Pictures and text from a story this morning on CNN.com:
A Cypriot jet with “no sign of life” in the cockpit as it approached Athens, Greece, crashed today, killing 121 people, officials said. Reports say F-16 pilots escorting the jet after air traffic controllers lost contact with it said the pilot was not in the cockpit and the co-pilot was slumped over the controls. A passenger may have sent a text message to his cousin. “The pilot has turned blue,” reports quoted the message as saying. “Cousin farewell we’re freezing.”
“Although there are precedents for both pilots losing consciousness at the controls of aircraft in the past, for it to happen on a large airliner like a Boeing 737, with all the backup systems they have there, does seem to be really quite extraordinary,” said Kieran Daly, editor of Air Transport Intelligence.
“It really is all very peculiar at the moment, I rather suspect we’re heading for a very complicated investigation,” he said.
From the front page of today’s New York Times comes this story about the kipple infiltration among our troops in Iraq, G.I.’s Deployed in Iraq Desert With Lots of American Stuff, centered ironically on “Camp Liberty”:
…wherever possible, the current generation of young soldiers - like its predecessors in Vietnam and other conflicts - has sought the succor of the familiar, and resourceful soldiers in this war have taken this quest to astonishing levels, accumulating all the accouterments of home: personal electronics, bed linens, furniture, household appliances and beauty products.
Gadgetry, in particular, proliferates among the 138,000 troops stationed in Iraq: laptop computers, MP3 and DVD players, digital cameras, televisions and video game consoles. On bases in greater Baghdad, many soldiers have cellphones and some have satellite dishes that pull in scores of stations. Personal DVD collections numbering several hundred are not uncommon; the legendary ones top 1,000.
Never in the field of human conflict has so much stuff been acquired by so many soldiers in so little time.
Emphasis mine. Natch.
From a recent column in the SF Chronicle by John Flinn, Culture shock still souvenir of Japan, comes the following excellent examples of Japanese T-shirt English, which I have made bold:
About the only place I saw English used consistently was on T-shirts worn by young people, and (as Japanophiles here are well aware) this was a weird, jabberwocky form of English. “Don’t mess with juicy,” read one shirt. “Hurry up the cakes,” read another.
After a while, I began to collect these slogans in my journal. They were, I thought, a peculiarly addictive form of poetry:
“Why waste lucky?”
“Oh my goodness. Don’t scully me.”
“Mischievous blue rabbit skunk.”
“Oranges now!”
(My guess is that if a Japanese speaker saw the kanji characters tattooed on ankles and shoulder blades all over America, he’d find them equally nonsensical.)
