By Carol Van Sturm
“Possessing the Neanderthal genome raises the possibility of bringing Neanderthals back to life. Dr. George Church, a leading genome researcher at the Harvard Medical School, said Thursday that a Neanderthal could be brought to life with present technology for about $30 million.”*
A few old-timers still remember the days when a single complete sentence was enough to cost a journalist’s job. The rest of us might recall the mid-century blowback, when an epidemic confusion of nouns with verbs was linked conclusively to atrophy of the amygdala and other judgment/discernment areas of the brain. A scramble to re-institute grammatical speech and writing in popular culture ensued, hindered by the dearth of teachers able to distinguish “text” from “write.”
One of the most effective programs in that era turned out to be a simple game show called “Storytelling 101.” Contestants were required to answer the question of the week with a story from their own experience or imagination; the only rule was that every sentence had to be grammatically correct. For the first few seasons, winners were few and far between, but as the show caught on, contestants boned up on their English and the audience became more and more savvy.
The popularity of “Storytelling 101,” I believe, was due primarily to the clever use of questions designed to expose the more embarrassing or ludicrous elements of human nature. The most popular question of all turned out to be “What is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done?” Contestants never seemed to run out of appalling, ridiculous or heartbreaking anecdotes about themselves. Today, long after the need for the program has faded, reruns continue to attract new audiences, who may wonder at contestants’ grammatical heroics, but recognize immediately the follies and fallacies of human nature. In that vein, the editors have collected here some favorite winners from the show.
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30-Million-Dollar Baby
My name is Rawley and if you want my age any closer than between two-score and three-score, you are out of luck.
The dumbest thing I ever did was to volunteer in a science experiment. It wasn’t called a science experiment, which probably sounded too low-grade. No, they called it research. Whatever it was called, it was a mistake, and I made the biggest, dumbest mistake of all.
Here’s what happened. I was in my early twenties and had no money for college. In those days, believe it or not, you had to pay to go to a college or university, and people would spend the rest of their lives trying to pay off the loans they took out to get a degree in economics or accounting. I did not like owing money to anyone, so I would waitress days and pole-dance nights for one term, to make enough for the next term. Then I saw this ad in the student paper, asking for volunteers in a long-term research project. The money offered was enough to pay for my entire university fees through grad school. If that was too good to be true, I thought I’d be able to tell. I was wrong.