Linesman/Mediator.

[hirez]

"The first day he created light and air and jam and soot and baked potatoes and hair and fish and arguments and frogs and banjos and... roads and cars and soot. More soot. Um. And Colonel Gadaffy and, er, crinkly things and, er, very small avenues... And, um, Belgium." (God is James Mason, of course. And sounds worryingly like half of my friends. Well, I say 'worryingly'. It's in fact rather comforting. You know, if we're all going to be taken over by some terrible virus from space, it'll be rather pleasing to discover that it's one that makes everyone ramble about jam and cats and wear nice outfits.)

So, um, anyway. On a scale of biscuits to evolution (Biscuits being as wrong as a wrong thing that lives on wrong lane, evolution being correct, and the full scale going biscuits, strife, Broadway, Mixmag, reader's wives, ball bearings, Erlang, wind-up robot, evolution) How wrong am I to rather expect my LJ experience to be two-way?

I know - I'll answer my own question: I don't give a flying one, now I come to think about it.

[ Do it in the car/wherever you are ]

Today I mostly wandered round trading estates with cobbled streets and found a Jewish cemetery round the back of the old railway goods yard. It may be the vestiges of the mithering and graveyard-bothering g*th within, but I spotted a set of gravestones behind an otherwise inconspicuous iron-bar gate set into a tall limestone wall. Even with the age and lichen, the text looked odd, so toddled over for a closer look. The top halves of most of the gravestones were in Hebrew, while the bottom halves were in English. Not a particularly odd thing to find in Bristol, given the history of the place, but opposite a rough looking pub behind a trading estate in the Dings? The Jewish cemetery in Whitby is well locked too. Anti-Semites are everywhere, it seems.

Trading estates are odd places. Burroughs banged on about the 'interzone' between (as far as I can tell) our reality and his reptilian/insectoid drug-addled version. I'm becoming more and more convinced that if there are weird things going on in an Avengers manner, they're going to be happening in the middle of a badly signposted industrial development. One of those with the new-build office equipment places nearest the road, but the further away from the beaten track you venture, the quicker things decay. Until the road ends in scrubby bushes with rain-sodden wank mags covering their roots and there's a lead-smelting plant one side of you and a workhouse the other.

I've worked in several. They all seem to feature an officey bit that's about the size of four portakabins nailed together which lurks in one corner of a barn. The first was next door to a meat-packing plant, the second was on the site of an abbatoir (that's the one on the bike path opposite Rose Green cemy.) the third was handy for this old-bloke pub that featured the world's oddest beer-pump. For some reason they ran the bitter via a see-through double-action hydraulic piston on the bar top. I can only guess it was some remnant of seventies Derbyshire.

What I'd like to do is rent one of those places, preferably in the sixties zone toward the back of the average trading estate, and turn it into an art project. There would be typewriters and a PABX and topless calendars in the goods in' bay. Unmarked vans would bring crates of unidentifiable materiel, which would be subjected to un-named processes (preferably involving unearthly shrieking from demonic machinery and terrible flashes of eldritch lights at odd hours of the night) and shipped who-knows-where in similarly unmarked vehicles. We could call it 'Excelsior Miskatronics'.

The other thing I wanted to mention, before I wandered off at a tangent was this place. It's close to where I'll be toward the end of the month. Probably not a popular destination when there's lager to be swilled and corsets to be ogled, but I'd like to attempt to get and have a look at it.

Cardington looks to be an interesting destination as well. Handy for Hester, too.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

Erlang

A. K. Erlang the telephone engineer?

[reddragdiva]

The Ericsson-invented computer language, I assumed. Huge amounts of Ericsson software are written in Erlang/Tk.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Ah... the one was named after t'other as it turns out!

Actually, I'm quite happy Erlang has a language named after him -- he was quite the main man in queuing theory.

[reddragdiva]

I've never touched it myself (and wouldn't know it if I tripped over it), but I was told by ex-cow-orkers that it was one of those things that was a nice language in theory but an eldritch fucking horror in all practical uses one would encounter. Like many products of computer science.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, nice theory shame about the practice goes for much of his mathematics too.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Dear Leader Brad has recently discovered Erlang, so expect great parts of LJ to be rewritten any time now.

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

Worcerstershire, Tooting or New York? And how is Mixmag worse than Readers Wives?

if there are weird things going on in an Avengers manner Oh there most definitly are, but you knew that already.

a see-through double-action hydraulic piston on the bar top Still a major feature of The Blue Bell in York where, as my pal John said, you can see your next pint warming up. Anyway...

[reddragdiva]

The Readers' Wives probably aren't pilling?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Airship kennels.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

a see-through double-action hydraulic piston on the bar top.

Got them in Ormskirk. Still serving Mild through them too.

[spride.livejournal.com]

> a see-through double-action hydraulic piston on the bar top.

The Arkle, in Morley, used to have them to ensure any flavour other than the faint aroma of scorched tea-towels was removed from its pints of Cameron's. I think they also were instrumental in creating a head the consistency of molten marshmallow.

The estate sounds a prime candidate for some Postcards From Hell, hint hint.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Aha. So they still exist and I wasn't imagining it. I'll have to get documentary evidence now.

Estate pics were Lomo-ed and need to go off to the far away chemist. Given the state of that camera, I doubt I'll need to potatoshop the results.

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

Pit stop in York on the way to your bunker should do it nicely.

[naturalbornkaos.livejournal.com]

Wind-up robot. Definitely.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Thought as much. I should probably do something about the Alligator Stations, but attaching pre-conditions to LJ-usage is about as fucked up as having to petition to be added to a(n) F-O journal. Exactly how much am I supposed to care without knowing what I'm getting into first? Why should I be bothered with anyone who gives off the impression that they've already got enough friends, ta very much?

[neilh.livejournal.com]

Count me in.

On the factory art project.

And on the undergroundness (if I make it up north, that is).

[razornet.livejournal.com]

I'd be quite interested in that as well.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with biscuits?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

They're splendid in their place - balanced carelessly in a saucer of robust Cylon tea. However, it's when they wander from their station and get airs and graces that the trouble begins. The great thinker Comrade Sayle was the first to notice the disturbing number of biscuits named after revolutionaries. It's no coincidence.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Bourbons were a bit reactionary, so why did they achieve biccie fame?

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

That'll be the Trotsky Family Assortment, then.

It's like labradors causing blindness. Amazing how they get away with it.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

You see? It's not just me.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Ah, the Plant Room, where the first Triffids to be captured alive were tamed and interrogated. The most placid became regimental mascots, of course, and a few of the friskier ones made excellent boundary-control guards.

There's nothing like an eager Triffid to make a so-called Peace Protester think twice about hopping over the wire. They're not as cuddly as the dogs, and they are much harder to distract with steaks and the like. For a while, some of the chaps thought there might be a business renting them out to industry, but the project foundered on some silly liability issues.

Shame.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[FX: Hysterics]

Given the context of ROTOR bunkers, that makes far more sense than the usual and pedestrian explanation. In fact, I believe it to be part of a government cover-up.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Right. I bet *every single one* of these big bunkers has a Plant Room, with fat power feeds, a good water supply, and - and this is the key point - drainage built into the floors.

They don't need all that just to keep a big combi boiler happy, do they ?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Indeed not. I would imagine you could run a lighting plant on Triffid oil for weeks.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

You're right, but it wreaks havoc with the morale of the mascots when you start doing that.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

nothing like an eager Triffid to make a so-called Peace Protester think twice about hopping over the wire

That's what you think. They're vegans, can't eat guard dogs. A good Triffid though, that'll keep a bender full of womyn fed for a week.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

... And give them the ability to gob caustic into the eyes of the polis for days after. Plenty of roughage too, I'll be bound.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

We had been wondering at the level of wastage our patrols had experienced through the winter months. I think there may be considerable merit in your hypothesis.

I'll be asking the handlers if it's practical to mix a bit of Bitrex in with the weekly derris powder treatments. That might help a bit.

[spride.livejournal.com]

Patrington? My dad was stationed there in one of his callbacks on National Service (he was a radar op).

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Holmpton, it says here. Which may or may not be the same place.