I live in Los Angeles, and today, everyone's going crazy over the flyover of the Space Shuttle Endeavor. Every single spot in the whole city that offers any kind of view whatsoever is jam packed with cars and people buzzing about. I know, because I had a doctor's appointment today, and traffic is insane! It's like Britney Spears decided to go hang gliding or something. (For those of you who missed it, it kind of looks like when a smaller dog is trying to hump a larger dog, like a Corgi on a Collie, only, you know, with a space shuttle on an airplane. And I guess more magisterial and stuff.)
And when I was in the car, I was listening to NPR (as usual), and they talked about the flyover and said they would "bring it to you live when it happens" (!?). So I was wondering how they would "bring it to us live" on the radio. Would they say: "Well, there it goes. It's flying over: the space shuttle on a plane."? Or might they say: "Wow, would ya look at that? Amazing! You can't see it, but it's really cool!"? Well, when the time came, what they did say was almost as silly. First they just listed off where it had flown over, and then they said it flew over downtown Los Angeles, and then they said: "I know this term is really overused, but it looks really awesome!" Wow, it was almost like I was there, listening to that! (I think now that we're all so used to seeing stuff on TV and the Internet, people have kind of forgotten how to make something sound awesome without just saying: "It's awesome."
Back in the old radio days, with all those murder mystery shows and whatnot, they really used to know how to use prose and accentuation to paint a mental picture. I guess it's a lost art. "Who knows what banality lurks in the descriptions of men? The Shadow knows!" (Like I'm one to talk. Only I generally do it on purpose to be silly. {That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!})
