Heathrow Hype and Time Travel (Einstein Was WAY Off)

Matt ("All Links All the Time") Drudge has a characteristically breathless headline over a link to a story from the always-quotable London Evening Standard: "Airport Meltdown As EVERY Flight Leaving Heathrow Is Delayed."

Wot? Granted, Heathrow is a great big mess, easily the most screwed-up major airport in the world.

But was every flight delayed yesterday morning? A simple check of FlightStats.com shows that to be an exaggeration, to put it mildly. At Heathrow, 81 percent of flights between 6 and 9 a.m. left on time; 60 percent between 9 a.m. and noon did, and 52 percent between noon and 3 p.m.

That's a lousy record. But air travelers need reliable information, not British press hysteria related as fact.

By the way, speaking of British press baloney, there's another hyperventilating link on the Drudge site today, from the Telegraph newspaper: "German Physicists: We have broken speed of light!" it says -- yes, in red.

Here is the top of the story:

"A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light-- an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time."

Holy Cow! (to quote the late Phil Rizzuto).

The learned physicists who came upon this earth-shaking discovery (which is strangely unmentioned in other world publications, undoubtedly because the media is in bed with those jealous bastards in the reality-based scientific establishment!) are identified as the Drs. Gunter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz.

That's K-O-B-L-E-N-Z.

[The University of Koblenz -- K-O-B-L-E-N-Z -- was most recently in the news when jealous members of the reality-based scientific community worldwide ridiculed a research report from the U-Koblenz physics department claiming that cell-phone signals were decimating the world honeybee population.]

In finally overturning that smart-ass Albert Einstein, U-Koblenz's dynamic Nimtz-Stahlhofen duo found that light travels "instantaneously" rather than at the speed of light, making it possible for you and me to one day get on a spaceship and arrive at our destination at the exact same moment as we actually left, assuming we didn't change our plans or miss the connecting flight. This, of course, holds new promise for addressing the growing problem of airline flight delays and cancellations. Northwest Airlines should hire those two birds.

(Explaining further, the learned Koblenz (K-O-B-L-E-N-Z) scientists also discovered that the speed at which bullshit takes up permanent residence in an otherwise empty skull is infinitely greater than the speed of light.)

The Telegraph article is based on a report in the august New Scientist magazine, a publication that some jealous bastards in the realty-based academic community have ridiculed as being "scientifically illiterate."

Whatever. I get nervous with this talk of time travel because, to paraphrase Woody Allen, it might mean I'd have to sit through Grandma and the other Mime-Clowns at the Big Apple Circus again.

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