Outrageous News, Part 1
Feb. 10th, 2005 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxOkay, so this week we saw Ellen MacArthur completing her task of breaking the world record for circumnavigating the globe.
I won't even begin to go into how I feel about this. The whole thing's as bogus as hell. First, she was using a piece of technology that was the top of the range, an almost unsinkable Technocracy - designed trimaran using the very latest space - age materials.
She had tech to keep her on course, in the form of GPS, satellite navigation, CCTVs everywhere monitoring her progress and, of course, the Royal Navy never more than a couple of hundred miles away, just in case she needed to be picked up.
A far cry from the days when ships were mono-hulled wooden vessels, no satellites, no naval support, and the risk of death everywhere, with no guarantees they would ever make it back.
What galls me most of all is this.
This vessel did not have a name.
The vessel was funded by a DIY chain store, who insisted that the fucking boat be named after the firm. So Ellen MacArthur, soon to be Dame Ellen, sailed around the world on a fucking billboard.
It didn't have a name. It had a fucking brand.
If you only knew how much this outraged me when I first heard about it. It's like naming your children after household products. "Here's my kids, Pledge and Ajax." "And these are photos of my brothers, Benson and Hedges."
This was the second most soulless thing to have made it to the top of the news this week.
Tune in to hear what the single most soulless news this week is. It's right on the heels of this posting.
I won't even begin to go into how I feel about this. The whole thing's as bogus as hell. First, she was using a piece of technology that was the top of the range, an almost unsinkable Technocracy - designed trimaran using the very latest space - age materials.
She had tech to keep her on course, in the form of GPS, satellite navigation, CCTVs everywhere monitoring her progress and, of course, the Royal Navy never more than a couple of hundred miles away, just in case she needed to be picked up.
A far cry from the days when ships were mono-hulled wooden vessels, no satellites, no naval support, and the risk of death everywhere, with no guarantees they would ever make it back.
What galls me most of all is this.
This vessel did not have a name.
The vessel was funded by a DIY chain store, who insisted that the fucking boat be named after the firm. So Ellen MacArthur, soon to be Dame Ellen, sailed around the world on a fucking billboard.
It didn't have a name. It had a fucking brand.
If you only knew how much this outraged me when I first heard about it. It's like naming your children after household products. "Here's my kids, Pledge and Ajax." "And these are photos of my brothers, Benson and Hedges."
This was the second most soulless thing to have made it to the top of the news this week.
Tune in to hear what the single most soulless news this week is. It's right on the heels of this posting.
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Actually...
Date: 2005-02-11 08:29 am (UTC)As for naming kids after household products...hell, I'd probably do it if it was a product I thought had a good name. Like Maxwell (Maxwell House Coffee)...or Wolf (Wolf Brand Chili). I mean, there are a lot of good names like that on household items. And I don't see why children should be treated any differently from our pets that are often given some of the dumbest damned names. If a person can call a dog Fluffy, then by Rimble, that same person should be able to call their own child Fluffy.