Where Worlds Collide

Now there’s this. Perhaps that thing washed up in Chile was really something Man Was Not Meant To Know after all; the whale carcass story is just a cover up…

As a brief respite from the doom and gloom enveloping Britains railways, a Eurostar train has reached the speed of 208 miles an hour on a test run the new yet-to-be opened Channel Tunnel Rail Link, thus setting the British rail speed record. It joins City of Truro, Mallard, the prototype High Speed Train and the ill-fated Advanced Passenger Train in the record books.

Not that we’re beating the world on speed now; the French hold the record of 320 mph, set by a TGV, on whose design the Eurostar is based.

Carnival af the Vanities reaches a Peak, with a 138-ton 1-Co-Co-1′s worth of links, at Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

OK, so which Illuminati just played the Ketchup is a Vegetable card?

Don’t know what I’m on about? All I can say is “Fnord!”

A poster on Pyramid Online asked the following:

I’m running a kind of “kitchen sink,” modern, horror, dark fantasy game. The characters are currently in a sort of alternate realm. At the end of the adventure I want them to think that they’ve come back to their reality. Of course, they haven’t. It’s a parallel timeline but the differences are so subtle they don’t notice them until well into the next adventure.

I know it’s a fairly broad question, but does anyone have suggestions for subtle, not easily noticed differences between alternate Earths?

People came up with a lot of interesting ideas, from the expected “Betamax not VHS is the standard for video tape” and “America has used the metric system since just after the civil war” to “Crude oil is transported in gel form to avoid the risk of oil spills”. Here are the suggestions I came up with:

• The whole of Ireland became independent in 1922. ‘Unionist’ terrorists, although totally disowned by the British government, have fought sporadic terrorist campaigns against the Dublin government, and ultra-protestant elements of the Religious Right in America sometimes raise funds for them.
• Ireland joined the allies in WW2, and the Royal Navy operated out of ports in south-west Ireland. (Probably too major a change, might have a significant effect on the Battle of the Atlantic)
• There was a civil war in Belgium between Flemish and Walloons in the 1950s.
• Margaret Thatcher was never British prime Minister. Denis Healey succeeded Harold Wilson and won the 1978 general election. He was defeated in 1983 by Michael Heseltine. The present British PM is still Tony Blair, who defeated the Tories in 1997.
• Switzerland is a member of the EU, but Denmark and Sweden are not.
• Jimi Hendrix is still alive, but the critical consensus is that he hasn’t made any great albums since about 1971. His ‘Disco period’ is best forgotten, although some unrepentant prog-rock fans love the album he did with ELP.
• Paul Rogers joined Deep Purple in 1973 as the replacement for Ian Gillan. To someone from our own timeline, their first album sounds remarkably like ‘Burn’ except with completely different song titles and lyrics.
• Elvis died in a road accident in 1961
• The big box-office fantasy hit filmed by Peter Jackson was not Lord of the Rings, but Michael Moorcock’s Elric.
• There are only three books in The Wheel of Time.
• Armour subtracts from damage in DnD, and always has done.
• The Channel Tunnel opened in 1974, but Concorde was scrapped after a few test flights as a waste of taxpayer’s money. People talk of the ‘glorious age of supersonic flight’ that might have been.
• European locomotive builders got a major foothold in the US railroad market; locomotives by English Electric and Krauss-Maffei are as common as the products of General Motors.
• On US roads, everyone drives on the left, not on the right.
• The two most common soft drinks throughout the world are Tizer and Irn Bru; the two manufacturers are great rivals
• Both America and Europe use the same voltage and frequency for domestic electrical supplies.
• Cricket is a major sport in Canada, and they’re one of the world’s top test sides. The game is now as popular in the US as soccer.
• The Hindenburg never exploded, and Zeppelins are still a common sight throughout the world. Ooops, sorry, don’t know what came over me, won’t happen again……

Some pictures of the Doncaster Open Day, 26th July 2003., which I didn’t manage to get to thanks to the idiots at Stockport station.

Add Stockport station to the list of places not to go when you’ve got a camera. I was taking some photographs at the north end of platform 1/2 while waiting for a delayed connection to Doncaster.

Suddenly I was yelled at in an extremely aggressive and threatening manner by one of the ubiquitous security goons telling me to leave the far end of the platform.

Turned out there was a sign saying “Passengers must not cross the line”, which I had assumed appies to railway tracks themselves (such signs appear at the end of most platforms). No, it seems this line refers to a painted line across the platform about 100 feet from the end of the platform. As to why the last 100 feet of the platform is out of bounds, all the security goon could come up with was some undefined “Safety” reason. (Probably some stupid and fatuous rule dreamed up by the Health and Safety Executive)

While photography isn’t actually banned there yet, the combination of vaguely-worded signage and aggressive jobsworths make it an inhospitable place to practice the hobby.

Makes me wonder if it’s time to hang up my camera except for the occasional foreign trip.

Update: Their other victim has this to say on Usenet. Remember Usenet? It was what people used in the days before egroups and blogs.

Tom Coates of plasticbag.org is forced by a new job to go cold turkey from Apple Macs. It’s not pretty…

As a result my extended connections to my social network - mediated through my alien stone, my totem computer - continue to atrophy. My sense of what’s going on around me is collapsing. I’m no longer sitting at the centre of the Panopticon. Instead I’m peripheral. What is central is the urinal of Windows machinery that, if I am thirsty for information, I must drink from. The internet that squeezes its way through task managers, continual crashing and word processors in browsers is not an internet I’m familiar with. It’s an ill-formed, thick and sticky horror - like Roast Lamb gone cold and congealed with fat. Coughed up by a used car salesman.

People rant about British train operating companies, including on occasions me. But no failures, cockups or mismanagement by the likes of Virgin or Connex approaches the scale of the chaos that’s engulfed British Airways at Heathrow the fast four days, when the checkout staff and baggage handlers walked out in a dispute over working practices. 100,000 passengers were left stranded, some for more than four days. Fights broke out in the departure lounges.

Patrick Crozier writes in a comment on Transport Blog that it’s all because of a small change of the law making it harder for companies to sack strikers. But it takes two to make an industrial dispute; I suspect much more of the blame lies at the feet of heavy-handed management.

In the end, it’s the customer who suffers. How many of those 100,000 will never fly BA again? The whole think makes me wonder if British Airways are going the way of Pan Am (Remember them?)

Let’s face it, many of us Brits are sick of him, but he’d be a big improvement on The Shrub. So now there’s Tony Blair for US President campaign!

But he’s not a US citizen, I hear you cry! They’ve thought of that.

To the cynics and cranks who brandish their dog-eared copies of the Constitution, we offer a collective raspberry (A derisive or contemptuous sound made by vibrating the extended tongue and the lips while exhaling - The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition).

Pthththbbbbttt!!!!