Where Worlds Collide

Another spot of bother for the Houston Light Rail. Be sure to look at the photo gallery, that comes from the train’s on-board camera. Ouch!

If you want to save the whale, don’t save this one.

A dead sperm whale has exploded while being delivered to a research centre near the southwestern city of Tainan.

Passers-by and cars were soaked in blood and body parts were sprayed over a road after the bursting of the whale, which was being carried on a trailer.

The whale had died earlier on a beach and had been collected so its remains could be used for educational purposes.

A marine biologist blamed the explosion on pressure from gases building up in the mammal as it began to decompose.

I blame the Deep Ones. Not totally sure what they’re up to, or whether or not it’s anything to do with the shoggoth washed up in Chile a few months back.

We had half an inch of snow during the night. And it was enough to make transport networks grind to a halt. Just like it always does, every time it snows.

This is the sort of time that having the rail line closed for rebuilding for five months really sucks, because the rail replacement buses have to struggle through the area’s inadequate road network.

I don’t believe the local authority has gritted a single road in the area; as a result of this the local roads were in a state of total gridlock this morning, and the rail replacement bus service simply evaporated altogether. I spent a hour at a freezing bus stop watching traffic crawl past at walking pace, with no sign of any bus, even going the other way. Up above street level I could see a steady flow of trains crossing the bridge on the other rail line to Stoke; there were significant delays, but at least the trains were moving. Unlike the buses.

After an hour I gave up waiting, having almost frozen solid, and went home to make myself a cup of coffee and attempt to thaw out. When I ventured forth again, the traffic on the road was finally moving, and I waited a further half an hour at the bus stop before a bus finally appeared. I finally got to work two and a half hours late.

It’s times like this I wish I lived in a country like Switzerland.

Thanks to The Ministry of Information for the link to this interview with Martin Orford of IQ which tells us why British Prog Rock bands don’t tour the US. It ain’t pretty.

Interviewer: You may have already partially answered this, but why don’t we see IQ more often in the States? Or Jadis as well?

Martin: Well. Because US Immigration won’t let us in. We’re not allowed to come in. They don’t like overseas bands. They say it takes the work away from US bands. If you turn up to a US airport with a guitar, they’ll put you on the next plane back home. The only people that manage to do it are the Scandinavian bands, and they’ve got sponsorships from their own governments. The only way that you can play the States is to get work permits, which basically they don’t give to people whose main profession is not being in a band. Our main profession is not being in a band, so there’s no way we’re going to get work then to be in a band. The only way that we can do a gig in the States is not-for-profit. You can’t do a tour like that.

Except for possibly Libya and North Korea outside of the US, it’s the most difficult place to come to if you’re in a band. I mean, somewhere like Russia is probably a lot easier. It is the most unwelcoming place that you could possibly find if you’re in a rock band. It’s unbelievably difficult to get an overseas band through Immigration. You can’t do it. The only way you can do it is do it not-for-profit and lie through your teeth when you come in. That’s all you can do.

Nobody in the US knows about this.

Interviewer: But yet our bands can go over there and generate revenue for other countries?

Martin: Yeah. But there is a very aggressive policy to stop overseas bands from coming into the US. So that’s why we don’t come over more often. That’s why we’re playing Mexico and not the US. We can land in a US airport if we’re in transit to somewhere else, but they won’t send us on with our guitars if we’re going to a US destination.

With one or two exceptions, British prog-rock bands part-time affairs; with progressive rock so marginalised, the market just isn’t big enough for more than one or two full time acts. So most progressive musicians must take a day job to pay the rent. This is why bands like IQ only release an album every five years or so; I think they’ve released seven studio albums in a career stretching over 20 years, and only three of those in the past 15.

Sadly bureaucratic officialdom doesn’t recognise things like this. Both European progressive rock bands and US progressive rock audiences are the losers.

Now I’ve got a digital camera, I thought I’d post a few photos of the unfinished N gauge layout, “Wominsee”. At the moment things are in the very early stages, there’s not much apart from track, the foundations of some scenery made from carved of foam, and a few buildings. But trains are running, thanks to ready-ballasted Kato Unitrack.

BLS Re4/4 No 193 arrives at the north end of Wominsee with a set of BLS blue and cream EW1 stock. The brown Re4/4s are very much workhorses of the BLS, and it’s a pity the only commercially produced version in N is this now-discontinued Arnold model. It’s rather crude compared with the the latest products from the likes of Kato and Fleischmann. The coaches are old Lima Minitrain ones. The pink freight wagons in the siding behind are supposed to be that colour; one of the world’s stranger freight stock liveries.

SBB Re4/4iv passes the station with an international train formed of German stock in the old Epoch 4 livery. The class never went into series production, and the four prototypes were eventually sold to the Sudostbahn to run between Romanshorn and Luzern. During the early 1990s these four locos were still in SBB ownership, and were a common sight on the BLS main line. The model is by Roco, another discontinued item, which I’ve managed to track down from eBay. The station building is a Faller kit; it’s scheduled to be replaced by the Kibri Swiss chalet-style building that I have yet to build.

Thanks to the Daily Mail-O-Matic, you no longer need to buy that manichean rag that supported the Nazis during the 1930s. (Link from Harry)

I found this one via my referral logs: The Ministry of Information, containing some very well-written reviews of recent prog-rock releases.

Game WISH 82 asks:

Sum up one or more games that you GM or play in 10 words or less. (Three is best, but not everybody is that pithy.) Don’t restrict yourself to current games if you have great ones in the past.

Three word summaries? A concept I’m familiar with; the late lamented CompuServe RPGAMES forum used three-letter acronyms to make it easy to identify games in the old Compuserve forum structure. Many people came up with short names that could be abbreviated into TLAs. So we had games like “Teatime and Tentacles” (1920s Cthulhu set in Britain) and “Have Spaceship, Will Travel” (Classic Traveller). RPGAMES successor, Dreamlyrics, has continued the practice.

Some current games:

Ahhran Empire Frontiers: “Venus Blood: The Love Boat”. I must point out that all the naughty scenes are in the members-only adult area. As the GM, I have to read that stuff…

The Stand: “You forgot to ask which airport, you idiot!” (At least for the UK players)

Edge of Hell: Goths and Groupies: Ümläüt on tour. The game isn’t supposed to be all about the adventures of the goth/black metal band, but with three player characters as band members…

Kalyr. With thirteen current players, split over two different sites, I find this game so impossible to summarise that I’ll have to leave it to the players themselves. My official title is “A world on the brink of change”.

Some older ones:

Hawiian Vacation: “Everyone I know is dead”. That GURPS Cyberpunk game did have a rather high body count; any PC whose player vanished was ruthlessly terminated.

Fragments of Chaos: “Everyone I know will soon be dead”. Well, it was a Cthulhu game.

Any convention one-shot run by the same GM as FOC: “Everyone will soon be dead”.

Then there was the long-running ADnD Spelljammer campaign that became known as “Vikings in Space”, so much so that it became the official name of the game.

I’ve finally got round to upgrading to MT 2.661, and got out of the dark ages of 2.2. Hopefully this has better anti-spambot protection. This post is really a test to make sure everything still works!

I haven’t written much on this weblog over the past week, so I’ll link to a couple of recent posts from newish additions to the blogroll. First, Amadán gives us a taxonomy of wingnuts and trolls.

For example, entry #2 on “Randroids”

Objectivists, aka Randroids

Libertarians are one thing. I have some libertarian sympathies (although I think most libertarians are just self-centered greedheads who want a philosophy to justify placing themselves at the center of their own little universe). But hardcore “objectivists” and devotees of Ayn Rand are just loathsome, cultlike in their behavior (they view Rand much as Scientologists view Hubbard), and essentially advocating self-centered amorality as “enlightened self-interest.”

By the way — Robert A. Heinlein was a science fiction author!

(Oh, by the way, I’ve just added The Light of Reason to the blogroll)

Meanwhile, Harry gives us a rundown on Conservative Correctness. How many of Amadán’s wingnuts and trolls parrot lines like this?

The white, heterosexual male, is a victim of our currently “PC Society”. His freedom of speech is restricted, job opportunities are denied to him, his viewpoint is never reflected in the liberal-left dominated media and people who try to raise families and live a decent law-abiding, hard-working life are penalised in favour of all manner of deviants and minorities.

I wonder how many “angry white men” realise the reason they didn’t get that job that when to someone who just happened to be black wasn’t because of Political Correctness, or anti-white prejudice. It was because they didn’t want to give the job to a complete jerk.