A woman risked her life and that of her family on a page from the National Geographic Magazine, when her husband brought some strange-looking things in from the fields. The family was undecided whether they were mushrooms or toadstools, until someone dug up a Geographic that showed plates of edible varieties. Their harvest was pictured, under the name of "Shaggy-mane," definitely "edible." With this as the basis of their faith, they prepared and ate the mushrooms. Nobody suffered.

To the participants in one of the Olympic games, loss of the four-hundred-meter relay race for women was a tragic incident. The Germans were far in the lead when the next-to-the-last girl came to pass the baton to the last runner. With a clear five-yard lead and the race as good as won, the baton was dropped. Pictures showed the despair on the face of the last runner as she realized what had happened. We sat one evening in Berlin looking at an illustrated magazine that showed pictures of the Olympics. The magazine had texts under the pictures in several languages. The English read: "They muffed the baton"; the French read: "le temoin," the French word for "witness." The idea was that the runner who reached the tape had to have the baton as a "witness" that the full distance had been covered by each of the runners.