A year or two down the road, they’ll be teaching Thomas L Friedman’s New York Times column at Columbia Journalism School. It has a killer opening:
I was at a conference in Bern, Switzerland, last week and struggling with my column.
So he outsourced it to the Tuvaluan intern at a small media-services start-up in Macau, and that just goes to show how swimmingly globalization is going?
No:
To clear my head, I went for a walk along the Aare River, on Schifflaube Street. Along the way, I found a small grocery shop and stopped to buy some nectarines.
They were unnaturally large and devoid of taste, which goes to show we need to follow the Chinese Politburo on serious climate-change legislation?
No:
When I looked up at the cashier, I was taken aback: He had pink hair. A huge shock of neon pink hair… I thought to myself: “Wow, wouldn’t it be nice to be a Swiss? Maybe even to sport some pink hair?”
And waddaya know, there’s an organic jojoba pink hair dye available in the Body Shop at Kuala Lumpur Airport, which just goes to show the world is flat?
No:
Barack Obama once had black hair. But his is gray now, not pink. That’s also the tax you pay for thinking about the Middle East too much: It leads to either gray hair or no hair, but not pink hair.
Well, bring on the Grecian Formula, because our leaders will need it.
Er, okay… Gray-haired Obama is the Flintstones, but pink-haired Swiss sales clerks are the Jetsons[scroll down], is that it? Hey, don’t sweat it, we’re within sight of the Big Thinker’s big finish:
Let’s really test how far Putin will go with us. I’m skeptical, but it’s worth a try. Otherwise, Obama’s hair will not just be turned gray by the Middle East these next three years, he’ll go bald.
Hair today, gone tomorrow. Unlike Thomas L Friedman: No pink slips at the Times.