WASHINGTON - The U.S. Bureau of Standards announced today that due to the general slowdown of the economy, a picture is now worth only about 800 words, down from its longtime level of 1,000 words."It's an indictment on the economy as a whole when something as dependable as a picture can be devalued by 20 percent," stated Frank Carlisle, director of the Bureau of Standards' metaphor division. "We were caught off guard entirely. There are critics who believe we should have seen it coming when a bird in the hand dropped to 1.73 birds in the bush, but hindsight is 20/15."
Many within the photography industry are calling for government intervention to pump a fresh influx of words into the system to shore up a picture's worth, but many policy makers are taking a wait-and-see attitude. "You can't just rush in to shore up leaky numerical metaphors without some assurance that their long term management will correct the problems that caused their devaluation in the first place," said a high ranking official in the Library of Congress.
"In situations like this, a miss is as good as 4500 feet," stated the official. "When a stitch in time plunged to saving only seven and a half, the sewing industry managed to right itself and the current rate of 8.875 stitches saved is now back to right around the established high water mark."
The Bureau of Standards offered no timelines for a picture's worth to rise back to its former level. "Until a picture recovers its word-to-image ratio, we suggest using 1.2 pictures in place of just one," said the Bureau in a statement released shortly after its initial announcement.
Photo and bogus news story © 2009 James Jordan.
2 comments:
For a moment, I thought 1 April arrived early :) Good one, James :)
Ha -- I was looking for the Onion link. You're very clever.
Post a Comment