Sity?

A hilarious little addendum to my earlier entry about the misspelled street sign- WXIA, the local NBC affiliate broke this story. Granted, it's not exactly as if someone plowed through historical documents and spied on underground political meetings. Likely, someone finally noticed that the sign was misspelled and called up the assignment desk. Since it was a slow news day, the producer decided to run with it, which is pretty cool. It's a fun story, worthy of note.

The fact that the other stations are following suit is what's funny. But, that's to be expected in this market. But where this story really gets funny is found in WGCL, the CBS affiliate's, morning assignment meeting notes, which for some reason, they publish on their website.

I'm really interested in local news. It's sad but true. Also sad but true, I get most of my information from fellow bloggers Doug Richards of Live Apartment Fire and CB Hackworth of Certain Speculation. That's pretty sad because I have much more time on my hands than either one of them, but they are just better at staying on topic than me. I mean, how am I supposed to find time to read assignment meeting notes when I'm busy looking for pictures of Kristen Stewart where she looks gay? In any case, it was on CB's blog that I saw this excerpt:

"JOHN CATER will follow up on this story. How does the sity misspelled the most prominent figure in Atlanta name incorrectly. How soon will the sign be repaired. We need to ask the city how many misspelled sign there are in Atlanta and how many they have changed for misspelling in the past year. TOUGH QUESTIONS!"

Tough Questions, indeed! Thanks for the, CB!

I know that Doug and CB have both at least visited this blog, but I doubt either of them are faithful readers, but it's really refreshing to finally have a critical eye watching local news. So, if they happen to be reading, good job, guys! I really enjoy your blogs!

Marin Luther King, Jr.

Something else to be proud of in the ATL. Not only are we home to Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but also home to his lesser known brother, Marin.

Typos can happen to anyone, but this makes you wonder how long this sign was up before someone noticed the mistake. Makes you wonder what you can get away with.

The Day the Moon Was Gone

Paul and I do pretty good on agreeing about what to watch on television. Usually, we settle on something about home improvement or cooking, but tonight, he had the remote and landed on a show called "The Universe" on the History channel. Would have been more appropriate on the Science channel, because this is history that goes WAY back. The official topic of this particular episode was "The Day the Moon Was Gone," but it didn't really talk about that a whole lot. Essentially, in this one hour, they covered everything about how the Earth formed and life evolved. Every once in a while, they would throw in some facts about how something might have formed differently if there was no moon. I mean, basically, everything would have been completely different. No mountains (somehow the earth's core would have been cooler, so no plate tectonics). More water. Shorter days. Constant winds. No advanced life forms.

It's those last two that really got me thinking, because at one point, when it was talking about the imaginary animals that could have evolved if there were no moon, it said that they could have evolved to have more arms to shield themselves from the wind. Hum.

Well, naturally, I was thinking that, personally, I could really use another hand. And everyone else probably could too. So, why don't we have one? I mean, if I had an extra hand, I really think that would give me an evolutionary advantage. Ahem.

And while I'm at it, I don't understand why we don't have tails. It seems like I learned in biology or somewhere that the animals that we humans evolved from had tails and then we lost them during the evolutionary process. Well, who were these lazy pre-humans that didn't use their tails? I would love to have a tail, especially a prehensile tail. It would really be a help when I'm trying to navigate the treetops. It would help me balance during a field sobriety test. I could wag it when I was happy...

The ending of this particular episode was almost like a punchline. They kept building up to and teasing with promises of talking about what life would be like if the moon suddenly disappeared. But, then, in the last two minutes, they covered this by simply saying that although in billions of years the distance between the earth and the moon would be so great that they would lose their gravitational attraction and the moon would go spinning off into space, BUT that will never actually happen, because long before then, the sun will explode and the earth and the moon will both burn up and cease to exist.

Cue Credits.