15 April 2011

Nitpicking

I've been watching the Blair Witch Project with half an eye and that's quite incredible, but even more incredible is this story published by the Standard: An ICC suspect lost a bag with USD10m in cash at JKIA when he came back from Den Hague. Regrettably, the identity of said returnee is a bit of a mystery, as is the entire case: "He had it when he came, only his bodyguards have recorded statements. He fears the perception the public would have of him if it were revealed he had with him such huge amount of money," the Standard quotes a 'senior police officer'. Indeed.

While we still marvelled at the whole story, a friend pointed out that USD10m in USD100 notes would weigh around 100kg, i.e., would a bit too big and heavy for hand luggages.

This reminded me that I recently emailed the Star to complain about an article that claimed the 'Hugging Saint' had hugged 50,000 people in 24hrs. Not possible. I calculated it, I think with a conservative estimate of one person every two seconds. The journalist probably took this figure straight from the press release, and/or otherwise made it up. Of course Ms Hugging Saint is of no relevance, so the fact that I actually calculated this and wrote an email just goes to show that I'm really developing some OCD with Kenyan papers.

A few days later, I found an article about rabbit breeding. Reportedly you could sell an adult rabbit for KES15,000, which struck me as quite extravagant. I started googling for Kenyan rabbit prices ... and then saw sense and went back to work. This is out of control.

3 comments:

  1. - Yes, he hugging saint had a full press campaign with numbers only Andrea would dare to question
    - And what did you find when you googled rabbit prices? Can a rabbit cost as much as 3 goats?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Haha excellent I never believe anything I read in the papers - sometimes they even get the date wrong...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ha ha ha, I completely agree with you. Not to mention the weird over the top descriptions. Sometimes I feel embarrassed reading the papers online: It's like they all had the same English teacher.

    ReplyDelete