Check Out This Junk
If you read the title, you have already been treated to my only significant original contribution to this post. The remainder is an indulgence in the notion that an accumulation of worthless items somehow has a value the individual items lack. This is, as anyone who has attended an arts & crafts fair or graded high school research papers knows, a fallacy.
Nonetheless, I ran across this stuff while looking for something else in the 2001-2002 stratum of my email archives. I sent each of these items to people I like so I must have thought it was clever then, and who am I to doubt my judgment?
1. I’m Not Prepared.
This piece from the late, great, lamented SatireWire may be more pertinent these days than it was when it was published 4 or 5 years ago. It captures dead-on the sensationalistic tone that has marked 80% of the stories on “60 minutes,” “20/20,” and their ilk for the past decade and, especially, since 9/11. Try entering “US unprepared for” at your favorite search site. Google returns 24,000 hits, including, on the first page alone, warnings that the US is unprepared for
- net meltdown
- bird flu
- bioterrorism
- the impact of aging population on health workforce
- the health impact of climate change
- oil cutoff
- baby boomers’ retirement
- humanitarian obligations of Iraq occupation
My favorite impending dangers for which we are not ready, however, are those that cover the field, “US Unprepared For Catastrophes” and “US Unprepared For Disaster;”1 i.e., our nation is the anti-Boy Scout; we are not prepared – for anything.
The SatireWire article is U.S. “Grossly Unprepared” For Unlikely Threats (with the subtitle No Plans in Place to Deal with Drying Up of Oceans, Giant Moon Explosion, Or Potential for Everyone to Be Pecked to Death Like in “The Birds”)
I also recommend a more recent take on this same concept from The Onion, which is, thankfully, still operational: Study Reveals Pittsburgh Unprepared For Full-Scale Zombie Attack
[Update: More Unpreparedness]
2. Scamalot
These days, email scams that make their way to my inbox seem to fall primarily into the categories of eBay, PayPal, or bank phishing, variants of the Nigerian Advance Fee ploy (AKA 419 Scam), the Netherlands Lottery, Survey Rewards, and, occasionally, a reincarnation of the Microsoft/AOL Giveaway (emailers are to be paid for forwarding messages to check out an email tracking system), but the following parody should ring true for those of us who were emailing back in the good old days. Prepare to wax nostalgic.
Hello –
My name is Billy Evans. I am a very sick little boy. My mother is typing this for me, because I can’t. She is crying. The reason she is so sad is because I’m so sick. I was born without a body. It doesn’t hurt, except when I try to breathe.
The doctors gave me an artificial body. It is a burlap bag filled with leaves. The doctors said that was the best they could do on account of us having no money or insurance. I would like to have a body transplant, but we need more money.
Mommy doesn’t work because she said nobody hires crying people. I said, “Don’t cry, Mommy,” and she hugged my burlap bag. Mommy always gives me hugs, even though she’s allergic to burlap and it makes her sneeze and chafes her real bad.
I hope you will help me. You can help me if you forward this email to everyone you know. Forward it to people you don’t know, too. Dr. Johansen said that for every person you forward this email to, Bill Gates will team up with AOL and send a nickel to NASA. With that funding, NASA will collect prayers from school children all over America and have the astronauts take them up into space so that the angels can hear them better. Then they will come back to earth and go to the Pope, and he will take up a collection in church and send all the money to the doctors. The doctors could help me get better then.
Maybe one day I will be able to play baseball. Right now I can only be third base.
Every time you forward this letter, the astronauts can take more prayers to the angels and my dream will be closer to coming true. Please help me. Mommy is so sad, and I want a body. I don’t want my leaves to rot before I turn 10.
If you don’t forward this email, that’s okay. Mommy says you’re a mean and heartless bastard who doesn’t care about a poor little boy with only a head. She says that if you don’t stew in the raw pit of your own guilt-ridden stomach, she hopes you die a long slow, horrible death and then burn forever in hell. What kind of cruel person are you that
you can’t take five g-damn’ minutes to forward this to all your friends so that they can feel guilt and shame about ignoring a poor, bodiless nine-year-old boy?
Please help me. I try to be happy, but it’s hard. I wish I had a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty that wouldn’t chew on me and try to bury its turds in the leaves of my burlap body. I wish that very much.
Thank You,
Billy “Smiles” Evans
P.S. You can send money to the person who sent you this because that person is very trustworthy.
3. HOORAY, HURRAH, MIZZOU, MIZZOU!2
In my copy of Mizzou (the University of Missouri Alumni newsletter), I found this item, buried among several pages of a section entitled, “Class Notes:”
Sheryl Crow, BS Ed ’84, of Los Angeles received a Grammy in 2001 for best female rock album, “There Goes the Neighborhood.”
The preceding item read
Patti Hamilton, BHS ’83 and husband Brian of Dallas announce the birth of Brenna Kaye in October.
The next item was
Michael Coit, BJ ’85, is a general assignment reporter for ‘The Press Democrat’ in Santa Rosa, Calif.
Chronological order, as Ms Hamilton and Mr Coit can attest, is a bitch.
4. Fourscore & Seven Slides Ago
If you haven’t seen the PowerPoint version of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address yet (there must be someone who hasn’t), it is certainly worth checking out. Developed by Peter Norvig, engineering director at Google Inc., in 1999, this spoof is credited with being the first parody embodying, in devastating fashion, the weaknesses and limitations of the PowerPoint lecture format. It has been viewed, by Norvig’s estimate, by at least 500,000 people and includes bullet points such as “unfinished work (great tasks),” “new birth of freedom” and “government not perish.” You can view it as well, at The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
There are many, many PowerPoint parodies now, none of which, in my estimation, matches the quality of the original. Still, they do have their charms. I suggest another effort from The Onion, Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation which includes not only the slides but a critique of the technique and style of the show with comments such as “The colors in Apologies & Farewells were perfectly calibrated for digital-projector display,” I.T. director Bill Schapp said and “I felt some of the later transitions were weak,” Pruriyaran said. “The point of a transition is to maintain audience interest and lighten the mood. To me, the door-closing sound effects in Will & Funeral were repetitive and heavy-handed. But Ron’s choice to end with that Hamlet quote and then fade to black was really powerful.” Or Try out PowerPoint Shakespeare
That’s all for now. More junk tomorrow …
- There is also a recurrent, more specific headline, “US Unprepared For Major Disaster,” which may be only a more polite version of “US Unprepared For Disaster,” or which may an implication that, perhaps, we are prepared for minor disasters. [↩]
- The entire Mizzou cheer follows:
HIT IT!
HOORAY, HURRAH, MIZZOU, MIZZOU!
HOORAY, HURRAH, MIZZOU, MIZZOU!
HOORAY, HURRAH, AND A BULLY FOR OLD MIZZOU,
RAH! RAH! RAH! RAH!
MIZZOU-RAH! MIZZOU-RAH! MIZZOU-RAH, TIGERS! [↩]
Shiraz spews out of nostrils on reading about Billy Evans.
(Opens Outlook, clicks New, selects entire address book….)
Ah, then my work here is done.