Fillims and Jiggerbites and litres of concrete

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NIKON D70 - 1/200 sec, f1.8 at 50mm

Radio NZ appears to be radically dropping it's standards on the Queen's English. Oddly though, it obviously spends huge money on training it's broadcasters on how to speak Maori correctly. The weather forecast is full of places that have odd sounding names. Mostly odd because the huge majority of us butcher the language.

The business news reporter (I can't drag his name to mind right now) that does the business news report at 6:45am every day insists on pronouncing gigabytes as jiggerbites. Kim Hill pronounces film as fillim (with 2 syllables instead of one.

I don't know why pronunciation has started to irk me lately. Dicks on TV referring to Centigrade when the correct measure is Celcius is really irking me too. Perhaps I'm getting old.

Last night on Discovery Channel there was a documentary on the building of a huge bridge and tunnel linking Sweden and Denmark. The amount of concrete used was massive, so was the earth moved and the steel used in the bridge. However the damn narrator decided that expressing those huge amounts in kilograms would make them much more impressive. For example, they moved something like 900 billion kilograms of rock to form a new island that was 4 kilometres (why didn't they tell us it was 4 million centimetres) long. Or that they used 500 million kilograms of steel.

Almost apocryphally at one point, we were told how many trillion litres of concrete was used in the Bridge. Who the hell refers to the amount of concrete used in litres? Cubic metres is how you measure concrete you dicks!

It got so bad, I was swearing at the TV. Why on earth does a serious documentary need to stoop to the level of reality TV and sensationalize every single damn thing to the point it's completely meaningless?

The Photo

It's 272,000 pixels, with 18,427 different shades of black and white, of some plant in our back yard. That plant has billions upon billions of cells all working together to keep it growing up towards the sun that is shining on it from 146,000,000,000 metres away. The shutter speed was set precisely at 0.000000000482 of a year. White balance was set to Cloudy (go figure why that is so simple). Nano-second timing was required by literally millions upon millions of components to get that photo captured and onto the Compact Flash card.

And since I started typing this post, my heart has beat about 1200 times. AND IT'S ALL FOR YOU!

Post Meta

Posted: Wednesday, 2 August, 2006 19:39

Captured: 2005:07:10 12:58:32

Add your own comment

  • :-) Beautiful shot. Really like this in B&W, great tones.
    Otto K. - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 1:21
  • You know what has been bugging me lately? On Discovery they have a really interesting documentary series called "Seconds from Disaster". The other night they covered the 'Herald of Free Enterprise' sinking just outside of Zebrugge harbour (England's largest peacetime maritime disaster since the Titanic - 193 died). These documentaries are excellent, but they are obviously written for people whose attention span is approximately 300,000 milliseconds (that's 5 minutes) because every time they have an ad they rewind to the beginning and give you a 'our story so far' summary. For Pete's sake! The adverts were only a couple of hundred milliseconds long! We can remember! Get on with it!
    BC - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 10:10
  • Love the photo, B & W is my fave...don't forget you've got parent/teacher conferences today and make sure you only stay for 600 seconds per teacher PLEASE. Having a tching diploma in Speech & Drama....I have to say lazy speech really hacks me off....budder, samwidg, choona, libry...,you rotter you've disturbed my day.
    Michele - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 10:21
  • BC, damn, you took away a future post I have in mind. I completely agree with you. If you were to remove all the summary of the story content, the program would be about 15 minutes long. Michelle, I can't make parent/teacher interviews this time. First time ever I've missed them. I have a meeting in the city this afternoon.
    Dave - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 11:55
  • tv programmes that annoy the hell out of me are the ones where the presenter has gone to a great deal of time, expense and travel to widest outer Mongolia to tell you something interesting, the camera man zooms in on the presenters face and you can't see what anyone is doing. Also 2 second flashes of what is happening.
    Ma - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 12:16
  • Additionally, those bloody "funniest/stupidest/lamest/sexiest commercials' programmes. Good stuff (some o' the time) But why do we need a presenter to say "Now watch this next commerical, in which the man in the white coat is not looking where he is going and walks into a power pole..." And then the ad runs. Thank GOD the presenter told me to watch the guy in the white coat! (The only person on the screen) because if they hadn't told me to do that my mind might have wandered and I might have been left wondering what was so funny about a guy walking into a power pole!
    BC - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 12:22
  • But then, I guess the canned laughter would have told me to chuckle along to keep the vibe of the show rolling...
    BC - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 12:24
  • Crazy DOF and very nice shades of gray in the lighting. Oh and this post took 25000000000 nano seconds to type out just for you!!
    dean - Friday, 4 August, 2006 6:13
  • snigger
    Dave - Friday, 4 August, 2006 11:37
  • Lovely B&W shot, love the drama in this picture and the symmetry of the fern. btw i always say millik for milk. But im a social worker and not a talkshow host.
    m a r i n u s - Sunday, 6 August, 2006 2:27
  • great Black and white image.
    crewcutter - Tuesday, 8 August, 2006 13:40
  • like the shallow focus and the tones and contrast looks nice
    mikhail - Thursday, 10 August, 2006 23:57

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