “God talk” has to come across as King James gibberish. I assume the mailer is depending on that ancient communications strategy: Expect a miracle.

Maybe there’s a lesson here for local organizations and businesses. It’s estimated that the media deliver to our attention 2,500 advertising messages, in one form or another, each day. The mailman alone brings us a stack of catalogs, magazines, direct mail, circulars, coupons and handbills. (Not to mention those shockingly graphic utility bills that have a way of demanding our attention.) Some of these print pieces are created by ad agencies or publishers with big budgets. So the competition for our attention is stiff. What’s disappointing is that some mailers apparently think their mailing list is not worth the time, the money, the talent.

Obviously not all organizations have the budget to produce shiny four color brochures with professional photography and commissioned illustrations. But they can do a reality check and ask themselves some basic questions: Do we know our audience? Are we talking in their terms? What image are our communications projecting? What are we saying between the lines? What year is it? Will someone addressed as a “postal customer” be ready to talk about his or her eternal destiny?

One of the ironies here is that we have just celebrated the season in which the God of the galaxies sent a message to his many earthlings. He didn’t send a doctrinal statement or a belief system or a creed. Because he wanted to meet people where they were—Nazareth, Samaria, Jerusalem—he dispatched a contemporary who would speak their language. It was a wholly imaginative way of bridging the cosmic—and communications—divide.

Okay, am I the first theologian to explore the relationship between the incarnation and bulk mail?