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Mixed in with a flood of complaint calls from angry parents who had trusted CBS not to expose their children to celebrity overexposure were several calls from NASA.
"We have a lot of experience with remote malfunctions, both hardware and software," enthused one engineer. "And we are the world's best at diagnosing and repairing them remotely. So we thought we'd offer our services. Besides, both Spirit and Odyssey are working well right now, so frankly we're kind of bored."
Based on the problems currently being experienced with the two Mars rovers, the engineers first decided to check the flash memory. "It turns out we all remember her flashing us very well," said Stefan Sliderule, self-nominated team leader and alpha geek. "So the multiple frame-by-frame replays weren't strictly necessary. Still, NASA believes in redundancy and relentless practice."
Asked if it wasn't a waste of resources to use the multimillion dollar technology of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to diagnose and repair a torn costume, Sliderule said "Look, it's all about exploring, going new places, places guys like me haven't been before. You're damn skippy it's worth it."
The repair efforts have been hampered by vigorous arguments over whether the failure is best characterized as a hardware or software flaw. "We're not making crude jokes, at least not right now," said Sliderule. "We're asking if the naugahyde dress material tore too easily during a planned maneuver or whether the Justin Timberlake robot was misprogrammed."
The engineers have been further stymied by their inability to contact the Timberlake Rover to perform diagnostics on its remote manipulator arm. They report getting nothing but junk data back from the Rover - data streams such as XXCAREER?IMPLOSION*@ and >>>COCAINERESERVOIRLOWPLEASERESTOCKPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE-- and are afraid its high-gain antenna is no longer pointing in the direction of either receiving stations on Earth or a successful publicist. As a result, they are having to bounce data off the tabloid satellites, which takes time and degrades signal quality.
NASA is hoping to parlay a successful analysis of the wardrobe failure into an opportunity to do more science on the issue of the origin and life cycles of celebrities, a species about which little is known at JPL. Engineers hope to get funding for more such missions, but are having trouble writing a grant rquest that does not use the word "Probe" in a suggestive way.
No word yet as to whether hematite has been discovered on Ms. Jackson's body, although at least one observer said he thought he saw "definite signs of saline deposits."
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The rest is the fakey part.
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