Author Archives: Craig

More travel goodness

I’m glad to run across this, from Sarah, 7 October 2002, since I can never remember the site: "For my pal with hugely long legs and the broadest of shoulders (all the better to bear the weight of the world): SeatGURU. They have seat space ratings for lots of airlines and airplanes."
They rate the seats by desirability according to various reasonable criteria, and show the location of power points, enabling me and my fellow traveller to watch Dr Who on my laptop all the way home during our last air trip.

Riding the rails

This seems to have been my first posting to the old blog, on 27 August 2002: "I love the train. Especially Trains that tilt. These are similar to, but different from, the Talgo ‘pendular’ trains used on Amtrak for the Seattle-Vancouver and -Portland runs. Hereabouts the tracks suck too bad for them to go anything like 125mph, to say nothing of 140."
Despite the sucky track, the Talgo makes the Portland run in substantially less time than the alternative (3.5 vs 4.5 parsecs) and the return leg on the alternative is always late. And the Talgo has business class, which everybody at my house will be taking not too many hours from now.

Hand importing, or reruns

In an effort to make the old blog go away, or at least make myself stop checking to see if it’s still there, I’m going to do more reruns from it.
On 18 July 2002, my esteemed co-blogger wrote: "How long will adflip last? They claim fair use on the basis of research for, of all things, goofy vintage ads you can send as ecards. A bit of a stretch. Download all the ads (1940 to today) you need for your own fair use before they get the inevitable cease and desist ecard."
And if somebody wanted to remind me tonight to check to see if my copy of the 1st edition AD&D Player’s Handbook is a true first or merely a first printing, so I can price it according to this guide, I’d be grateful. How grateful, you may ask? Well, it turns out better judgment prevents my saying here; you’ll just have to take your chances.

But Buffy's not a sidekick

Russell Davies says his new Doctor will have a "modern action heroine" for a sidekick. Which seems to me to miss the point of a sidekick. If your sidekick is too able to take care of herself, you end up requiring badder baddies to create any sense of peril (or you have to make her twist her ankle during the chase scene, or something), and your hero has to get commensurately more powerful, and you end up risking a ridiculous escalation.
I’ll just hope the reporter is not accurately representing Mr Davies’s intent.

Not for the squeamish

The BBC headline that caught my eye was "Me and My Parasite." One of the anecdotes involves a waiter fleeing in horror from a customer: "Broughton chased him down the street urging him to tell him what was wrong. But the boy would only point, wordlessly, at his nose." Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Apparently the piece is a teaser for a programme called "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Here’s hoping it hops the pond to BBCA so I can be revulsed in my own home.

First, panic

You’ll need to print this out, so you’ll be able to use it in the event that the unthinkable (a loss of net connectivity) happens. Of course, it’s foolish to think that surviving such a cataclysm is possible, but such guidelines should serve to calm the ignorant masses.