Friday, March 2, 2007

Branching out in New Zealand

After spreading like wildfire in Southeast Asia, Sideline Views has now gone under as New Zealand joined us for the first time. They were from Auckland, actually, which reminds me of a funny story I once heard.

A writing coach was once talking to a bunch of writers (myself included) about coming up with catchy ledes. It's hard to come up with a good one so those who do it well are few and far between. So this coach tells us about something he came up with once. Seems that some foreign exchange student was making his way to Oakland, California (let's call him Johnnie Johnson). But Johnnie had an accent, as foreign exchange students tend to have.

Anyway, the person at a connecting airport misunderstood Johnnie as he was en route to Oakland.

The lede to the story went something like this (I'm paraphrasing):

"Say Oakland.
Now say Auckland.
It took you a few seconds to realize that they were completely different. It took Johnnie Johnson some 20 hours and thousands of miles to find out the same exact thing."

Seems this kid was put on a plane to Auckland, New Zealand instead of Oakland, California from some city in the Midwest.

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