'Hannah Montana' balloon & birds leave Florida powerless

[ALIASd]

Nov 10, 2008 2:10 pm US/Eastern

Hannah Montana Balloon Blamed For Power Outage

Jose De Diego Middle School Lost Power Along With Homes Within 4 Block Radius

Balloon Hit Power Lines Which Startled Hundreds Of Birds

Birds Flew Off Power Lines Which Dislodged & Fell

MIAMI (CBS4) ― It was a rough morning for students at a South Florida middle school when the power was knocked out for hours and a Hannah Montana balloon is being blamed for the mishap.

According to Miami fire officials, a helium balloon with popular 'tween superstar Hannah Montana's picture on it, hit some power lines near Jose De Diego Middle School, near NW 5th Avenue and 32nd Street.

The balloon got caught up in some electrical lines around 7:30 a.m. which startled hundreds of birds that usually reside on the lines.

When the startled birds all flew away at the same time, the sudden weight shift caused the electrical lines to dislodge from the post and fall to the ground. The live electrical lines landed on a fence and sidewalk near the school.

Miami Fire Rescue spokesman Lt. Ignatius Carroll spoke to CBS4's Liv Davalos.

"Normally when you drive down the street you see the birds lined up. You never think that birds would be able to disrupt power to a neighborhood."

As students arrived to school, they were kept away from the fence which was electrified, while FPL crews worked on shutting down the grid supplying power to the wires.

The school bell did ring on time because the school ran on the backup generator, but dozens of homes within a four block area also lost power.

cbs4.com - Hannah Montana Balloon Blamed For Power Outage

[Aladdin]

Someone caught a few pictures before the incident



Here's a close up of the birds who incited this incident



This picture is from a camera on top of the post, from which the powerlines were dislodged



You can see in the faces of the birds, that they know something is about to happen. Animals sense those types of things, in advance.

[blondiethesounds]

lol...only Miley Cyrus' face could cause so much drama.

[Lighthope]

Originally Posted by blondiethesounds

lol...only Miley Cyrus' face could cause so much drama.

Actually, have you heard her sing? I mean sing without all that electronic enhancement they do to her voice.

Not to be cruel, so let's just say she shouldn't be trying out for American Idol...

Lighthope

Pearls of Wisdom - "The past is gone and its marks can not be unmade." - Wise Old Owl (Tigers' Quest)

[ALIASd]

Fascinating. What color is the button do you think they pushed this morning for the GMA live broadcast in front of a live audience in Nashville for example?

Her singing voice sounds quite like her natural speaking voice. Do they sell these magic machines at the Radio Shack near you or what?

The story was about a balloon and some birds not pick on a teenage girl.
Who generates hundreds of millions of dollars for The Walt Disney Company.

[Lighthope]

Originally Posted by ALIASd

Fascinating. What color is the button do you think they pushed this morning for the GMA live broadcast in front of a live audience in Nashville for example?

If you think that was unenhanced...

Lighthope

Pearls of Wisdom - If 90% of all the scientists who ever lived are alive today, doesn't that mean that 90% of the mad scientists are alive as well?

[Sambo]

Just another device in the rack of audio gear.

The pitch-shifting algorithms of a few years ago required recording and post production work. With today's processing power it can be done on the fly. There are a number of machines that have laptop interface.

Excerpts from some product literature...and there are many software products that will do this...

...A high quality natural sounding pitch shifter and auto tuner with the ability to transpose the pitch of a voice or an instrument up to 2 octaves, up or down. Add to this a full fledged pitch correction section with MIDI control, modul matrix...a new analysis and synthesis engine with lower CPU utilization. It can transpose the pitch and formants independently, thus enabling both formant preserving pitch transpose and other more unusual effects...features an automatic pitch correction function and auto vibrato. You can use it as a High quality pitch shifter voice, spoken or sung, or solo instruments ...Automatic pitch corrector for voice, spoken or sung, or solo instruments...Over 60+ preset scales and possibility to create user scales via Scala...Automatic correction of pitch to current MIDI notes...

What this means is that a voice sung live and a MIDI instrument playing the same notes - the voice can be corrected in pitch, on the fly to the notes of the MIDI instrument.

That it was done at this concert - I'll never know. That it can be done on the fly and undetected - it happens more than you would think.