The headline news yesterday (8/8) was about a Jetstar plane nearly colliding with a Qatar Airlines plane at the Sydney airport. But what I heard from my tv was about, omigod, a Death Star plane. Death stalks Sydney.
Well, jet and death are in fact quite similar phonologically and so are easily confused. Meanwhile, the Australian economy airline is fresh news for me, while I’ve been steeped in Star Wars stuff since 1977. So everything tips my perceptions towards death.
The background: Jetstar. From Wikipedia:
Jetstar Airways Pty Ltd, trading as Jetstar, is an Australian low-cost airline headquartered in Melbourne, Victoria. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qantas, created in response to the threat posed by the airline Virgin Blue (now known as Virgin Australia). Jetstar is part of Qantas’ two-brand strategy of having Qantas Airways for the premium full-service market and Jetstar for the low-cost market.
The background: the Death Star. From Wikipedia:
The Death Star is a fictional massive space station and superweapon featured in the Star Wars space-opera franchise. Constructed by the autocratic Galactic Empire, the Death Star is capable of obliterating entire planets, and serves to enforce the Empire’s reign of terror. It appears as a hundreds of kilometers wide mobile space station that has the shape of a spherical moon or planetoid.
… Since its first appearance [in the 1977 film Star Wars], the Death Star has become a cultural icon and a widely recognized element of the Star Wars franchise. It inspired numerous similar superweapons in fiction as well as in other Star Wars works.
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