January 16th, 2009

So, you may or may not have heard that a plane kinda sorta went down over some water and had a bunch of people on board and the pilot was awesome and nobody died and the plane was fit enough to fly dying school Somali school children with cancer to Disney World less than three hours after the accident.

Personally, I thought it was awesome that the pilot was able to handle the situation so calmly and kudos to him for following his training. But the cynical part of me thinks, yeah, that’s exactly what he was trained to do, so it’s no big whoop that he did it. Good on ya for doing it right, but it’s not exactly going above and beyond.

It’s a great story, but really folks, we’re not talking about a cure for snoring here, we’re talking about someone who did a great job in a situation he was trained to expect. The rhetoric is rapidly getting out of hand here.

1. “God was certainly looking out for us.” Really? He was looking out for you? By pelting your plane with geese?

2. This Flickr account was posted onto a website I read, along with the typical comments. But what cracked me up wasn’t the reaction of the internet at large, it was the first comment on this picture here. Really? A miracle? A miracle? This is a word we usually only reserve for children spontaneously cured of cancer or Republicans spontaneously coming out of the closet. It’s not something we say when talking about people doing their jobs.

Yeah, I know life sucks and we’re all thrilled when MSNBC carries an article that doesn’t involve death or politics. But really, can we stop with the nauseating embellishment?