In the Inbox

Calendar editor-Chuck gets notices of all the happening in town (and apparently insults that rhyme with his name), Molly gets books and music, the Teditor gets EVERYTHING and me, well my inbox fills up with . . . well, a lot of stuff that’s not really related to environmental reporting. Like yesterday, when I got a promo from a company called “Darf.” Darf is selling “Funagle: a board game people play with their dogs.”

The goal of the game, I kid you not, is to get points for getting your dog to “do an activity.” Like the Moonwalk. That’s their example. Right. My dog can give me five, play dead and do basic math problems, but I can guarantee you, she can’t Moonwalk. And she especially can’t do the Moonwalk when trapped in a room with four other idiot dog owners forcing their dogs to play board games.

But the point is less that this game is silly, and more that I get silly things in my inbox.

Before I proceed with my kvetching, don’t let this discourage you, by the way, from sending me story ideas. I love story ideas. I met a guy last week at a party in Seattle, who mentioned his recent grand jury subpoena. When I was clearly intrigued, he asked “if that interesting for a news story?”

Yup. Grand juries often make a good news story.

Lately my email account seems to have been added to a list that promotes Christian books. Now, I find the Bible fascinating. But I draw the line at Christian pop-fiction. Maybe I’m a snob, but poorly written pop-culture books with Christian themes don’t do it for me. And more importantly, pop-culture Christian books do not make environmental news. Not unless you’re printing on some kind of ultra-cool recycled paper or creating toxic residues with your printing. . .

At any rate, I’m not really sure why someone out there thinks the enviro reporter for the Eugene Weekly wants to report on: When The Wedding Ring Comes Off by Percy D. Gorham, which lifts, “the reader's faith as he points each mind to the sublime Holy Spirit in such a way people may not have known was possible.”

Huh. You’d think a book about infidelity would be less about the holy and more about the bodily. . .

Well, anyway, I’m all for people finding the sublime. But the scariest press release I got this week was this one: Iraq in My Eye: Memoirs of a Navy SEAL in which Chuck Bravedy of Canton, Ohio proposes a new way to deal with prisoners in Iraq: “I see substantial ground being made if we pull all Korans out of the cells and replace them with Bibles,” he writes.

Bravedy was apparently disturbed by the way troops provided prisoners with the Koran (his spelling, I tend to go with Qur’an) when they could be “indoctrinating” (his word choice) them by providing Bibles. Silly troops giving those darn Muslims freedom of religion. What are they thinking?

To quote directly from his press release: “Bravedy's dream is to assemble a team and return to Iraq for a year to minister in military
prisons teaching the men there that there is more to life than killing Americans and eradicating western influence.”

What was that old bumper sticker about the Army?

That’s right: Join the Army: Travel to distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them.

Military bludgeoning with the Bible. Well, maybe there's a story in there after all.