Saturday, 5 January 2008

New word: snarge


It's described by an expert as "what's left after a bird hits an airplane, goes through an engine. There are no feathers or any other kind of remains of the bird left except blood, guts."

Every time a tweety-bird goes into an Air Force jetplane's engines, the remains -- the snarge -- are sent off to the Smithsonian in Washingtonian where the bits are examined to find out what species was involved. That information helps to determine when it would be a good idea to keep the expensive jets from taking off and landing, because a single chaffinch could take down a whole plane at a cost of more than $1500, or possibly even higher.

Anyway, here's a video report from the Wall Street Journal on the subject of snarge, and who even knew the WSJ had video? Mine is just all made of paper.