Where Worlds Collide

After that pack of Iraqi regime playing cards, Uggabugga suggests a Bush Regime set. It had to be done.

You are Season One. You bear little to no resemblance to anything that happened afterwards. You are monochrome. Leave me alone so I can pretend you don’t exist.

Which Doctor Who Season Are You?
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Link from Perverse Access Memory. Actually I’m too young to remember the William Hartnell years.

The Wandering Distraction Table, for things to interrupt your gaming session. All these are (allegedly) real incidents.

Some highlights:

18: Cat throws up on game supplies.
19: Cat scatters books, papers, dice, miniatures, etc. while being chased by other cat/room-mate/room-mate’s-boyfriend/phantom mice.

and this trio of related events

21: Host’s room-mate (who’s bedroom shares a thin wall with the gaming area) has loud and rowdy sex.
22: Room-mate’s-boyfriend crosses game space to bathroom while completely naked.
23: Room-mate crosses game space to bathroom wearing only a towel.

and finally:

40: Player who has left the table to get a drink decides to play with the Victorian hand-cranked centrifuge on the mantelpiece and gets hit by one of the rotating tube holders.

(Archived from a thread on Pyramid Online)

Strewth! I’m Australia!

Australia - Founded as a gigantic prison colony, Australia has turned into a Mid-Level world power. Known for its wildlife and culture.

Positives:
Reformed.
Culturally Admired.
Mid-Level Power.
Renouned Flora and Fauna.

Negatives:
Founded by Criminals.
Island Nation (Isolated).
Talk Funny.

Which Country of the World are You?
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(Link from Castel Dodge)

Cold Spring Shops considers the fate of second and third class passengers on the Titanic and wonders:

Did steerage fares trade at a discount that reflected a somewhat higher probability of drowning in a shipwreck account the first- and second-class passengers had first crack at the lifeboats? (Anybody remember the camp song with the stanza that ends “So they sent them down below/where they were the first to go/It was sad when the great ship went down?” I am collecting variants of the chorus. So far I have “husbands and wives, little children lost their lives,” “uncles and aunts, little babies wet their pants,” and “fishies and turtles, little ladies lost their girdles.” Other contributions welcome.)

Thinking about some modern train designs, it almost seems that the opposite is true; in many modern designs, such as the class 166 “Thames Turbo”, the first class accomodation is at the extreme ends of the set, where the premium price passengers are most likely to die in the event of a serious collision! Of course, the lower seating density of the first class section means the total death toll might be lower than if an equivalent section of second class seating gets flattened, so perhaps things balance out.

Or perhaps, because crashes are actually very infrequent, this factor wasn’t even considered.

From Caveat Lector, complete caveman grammatical rules! And not one mention of the word “Versimillitude”. Now you too can speak like a Sun reader or football supporter!

The trouble with trying to build up a model locomotive fleet including some discontinued items is that sometimes, like London buses, they all turn up at once! I’ve seriously overspent my model railway budget this month. First there was the Roco Re4/4iv in Bahn 2000 livery I won in an eBay auction.

Then not one, but two Arnold BLS Re4/4s

Pity that the Arnold model is quite dated, and rather crude by today’s standards. These locomotives are very much the workhorses of the Bern Lötchberg Simplon main line, working in pairs moving freight trains up the ruling 3% grades through the heart of the Swiss Alps, and any model of this line needs these locos in quantity. Now I’ve managed to accumulate four of these models, I expect Kato or Fleischmann to announce a new state-of-the art flywheel drive model to render these four obsolete!

Yes, I am aware the comments seem to be broken. It looks like an index is farkled. Any comments you make are being committed to the database, and are being emailed to me. But they’re not currently displaying

From BlogCritics, THE BIBLE: Post-Modern Edition. The first chapter of Genesis comes out like this:

In the beginning, the signal had yet to be broadcast. A darkness covered the scene.

Then God said, “Lights!”

God saw how good the light was. God then separated the light from darkness and created three work shifts: Day, night and graveyard.

Then God said, “Camera!”

Or the modern-day Tower of Babel

Then, in the 1980s, “Cable Television” came into its own, followed shortly thereafter by the personal computer. By the end of the 20th century, Internet access became affordable and very popular.

Soon, the world was “media saturated”. Many small, niche markets appeared. True communication began to be fractured and unruly.

The signal-to-noise ratio dropped dramatically.

And the Lord said, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

First North Western must be short of stock today. They announced that the 8:24 was running a Reginald Perrin-style 22 minutes late (Escaped puma at Heaton Chapel?), then when it finally turned up, instead of the usual class 323 electric, in rattled an ancient class 101 DMU.

Dating from 1958, these are just about the oldest trains on the network. They were supposed to have been withdrawn something like five years ago, but FNW’s latest trains, the shiny new class 175s, have failed to work as reliably as hoped. A dwindling number of ancient relics from a past age have to soldier on.

Could have been worse. Tonight I might have to travel home in one of the ghastly 4-wheeled class 142 “Nodding Donkeys”, a strong candidate for the worst trains ever built.