I took a little break this morning from detailing how to blind 200,000 people at one time by adding water to your chemical pressure tank, and I checked out CNN because even hearing the same news over and over is better than daytime TV. Two things annoyed me:
They showed the RBS commercial that states lovingly that if Jack Nicklaus added together all his best scores from all the times he played the Master's he would have a score of 47. If I added my best scores from every time I played miniature golf I would have a score of 18, I bet. What is the Royal Bank of Scotland promising me? They can help me cheat by ignoring my failures? This commercial really annoys me.
Then I was distracted and turned away, and when I turned back to CNN I saw the Breaking News logo, not the pansy "Just In" logo, but the big spinning "Breaking News" logo, the one they played 9 times the night the 9 miners were rescued in 2002, the one they save for the big stuff, the one that will bring me out of a coma. Then they tell me that ValuJet flight flight 592 crashed.
"Huh," I think, "That makes the second ValuJet plane crash. Didn't one crash in the Everglades?" Then Daryn Kagan (dating Rush Limbaugh - amazing, I checked Snopes, not a lie) continued talking about the big crash. The banner at the bottom says "ValuJet Crash" and for a moment I thought "Dang. They got that banner up pretty fast considering it was Breaking News." Of course it finally dawned on me that ValuJet has been out of business for years and I had just seen a Breaking News Moment in Time, a Broken News if you will. It must be the 10 year anniversary of the crash and they were doing a little "You Were There" retrospective.
"Good thing ValuJet is out of business," I thought, "because if I had a relative flying from Miami to Atlanta I'd be freaking right now." And then I watched Daryn Kagan's face as she struggled to keep her composure as someone clearly began screaming into her ear: "Hey! You can't say that! The phone lines are going crazy!" But she soldiered on as if there were not Bylaws and Regulations dictating when the Sacred Importance of the Breaking News Logo can be invoked. If you call upon the name of the Breaking News in vain it loses its power. What is CNN coming to?
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