"It was the equivalent of falling off a two-story building and hitting a brick wall.
A downward-sloping yield curve is the equivalent of apples falling up.
(We can put to the side the equivalent of money falling from the sky: alternate revenue sources. They exist, but they usually are an order of magnitude less than what would be needed to offset significant tuition decreases).
"I thought, mistakenly, that a mass disaster from an airplane crash would be the equivalent of a building falling down.
In the US alone 33,000 people are killed, the equivalent of a 737 falling out of the sky five days a week.
Admittedly football is a team sport, but losing Romo is like a horse running most of a race without a jockey, whilst the absence of Bryant is the equivalent of its shoes falling off.
This baseball season, the rivalry tilted ever so slightly in Osaka's favor when its ne'er-do-well team, the Hanshin Tigers, clinched a league championship for the first time in 18 years, and the Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo, the equivalent of the New York Yankees, fell into a slump.
Dear birth father of my adopted son, You don't know me, and you don't know you have a son, so this letter is the equivalent of a tree falling in an uninhabited forest.
Which brings us back to Muzyka, who, in a Wednesday post on BioWare's Web site, performed the artistic equivalent of falling to one knee and kissing the Godfather's ring: he announced that the studio would cave to the demands of its "core fans" and revise Mass Effect 3's ending.
White carpet — the decorating equivalent of falling in love with a married man, an enterprise doomed to failure and heartbreak.
