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In This Issue

• Scandal Pol Denies It All
• Hipster Ironic Since Age 14
• Baby Names May Be Lame
• AIDS Continues Dance Marathon Win Streak
• Jeff Sachs, Meet Anna Nicole
• Tales of the Inexpressible: Plumbing
• Iraq Gets Improbably Pale Spring Break Vacationers
• Compare, Contrast.
• Pics Worth 978 Words
• A Primer for the Primaries
• SEXILED: The Board Game
• Online Dating Adventures
• Well Bread
• Men Secretly Letting Their Hair Down and Asses Up
• Anthropomorphism
• Lerner Hall: Time to Take Out The Trash
• Fed Bash, Fed Bash, Fed Bash

In a long-awaited breakthrough, the American Institute of Numerical Pictography released their discovery that a picture is worth exactly 978 words.  The discovery’s repercussions are vast and multiform, including a devastating effect on the economy.  

Yesterday, photographers, painters and other visual artists gathered outside the A.I.N.P.’s Manhattan headquarters to protest the release of the finding.  Their wordless signs spoke volumes in the pictorial expression of their malcontent.  One giant yellow frowny-face represented the almost 500-word long third chapter from the Book of Job, repeated twice.   

“We feel the methods used may have too large a margin of error.  And personally, I don’t condone animal testing,” said Lower East Side resident Martin Stranelli.  Among other complaints, protesters alleged that the study did not respect the picture’s relation to other methods of communication.  Emily Kernan Rafferty, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explained that 1000 words has an accepted reading time of  266 seconds.  The decrease to 978 words would reduce the time to approximately 260 seconds.  “Six fewer seconds means much less time spent in the museum, with a much smaller likelihood of needing sustenance at one of our cafés,” explained Rafferty.  She then displayed what appeared to be the original of Munch’s “The Scream,” as if to say, for 260 seconds, “AAHHHH!”

Even the film industry has taken a hit from the AINP finding.  Filmmaker–pedophile Roman Polanski was out on the street with a mathematical argument similar to that of the art world.  “A picture is 1000 words.  In cinema, you see 24 pictures a second – that is 24,000  words a second! If a picture is only 978 words, there are only 23,472 per second!  You might as well read a book!”  He then asked to strike the last statement from the record, which we refused.  

But not everyone is upset by the discovery.  New York Daily News spokesman Peter Desfromages was hopeful about the future of the written word. “We’ve fired all of our photographers to put more of a focus on our writing.  We want to show that we can compete with the rest of New York’s big publications, like the Gotham Gazette and AM New York”. 

Other industries are trying to use the pictographical change to revitalize their product. Aforementioned art-monger Rafferty has ideas about revamping the Metropolitan Museum to counteract the affects of the AINP discovery.  Starting in 2007, the Met will begin re-painting its collection in a 28-year, 16-billion dollar project to increase every painting’s area by 2.2 percent.  “If the pictures themselves are bigger, visitors may take more time to read a painting,” Rafferty said, making quotation marks with her fingers, “and thus, will be more likely to require sustenance at one of our cafés. And we might do the same to the sculptures, just to be safe.”

Director Richard Linklater (A Scanner Darkly) has launched a project in somewhat the same vein.  His new film Photocopier is being shot with newfangled 25 frame per second cameras, intended to deliver 24,450 words per second.  “With this new method, we could do the fifth Harry Potter in 9 seconds!” exclaimed an optimistic Linklater.  But the souped-up cinema format has its drawbacks.  When viewing the “dailies,” the raw, unedited footage from the film, lab technicians were known to have suffered seizures.  Asked to comment, Linklater responded, “You call those seizures?  I call them glory-shakes!”

National consequences have been quick and evident.  In Times Square, the 48-foot Coca–Cola billboard has been replaced with a 48-foot pictureless paragraph, beginning: “There are many reasons why you, as a consumer, should drink Coca–Cola.”  Also, the familiar cry, “I’ve gotta watch my stories,” has been robbed of its figuratism as NBC replaced the footage of its midday soap operas with slow, scrolling footage of their un-performed scripts. And the 125 -year old Kodak is emptying its warehouses of photography equipment in favor of pencil-making machines.  Said Antonio M. Perez, CEO, President and Chairman of Kodak, “Pictures just aren’t what they used to be.”

And in a sense, he is right.  As the English language grows and words take on new connotations, their versatility grows. Also, with the influences of slang and dialectal trends, the tone of a word can now change its meaning; the word “right” can mean any one of 18 different things, depending on context. Not even the Mona Lisa has 18 meanings.  AINP researchers predict that by the year 2100, a picture will be worth no more than two words: Mona. Lisa.