A Sound of Thunder - Ray Bradbury

Classic Old Skool Sci-Fi Short Story.

TOC FrameSet

The Mysteries of Machinery.

Road Squadron - Ship Reference

Star Wars Geeks Only

I love the coast of Europe from the sky. From here you can really see differences between the places (and the shocking similarities between most places.) Holland is like something from the mid-atlantic, some newly formed land with its rough fresh sands pouring into the channel and the north sea, and soft, flat clouds scudding quickly over. France and Germany are curiously similar in their make-up, patchwork countries, land stitched together artificially, like the countries themselves with their arbitrary boundaries crystallised after the wars. It's hard for me, and even more so for the many of my generation who weren't born with their nose in a book, to conceive of France and Germany being one continuous entity, or rather, one endless stretch of thousands of independent entities, counties, cities towns and villages, reducing right down to the households and the individuals inside. That's probably why it's so easy for me to accept a unified Europe; I know that the world used to be this way, but can't conceive of this so find it easy to fail to conceive of how it might be once Europe is united again. All these people moaning about their cultural exceptions and unique cultures; from up here they're all just white-limned coastlines and green-quilted fields.

That said, Denmark from above is fantastic, Roke come to life from A Wizard Of Earthsea. Great fluted swinging mills, satanism fled, no grist to them, pumping power to Copenhagen, massive trading ships low beneath cargo containers but close enough to touch, a boy and a snowman floating above the clouds, the diaspora of islands with cute silly roads running in ludicrous lines on the smallest promontary. There's even one that, threatened with erosion I presume has been surrounded with a sea wall... Ah, to sleep there for a while.

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Good website idea - interesting suicides. Get people to make webcam movies of themselves dying. sky-diving without opening your parachute, deliberating lengthening your bungie cord, slow drowning, snow-bound death, etc, etc.

(Waits for applause - doesn't get it)

Well, okay then. I thought it was a good idea!

No link, just a picture of a big robot the US military have built WITH TAXPAYERS' MONEY FOR NO GOOD PURPOSE. Maybe.

Check out The Royal Society in - To The Moon. A sober and meaningful explanation of an attempt by Pepys and Newton to organise a trip to the moon, way back in C17.