Since we’re talking about media screw-ups in the comments of another thread, I thought I’d throw this in, so I can get it off my hard drive:
Mike Harden, seen here, is a columnist for the Columbus Dispatch. Some time back he wrote about a minister who works as a full-time eulogist — all he does is funerals. Ripley’s Believe It Or Not apparently found it suitably believe-it-or-not-ish for their syndicated feature, and included it in the illustration. Only, oops, that’s not the minister:
Marcia said on June 22, 2007 at 11:26 am
That is freakin’ hilarious.
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Marcia said on June 22, 2007 at 11:28 am
P.S. Do you know if Harden’s seen this?
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nancy said on June 22, 2007 at 11:58 am
Yes, I believe the proverbial sharp-eyed reader caught it and brought it to his attention.
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Kirk said on June 22, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Yes, he’s definitely seen it. He showed it to me, and I shared with Nance.
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brian stouder said on June 22, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I think this is Dan Paulon’s mistake…
…or maybe it wasn’t a mistake at all!!
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nancy said on June 22, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Sharp-eyed Brian sees that “Dan Paulon” gets the credit for two of the three items on this particular day. I wonder how many he sends them a month, and what they pay for it.
Reminds me of the day Mark GiaQuinta got in Hints from Heloise and nearly peed his pants laughing.
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Marcia said on June 22, 2007 at 3:18 pm
I think there’s an income opportunity there, Nancy.
Since I’m already in the off-topic box today, I’ll continue:
My all time favorite Hints from Heloise tip is this one:
Get an old sock, cut the foot off, and wear it on your arm while driving so that the arm doesn’t get sunburned if it hangs out the window.
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nancy said on June 22, 2007 at 3:32 pm
I met Heloise once. This was Heloise II, daughter of the original Heloise. She was lovely and charming, really funny. So I asked her: OK, tell the truth. Some of those hints are pretty damn stupid, aren’t they? And she said, yes, honestly they were, but the first thing she’d learned on the job was that what’s stupid to one person is genius to another.
She said her favorite example was the woman who wrote in to suggest that, when applying hairspray, you hold the spray can cap over your ear, so that it doesn’t gunk up your jewelry. H. said, “I thought, ‘How ridiculous. Why not just put on your earrings after your spray your hair?'” But she put it in the column, and not a month after it ran she was doing a TV interview, and the anchorwoman went on and on about what a smart idea that was, and she’d recently started doing it, and it’s saving her jewelry, and blah blah blah. So you never know.
Mark’s hint was something like, “I’m always looking up the same numbers in the phone book, and I never seem to have my glasses. Now when I look something up the first time, I write it in the margin of the phone book in heavy marker, so I can see it later without my glasses. Problem solved!” He said he purposely tried to think of the lamest hint possible, and Heloise didn’t change a word, and even included “problem solved!” So he was thrilled.
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Julie Robinson said on June 22, 2007 at 3:33 pm
My favorite Heloise Hint came from a woman who noticed that sometimes the weather reports were inaccurate; so now she STEPS OUTSIDE in the morning before deciding what to wear. Gosh, wish I’d thought of that…
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Hattie said on June 23, 2007 at 4:01 am
I like the one about making house slippers by cutting the toes out of old tennis shoes.
Now that’s fashion flair for you!
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brian stouder said on June 23, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Say – just wanted to say I’ll be out of pocket for a few days. We’re loading up the young folks and going into the Keystone state, there to see Milton Hershey’s chocolate factory, Crayola’s crayon factory, and of course Little Round Top, plus a stop at the Sidling Mountain cut.
So this will be Posting Suspension In Advance, for the next time I fail to close a tab.
In the meantime mark me down as agreeing with 100% of Dorothy’s and Marcia’s posts, and 95% of everyone else’s, but with an asterisk next to MichaelJ’s, since they usually surpass my meager powers of interpretation
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Danny said on June 23, 2007 at 7:20 pm
In the meantime mark me down as agreeing with 100% of Dorothy’s and Marcia’s posts….
Girls, you know your mission. Say outlandish things that Brian would never agree with and let him suffer the consequences. Heheh
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Marcia said on June 24, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Bwahahaha………….
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Dorothy said on June 25, 2007 at 7:18 am
*Rubbing hands with glee and letting my mind create all SORTS of wild scenarios and opinions to bring down Brian in his abscence!!*
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Kirk said on June 25, 2007 at 8:28 am
Now you have an Ann Coulter ad on your site. Beautiful.
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Jason said on June 25, 2007 at 8:45 am
That’s some crack research team they’ve got at the Ripley Factory.
Or maybe it’s all a fiendishly clever ploy to generate a future cartoon:
“MIKE HARDEN of Columbus, Ohio, is a newspaper columnist … but a nationally-syndicated newspaper feature THINKS HE’S A MINISTER!”
(P.S.: Anyone else remember David Letterman’s “Museum of The Hard To Believe”?)
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