Funny Business

From the Redwood Forests to the Gulf Stream Waters

During a Sojourners volleyball game last summer, art director Ed Spivey explained why so many serves from the opposing team fell between him and another player: "I've been in community so long, I forgot how to say 'Mine!'"

Ed recently reported at the start of an editorial staff meeting that his two preschool-age daughters don't have the same problem. They're in that stage of life where "Mine!" is one of their favorite words.

Things have definitely gone too far, concluded Ed after driving with them on a trip. When the song "This Land Is Your Land" came on the tape player, 4-year-old Colleen started singing along, "This land is my land."

Two-year-old Kate piped up from the back seat, "No! This land is my land!"

Colleen shot back, "No. This land is my land!"

Ahhh, what would Woodie Guthrie have thought?

Addition, Subtraction, Conversion, Redemption

You've heard the one about the man who went to the bank to get some change for a $100 bill, and the bank teller asked, "What denomination?" and he answered, "I'm a Methodist." Here's a modern twist.

According to Bob Levey of The Washington Post, a man who works at a desk in a downtown Washington bank got a call from a woman asking how to dispose of a $1,000 bond. "Is this bond for conversion or redemption?" the banker asked.

"I'm sorry," said the woman, "I must have reached a church by mistake." And she hung up.

Business With a Bite

As the dollar bounces up and down all over the market and most Americans are feeling the pinch of a recessive economy, it's good to know that someone's doing well. According to the American Academy of Dentistry, the tooth fairy paid an average of $1 in 1987 for a lost tooth, up from 85 cents in 1983.

Relatively Speaking

Albert Einstein didn't make out too badly in 1987 either. The scientific genius routinely destroyed his manuscripts, and few were published because of the intervention of World War I. But one of his manuscripts, that describing his theory of relativity, was kept safely in a cardboard box. The 1912 manuscript, 72 pages long, written in German, and sprinkled with diagrams, sold at a Sotheby's auction for $1,050,000.

However, page 39 of the manuscript reveals a disturbing reality. The original equation for the theory of relativity was eL=Mc². Someone crossed out the L. Our theory is that what he was really trying to say is that love makes the world go 'round; but he got nervous and decided instead to let everybody know that the mass of a body in motion is a function of the energy content and varies with the velocity.

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.