It's relatively geeky to build your own weather balloon, but an entirely different thing to accidentally let it loose with your son inside. The nightmare unfolded Thursday and the world watched as the weather balloon sailed through the sky, the status of the boy inside unknown. Would he be alive? Would he be dead? Would he have turned into a cat? But seriously, since the safety of a child was at stake, naturally every single media outlet was scrambling to be the first to report more details about the story.
Eventually, the balloon landed, and it was found that the kid was not, in fact, inside the balloon. So did he fall out somewhere? It turned out that the kid was hiding in the attic. He feared his father's famous wrath, so he was hiding there for five hours. His father gave a heartfelt apology for that in front of news cameras.
That would be it, if not for the revelation that the police were working behind the family's back, and behind the back of the news media as well, to investigate whether it was a hoax or not. While the news media were falling over themselves trying to drum up ratings by reporting everything they could about the real life Hot Air Henry story, police interviewed the husband separately from his family, and got enough to issue a warrant. Apparently, the family were hoping this would help their goal of being reality TV celebrities. Well, staying true to crime show tropes, the family has now lawyered up.
But the news didn't have its head completely in the clouds this week. In an update to a news story we touched upon last week, Microsoft had originally reported that they lost all the data that Sidekick users had entrusted to them, but now it seems they took a peek in the lost and found box, because they've revised their statement significantly. Considering this is Microsoft we're talking about, people who supposedly should've known what they were doing in the first place, this kind of miracle isn't even in the same ballpark as, say, feeding five thousand people with five loaves of barley bread and two fish, or getting eight days of use out of one day's worth of oil. Also interesting is the timing. They announced their miracle right when Windows 7 is launching. Hmm.
Apparently, Nintendo is the best company in the world. BusinessWeek magazine used factors such as sales growth and value creation over the past five years. In other words, to be listed as the best company in the world today, you have to have been the worst company in the world, five years ago. Or close to it. If my impressions of the list are correct, then if Nintendo had constantly been at the top of the video game market since it hit a home run with the NES, it might not have even been mentioned in the magazine.
And in other news, Eugene Kaspersky wants to end anonymity on the Internet, and is willing to cut off any country that doesn't agree with him. Obviously, this guy wouldn't get my vote for President of the Internet, even if he thinks, in his mind, that he is President already. While he's rubbing his hands together greedily at the thought of all that personal information being available, Google is rubbing their hands together greedily at the thought of their Street View expanding further. A couple weeks ago, they finally added Canadian cities, and now they're calling on Americans to choose where their Street View Trike goes, since there are so many notable landmarks and other such destinations that cannot be visited by car, but are interesting enough to be documented. But the quest for more information may become pointless if doomsayers are correct, for the Large Hadron Collider, that machine that was supposed to suck the Earth into a black hole last year but broke before anything could really happen, is finally repaired and cooled back down to operating temperature. Cue the doomsday warnings in 3, 2...
Commentary for this episode:
I grew up with the Henry stories. Hot-Air Henry, Cross-Country Cat, etc., and while the premise behind it was certainly doable in real life, I didn't think I'd hear about it actually happening to someone, let alone a little kid. It wasn't even an ordinary balloon in this case, but a weather balloon. I wonder if this is where the family stole the idea from.
Interestingly enough, I would've been just as correct to say that Jesus fed 4000 people with seven loaves of an unidentified type of bread, and a small but uncounted number of fish. I suspect that Luke and John's account of there being 5000 people and less food present was embellished from the original version of events.
Unfortunately, my small city of Revelstoke (hah, Eugene, how's that for being unanonymous?) isn't in Google Street View yet, but you can still view it in a top-down, SimCity perspective with Google Maps. Good news, we haven't been terrorized by Godzilla yet, but I suspect it's coming any day now.
Speaking of, SimCity predicted global warming! Apparently, Rio De Janiero gets flooded by 2047. But bad news for Bostonians: you're going to be irradiated next year when your three nuclear power plants all fail. But wait a minute, you say. Boston doesn't have any nuclear power plants. Doesn't matter. SimCity says they'll fail, so they'll fail. :)