Words and Stories That Made Me Laugh Today

Reading online this morning (The New Republic, Salon, Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times), I came across several interesting and very different stories. Here are two that made me laugh:

• Gail Collins' op-ed column, "Our Election Whopper," in The New York Times: Collins has a few words--some serious but mostly all in good humor--about the end of the presidential campaign. I laughed at this paragraph, though:

  Obama’s target audience is the 10 percent of voters who told this week’s New York Times/CBS News poll that they did not feel as if they had received enough information to make an informed decision on the presidential race. I believe we have met them before. They are the men and women who get up at a town hall meeting after the candidate had just made a 20-minute opening speech about his/her plans for health care reform, and say: “What I want to know is, what are you going to do about medical costs?” My theory is that whenever they hear someone start to discuss the issues, they cover their ears and make humming noises, the way my husband does when I say it is time to take a look at our 401(k)s. [my emphasis]

  I laughed because I have noticed these people over and over in the election, people who still, at the end of this very long campaign, say that they don't "know enough about Obama" or that "Obama has not told us just what he wants to do if he is elected president." Where have these people been? I wonder. Collins' image is just right, and I can see those folks sitting in town halls like a bunch of kindergartners with their hands over their ears, humming.

  And I can relate to what Collins says she's going to do after being so immersed in the minutiae of this presidential campaign: read the Russian classics. I think I'll read more poetry. I'm not sure my attention span is quite up to Russian literature yet after months of intensive online news browsing.

• The wire story that I read on Salon about translation issues in Wales:

  Officials had e-mailed a translator to supply the Welsh translation for a traffic sign. Road signs in Wales are printed in English and in Welsh. However, the translator was not in the office, and the English officials received one of those instant reply e-mails stating that the translator was not available. The officials, not being able to read Welsh, thought the e-mail was the Welsh version of their English road directions:

  In English, the road sign was just fine, warning drivers that the route ahead is not suitable for heavy trucks.
  
  But the translation in Welsh didn't work so well. "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated," it said.