Border Lines -
The Daily Herald has clearly garnered a fair bit of luck in its 115-year history.
I can only assume this because we keep receiving emails from complete strangers, offering to give us money.
Sometimes it's lawyers from deceased African emissaries, other times we learn we won some Internet lottery (again). It's quite shocking how many famous people we're related to, really. I'd hate to name-drop, but apparently, we're the second cousin, twice removed, of Rasheed Asim Abdoullah, the famous and recently deceased oil tycoon.
(Odd, a Google search shows no such individual, and one would have thought that the lawyer of such a rich and wealthy man could afford a computer program capable of spell-checking.)
Here and there, we find emails from lonely Russian ladies who just want to find a good husband. (Alas, we are a corporate entity and thus incapable of serving as a groom in a wedding ceremony.)
On occasion, we even received the modern-day equivalent of the old chain letter, suggesting that we must immediately forward the email to no less than six contacts lest we suffer an immediate bout of leprosy, impotence or - even worse - are forced to accept a free weekend's stay in Toronto.
One wonders how people used to convey such messages in the old pre-email days. (I can't recall seeing that many faxes from lawyers of really rich and very dead diplomats 20 years ago, come to think of it.)
I do, however, have an insight into the genesis of such odd propagation, courtesy of a "friend" who shall remain nameless.
The "friend" kindly gave to The Lady an unassuming, mostly liquid bag of bubbling yellow goo and a set of instructions for what was, we learned, supposed to be "Amish bread starter."
The instructions, upon first glance, were relatively uncomplicated: Day one - mush bag, day two - mush bag, day three - mush bag. Somewhere around day seven, one is commanded to add more ingredients: flour, milk and somesuch. Then comes the glorious 10th day when one retains a portion of the batter, and to the rest adds a few other odd ingredients (applesauce and instant pudding - the latter causing some doubt about the alleged Amish origins) and bakes the final product.
Said baked product (two pretty darn tasty cake-like loaves) were positively received in the Herald office.
But there's a catch, you see: the other part of the instructions detail that one should retain one batch of this material, and give three more bags, complete with instructions, to various friends.
Dutifully, after 10 days, The Lady gave me two bags of goo to distribute to the office.
The recipients of our kindness followed the 10-day instructions to the letter.
I know this because 10 days later, a few folks in the office were seen wandering around with bags of yellowish goo, seeking to spread the battery Amish love, not realizing that they had unwittingly become the means by which bags of yellow goo reproduce.
We, likewise, also had several goo-filled containers to dispense. The lack of willing recipients, however, was duly noted.
This, I declared, is what happened in the days long before chain mail and spam: people gave each other Amish bread starter.
But some wisdom has come into the picture, at least on the local front: The Lady realized the one way to eliminate the growing quantity of yellow bubbling goo was to give it away.
Every last bag has now left the house, a token of our generosity to those we, er, selected to receive this gift that keeps on giving. And, it should be noted, one of our staffers has come to the same conclusion, freely disseminating four bags of starter sometime early last week.
Somewhere yesterday - if my calculations are correct - someone near you received a bag of yellowish goo, and a set of instructions.
Consider yourself warned.
Vern Faulkner is managing editor of the Herald.
