One of my favorite newspaper-reading games is finding funny headlines, like “Nuns jailed in drug conspiracy,” or “High schoolers may be required to volunteer.” (My kitchen is festooned with headlines like that, cut out of the paper and taped up on cabinet doors.)
Another is looking for ironically-paired articles or pictures. The rules are simple: they have to be on the same page or on facing pages, and be somewhat ludicrous when considered together. Here are two that appeared on page A8 of the 06 January, ‘05 Bloomington Pantagraph…
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- “Americans can be proud of response to disaster,” an article touting the generosity of Americans in response to the awful Christmas-day tsunami of ‘04 (in particular, the $350m promised by our government), and
- “Just a thought,” giving props for the excellent performance of our $850m Mars probe, Spirit
I liked this juxtaposition because it breaks away from the tired-by-now comparison of how long it takes us to spend $350m in Iraq (answer: just under two days.) While we’re patting ourselves on the back for kicking in what amounts to a pretty painless amount of money toward the tragedy, pundits everywhere just can’t resist using the “Iraq” as a unit of monetary exchange. Here we get to use the “Mars.”
I for one am proud we’re spending a little more than double the cost of saving thousands of lives in Asia to discover that there are rocks and dirt on other planets. It’s the march of humanity into the cosmos, and all that.
OK, that was a joke. I really am proud of our scientific research, and I’m of the opinion that the robotic Mars probes are worth every penny. I just hope we don’t break our arms patting ourselves on the back over that tsunami thing. In the big picture, we’re not exactly giving until it hurts, are we? A pity, since it’s an opportunity to show our non bomb-dropping, missile-launching, depleted-uranium-firing selves to the Muslim world.
Speaking of which, I heard someone joking the other day about how dumb it was to send an aircraft carrier to a disaster zone. “What are they going to do there, bomb them out of their misery?” Now I appreciate a good joke about serious stuff – I just did the same thing two paragraphs ago – but consider this:
Aircraft carriers are practically floating cities, with power, hospitals, fresh-water-production capability, an airport, and a concentrated population of people who are highly motivated to help, and just as importantly, know how to help. Here is a good rant about that on Varifrank – a good blog I just found from this post on Cajun.
I discovered another good blog today, also from the recommendation of another of my existing favorite blogs, and I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. Enjoy!