Submitted for your approval

By Kristin

Afternoons in my car on a Sunday afternoon are never boring. The line up on NPR keeps me quite entertained. A Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me are among of the few programs that entertain me along my drive. This past Sunday, I was able to catch a portion of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, a news quiz show where contestants are tested on their knowledge of current events. One bit of news breaking from Google land will, if successful, save hundreds of thousands of relationships nation wide. To loosely summarize a summary of the new GMail feature given by one of the guest hosts, if someone writes an email during evening hours and on the weekend, the sender would be prompted to solve a series of math questions aimed at determining if the sender is in an appropriate state to send the email. This would hopefully eliminate emails sent after a night, or early afternoon, out on the town aimed at assumingly innocent victims of the dreaded “drunk email”.

I, for one, am a fan of this new feature. It creates a safeguard for the emailing world. Not only would the intoxicated person need to be able to successfully open the email program, he would then need to demonstrate a minimal level of intelligence to proceed with the letter. For example, Jimmy goes to happy hour with some co-workers and takes full advantage of the specials. He then goes home to compose a letter to his old girlfriend to tell her that he still thinks she is the most rotten person on earth and he is holding on to her favorite earrings as payment for how she broke his heart. In the heat of the moment, the letter is eloquent, powerful and hits a home run. This is where the new GMail feature will step in:
Question 1: Find the area of a square that measures 4 feet long and 2 ½ feet wide. Jimmy answers, after struggling with the calculator, 10 feet.
Question 2: Susie, who is 7 years old, is four times as old as her brother. How old will Susie be when she is twice as old as her brother? Jimmy puts his head in his hands to think and promptly falls asleep only to wake up in the morning and delete the unsent email saving himself an embarrassing phone call to the ex-. Success! The GMail function has worked.

I propose that we establish a similar sort of test for all bloggers. After typing a masterpiece the writer would be forced to answer a series of questions about the article to make sure that it is blog-worthy. I have a sampling of questions I would like to see asked:
Question 1: Count the number of times you use a personal pronoun. Is there one personal pronoun for every 10 words? Correct answer, Yes.
Question 2: Have you used any current, hip and trendy jargon from the youngest identified generation? Correct answer, Yes.
Question 3: Have you avoided an angry tone aimed at other bloggers who clearly have no idea what they are talking about? Correct answer, No. You should quote at least 2 other relevant bloggers in each article and clearly state that they are out of their minds.
Question 4: How many other bloggers have written about this topic? Correct answer, Irrelevant, all other bloggers are interior and their opinions do not matter.


Opening Panel Round
A sobering new email application