Where Worlds Collide

Reading this month’s edition of Modern Railways, I was struck an article called ‘Boiling Frogs’ about the way costs for any infrastructure projects are spiralling out of control. Regardless of whether these inflated costs are paid by higher fares or increased government subsidy, people like me (both a taxpayer and a rail user) will still end up footing the bill.

The article (sorry, they don’t have an on-line issue; it’s strictly dead-tree only) identifies several factors. One major factor is all sorts of silly rules insisted by the HSE (Health and Safety Executive). Even non-libertarians like me recognise that the HSE is a completely out-of-control bureaucracy, seemingly accountable to no-one but themselves. Patrick Crozier takes them to task over the Potter’s Bar accident.

An aside here; why does it now take two to three weeks to reopen a like after a train crash, when before privatisation it used to take a few days? I’m old enough to remember the West Ealing derailment in 1973, when wreckage blocked all four lines. It was only two or three days before traffic was running on the slow lines, while they were still working on clearing wreckage (let alone repairing track) on the fast lines. Can you imagine that happening nowadays? Along with British Transport Police’s declaring of crime scenes, the HSE is the major villain here.

To return to these inflated costs, the other major villain is the wheel/rail split. The fragmentation of British Rail into hundreds of separate companies operating trains, owning the trains, owning the track, and maintaining the track was supposed to give us a more efficient railway, according to the architects of privatisation. What rot! I’m now convinced the fragmentation was nothing but a massive job-creation scheme for accountants and lawyers, US-style pork-barrel politics at it’s very worst. It hasn’t given us a more efficient railway, precisely the opposite. Any would-be efficiency gains have just been swallowed up by this new army of suits.

What is to be done? The effective renationalisation of the unloved Railtrack (the company that owns the track) may or may not be a step in the right direction. I would rather see the wheel/rail split ended altogether, either by renationalising the whole bloody lot (which realistically I have to accept isn’t going to happen), or by handing control of the rails to the train operating companies. I realise this is still going to cause problems of track access where multiple TOCs use the same tracks, such as the eight different operators (including two freight companies) using Manchester Piccadilly, but it can’t be worse than the present system.

Is this the finest view in England? Horse Cove, between Dawlish and Teignmouth in Devon, with the seaside resort of Dawlish visible in the background. For those interested in such things, the train is a Stagecoach South West Trains express from London Waterloo to Paignton, formed of two class 159 units.

I’ve added a comments feature to this blog - now you can comment on my entries without having to email me.

An Estonian group is recording medieval-sounding versions of Black Sabbath songs in Latin. Their album contains songs such as “Rotae Confusionis” and “Verres Militares” in slow, minimalist versions that wouldn’t seem out of place in the Sistine Chapel, according to Yahoo. Their official site is www.sabbatum.com if you want to know more.

There are an awful lot of blogs out there. Sturgeon’s law seems to apply with a vengeance here; more that 90% of the blogs I’ve looked at at random are completely vapid nonsense, typically the product of a self-obsessed and semi-literate teenager. Look at the “recently published blogs” on the front page of www.blogger.com and click on a few to see what I mean.

There are some more worthwhile ones, of course. I’ve been reading a few. One is Bruce Baugh’s Writer of Fortune II (Electric Weblogaloo). Bruce is a professional writer of role-playing games, and his blog has recently covered topic including cryonics, internet file-sharing, and Hungarian prog-rock. Yes, Bruce, “De Produndis” by After Crying is a superb album, I’m listening to it now. Shows how unimaginitive and derivative most western European and American neo-prog bands are.

Another is Patrick Crozier’s UK Transport blog. I don’t share his Libertarian philosophy (do you believe in the total privatisation of the road network?), but his blog is well-written and thought provoking.

Then there’s Tim Deagan’s account of his experiences restoring a vintage Amercan fire engine.

I ought to say something about Rowan Williams, the next Archbishop of Canterbury. He’s already been rubbished in one or two conservative blogs as an old-school leftie. He seems to me to be an order of magnitude better than the lacklustre George Carey, and perhaps some honest criticism of global capitalism should be heard and listened to. Theologically he seems pretty orthodox, and I find the criticism from one or two reactionary evangelical groups (such as Reform) to an encouraging sign. Previously the church had made too many compromises with these reactionaries over ordination of women, which has left women priests as second-class citizens within the church. With Rowan Williams at the helm, they need to sort our this mess. Of course, you could argue that it’s none of my business, since I’m a Methodist, not an Anglican

He’s already got in to trouble with Walt Disney (mess with The Mouse at your peril). Disney hits back at his criticism of their over-aggressive marketing to children. I’m not sure of his position on RPGs…

While on the subject of good and evil (sort of), does anyone else think Nicholas van Hoogstraten resembles an RPG or comic-book villain? The vicious henchmen? The massive egotism? The over-the-top palace he was building? We mustn’t forget, though, this is a real man who has inflicted a lot real misery on a lot of people.

On a completely different subject, it’s a pity I missed the Steve Hackett/Evelyn Glennie concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday; this review from the Guardian sounds interesting. Hope this work gets recorded.

Arrhan Empire Frontiers, a space piracy message game run on the Dreamlyrics message boards. Follow the adventures of the not-so-good ship Venus Blood, and her merry crew of cutthroats and brigands!

This is a long-running message board game, originating from the late lamented RPGAMES Forum on Compuserve. Originally GMed by Howard Miller, although I’ve co-GMed some threads in the past. I have now foolishly agreed to take over the game full-time.

Since so many people love taking the piss out of us rail enthusiasts (not trainspotters!), sometimes it’s fun to have a laugh at the expense of those who don’t share my hobby - take a look at this post on Dreamlyrics.

Thanks to mediageeklife for this link: The 50 worst guitar solos of all time This list is highly suspect - what on earth is Dave Gilmour’s sublime ‘Comfortably Numb’ solo doing on there? And where is Jeff Beck’s truly bad solo from ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining? Nice to see the grossly-overrated Eric Clapped-out at #1, though

While on holiday I finally finished the reading “Return to the Whorl”, the final volume of Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the Short Sun” science-fiction trilogy. A deep, complex and literary work, it’s one of those books I know I shall have to read a second (and possibly third) time to fully understand.

The “Short Sun” trilogy is a direct sequel to Wolfe’s earlier “Book of the Long Sun” tetralogy. The Book of the Long Sun is set in a vast generation starship, The Whorl, three hundred years into it’s vogage, and concerns the adventures of a novice priest, Silk. The story becomes more complex as Silk discovers more of the true nature of The Whorl, it’s ‘gods’, and his own destiny.

The the first volume of the Book of the Short Sun, “On Blue’s Waters” starts as the story of Horn, the supposed author of Book of the Long Sun, now living on the colony world of Blue. Civilisation on Blue is degenerating into anarchy, and what passes for the rulers of the city of New Viron see Silk as the only person that can save it from collapse. Horn’s mission to return to The Whorl to find Silk.

As expected in a Gene Wolfe novel, nothing is as simple as it seems, and it grows more complex and adds layers as the story progresses. In the first volume, we learn that the narrator is now ruler of another town on the colony world, Gaon, and the story of Horn’s journey towards The Whorl took place many years earlier, a device used in Wolfe’s earlier “Book of the New Sun”. But by the second volume, “In Greens Jungles”, the ‘present-day’ story of the ruler of Gaon takes over the bulk of the narrative. And the indentity of the narrator becomes more uncertain.

I won’t give away any more of the plot; you’ll have to read it yourself. I love the way Wolfe uses so many generic SF tropes, such as robots, psionics, virtual reality, space travel and blood-drinking alien shapeshifters, but in a totally original way. There is also a very strong moral and religious theme right through all his books.

It’s a pity Gene Wolfe is not better known; the Short Sun trilogy doesn’t even have a British publisher! Perhaps it’s the combination of his mannered, literary style that doesn’t appeal to many SF fans used to a more straightforward type of storytelling, and his use of so many SF tropes (with the assumption that the reader will recognise them) limits the accessiblity to a ‘literary’ audience.

Of course, there are a lot of web sites about his work. After a few web searches, I found Ultan’s Library - an e-journal for studies of the SF of Gene Wolfe, and The URTH mailing list: Discussion of the works of Gene Wolfe. I also found an essay by Gene Wolfe on Tolkein. Gene Wolfe strongly approves of Tolkein’s world view, perhaps not surprising in the light that Wolfe, like Tolkein, is a conservative Catholic.

I’ve finally managed to find (thanks to my brother) some information on the Polish goth-metal band, Closterkeller. While my brother was working as an ESL teacher in Poland he bought me back a couple of their albums as Christmas and birthday presents. The music is a strange mixture of goth, new wave and metal influences, sung entirely in Polish. The band, as far as I know, are virtually unknown outside of their native Poland, making those albums some of the more interesting things in my record collection.