Saturday, June 21, 2008

Snopes and rice

You gotta love the web: there's hardly anything you can't find an instant answer to.
For example I was just reminded of a wedding some years back, when my sister told that the reason the rice was in little nets was that it made the stomachs of birds explode when they ate it. Thinking of it, it had the flavor of urban myth, so I looked it up, and viola.
(OK, so most people say "voila", but my mother's middle name was Viola, so...)

PS, doesn't "Snopes And Rice" sound like a movie title? Sort of like State And Main with William Macy. Boy, what a lemon that was. It was made in the rich style of Magnolias, so I thought at the beginning that it was a quality movie. But then the cracks started to show. Good example: an important appointment is accidentally erased from a big schedule board, and it is claimed and shown later that it was re-entered under the wrong date causing a missed appointment with the mayor, when in fact the movie clearly showed earlier that it was re-entered correctly.

Worse, of course, is when a movie deliberately misleads the audience. Like in Rules of Engagement with Samuel Jackson. One scene shows that the mob which was massacred was an innocent, protesting mob. A later scene shows the same mob at the same time, but this time all of them are firing wildly with automatic weapons at the embassy, completely changing the story.

But I digress. Big and often.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Huh. I'm a wedding photographer, and I can remember years back at a wedding rehearsal the party being told by the coordinator at the church that there would be no throwing of rice after the wedding because the rice swells up in the stomachs of the little birdies and it kills them. Whereupon one of the groomsmen siad, "well in that case, you can use my wife's rice pilaf; it's already cooked and it isn't any good for anything else."

Anonymous said...

Alka-Seltzer will definitely cause birds to go BOOM. Sea Gulls love the stuff. Great video material, if you can follow-focus the subject. But then, there's always more Alka-Seltzer tablets to toss up there...