I wouldn’t normally point to this sort of thing, but–well, it’s my local newspaper, it’s an interesting testament to people taking things just a little too seriously, and–as translated into a YouTube video and, better yet, sampled music video, it’s hilarious. (YMMV). [OK, there’s another appropriate word before “hilarious,” but I don’t use that kind of language in my blog, and anyway the tears have stopped streaming…]
You may have seen this six times already. It was on one of the A-list blogs. I saw it on Copyfight and maybe elsewhere, but for some reason I didn’t go look at it until David Free mentioned it.
The setup: The San Francisco Chronicle records reader complaints. Some of them, it puts up as podcasts on SFGate, the Chron‘s website. [Yeah, they have podcasts, Blogs, too.]
They had a story about uses for drones–aircrafts that don’t have pilots on board. A subhead used the phrase “pilotless drones.” A reader thought that was redundant. And called to say so.
The reader nicely mentioned his problem. And others thought his way of stating it so magnificent that, first, someone put together a set of photos, set the podcast to music, and put it on YouTube. The killer, though, is the second YouTube video, where someone turns it into a proper music video. Links to the two YouTube videos are on the SFGate site. There’s already a ringtone…
And, as another (very brief) reader call notes, “pilotless drone” isn’t necessarily redundant: Many (most?) drones are actually piloted remotely.