Things That Could Have Happened This Year

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Dear Readers,

  Since 2009 comes to an end for you tonight (really, I think it ought to be 2008 and there should have been a year zero, but it's your number system, not mine), I thought I would do a year in review from an Anachronist's perspective.

  For an Anachronist, it's not always so interesting what happened as what might have.  And so, here's what could have happened in the past year:

January: President John McCain takes the oath of office, which Chief Justice John Roberts screws up anyway.  Somehow, Vice President Sarah Palin steals the show for all 500 attendees.

February: President John McCain mysteriously dies in a helicopter oil drilling hunting expedition, and President Palin is sworn in.  Russia promptly deploys missiles in Kaliningrad.  Vladimir Putin paints shirtless portraits of himself on the largest missiles.

March: France withdraws from NATO.  Youth march through the streets in celebration, setting fire to cars and tossing hammers and sickles through windows.

April: Russia invades Ukraine.  In the ensuing nuclear exchange, all world capitals and most of the nuclear/military infrastructure is destroyed.  Due to an efficacious antimissile defense system, most US cities (with the exception of Washington DC), are spared.

May: The collapse of the global economy is accelerated by the fragmentation of the United States as well as the population collapse caused by the war.  World leaders are no longer available for comment.

June: Steve Jobs, from an undisclosed location in Apple's Rocky Mountain bunkers, announces the release of several new products, including a hand-crank powered iPhone.  3G coverage is spotty, no matter what you have a map for.

July: With their new stadium now the capital of a breakaway republic, the Mets play their best season in history, which mostly consists of repelling other "nations" from the stadium gates.

August: Speculators finally give up on their attempts to sell vast quantities of gold in the postgovernmental economy, since most people are far more interested in practical goods like food and antibiotics.

September: Still no sign of Swine Flu.  It was wiped out during the nuclear exchange in April.  There is no talk of a vaccine.

October: The first images of Washington DC are found on what remains of the Internet.  President Palin is in none of them.  With the falling housing market, the Fourth Estate is sold for a tenth of its original value.

November: The coming of Thanksgiving results in a cessation of hostilities in the former United States, though problems arise as arguments over who would have won the customary football game boil over into skirmishes.

December: With no remaining global infrastructure, the survivors find themselves overjoyed that global warming has continued.

So, I think we can all safely say that things went better for your time stream than could have been expected.  Happy New Year!

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

The Good Old Days: When I was a Graduate Student

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Dear Readers,

   In hopes that I can give you a more personal view of my life, I thought I would write a little bit about how I came to be associated with the University of Constantinople.

   It was, for you, not too long ago that a younger, time-normal version of me moved to New York City to embark on a grand quest to become a famous scientist and save the world from great terrors.  At least, at the time I thought that was what I would do.  On the side, however, I made a litle money writing speculative fiction stories.  Sometimes when I go back to them I laugh.  The truth has ended up being so much stranger than any fiction I managed.

   At about the time that my career began to pick up, I received a most peculiar email.  It appeared to be from, well, me.  It puzzled me how someone could impersonate me with such accuracy, and over a period of time I convinced myself that I would indeed become a professor at a university one day.  Of course i assumed that this was all some elaborate prank or terrible hallucination, at first, but in the end I discovered it was all real.  Perhaps I will tell the full story another time.

  Dr. Skylar--me!--informed me that there would be many paths that I could go down, and many of them would lead to the University of Constantinople, but there would be many challenges as well and some versions of me would not answer the call.  He--I--felt assured, of course, that at least one of me would make the choice to join the University.  After all, we both knew he would never exist t contact me if it did not happen somewhere.

   The first step I had to follow was to go through the full undergraduate distance courses.  I continued to write speculative stories, but this time, my academic papers would sometimes substitute for a story here and there.  In many cases, this work seemed more outlandish and original than what I came up with on my own.  As I progressed, I began to gather a group of other writers who eventually became known as the Speculative Collective, a named devised by the multitalented Edward Joel Anderson.

   The Speculative Collective gave me a unique cover for my studies with the University.  As the years progressed, the most bizarre activities could be covered in the name of speculative fiction.  It was a great deal of fun, really!  And it set the stage for my future academic writings.

   Later on, I had to select a graduate adviser and a thesis topic.  Not being the narcissistic type, and concerned about spacetime's integrity (though later-me told me not to worry), I picked George Sphrantzes as my advisor and began to study the collapse of Empires and the dark ages that followed.  These became the topics of both my thesis and of several written projects.  My interest in these topics continues in my life at the University, and it has become (or really, has always been), a major focus on our department's research.

   Eventually, the time came for me to actually come to the University itself.  This is a complicated process that I will explain in detail some other time, as this post is more about my story than the complicated science involved in transmission of personality to outside time.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Sunday Seminar Series: What's the Point?

Part of our Identity; Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  This is another installment in my Sunday Seminar Series, wherein I distill lectures from my introductory class, CHRN/AUG 100, for general consumption by distance students.

  You've had a bit of a break from this over the past few weeks, but I'm sure my best students have kept up with their reading and have minds eager to be pried open and molded.  I've always found that concept strangely aggressive, but I'll run with it.

   Today I want to talk to you about the whole point of the University of Constantinople.  It may seem all well and good to you that we advocate a sort of hybrid pragmatic-postmodern view to analysis of augury data, and that we collate and collect information and cultural anthropology across a variety of different time streams.  It seems well and good enough to me, at least.  Still, it's not all that we're here for.  This seminar will explain in a cursory overview what the next few will explore in more detail.

   First, the facts: We are a university outside of normal time, created by a freak accident.  We can obtain a variety of information from other time streams, and daily (well, at least, something like daily) our capabilities improve.  We can, to some degree, return matter to normal time, though this is a tremendously expensive procedure.  We can as well create copies of any individual who ever lived anywhere, though that is also quite expensive and it requires something of a special art so that you do not get the wrong sort of person.

The Short Course on Yesterday's Post: The Message of a Chabad Christmas

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Dear Readers,

  I thought today I'd give a little analysis on yesterday's post about Mendel Claus, my name for the figure suggested in that narrative.  There are some physical and metaphysical ideas there that raise an eyebrow for me, especially considering my affiliation to the University.

  I chanced upon the story while I looked through some old reporters' notes, from a famous New York Times writer.  At least, famous in his time stream.  In yours, I think he had a rather successful film career instead, 80% of it just by showing up.

   The idea that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, somehow found a kabbalistic path to immortality is not an unusual thought to find throughout the various time streams.  Usually, however, it is an idea put forward by his followers after his death and its veracity is dubious at best.

  On the other hand, the idea that he ascended mortal affairs to become a somewhat discorporated realization of the Santa Claus construct is unique to the one source I used to build the narrative.  It relies on a few simple principles in common between Rabbi Schneerson's way of life and the principles of the holiday you're privileged to celebrate.

  Mechanically, the part that interests me the most is the concept of kfitzat haderech.  One steps through one material object, and comes out in another.  We have several professors, including the Genius of Vilna, Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman, working on this technology for the University.  The very mode of travel shows that the important part is not what or where, but how.  It is the manner of thinking.  It is, in the parlance of Christmas, the thought that counts.

  Metaphysically, the key idea is that this man, this Rabbi who spent his life in an attempt to bring the Jews closer together, as well as to commit random acts of kindness to all people, would spend his "afterlife" as a man who tries to bring the whole world together.  Santa Claus is, at his core, the manifestation of the rabbinic ideal, an unshaven man in snazzy clothes who does his best to make sure everyone, everywhere gets the things their hearts desire without embarrassment.  It is the pinnacle of the idea of kindness throughout Judeo-Christian theology: that the recipient feel only the gift, and not the obligation to the giver.

  With only once source, I am not sure how much of it to believe.  But every story about a cheerful Santa Claus is one that I want to be true.  The idea that such a selfless person could be out there, could have transcended time and space to become an avatar of generosity, is an idea that warms my heart.

  Merry Christmas (Always),

   Dr. John Skylar
   Chairman
   Department of Anachronism
   University of Constantinople

 
 

Christmas Story: Mendel Claus

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Dear Readers,

  This one is for the holiday, but I assure you that the events within are true for the time stream of origin.  Like yesterday's, it's not too far from your own time stream.

   The notion of some kind of "Jewish Conspiracy" is something you hear a lot about.  Thankfully, in your time stream, these are mostly jokes and not actual paranoia.  In the time stream that I'm featuring today, however, there is a global cabal of sorts, organized of specific Jews.

  Its aim is to repair the world.  And it does it in a most interesting way.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Two boys outside laughed and yelled, "Man, I don't even know what we did last night!"

Why I Live at the Tim Hortons

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Dear Readers,

  Today's post is titled as it is out of a nod to Eudora Welty's famous story "Why I Live at the P.O.," but it is of a very different nature.  I hated the story, but the title stuck with me.

  Sometimes, there are time stream variations that you would never notice.  Ones that live just beneath the surface, in the dark caves of your contemporaries' personal lives and there is little you can do to figure out quite which possibility you live in.

  One such possibility is treated in today's post.  Specifically, as regards Canadians and their odd obsession with Tim Hortons.  You know TH as a coffee shop with curiously delicious maple donuts.  It is a cornerstone of the Canadian economy.  However, in some time streams, TH is a much more bizarre prospect, as you'll come to learn in today's story.  Don't worry; it's not actually an episode from your time stream.  I'm pretty sure, at least.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

I stood in the cold with bated, visible breath.

Sunday Seminar Series: Truth and Belief, Part II

Comet, or Dragon? Image via Wikipedi

Dear Readers,

  After the problems that occured with my "Great Expectations" Friday Seminar, I discovered that the response improved when I posted my seminars to time-normal Sundays rather than Fridays, and I've changed the schedule accordingly.

  If you are just joining us, my Sunday Seminars are a series of posts adapted from material for my first-year undergraduate Anachronism students, CHRN/AUG 100.  Last week we talked about different kinds of information, and I defined some terms for you.  It would be useful to go back to that, but I intend to move on from there, so foreknowledge should not be entirely necessary.

   The important point that I want you to take home from these two seminars is that there are different sorts of conclusions you can make about "reality."

   Let me give you an example.  There is a medieval source, from your history, in which a bishop describes his experience of seeing a dragon.  Historians (as you know them) and Anachronists both are interested in this account for a variety of reasons.  However, even time-normal historians consider this source in two ways.

  The first is literally.  The source gives us an account of what a dragon was to a medieval person.  For this bishop, whatever he saw really was a dragon.  And thus we come to interpretations of truth.  Pragmatist philosophy suggests that if an interpretive worldview is useful to someone, then it is true for that person.  What is true, thus, is not necessarily the same for everyone.  Because of truth-bias from his or her original worldview, the Anachronist has to realign his or her mind to that of the source author.  That is, if the Anachronist seeks a literalist, source subjective impression of the information available.  Furthermore, it gets very interesting when you consider that there are time streams where the objective reality would agree with the subjective reality of a dragon.  Keep an open mind!

   Of course, what if we don't take the source literally?  What if we want to figure out what "really happened"?  Was the dragon a comet?  Ball lightning?  It can be a lot more difficult, because to some degree we just have to trust in our sources.  We can't see these time streams via Augury.  So we often have to look for clues in the sources words that tell us what the different possibilities.  The take home message should be that you can never know what "really" happened or will happen in a time stream.  You just know what could happen.  And that's what Anachronism is all about.

   There is another way, however.  There are the people at the University, who still have their memories from a time normal life, but the perspective of interaction with those who have different perspectives.  When in doubt, consult a colleague.  Often, there is someone here who can tell you what their subjective experience in a given related time stream was, and that can help inform you as to the possibilities for your time stream of study.

  In the end, all we can really say is what our sources believed the truth to be, not the "real" facts.

  And yet, this does not matter.  There are so many possibilities out there, and the mere inspiration from a source provides us with something meaningful.  If a source can imagine it, there is likely a time stream where it will occur.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

A Day in the Life: Thanksgiving in Omentown, Part II

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Dear Readers,

  Last time, I started a story about Thanksgiving in a Maine town that I study.  Port End, which I like to call "Omentown" in my notes, is a place where the fields that give rise to augury are strong enough to actually affect the natural world.

  As a result, omens in that place are real, and they often come true.  The people who live there have adjusted accordingly.  We followed Omentown resident Ed while he saved his smaller friend Carl from a destitute man who attacked him.  Ed did it to prevent the realization of an omen he saw earlier in the day, but felt unsure if he really interpreted the omen in the right way.

  And now, the conclusion.  When we rejoin Ed, a day has passed, and we are at his family home for Thanksgiving.  Below the cut.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople