Daily Briefs: Interoffice Correspondence, America’s Favorite Mom, Boring Journalism
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By CHRIS PACKHAM
Kansas City, you are the saddest: When I graduated from high school, my mom gave me the Oxford English Talking Dictionary on CD, read by velvety-voiced Patrick Stewart. It was an extremely lavish and expensive present. It runs to 7,000 discs, and each definition is a separate audio track preceded by a burst of “Symphonies and Fanfares for the King’s Supper” by French composer Jean-Joseph Mouret. So you end up hitting the FWD button a lot. I’ve never successfully looked anything up in the Oxford English Talking Dictionary. I broke out the set and unsuccessfully tried to look up the word “Sad” last night after getting this e-mail from Pitch theater critic Alan Scherstuhl:
Subject: Saddest Local News Teaser Ever
On Channel 9, at 9:43 p.m., during Lost, which I saw ’cause I’m that big a geek:
“And if you’re thinking about taking the bus to work, but aren’t sure how, we’ll show you.”
If this doesn’t work, can we at least have some revenge? For some reason, people get depressed when I explain my cold, mechanistic perspective on human nature. I’m sorry, but if you people act like a bunch of preprogrammed automatons, how am I supposed to wax girly about the “majesty of human nature”? Fuck all that, robots. Example: Some Los Angeles prosecutors, using nothing but paper clips, chewing gum and conspiracy laws, have sort of MacGyvered a jury-rigged way of prosecuting alleged Missouri asshole Lori Drew for allegedly hoaxing a 13-year-old girl into committing suicide via MySpace.
Even though she didn’t break a specific law, everyone more or less wants Drew punished. I’d love suspending Drew in the Bartertown pigshit vat as much as the next Master Blaster. But that isn’t my sensible, HAL-voiced forebrain talking. I’ve read articles about the theorized Darwinian basis for the societal compulsion to punish wrongdoing (except in Kansas, where all Revenge Justice is personally meted out by State Prosecutor Jesus Christ, a prophet character you may remember from the Koran who preached the Injīl, one of the four Islamic holy books. HAHAHA! Just kidding, Kansas. It’s all Darwin and monkeys). All’s I’m saying is, Lori Drew messed with the Anthropic Mechanism bull, so she gets the Determinist horns.
As a service to both the illiterate and the hardscrabble future survivors of global holocaust who have no written language, here are the last two annoyingly subreferential paragraphs distilled into pictorial form:
Friday Snap Challenge: As an experiment, I tried to find the most boring Kansas City news story and then say something snotty about it. Naturally, I went straight to the Kansas City Business Journal, the sort of Tigris-Euphrates cradle of original boring. Hey, look! Pizza Hut will close OP call center, lay off 180. They’re apparently outsourcing all their pizza ordering from now on. WHOOPS! There are human beings involved with this story, which makes it a tiny bit interesting. So I definitely have to go with Bank of the Prairie opens second branch. Hey, Bank of the Prairie, your $118 million in holdings is so small you be jumpin’ off curbs talkin’ ’bout “WHEEEE!” SNAP!
