Terms I can understand.
So some massive collision of two stars happens and makes a big splosion detected by astronomers. I assume that they used a big calculator to work out that around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 J or 10 to the power of 33 Joules of energy was released. Of course the layman isn't really going to understand how much energy that really is so The Age did a unit conversion into layman's terms: "equivalent to the amount of energy that around 185.3 billion average Australian homes would use in a year." ... Yes now I understand, roughly the equivalent of two Toyota Landcruisers colliding.

Sunday, Gorey Sunday.
Took the dog for a walk at Yarra Bend on Sunday morning and crossing the bridge to Studley Park boathouse I could see four or five abandoned tripods arranged in a row. Seconds later four camera crews come bolting out of the bushes arranging their cameras and microphones in time to see Al Gore climb the stairway to Kevin.

If I was as gutsy as I like to think I am I would have sent my dog to poop on command at the feet of Al and then would have asked some smart-arse question to get me on that night's TV news. Alas I'm not very gutsy, not very clever, and didn't really fancy a tazering so I left things at taking a picture with my phone.