Look and Read for International Surprises

"They're all wearing jeans," a friend said back in 1979, when Iranian militants were storming the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. That observation introduced me to what can be learned by looking at the details in media photos and also by looking for unexpected information in novels and other publications.

The clothes and expressions on people used to illustrate articles say a lot. When criminals or terrorists are captured, we don't see them well-groomed, wearing well-tailored business suits, or smiling at the camera, because pictures are chosen to help tell the same stories as the articles tell.

Some times pictures unexpectedly generate funny ideas instead of the serious ones they are intended to communicate. Draperies/curtains made into clothes is a device we've seen in Gone With the Wind, Sound of Music, and Enchanted. Seeing China's President, Xi Jinping, dwarfed by the enormous red drape behind him at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party, all I could think of was how many gowns could be fashioned from that material.

Then, there is the information that turns up in unexpected places. While reading the class notes about alumni in a secular university's magazine, I saw a former student wrote a book about a Roman Catholic priest, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who was martyred for speaking out on behalf of Jewish citizens against Nazi practices.

When I was listening for stock market tips, Jim Cramer, a stock analyst and the host of "Mad Money" on CNBC, mentioned he once heard a professor say, if you wanted to learn about reality, read novels. Sure enough, I was reading the latest novel, The House of Unexpected Sisters, by Alexander McCall Smith, the British author who writes a series set in Botswana, Africa, when, on page 151, I saw he wrote about a store that sold furniture made from Zambezi teak and mukwa wood, "none of this Chinese rubbish." I hadn't expected the controversial subject of African wood, a subject I discussed in the blog post, "Don't Take Any Wooden Nickels," to turn up in a novel.