In 1928 Coca-Cola began to market their product in China. Legend has it that the Coke people recognized their peculiar name presented a significant language barrier. They kept trying to match the sounds "ko-ka-ko-la" to conventional Chinese characters, but with little success. Eventually, some Mandarin shopkeepers became impatient and hung up signs that matched the…

God loveth adverbs. After watching his Detroit Pistons basketball team fall behind the Miami Heat three games to one on Tuesday evening, head coach Flip Saunders noted “Right now, we’re not functioning very good…” That may be true, but I wonder if Saunders’ intention was to discuss the Pistons’ virtue. By using an adjective where…

Old bed sheets. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’m highlighting two surveys released this week citing how The Da Vinci Code has undermined faith in the Roman Catholic Church and badly damaged its credibility. A British survey revealed that readers of Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel are twice as likely to believe Jesus…

The arts as an ally. When Brigham Young led his Mormon flock to Utah, he instructed them to first build a Temple that would be used only by Mormons for worship.  The second project, interestingly, was to build a center for the performing arts that could be used by the entire community. Young viewed the…

Abstinence and coherence. Since 1993, about 2.4 million young people have signed a pledge to wait until marriage to engage in sexual intercourse as part of True Love Waits, a church initiative promoting premarital sexual abstinence. For seven years, researchers from Columbia University and Yale University studied 12,000 teenagers who took the pledge. In March…

The Da Vinci Code. For the uninitiated, The Da Vinci Code is a novel by Dan Brown that has been on top of best-seller lists since early summer of 2005.  In Brown’s novel, the “Da Vinci code” refers to cryptic messages supposedly incorporated by Leonardo Da Vinci into his artwork. According to the novel, Leonardo…

Batteries and Baywatch. During her tenure as ambassador to Morocco, Margaret Tutwiler1 discovered that the average day for a Moroccan man went like this: work hard all day, come home in the evening, unplug the car battery, haul it into the house and connect it to the TV so that the family can catchBaywatch, the…

Head on. I bumped into an old friend at the airport last week and discovered we were booked on the same flight home. It made for a quick two-and-a-half hours. He was excitedly describing his meetings, especially the opportunity to “witness” to his colleagues. “I told them I read the Bible and pray.” “That’s great.”…

According to business consultant Challenger, Gray and Christmas, Inc., beginning today – March 16th – lost productivity in the American workplace will increase by at least 3.8 billion dollars over the next three weeks.  The bleeding will only take place on ten of those days, during which keyboards stop clicking, voice mail goes unanswered (of…

This too shall pass away? Abraham Lincoln once told the story of the oriental despot who summoned his wise men and charged them to go away and not to come back until they had formulated a proposition to be carved forever in stone.  When they returned, the proposition they offered him was: “And this too…