Thursday 22 September 2011
Satellite apocalypse
No, I don't mean Big Brother Australia will be shown on Sky. I mean this:
We're doomed. Doomed, I tell you, dooooo...
... oh, just the size of a bus and weighing about six tonnes? And that's giant now, is it? I mean, I kind of assumed that giant meant, you know, giant. Biggest thing to have hit the planet since Tunguska, sort of thing. At the very least all the flapping would make you think that it's the biggest man made thing ever to have hit the plant. It's 'giant', after all. Except that if you use that word to describe something that weighs about the same as a luton van with some large furniture in the back, what word do you use to describe the 77 tonne Skylab that de-orbited and fell onto Western Australia in 1979? And since the article specifically mentions that Skylab was the 'biggest piece of space debris to fall from orbit' I wonder why The Teletubbygraph felt the need to spice up the headline with the giant thing. 32 years ago the rather more worrying news that 77 tonnes of space junk hit a populated country, albeit a pretty sparsely populated one and in a mostly empty area, was reported like this:
And the NYT headline now? A very un-scary 'Satellite to land, somewhere'.
Why is it the British press doing the beat ups? Why has the once respected Teletubbygraph joined in? Harden the fuck up, for heaven's sake.
We're doomed. Doomed, I tell you, dooooo...
... oh, just the size of a bus and weighing about six tonnes? And that's giant now, is it? I mean, I kind of assumed that giant meant, you know, giant. Biggest thing to have hit the planet since Tunguska, sort of thing. At the very least all the flapping would make you think that it's the biggest man made thing ever to have hit the plant. It's 'giant', after all. Except that if you use that word to describe something that weighs about the same as a luton van with some large furniture in the back, what word do you use to describe the 77 tonne Skylab that de-orbited and fell onto Western Australia in 1979? And since the article specifically mentions that Skylab was the 'biggest piece of space debris to fall from orbit' I wonder why The Teletubbygraph felt the need to spice up the headline with the giant thing. 32 years ago the rather more worrying news that 77 tonnes of space junk hit a populated country, albeit a pretty sparsely populated one and in a mostly empty area, was reported like this:
And the NYT headline now? A very un-scary 'Satellite to land, somewhere'.
Why is it the British press doing the beat ups? Why has the once respected Teletubbygraph joined in? Harden the fuck up, for heaven's sake.
Satellite apocalypse
2011-09-22T23:18:00+10:00
Angry Exile
Don't Be So Fucking Silly|Journalistic crap|UK|