Where Worlds Collide

I’m told this meme started somewhere in the Blogosphere, although I ran into it on Dreamlyrics.

The goal is to change one letter of a book title so as to give the story an entirely new meaning. After the altered title, offer a one or two sentence explanation of the new story.

I’ve interpreted changing one letter and including adding or removing a letter as well as replacing one. These are my contributions to the meme:

Neuromincer:

The true story behind Mad Cow Disease

The Curious Incident of the Bog in the Nighttime

Why did a suburban garden suddenly change into a swamp?

The Munster Manual

A d20 sourcebook for TV sitcoms.

Lard of the Rings

The adventures of a team of seriously overweight wrestlers.

Star Ward

Stories from hospital for celebrities, being treated for such things as freak gardening accidents.

The Mountains of Mudness

The terrifying story of sanity-draining non-Euclidian mud!

Valley of the Dulls

Very boring, and nothing at all happens in 703 pages.

The Stairs My Destination

A Dalek scientist struggles with the problem that’s been thwarting the Dalek conquest of the universe.

Gob Emperor of Dune

He rules the universe. But he’s all mouth.

Casio Royale

James Bond must thwart a villain who’s trying to dominate the world using sinister mild-control devices embedded in pocket calculators.

Dr Po

Another Bond adventure, featuring a terrifying overweight red villain with a television ariel growing out of her head.

A charity record that won’t suck? ProgAID‘s single “All Around The World”, written by Rob Reed of Magenta, will feature a who’s who of modern-day prog rock artists, representing bands such as Magenta, IQ, Karnataka, Shadow Gallery, The Flower Kings and Mostly Autumn.

ProgAID was set-up in the wake of the terrible earthquake and Tsunami disaster that tragically struck on the 26th December 2004. The sheer destruction and loss of human life was of a scale that shook the world. It was therefore decided, that maybe the Progressive Rock Community could do something, even in a small way, to help alleviate some of the suffering endured and therefore help towards the rebuilding of lives and communities.

ProgAID at this point, is focused on this one particular cause, but now that it is up and running, our intention is to stay together and help where ever and whenever countries, communities and people need the support of people who care and want to help.

ALL monies paid to us go direct to the people we are aiming to help and your support is needed and appreciated. We thank you for visiting us and for being aware of situations that we can’t control but can aid to put right.

But will it be 20 minutes long, and will there be mellotrons on it?

Update: According to Jon of Karnataka and The Panic Room, the song will indeed have not only mellotrons, but 12 string guitar played by none other than Anthony Phillips. Progtastic!

Moveable Type have just introduced a ‘nofollow’ plugin. This works for both 2.661 and 3.1, and adds the ‘nofollow’ tag to all links in comments; this magic tag will tell Google not to index the URL that appears in the comment. In theory, this will make comment spamming completely useless.

Checking my activity logs, I saw that I had 850 comments blocked by MT-Blacklist in the past 24 hours. God knows how much of my bandwidth these slime are consuming.

Ever wondered what a class 50 might have looked like in ‘Deltic Style’ green? Or a Deltic in Virgin “Thunderbird” style with Dellner couplings? Or a Peak in Midland Main Line tangerine and teal?

Someone from the The AC Locomotive Group shows us what might have been! (Link from a post by Andy Gautrey on the Demodellers mailing list)

Today is the deadline for votes in Norm’s 10 best songs poll.

I’m asking you all to send me your ten (10) choices for the greatest songs of rock and pop music. The background to this is that, for his fiftieth birthday, my friend Drew compiled his top 50 of same, and a formidable list it is. Being prone to this kind of thing myself, I am in the process of compiling my own list - of which more in due course. The exercise is what inspired this poll.

Here’s are the votes of the Cheadle Hulme jury:

Blue Öyster Cult: Astronomy Specifically the live version from 1977′s “Some Enchanted Evening”. It’s one of those song for which I can always remember the first time I heard it. Forget the lame cover by Metallica, forget the overplayed ‘Reaper’ or the lumbering ‘Godzilla’. This is why BÖC are one of my favourite bands.

Rainbow: Stargazer. It wasn’t for many years that I realised it was partly a ripoff of ‘Kashmir’. But I still love the song.

Pink Floyd: Comfortably Numb. While everybody thinks of that solo, the entire song is a classic.

Deep Purple: Highway Star. Just turn it up to eleven!

Queensrÿche: Breaking the Silence. Operation Mindcrime is one of those albums where it’s difficult to single out one great song; they’re all great. But this one’s my favourite.

Rush: La Villa Strangiato. ‘An exercise in self-indulgence’ So you have a problem with that?

Marillion: This is the 21st Century. Marillion may be old lags, but they’re not into endlessly recycling their past; this one’s very modern-sounding with it’s loops and samples, and just gets stuck in your head.

Yes: Gates of Delerium I’d be letting my reputation slip if I didn’t include a side-long 70s prog-rock epic. The closing ‘Soon’ section has to be one of the most spine-tingling bits of symphonic rock ever recorded.

Dream Theatre: Disappear. DT are known for amazing chops and endless solos. But this song shows how amazing they can be when they keep it simple. What Radiohead might have sounded like if Thom Yorke could actually sing.

Budgie: Wildfire. Amazing what three Welshmen could do with four chords and a lot of energy. Who needs punk? Brings back memories of barnstorming live performances from the early 80s.

Our transdimensional scientists have managed to retrieve some publications from various parallel timelines. Unfortunately, the only publication they’ve managed to find is Modern Railways

1997, Cornwall: Imerys take delivery of the fifth and final GM-built diesel for the 2’6″ gauge Cornwall Minerals Railway. These machines now work all china clay traffic between Rocks mill at Goonbarrow and the port of Fowey, including the standard gauge wagons on transporters to Par. Imerys plan to retain two of the Hunslet Bo-Bos dating from the 1960s for shunting at St Blazey and Fowey, but the other two operational machines are to be sold to the Newquay Steam Railway, who will used them both for works trains and for some off-season passenger work.

1977, North America: Following the successful trials over the past three years, Amtrak place an order with English Electric for a further 35 5000hp locomotives, based on the successful British Rail class 87, for use on the North East Corridor between New York and Washington. English Electric beat off strong competion from AESA of Sweden with the Rc3 derivative.

1971, Wessex: A Great Western turbotrain breaks the world rail speed record, reaching 352 mph on the racing stretch between Didcot and Swindon, demonstrating Brunel’s foresight in choosing the 7′ gauge.

1973, BR Western Region: In a change of livery policy, BR begin outshopping main line pacifics in BR blue, replacing the unlined black used since 1966. First locomotives outshopped in the new colour scheme are Britannias 70012/4 from Swindon and Rebuild Bullieds 34013/5/22 from Eastleigh. Both classes will continue to work the cross-country Reading to Birmingham services until the electrification is completed in 1976. Meanwhile Toton recieves an additional ten air-braked 9Fs to cope with increased East Midlands coal traffic resulting from the current the oil crisis.

1981, BR Midland Region: After closure for conversion work, the Woodhead line reopens under 25kv electrification. The Godley Junction to Warrington electification was switched on at the same date. The first train was a westbound MGR from Barnsley Junction to Fiddler’s Ferry power station, hauled by class 88 No 88122. The conversion brings to an end the dual-voltage switchable tracks at Tinsley Yard.

Joe Gordon, who until recently was an employee of Waterstone’s bookshop in Edinburgh, has been sacked for blogging. British SF Writer Charlie Stross knows Joe well, and has some comments on the subject:

For starters, Joe is an extremely knowledgable specialist bookseller. He’s an SF fan. Not just an SF fan, but a reasonably personable bookselling SF fan with an encyclopaedic grasp of the field and an enthusiasm for it that was infectious — it was difficult to walk into that shop and walk out again without having spent far too much money. His buying recommendations spread throughout the company (and outside it, as a regular reviewer writing for the online SF lit crit field), to an extent such that one editor of my acquaintance knew him by name as one of the key people to target if you wanted a new SF book launch in the UK to go down well. People trusted his opinions, people inside his company. The combination of specialist knowledge with enthusiasm isn’t something you can buy: if you’re running a business you just have to hope you can grab it when you see it. For a fellow occupying a relatively humble niche — no manager, he — Joe was disproportionately influential.

For seconds … over the past few years Waterstones has plotted a precarious path through the turbulent waters of corporate retail. Most recently, the company was taken over by HMV, another large retail media chain. About six to eight months ago a new manager arrived at Joe’s branch, and reading between the lines it appears that there was an immediate negative reaction: perhaps calling it a clash of corporate cultures wouldn’t be excessive. Joe was banished from the front desk to the stock room, a grubby windowless basement from which he had no exposure to customers. The previously thriving program of author readings and signings mysteriously vanished. Shelf space devoted to SF and fantasy — Joe’s speciality — receded into the shadowy depths of the store and shortened, shedding titles and variety (which, for a genre where sales are largely midlist driven and readers are browsers, is the kiss of death). And finally, Joe was accused of gross misconduct by his manager on the basis of a trawl through his online journal.

The story has now made it into the national media. If Joe was sacked from ‘bringing the company into disrepute’, then his pointy-haired idiot of a boss has brought the company into far more disrepute than one blog ever could.

This sort of behaviour makes me most unwilling to patronise this corporation; unfortunately almost all the larger book shops in my area are theirs. Unless Waterstones somehow sees sense, all my future book purchases are going to be online.

This is the first time I’ve managed to make it to the Winter Stabcon; usually the date clashes with the Maidenhead and Marlow Model Railway clubs annual show. While the summer event is still held in the traditional venue of Woolton Hall, the winter convention now takes place at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport.

Because it’s quite close to my current home, I decided it would be a cheaper option to travel in each day, since the taxi fare home late at night worked out rather less than cost of a hotel room. Unfortunately the hassle of getting there in the morning, especially when trains run late or the Sunday rail replacement buses turn out to be at inconvenient times made me wonder if I’d really made the right choice.

It’s always advertised as a ‘small friendly convention’, which probably explains why I did very little actual gaming on the Friday night, spending the time chatting and drinking beer. Unlike the summer event, we didn’t manage to drink the bar dry by the end of the con, although we did finish off all the bottled real ale by the end of Saturday! As is usual for events like this, I met up with a few old friends such as Sasha, L’Ange and Toni.

Stabcon is really a boardgame convention with a minority of roleplayers; of the 150 or so attendees, the majority spent the weekend playing complicated boardgames with thousands of pieces that lasted for 14 hours.

In the end I only played two RPGS. On the Saturday I played in Kev’s Call of Cthulhu game set on Mars during the early days of colonisation. On Sunday I played in the GURPS Discworld epic GMed by Phil Masters, in which the beer tasted of herring, and I played the axe-wielding barbarian Volf Volfssonssonsson, and no cliché was left unturned. I’ll avoid spoilers just in case anyone encounters either scenario at future cons, but I will mention Volf’s drunken Viking sea shanties, and his attempts at fishing for freshwater herring.

The third game I’d signed up for sadly failed to attract a sufficient number of players, so I ended up joining a game of Munchkin Bites instead, the latest of Steve Jackson Games Munchkin games. This one mercilessly parodies both White Wolf Games and Goth subculture in general. The game ended as a three-way tie with three players all at ninth level, because it was getting late and most of the players wanted to go to bed. I also played in a game of Credo, the game based on the Great Council of Nicea, in which the players represent different factions of the early church attempting to hammer out a Creed. Ours started with “We believe in many gods, including…”, although it went mostly orthodox after that. There were quite a few shorter games, most bizarre of which had to be the Mornington Cresent-like game played of Friday night with assorted dice, empty beer glasses, pencils, bits of paper and empty milk containers.

I’ve already signed up for the Summer Stabcon, on 8th to 10th of July at the traditional summer venue at Woolton Hall in Manchester.

Scott has posted a list of the 17 shows he’s seen in 2004. I’ve only managed a mere five, although that’s five times the number I saw in 2003. All of them are prog-rock of sorts. Biggest regret was missing Rush. Their tour sold out months in advance, before I knew whether or not I’d still be living in Manchester; the perils of being a contractor. Still, these are the bands I did manage to see:

• Yes, Manchester MEN Arena
• Marillion, Manchester Academy 1 (*)
• Mostly Autumn, Jilly’s, Manchester
• Uriah Heep, Manchester Academy 2
• Mostly Autumn (again), The Limelight, Crewe

Best of them was probably the last, two days before Christmas.

(*) The Marillion show was the night before I went on holiday, and I never did get round to writing a review. I’ve linked to the very detailed review from The Ministry of Information instead.

There’s a new Lexicon Game starting at The Phoenyx. The first one never really got off the ground after failing to attract a critical mass of players. Hopefully this one might prove more successful, especially since those players from the first time round have learned some lessons about how the game should be played.