It All Started Next Week........

(Probably makes more sense if you read this first!(link))
It all started next week. I was feeling guilty that Red Dirt Girl's internet birthday party had sparked off so much fun and originality, and.... I'd only sent her a picture or two.
What, I thought, could I have done to bring a big smile to her face?
What might she want and not get?
Well, she keeps coming back to her fascination with the Aurora, the Northern Lights.
Could I by some cunning internet trickery, take her to see them. Or OH WOW! -Could I bring them to her, and light up the party?.....last week....Oh Dear.
Once I get a crazy idea, I'm a demon... So, next week I started on a long trek, of learning, travelling, making and doing.
First I had to learn how the Aurora works. Then I had to get myself up to speed on physics, theoretical stuff, mathematics, all those funny symbols...
It took ages.
Until 2012 in fact, by which time RDG had partied through five more birthdays.
The breakthrough came after the banning, totally, of all chemical additives to food and water in 2010.
My IQ surged to almost normal.
Some damage had been done, but I managed the first clumsy draft concept of the clockwork-heart-anti-matter-enfrictionator. By 2012, I had a rough prototype up and running, discovering, by the way, that rust is a potentiator for space/time warping.
Having learned by then to make a, though I say it myself, rather good aurora, in any place of my choosing, the next task was to control the space/time warpingnipraw emit\ecaps eht lortnoc............
Argh
Sorry
Time slippage.
Hold on whilst I rosin the drive belts.
There. That should hold it.
I watched all the versions of back to the future, to see if I could find any clues.
But
It all seems so complex. Speed, Clocks, Flux Capacitors etcetera.
So I turned to Jules Verne, H.G.Wells and their ilk.
Ha! burnished ivory, gutta percha, and brass?
no thank you.
But
By chance
I found the clockwork heart antimatter enfrictionator, when close-linked to an embiggener, and fuelled with dark matter, or, in a pinch, molasses, seemed to do timeshifting quite well.
Calibration was tricky at first. I burned out several calendars.
But I discovered that pulling the handle as far as the knot on the wood of the side-frame, took me into Elizabethan England.
Wherever I travel, I take a few books and time travel takes a surprising amount of time. So I'd taken my mother's old edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Spotting an opportunity, I sought out the struggling bard, cursing and swearing, writers block... And an opening night but days away.
I copied a few verses in longhand, quill-penned scrawl.
slipped them under his door.
Offered him Henry the fourth, part one, act by act, scene by scene....
For cash. Soul not required... Told him my name was Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe...
Oh what a jolly jape.
Meanwhile, I was investing his coins in some new fangled ideas. With the aid of my history book, I was able to pick the winners, my investments bore fruit, and I purchased gold leaf, this being far better at auroreal regeneration than the cooking foil I had hitherto used.
Then... Forward again into last month. Because I really needed antimatter......
Hence the trip to the Cyclotron, and all that fuss at CERN.
I left a few more plays for Shakespeare, including The Tempest.
I think it will set him on the right track again, having Shakespeare to learn from.
So.
From Cern
Antimatter powered, in backwards time.
To the Party
And to set up the Aurora Generator. -I overpowered it by accident.
2000 miles wide.... I only meant for about twenty.
Still, it gave Mexico a party too.
Backtiming, again, I arrived at the party just before, five miles to the north, I set the aurora off.
Dylan was singing "To dance beneath a diamond sky, with one hand waving free" as overhead, a coruscating curtain of ruby red light burst across the star-sprinkled night sky.
Perfect.
Well.
I remember drinking margaritas... someone fell off an elephant onto my cake, and giggled uncontrollably...
The morning after, my head hurt terribly, as I woke here in my own little bit of England.
To the sound of hammering on the door.
"Police! Open the door!"
Yes. Chief Inspector T.Runcheon had sent the boys round to arrest me for breaking into Cern, and the theft of antimatter.
I pointed out, that the television cameras in Texas showed me, quite clearly, stepping out of the limo at Red Dirt Girls party bash, five minutes before they claim to have surrounded the lab at Cern.
Ergo, they'd got the wrong guy....
And besides? Theft of what, exactly?
Theft refers to stealing... Things. But antimatter is not just the absence of a thing, it's an antithing. How could I steal something which has a negative existence?
Argue that, Copper.
Eventually they let me go.
I'm so tired. But I might just nip back to the party....
And arrive a moment before myself on those cameras... Just for fun.

Having trouble with the drains...

Soubriquet Missing!

14th April 2007
Punk Poet and sometime blogger Ersatz Soubriquet was yesterday reported missing. Police searches, and exhaustive investigation of his recent computer records indicate that in recent weeks he has been concerning himself deeply with the mechanisms of the Aurora Borealis.

In his kitchen, beneath vegetable peelings and bread crusts, was found a notebook filled with jottings, most of which were so mathematically advanced that Doctor Steven Hawking was called upon to interpret them.
"My God!" he cried, "This is incredible! Soubriquet is positing an 'n' dimension fractal warp of space/time, to be driven by an antimatter-energised clockwork motor- yes, I think this could work...." Chief Inspector T. Runcheon, of the British Blogger Police, then asked Doctor Hawking, what the point of such an activity might be.

"It seems that a friend of his has never seen the Aurora Borealis, nor for that matter, the Aurora Australis, and it is her birthday today.
Soubriquet indicates in his notes that he is seeking to build a machine, so small it could be posted anywhere in the world. Running from a tiny clockwork motor he calls 'the heart', it would enfrictionate antimatter particles, setting up a highly charged magnetic flux, similar to the field at the planet's poles. This would be directed, by reflective foil mirrors, made using origami techniques, into the sky, and would extend thousands of miles above the earth."
"If he can do this, if it can be achieved, it would attract the solar wind, causing molecules of gases in the most outer reaches of the atmosphere to glow, oh, like a glowstick, over hundreds of miles across the sky, centred above his device."
"There is only one place he can be, only one place in the world where antimatter is being generated by science, Inspector, You must follow him to Cern, the vast Cyclotron beneath the Alps"

The hunt moved rapidly to CERN, where Interpol and Swiss special forces sealed off the vast physics complex.
This newspaper's reporter, on site, CERN, Switzerland, has been told that no person could possibly survive venturing into the antimatter chamber with a small glass jar, as Soubriquet appears to have done.
The immense forces and magnetic fields involved would rip a human body apart, into a mist of whirling molecules, accelerating almost to the speed of light.
Although a strong combined force of police and soldiers surrounds the control complex, it seems there is little chance of Soubriquet ever being seen again.

STOP PRESS: SOUBRIQUET SIGHTED IN TEXAS!!!

STOP PRESS: TEXAS SKY LIGHTS UP! "IMPOSSIBLE!" SAY SCIENTISTS AS NORTHERN LIGHTS APPEAR AS FAR SOUTH AS GULF OF MEXICO. INCREDIBLE SWIRLING SKIES BRING PARTY ATMOSPHERE TO SOUTHERN STATES!

"Icarus Ascending on Beautiful Foolish Arms"

A ghost of aviation She was swallowed by the sky Or by the sea like me she had a dream to fly Like Icarus ascending On beautiful foolish arms Amelia it was just a false alarm From the song "Amelia", by Joni Mitchell.

Icarus

Icarus was the son of the inventor Daedalus and a slave named Naucrate. King Minos of Crete imprisoned Daedalus and Icarus in the Labyrinth to punish Daedalus for helping the hero Theseus to kill the monster called the Minotaur and to escape with Minos' daughter, Ariadne. Daedalus knew that Minos controlled any escape routes by land or sea, but Minos could not prevent an escape by flight. So Daedalus used his skills to build wings for himself and Icarus. He used wax and string to fasten feathers to reeds of varying lengths to imitate the curves of birds' wings .

When their wings were ready, Daedalus warned Icarus to fly at medium altitude. If he flew too high, the sun could melt the wax of his wings, and the sea could dampen the feathers if he flew too low.

Once they had escaped Crete, Icarus became exhilarated by flight. Ignoring his father's warning, he flew higher and higher. The sun melted the wax holding his wings together, and the boy fell into the water and drowned. Daedalus looked down to see feathers floating in the waves, and realized what had happened. He buried his son on an island which would be called Icaria, and the sea into which Icarus had fallen would ever after be called the Icarian Sea (between the Cyclades and Asia Minor).

New Technology is Always Difficult

The Blog Archipelago Revisited

Artwork by Roger Dean.

Back in January, I wrote of The Blog Archipelago , a concept that struck me at the time to cover my concept of bloggers and their works, and how we interact. That we are travellers on a sea dotted with myriad islands, the Blogs.
Since then I've travelled far, made new friends, alienated one or two also.
We drop into a blog from all sorts of directions, sometimes through a link off another page, sometimes via a search for a phrase. And sometimes we very quickly decide that the content and style of a page is not for us, and move on, or the converse, we feel quite at home and stay, until we see the clock out of the corner of our eye, and gasp, wondering how so much time could have slipped by whilst we browsed.
As a Blogger (or Bluffer), I always hope for feedback.
Does anybody like what I do? Did what I said garner a positive or a negative response? How will I know if you don't stop to leave a comment?
Today, there are extra visitors, because I got a much appreciated mention on Draw Conclusions on the Wall a blog which leads me into much thought and philosophising. If anyone out there was taught to spell 'Dilemna' as it appears here, and not as 'Dilemma', David at Conclusions would like to hear from you.
There's much more there besides, and of course, the bloggers treasure map.... links to other islands.
Also, I got linked by Hanan, at Growabrain.
Hanan's following is huge... Some seven million page hits in the last three years. I've accounted for several hundreds of those, over the years. His energy and dedication to daily content shames me, and I can recommend, if you're ever bored, at a loose end, stuck at home with a broken leg or the flu, a visit to Hanan's archives will soon give your brain a new lease of curiousity. I tend to visit every day. But I confess I never get to follow every link trail he sets.
What amazes me is that for every topic he blogs, he must search over several more that he deems not to quite make the grade.
Here, though, is the link twixt Hanan and me.
A couple of weeks back he was wondering why he does this, whether anyone cares. Despite the seven million page hits he was having doubts. Just like me with my handful of hits.
And that, largely, is down to the paucity of feedback from visitors.
I know we won't comment on every blog we visit. And if there's a big heap of comment, our voices may be superfluous anyway, but please, every few blogs, leave a few words. Positive or negative, it all helps the blogger in future decisions.
So
If you've tarried a while here, and have thoughts good or bad, please spare a moment to comment. And thank you for dropping by.

HA!

Ed Alleyne Johnson

I'd never heard of this guy until i bumped into him on Random Good Stuff