You've probably noticed this by now, but we journalists just love the word "chaos", writes Frank McNally
Any excuse we get, we put it into headlines and opening paragraphs. Next to drink, it's probably the profession's greatest weakness.
The word can feature in connection with everything from hospitals to GAA fixtures, but for some reason it occurs most frequently on the subject of public transport. It attaches itself, limpet-like, to stories such as the recent terrorist plot ("airport chaos"). It is invariably predicted to arise from industrial action by train drivers ("rail chaos"). It can even be applied to slow driving conditions ("bank holiday traffic chaos"), even though a five-mile tailback at Moate is as close to the opposite of chaos as you can get.
Chaos merits two entries in my encyclopaedia. One describes "the confused, formless mass out of which the ordered universe emerged" (which I suppose, except for the bit about an ordered universe emerging, is a plausible description of Dublin airport). The other relates to chaos theory: "the study of systems that obey scientific laws but whose behaviour becomes unpredictable in the long-term, either because there are too many variables or because the initial conditions are not known with sufficient accuracy".
Again, you can see how this would suggest itself in stories about CIE. But again, as with Moate on a bank holiday, "rail chaos" is a paradox. Iarnród Éireann is never less chaotic than when its trains are not running.
I sometimes think that rail travel's particular reputation for chaos derives in part from another word: "locomotive". As you probably know, loco is a Spanish word for a "poisonous, leguminous plant" which, when eaten by cattle, causes a brain disease of the same name. Hence the English slang term.
Accidental as it is, the connection is unlikely to inspire confidence in locomotives, or their drivers. Unreasonable industrial action by the locomotive drivers' union may appear to the public to arise from motives that are loco in more ways than one.
The public's underlying prejudice in turn spurs the drivers to worse extremes. And thus we are locked into a vicious circle (or a mad cow roundabout). But I could be wrong.
There is something deeply reassuring about the news that the US space agency Nasa has lost the original film of Neil Armstrong's moon landing. Not that Nasa admits it's lost, exactly. It was filed away all those years ago in the agency's vast archive - since when, due to the retirements, and in some cases deaths, of personnel, there has been a 100 per cent reduction in the corporate memory of where it was filed. It's not the film that's lost. It's the person who knows where it is.
My home office is not vast. In fact it's smaller than the Apollo 11 space capsule. Yet things become mislaid in it all the time, and for dismayingly long periods. These currently include my driving licence, or at least I hope so. It's not that the licence is lost, exactly. It's just that recall of where I put it is not currently available.
I probably left it down for a moment one day and it became covered with some of the important newspaper cuttings that I carefully file away on the desk, or the floor, depending on which is nearest. The cuttings may look to others like a formless mass of paper. A headline writer might even describe the scene as "cuttings chaos". But the layers of documents are in fact carefully organised into time periods (cretaceous, jurassic, carboniferous, etc) that I can date by their different shades of yellow.
The nightmare scenario is that the licence may be filed away somewhere in the vast archive of toys and children's art projects that used to be my living-room. The TV remote (an object whose behaviour is governed by chaos theory) disappeared for two months earlier this year, until it turned up in a box of Power Rangers. Inquiries about how it got it there continue.
So the news that such a highly organised body of people as the US space agency could mislay something as important as footage of the moon landings is heartening. But I still think the internal scientific community is over-reacting with its attempt, as reported yesterday, to tidy up the
solar system.
Yes, a conference of astronomers in Prague is now trying to define what constitutes a planet, a process that many scientists hope will result in the downgrading of Pluto. The creation of a breakaway, eight-planet premiership would be designed to avoid having to recognise Xena, the unofficial tenth planet discovered last year, which appears bigger than Pluto, and whose inclusion would lead to further enlargement. Scientists are far from unanimous on the issue, however.
As a man, I sympathise with those seeking to reduce the clutter, while as a newspaper man, I'm rooting for Pluto's retention. This is partly sentiment: it's the Charlton Athletic of the solar system and I'd hate to see it relegated after all these years. But it's also partly because retaining it would open the door not only to the 10th planet, but "scores of other pretenders".
Any journalist can tell you what that would be a recipe for.