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Welcome to Birdbrain
Spacelines
by Mad Dog
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These guidelines, which should be renamed “The Duh! Report,” are
another example of a government agency spending our hard earned tax
dollars to state the obvious. Hey, it’s easier than original thinking. |
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Last week the Federal
Aviation Administration (motto: “Straighten up and fly right”)
released guidelines for passengers and crew members of commercial
suborbital reusable launch vehicle operations with space flight
participants. You know, what you and I would call tourist space ships.
Never mind that there is no vehicle capable of carting people into space
and back and probably won’t be for at least ten years, we can rest
easy knowing the government is planning ahead, something that would have
been nice a while back. Like, say, before 9-11.
Among the recommendations they make
is that flight operators should tell passengers about the risks
associated with space flight (“You may embarrass yourself by puking
during liftoff, regain all your new found weightlessness when you get
back to Earth, and fry to a crisp during re-entry.”), that passengers
must have a check-up with a doctor “experienced or trained in the
concepts of aerospace medicine” (try asking your primary care
physician at the HMO for that referral), and that they not be allowed to
show Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or any Hilary Duff
movie on board so as not to alarm the passengers.
The most amazing thing about this is
that someone — probably a slew of people — got paid to come up with
these guidelines. You know they thought hard and long about it since
they also recommended that each member of the flight crew “should be
trained to operate the vehicle,” that the space ship should “provide
adequate atmospheric conditions to sustain life and consciousness,”
and that there should be “provisions for stowage of all objects in the
cabin.” There’s no mention of having to put the tray table in the
upright and locked position during re-entry, but hey, there’s a reason
the guidelines are only version 1.0.
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This proves once again that you can’t believe everything you hear,
even if it is coming from the government. Okay, especially if it’s
from the government. |
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These guidelines, which should be renamed “The Duh! Report,”
are another example of a government agency spending our hard earned tax
dollars to state the obvious. Hey, it’s easier than original thinking.
But this isn’t always the case. Some government agencies actually balk
at stating the obvious. The other day the Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration, a wholly owned subsidiary of the
Department of Health and Human Services (motto: “Sorry, nonhuman
services are down the hall”), decided that the title of a talk being
given at a conference they were funding in Oregon had to go. Apparently
”Suicide Prevention Among Gay/Lesbian/ Bisexual/Transgender
Individuals” was a little too specific, even though that happens to be
the topic. A government official asked that the words “gay,”
“lesbian,” “bisexual,” and “transgender” be deleted and
“sexual orientation” be substituted. Since that made no sense to
anyone except maybe Norm Crosby, the talk’s title was changed to
“Suicide Prevention in Vulnerable Populations.” That’s better, now
isn’t it? Never mind the fact that suicide isn’t even possible if
someone isn’t vulnerable. Or at the least it wouldn’t be very
successful.
This proves once again that you
can’t believe everything you hear, even if it is coming from the
government. Okay, especially if it’s from the government. This isn’t
only true in the United States either. If you call the British Columbia
Ministry of Transport to check on road conditions, and used the phone
book in Northwest British Columbia to get the phone number, you’ll get
a female voice that says, "Ummm, baby, you've dialed the right
number." It might in fact be the right number, but only if you want
phone sex, not road or weather conditions. It turns out the local
directory printed the wrong phone number and no one from the government
bothered to proofread the listing before it went to press. The phone
company is thinking about tossing the undistributed directories in the
trash, proving once again that the United States isn’t the only
country whose government lacks a sense of humor.
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A
report in the February issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience (motto:
“We’d rather review movies but that Ebert guy won’t let us.”)
says birds aren’t birdbrains after all. |
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Speaking of government proofreading errors, Hong Kong recently
spent $2 million putting up thousands of new and replacement street
signs. Unfortunately after they put them up they discovered that a
number of them contained misspellings, including “Supereme Court
Road”, “Club Stree,” and “JacKson Road.” The signs, which were
made my prison inmates, prove that you get what you pay for. It could
also prove that government proofreaders are birdbrains, but it turns out
that would be in insult to birds.
Yes, you guessed it. A report in the
February issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience (motto: “We’d
rather review movies but that Ebert guy won’t let us.”) says birds
aren’t birdbrains after all. The researchers say birds exhibit
“complex cognitive behavior,” which on the evolutionary and
intelligence scale falls one step above whoever decided Miami Vice
should be remade as a movie. Of course considering Hollywood is also
remaking The Honeymooners, Bewitched, and The Dukes of
Hazzard, there’s a good chance the title of birdbrain may have
been passed from birds to studio heads while we weren’t looking.
But even if birds have lost title to
their brains, at least they can fly wherever they want without the
government getting into the act and issuing numbingly obvious guidelines
they have to follow. This is a good thing since, unless I missed that
study, they wouldn’t be able to read the guidelines anyway. Ah, were
we only so lucky to have that excuse.
©2005 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country.
Read them, but follow the guidelines when you do.
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