A Day in the Life: Here There Be Monsters

Dear Readers,

  Tuesday brings you another Day in the Life, my name for a weekly piece that gives you a "slice of life" from one of the time streams that the Department studies.  It's a fictional short that I write, based on the primary sources from the given time stream I've chosen to feature.

  Today I decided to write about something a little different.  It's a time stream that is very, very similar to yours.  In fact, it might even be your time stream.  The truth of it is yours to decide.  The details, you'll see.  For my part, I don't judge the truth of a thing, but instead present it as it was believed.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

LA never gave the 'foreboding city' feeling that Will expected.  Despite the hardboiled detective novels and that whole LA-noir 'confidential' culture, there just was nothing in an irrigated sunny desert paradise that made him shiver.

He looked out of the car to confirm he feelings.  Of course, he could find all kinds of seedy deals when he blew down Fairfax in his busted-up neo-Thunderbird, but it lacked the "Nighthawks" feel he hoped for when he moved out there from Bethlehem, PA.

"Puddles," Will's voice scratched out to no one in particular.  That's what it needed.  Rain, puddles, whatever.  A good flatfoot needed to tromp through the wind and wet and rain, not the breezy desert nights and orange-lit back lot palm trees.  Gumshoes should need to wear trenchcoats and hats just to keep dry, and their Italian leather shoes should make soggy slapping noises.  Instead, he felt surrounded by t-shirts, board shorts, under-armor and other superficial, modern crap.  LA felt like a bad place for a traditionalist.  "What a joke," he shook his head at the neighborhood.

Will came up near Canter's, but of course, could not see even a postage stamp of street parking.  He remembered the little lot nearby, though, and to his luck, found a space fast.  He locked the

Canter's, via Wikipedia

T-bird and straightened the rosary that hung off of its mirror.
Like usual, Will had to chuckle when he walked by the Kibbitz Room.  Nothing like an old Yiddish joke.  The new LA Jews lacked jokesters like the old, too.  He sighed.  Nothing here went deeper than ten years.  Even the land shook off its history like a bad case of fleas, with every earthquake.

He ducked into Canters' and took a dead-on look at an unfamiliar maitre'd.

Monday Muse: Tunnel Tunes

Dear Readers,

Image via Wikipedia

  Monday is always a good day for music, like the fine people over on Twitter have figured out.  For my part in that fun, on Mondays I take a poetic or musical source from a time stream of my choice and publish it here for you.

  Now, of course, musical sources are really not my area of expertise, but they are incredibly valuable in how they connect an Anachronist with the culture he or she studies.  So, to some degree, Monday Muse is where you are on an even playing field with me as we discover some musical sources together.

  Unfortunately, augury data rarely, if ever, contains comprehensible audio.  We often need to find screenplays just to interpret the videos that we pull in, and this can be a tricky endeavor.  Therefore, music ends up almost exclusively as lyrics, and is in many ways difficult to distinguish from poetry.  The arbitrary nature of musical notation also complicates this; we can't be sure what conventions are relevant in a given time stream, so it becomes difficult to make conclusions.

  I've focused on neo-Aegea on this blog for some time now, but I'm not quite ready to give it a rest yet.  Today I'll provide a source from a set of popular songs.  Unlike last week's Martian song, this one may be originally a professional composition.  It should be easy to identify the cultural heritage that this song developed from, as it is another mutant of a song contemporary to you.  Additionally, it is a tribute to Civet, the famous storyteller whose work I've translated in the past.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Oh, the shark, babe, has pretty teeth, dear
      And it shows them, pearly white.
      Just a Chesire-smile has old Civet, babe
      And he hides it, ah, in plain sight

When that shark bites, with his teeth, dear

      Scarlet billows, start to spread
      Fancy white lies, has Civet's tales, dear
      So you nevah, nevah know you've been conned

Now on the dock-ring, one sunny morning
    Crowds gather, oozin' cash.
    Someone's got them, in his palm dear
    Could he be...Civet the Storyteller?


A-there's a scaph-boat...down by the river dontcha know
    Where the tales flow from that old clown
    Oh that scaph's there, just to escape, dear
    Before long, 'ol Civet's, bum bum bum...leeeaaavin' town.


That's as far as my source goes.

Weekend Worlds: Jonas and the Metro, Part III

Dear Readers,

  Enjoy this final piece of Jonas and the Metro, translated by yours truly from the original neo-Aegean.

  When we last left the Engineer Jonas, his fellow bathyscaph metro passengers cast him into the waters in the metro tunnel.  From there, we continue.  Look for Parts I and II in the archives, or in the links.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantintople

The journey out of the bathyscaph metro car plunged Jonas into a topsy-turvy world of tunnel seawater.  Buffeted from left to right, he got only the few minutes' air that an occaisional trip to airpockets at the tunnel ceiling offered him.

If he could have spoken, he might well have said, "Not only will I die, but I will be tortured!  I should never have doubted Athena!"

He struck his head against the ceiling, and descended into darkness with no knowledge whether he would ever return.  [this is a good point to request donations to hear the end of the story; attached to Jonas, your audience will now want to put in a few bits to see what happens to him here]

Jonas came to consciousness surrounded by selkies.  On land, the color and shape-changing creatures seemed more innocuous and innocent than he ever noticed before.  As his thoughts clambered through the fog to find coherence, he watched their young play and fight amongst each other.

"I'm in their nest," he spoke aloud.  The selkies would not care if he talked to himself.

Somehow, as the waters bounced him about, they deposited him in a selkie nest above the tunnel waterline.

"I can't believe it," Jonas said to himself again, and shook his head.

The selkies all turned to face him, and communally opened their mouths.

"Indeed, that is exactly the lesson we tried to teach you.  But you did not see it.  And so, we summoned our servants, these selkies, to save you from the water, so that you might see how we control this world."

Jonas sat dumbfounded, and then prostrated himself, "Athena?"

Weekend Worlds: Jonas and the Metro, Part II

Dear Readers,

  Weekend Worlds gets taken over this week by neo-Aegea, since I was in the midst of telling you a story.  I've decided that this story is better told in three parts, however, and so below, you can find the middle of my translation.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Image via Wikipedia

Jonas set off on his own to find the old Machinists' shop.  For the first half hour of his walke,d he cursed the Engineers of his home City and himself for his lack of preparation.  His bag contained provisions, augury and sacrificial equipment, all manner of texts, but no map.

The locals were kind enough to help, however.  They yelled helpful advice to him where ever he went.

Friday Seminar Series: Continuity, Part 3

Dear Readers,

  As per usual, your Friday brings my Friday Seminar, where I introduce your time stream to some of the material from my introductory Anachronism course, CHRN/AUG 100.  Last week I talked about dating and temporal arrangements, which followed up on an article from earlier in this "course" on continuity.

  This week's seminar will expand on those topics via some examples and discussion of the markers that we use to develop a temporal continuity.  My supplementary post on Augury might also be useful, if only to give you a background into the kinds of sources that I'll be talking about in the rest of this seminar.  I apologize in advance for the more philosophical parts of this installment.  Francis helped me prepare it, and he really likes that sort of thing.  I've tried to include links where I think they will be useful.


  Now, first I want to caution you about this.  In your time stream, much is made of scientific and statistical certainty.  The idea of your science is that data should have one significant interpretation and others that are less likely, and thereby theories get developed.  With Anachronism, it isn't so.  There is no way to piece together a chronology from Augury data with high certainty, because time streams can separate based on extremely rapid lynchpin events.

  Here's an example.  Let's say that I have a photograph that is dated 1939, and that in this photograph I see Luftwaffe fighter planes lined up on a runway.  I can make a lot of conclusions from the imagery, where I might see the Iron Cross on the plane's tail, or other identifying marks.  I can also conclude that Aviation was invented in the time stream where this image originated.

  But I can't say that in that time stream, the Wright Brothers invented airplanes in the early 20th century.  Now, it's going to be true that they did in a whole lot of time streams where there are serious warplanes by 1939, but I can't be totally sure.  What if another inventor beat them to it, but other events went in essentially the same fashion?  It's always a possibility, unless I find a picture of the Wright Brothers' successful flight test, or another source confirming it, inside the same chunk of Augury data.  Even if I found the photo shown below, I couldn't draw a conclusion with good certainty.  I'd have to see the plane.

Image via Wikipedia

  Therefore, conclusions that Anachronists make can be somewhat handwavy for the tastes of more strictly scientific philosophers.  It comes with the territory that we need to be a little more postmodern than our positivist or utilitarian time-normal counterparts.  We talk a lot more about likelihood, usefulness, and possibility than we do about necessarily observed fact.

  Now, that might make you think what we do is an art rather than a science, but that's not really true either.  The burden of backing up our assertions does still lie with us, and the argument must be coherent and logical.  Anachronists don't make emotional appeals, but reasoned arguments.

  With that first example down, I want to move on to something a little bit more practical to illustrate how I work.

Since I've just noted how frequently I make assertions that could easily be wrong, I think for this example I'll turn to your time stream's War on Terror.  I don't think your contemporaries know quite enough about it yet to determine for sure if any conclusions I make are right or wrong, and so my post will live in safety until more information is released.