Read the News and Look for Reasons to Smile

A different tack now, on news of the growing financial crisis.

Does a broadcast announcer ever get the giggles when talking about the “footsie 100” of Britain’s markets?

I used to work in radio news. Several years ago I queried my co-workers

on pronouncing the the Nikkei in Japan’s markets and came up varied different answers , with "NEE keh" winning out.

Amid reports of all the suffering of last spring’s Sichuan earthquake in China, why would a moment of amusement brighten my emotions as I read? Very simply, I liked the wordplay as a reporter's favorites -- “who” and “when” -- appeared quite literally in the story. President Hu Jintao urged all out rescue efforts, even as Premier Wen Jiabao was traveling to devastated Sichuan province.

As a “Ralph”, I am slow to poke fun of people’s names, for mine is no easy handle. Thankfully, it is much shorter than the one time foreign minister of Qatar – Sheikh Hamad bin Jassin bin Jabr al-Thani. As far as I can tell, he only got the “Sheikh” tacked onto his name. Micahel Zammit Cutajar worked harder at giving a radio announcer a fractured jaw, getting appointed as the (take a breath and then say it) Executive Secretary of the Secretariat of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Whew!

I logged a lot of hours editing Reuters newspaper reports to use as broadcast copy, and so little amusements quietly crept in. Did anyone else’s mind replay old “Smash!” and “Pow!” scenes from Batman when encountering the name, Susilo Bambang Yodhoyono, of Indonesia? Maybe just me.

Is there really religious teaching about “Our Lady of Unraveling Knots”?

What novelist would tag a Philippines Archbishop with the surname of Sin?

Life’s Author, that's who.

Life can be a “who’s on first?” comedy, ala Abbott and Costello routine. Or a tragedy of “I don’t know” even how to take up the first thread of string to try to unravel a knot. An unexpected death, great loss in a natural disaster, or a stock market slide that seems to not have found a bottom.

All make a lot more sense when we call on the Name that holds no irony, needs no earthly intermediary and bears nothing but goodwill and grace for us.