Misinterpreting the anchor...

There is an old Woody Allen line that runs: "What if Khrushchev wanted peace, but his interpreter wanted war?" It muses on what might happen if what a world leader were to say was turned around by the leader's interpreter.

Well, in one of those classic cases of life imitating art, it turns out that a sign language presenter at the Ukrainian UT-1 television station got sick and tired of what she was being told to interpret, and put her own slant on the news.

From MosNews.com:

Natalia Dmitruk, a sign language presenter with the Ukrainian TV channel UT-1 has ignored the text read by the news presenter and instead transmitted the message that the results of the elections were rigged, Russia’s NTV television reports.

Dmitruk rebelled during the morning news broadcast on Thursday. The Visti news program is the only program on Ukrainian television adapted for people with hearing difficulties.

During the broadcast, the sign language presenter ignored the text about the results of the presidential elections read by presenter Tatyana Kravchenko and instead transmitted the following:

“The results announced by the Central Electoral Commission are rigged. Do not believe them. Our president is Yushchenko. I am very disappointed by the fact that I had to interpret lies. I will not do it any more. I do not know if you will see me again.”

No kidding about that last. Talk about your basic non-career-enhancing move!

Cheers...

Relocating the Soyuz...

Moving the Soyuz transport vehicle from the Pirs docking compartment to the Functional Cargo Block has been the focus of intense coordination for much of this past week. The move will make the Pirs available to the crew to use as an airlock for some extravehicular activity later during their flight.

I've worked transport vehicle relocations before (while doing space-to-ground interpretation in February 2001, for example), and it's always stressful because everything on the station has to be shut down and the entire crew must enter the Soyuz for the operation to begin.

The station shutdown is the sort that assumes the crew is leaving for a long time, because if -- for some technical reason -- the Soyuz is not able to dock back to the station, the crew will have to deorbit and the station will remain unmanned until the next crew is sent up. (The possibility of having to deorbit is also the reason the entire crew has to suit up and get into the Soyuz.)

The crew has been up for nearly 7 hours preparing for this operation. They'll be buttoning up the Soyuz (with themselves inside) in about 40 minutes, with undocking to occur about 3 hours later. At that point, the crew will be flying free of the station until they redock 30 minutes later.

The daily report has just been handed to me, so I better go off and translate it.

Cheers...