[meteorite-list] Meteorite Hits 14 Year Old Boy?

[Fries, Marc D]

Wow.   This has gone from a side trip to WTFia to a full-blown
start-forwarding-the-mail experience.  The behavior of the media doesn't
surprise me in the slightest, but up until now I thought the Bad Astronomy
guy was using that name in jest.  Thanks for the update.


On 6/16/09 12:47 PM, "JoshuaTreeMuseum" <joshuatreemuseum at embarqmail.com>
wrote:

> http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z126/tboswell/0667086000.jpg?t=1245180536
> http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z126/tboswell/article-1192503-054F2E9500000
> 5DC-83.jpg?
> http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z126/tboswell/SNN1235HH-380_823358a.jpg?t=1
> 245180707
> http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z126/tboswell/article-1192503-054F2E9500000
> 5DC-34.jpg?
> http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z126/tboswell/_45916040_cen_meteoriteboy_03
> .jpg?t=1245180773
> 
> Here are some pics from this story on our young P.T. Barnum  which at last
> count had over 100 article links on Google News.   I haven't read them all,
> they pretty much rehash the original story with some added embellishments.
> Incredibly, every single story I've read makes the same misquote:
> Ansgar Kortem, director of Germany's Walter Hohmann Observatory, said: "It's
> a real meteorite, therefore it is very valuable to collectors and
> scientists."  According to the original  German article, the actual quote
> is: " If it's a real meteorite, it's therefore very valuable to collectors
> and scientists".  What a difference one word makes!
> 
>    It's almost as if not a single one of the journalists bothered to check
> the primary source story. Probably not surprising since it was in German and
> would require some effort to translate.  More work than I'd want to do for
> $8 an hour (what I was offered to write  for the South Bend , (IN) Tribune.)
> 
> Anyway it's a fun story to follow, and I'm curious to see how the Susan
> Boyle of the meteorite world ends up.  Probably more like the Octo Mom
> narrative.
> 
> So, whaddya think, a carbonaceous chondrite, with black exterior and
> interior?  I'm pretty sure the filled in pothole in front of the kid is
> supposed to be the impact crater.  (LOL!)
> 
> In all the stories, mention is given to only one person saying this is a
> Newtonian impossibility: Darryl Pitt who is given the role of voice in the
> wilderness by MSNBC in one of the earlier stories.
> 
> Bad Astronomy's (Discover) Phil Plait believes that an exploding fireball
> increased the velocity of the pea sized stone (hasn't this theory been
> debunked on the List?) and that the kid's injury was from shrapnel from the
> asphalt crater. And he says this with a straight face!  Phil got a little
> miffed at me for saying that no real astronomer would believe any part of
> this shaggy dog story.
> 
> Phil Whitmer
> 
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