What Happened That Day

Doomsday predictions make no sense—if you’re wrong you look like a fool, and if you’re right it doesn’t matter because you’re dead—but that basic logic hasn’t prevented generations of doomsayers from sermonizing and setting dates. So in the spirit of a good chortle, witness the introduction of a weekly feature: What Happened That Day. Each Friday morning on The Bedroom Floor, you'll read the story of a new lunatic, including, of course, the embarrassing aftermath unleashed when the world fails to end. And so, without further ado...

Lee Jang-Rim

Lee Jang-Rim, a South Korean Christian pastor, preached that the world would end at midnight on October 28, 1992. In September of that year, however, Lee was arrested by Korean police on fraud charges—he apparently pocketed $4 million donated by his flock. Police seized about $26,000 in cash at his house, along with scores of bank checks and bonds set to mature well after the world’s end, casting his faith in his own predictions into doubt. Nevertheless, his congregants, who numbered an estimated 20,000, remained devoted. One of the dupes avowed to Reuters at the time that Lee “is our pastor. And he is good. There is no truth to what the police are saying.” As the October 28 deadline drew near, followers expected the world to begin spiraling into chaos. It didn’t. Still they remained undeterred. “Yet the day will come anytime in the near future,” one church steward told the AP. In the hours leading up to the Rapture, thousands of people stood on the streets in Seoul, singing hallelujahs and chanting, “Rapture is coming!” It didn’t. “We just got the message from God wrong,” one believer told the AP. “Jesus will be back in several years.” There was little commotion in the aftermath, aside from a woman collapsing, a man beating up a preacher and a few disappearances. A few days afterward, the church officially disbanded, releasing a statement approved by Lee: “We are sorry for creating problems to the nation and the established churches by misinterpreting the Bible.” Lee spent a year in jail for his crimes.

Serial Comma Watch

The use of the serial comma is, at least in my book, one of the more interesting choices copyeditors make. Its use has come to connote dour correctness, while its omission is a mark of informal utilitarianism. (For those who don’t know, the serial comma comes before the “and” in a list, i.e. peaches, doctors, and duck soup.) Strunk & White favor it, while the AP stylebook frowns. Thus I couldn’t resist compiling a list: Who uses it and who doesn’t? What follows is a (growing, I hope) roster of magazines:

Yes:

1. The New Yorker
2. The New York Review of Books
3. Harper’s
4. The New York Observer (Yes, it’s newsprint, but it’s really a magazine)
5. New York
6. The Atlantic Monthly
7. The Village Voice
8. Esquire
9. Artforum
10. Black Book

No:

1. The New York Times Magazine
2. The Economist
3. Art in America
4. Seed
5. Stopsmiling
6. Bomb
7. Topic
8. Time Out New York
9. Rolling Stone
10. Money Magazine

The real question, of course: What do these magazines have in common?

Where's Kimmie's Missile?

Today came news that North Korea's insatiably cukoo regime might be in the final stages of planning a test of a long-range missile that could reach the U.S.--assuming, that is, that our nation's always-reliable, top-of-the-line missle defense system doesn't blow it out of the air first. That's alarming enough, and yet, given the vagaries of Kim Jong-Il, not too surprising either.

What's more interesting here is not so much that North Korea's leader is more batshit than Britney on a bad day, but what North Korea's missile program says about the posturing that constitutes the nation's--and by extension, Kim's--notion of its power. In reality, it appears that North Korea, despite its ambitions, is playing with a very weak hand to a table of international players who long ago called its bluff. It's clear in almost all the evidence gathered so far about the North Korean program that it lacks so much in technology and scale as to pose nary a threat to anyone--at least not anyone in the U.S. For Japan and China the threat is considerably greater, of course; even a missle made of toothpicks and powered by an onboard coal furnace could get that far in the hands of a few adequately-trained physicists. This site paints a decent picture of how ramshackle the North Korean missile project is, though the dossier is admittedly a bit dated.

Whatever its technical flaws, though, North Korea's missile is an interesting story. Which begs the question: Why didn't the New York Times article tell us where, exactly, the missile test site is? All we get is that it's "a site in North Korea's remote east coast." Given the geopolitical significance of the test site, I think most readers would want to know as much as possible about this place--where it is, what it looks like, who's there, how shipments are made. I may be mistaken, but I think most readers favor concrete details on the geographical origins of a missile threat over abstractions like "North Korea's remote east coast," a hackneyed bit of journalese that does as much to place the site and describe it as saying New York City is somewhere in the densely-populated northeast.

I did some looking around and I think I've come up with a satellite image from Google maps of the launchpad in question (tell me if this is the wrong one). The shadow of a launch tower is clearly visible pointing north. I can't quite figure out what the source of the shadow that criss-crosses the tower is. It may be merely a depression in the earth. If anyone has any more details, please comment.

A Theory of Edge

When people—media nerds like me especially—want to describe what they like about a publication, be it a magazine, newspaper, website or blog, one adjective likely to appear among the vague musings is “edgy” or a variant thereon: “edge,” “edginess,” “edgier” and so on. If it has “edge,” it’s good. If not, not so much. Rarely, though, is it clear exactly what edge means, or what articles or feats of editorial direction might support an argument for a publication’s edginess. But while it might often be a way of avoiding the oh-so-bland pronouncement that “this magazine’s good,” edge does mean something more than mere endorsement. Hence this attempt at what I’m pretentiously calling a “theory of edge.”

Taking a cue from B-minus high school essays, I’ll start with definitions. The OED defines as “edgy” anything “that challenges received ideas or prevailing aesthetic sensibilities; at the forefront of a trend.” The American Heritage Dictionary, meanwhile, yields these meanings: “Having a sharp or biting edge: an edgy wit” and “Daring, provocative, or trend-setting: an exhibition of edgy photographs; an edgy menu.” While I’m not sure I’d ever call a menu “edgy,” this sums up, on the surface, what the term means. It’s trend-setting, provocative, sharp; it challenges the status quo.

Etymologically, “edge” derives from the expression “cutting edge,” a fact to which the OED’s definition alludes. The word authority traces the expression—sans “cutting”—to a New York Times Book Review piece by Peter Schjeldahl from 1976 about modern art: “The [essays about] Warhol … and Grosman …, like the edgier Paik and Mekas (which, I must allow, I might like better if I felt more warmly toward the art of their subjects), are in Tomkins's standard genre.” “Edgy” was then in use mainly as a synonym for “on edge,” and it remained that way until about the early 1990s, when the “provocative” usage took over.

So there we have it: the definition and history of edge. Satisfied? I’m not. Edge is a willingness to take swings at the establishment and say something new. More crucially, though, edge is exposing the dirty underside of an institution, person, place or thing generally agreed to be taintless. Revealing a posh suburb as a prostitution-addled gangland, for example, would be edgy, as would discovering that the man who dresses up as Barney for the eponymous kids’ show dreams of having sex with chimps in a space capsule as Tinkerbell looks on and sings “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

All of this may fit the foregoing definitions of edge as “provocative” and “trend-setting,” but in this latter sense we have something much less vague. Under this definition, it’s easy to see why some mags that lay claim to edginess—I’m thinking design-heavy hipster rags like Paper and SOMA, for example—aren’t edgy. Rather than undermining an established zeitgeist, they’re merely singing hymns to the new status quo, no matter how edgy they might like to think they are. All we see here are fashion spreads mixed with articles on the bands- and movies- and people-of-the-moment. It’s news, but it lacks the against-the-grain-ness that’s the hallmark of edge. There’s a place for magazines like these (obviously, if they can sell copies, there’s a place for them), but they’re far from doing anything surprising or lasting largely because their editorial direction lacks any sense of edge. Other magazines, websites, TV shows and blogs, on the other hand, understand what edge is and how to get it. Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New York Post, Gawker: they all, to varying degrees, exploit edge for profit. The Walrus—the Canadian Harper’s, essentially—recently published an article on an old man living a humdrum life in France who, it turns out, was responsible for operating the guillotine in Algeria during the colonial days and beheaded about 200 men. That’s edge. It’s not simply exposé—it’s not necessarily scandalous—but it reveals something unexpected.

Of course, edge isn’t the universal standard of editorial success. Many edge-less articles rightly seek to inform or explain by divulging new information and aligning disparate facts. Nor is edge a necessary component of every media-industry enterprise. In fact, a lot of the best journalism out there just isn’t edgy. But the masses like edge. The National Enquirer is edgy, even if its stories are about as credible as the Onion’s.

Edge sells, which is something PR flacks realized long ago. Press releases abound with claims of edginess. A release for the latest issue of Cowboys & Indians says the magazine “contains a dozen edgy and provocative stories of McGuane's New West.” In another recent example, “Visual Entertainment releases the wickedly funny, twisted, and edgy film, Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic on DVD June 6, 2006.” The list goes on. Even Matt Drudge was once labeled “edgy” (oh, but you’re still so edgy, Mattie) when he signed a deal with AOL in 1997. AOL Networks President and CEO Bob Pittman was quoted saying, “Matt Drudge and AOL share the same ingredients—instant, edgy information—that enable them to be among the very few standouts in cyberspace.”

Nowadays, given its overuse, edge is a term probably best left to the PR department. It’s useful in some contexts, but ultimately its meanings are too multifarious for it to be of much use. At least now we know something more about what it does mean. Well, sort of. Hey, it’s just a theory.

What's up with Nazi Mohammed?

Poring over sports news online during the past year, I've noticed something embarrassingly off-kilter. You see, there's a center for the Spurs whose name is Nazr Mohammed. He's been in the league since 1998, and he's a pretty reliable player. Thing is, for some reason, I kept seeing his first name misspelled as "Nazi," which, given his last name, brings up a lot of weird associations.

Last summer, Steve Kerr, Yahoo!'s basketball analyst, wrote this sentence:

I would expect Larry Brown to start Rasheed Wallace on the Spurs' superstar. Rasheed's length bothers Duncan, and putting Ben on Nazi Mohammed will allow him to do what he does best – roam and help from the weak side.

Then, this February, Kerr made the same mistake:

Nazi Mohammed and Steve Smith: Both players go from last place teams to potential championship-caliber teams (Mohammed to Spurs; Smith to Heat). As the teenage boy said in "Animal House" when a dancing girl flew into his bedroom, "Thank you God!"

Obviously these mistakes aren't intentional, and I don't think Kerr subconsciously equates Islam with National Socialism. One has to wonder, though. You'd think that after making this shorts-shittingly embarrassing faux pas once, Kerr would have learned his lesson.

Weirdly, though, this isn't a Freudian tic limited to Kerr. In an AP account of a game this March, Tim Booth wrote:

Earlier in the game, [Ray] Allen was kicked in the back by [Bruce] Bowen while the two were laying on the ground. Bowen was called for a technical, while Allen had to be restrained by Robert Swift and Nazi Mohammed.

I don't know what to make of all this except to say it's a little surprising. Everybody makes mistakes, but how do you write "Nazi" as someone's first name? Especially when his last name is Mohammed? Where is the copy desk?

One of those Strange New York Stories

I was walking slowly up the Morningside Park steps recently—it's a notoriously greuling climb, especially for black-lunged smokers like me—when I came upon an unmolested coconut sitting exactly in the middle of one of the steps. A fat, crazy-eyed bum was standing next to it, just staring at it. "I hope that ain't no bomb," he said as I passed, flashing me a gap-toothed grin. "Yeah, I hope not," I said.

Then I got the hell out of there.