While your State Dept. looks into the matter of the Dead Sea Squirrels, please don't feed the little varmints!

One of the famous Dead Sea Squirrels?

by Ken

Sure, squirrels look adorable, but as comics immemorial have pointed out, they're rats with better tails, or better fashion sense. You wouldn't go around encouraging rats, would you?

From Al Kamen's Washington Post "In the Loop" column today:

Dead right

A State Department notice this week decreeing the Dead Sea Scrolls “culturally significant” caught our eye.

Wondering just how the department came to such an obvious conclusion (the scrolls contain only the oldest-known Biblical texts, after all), our colleague Emily Heil attempted to reach a State official to find out.

But the message left with a receptionist got a bit lost in translation. A spokeswoman returned the call, confused and professing to know nothing about these “Dead Sea Squirrels” about which we had inquired.

Loop: “No, I meant the Dead Sea Scrolls, not Dead Sea Squirrels.”

Spokeswoman: “Oh! Scrolls! That makes much more sense.”

The rodent mix-up settled, we learned that declaring the items to be kind of a big deal isn’t merely an academic exercise. It’s a hurdle that museums and other institutions have to clear before they can import certain objects from abroad. The scrolls are part of a touring exhibit, “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Biblical Times,” which will make stops at Discovery Times Square in New York and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Now, we’re eagerly awaiting State’s ruling in the matter of whether Leonardo da Vinci was, in fact, “pretty talented.”

And we’re working on our enunciation.

This is pretty amusing, sure, but also more than a little alarming. A lot of the way we hear, or more specifically distinguish among the possibilities of what we're hearing, has to do with context. And that nobody at the State Dept. charged with dealing with inquiries from the Washington Post has the Dead Sea Scrolls as an automatic context for the Dead Sea -- this I find, well, more than a little alarming.

(I'm presuming that Emily identified herself in her message as a caller from the Washington Post, which would explain why she even got a callback regarding her silly squirrel question, which I'm guessing you or I wouldn't have. Of course it's probably also true that Emily's name doesn't figure among the roster of WaPo "heavy hitters" whose queries would have gotten more serious attention from State's press operation. Still, she did get that callback. Somehow, though, this rather deepens than eases my apprehensions about the episode.)

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