The Sentinels

I don't know about you but when I see something I'm not familiar with, I try and guess from context what it is or what it might be used for.

For instance, there is some construction going on near my office building and just the other day when out on my walk I noticed these strange dealies sitting ready to be included in the process somehow.

The logical part of my brain suggested that they looked like something that might be used in the foundations.
This was a pretty safe bet as they're just finishing up preparing the ground and are getting ready to lay the foundations.

The part of my brain that gets most of the votes on what to think about concurred on the foundations part but decided that they looked like dog kennels and that if someone was going to place dog kennels in the foundations of a building they would probably be placed at four points in the foundations and contain guardians, an act of sympathetic magic to protect the building being constructed.

Now these guardians could be of several natures:

• Artificial. Made out of stone or other such materials and placed symbolically like Terracotta warriors to arise when needed.
• Supernatural. Immortal creatures that can endure without sustenance or sunshine and whose presence provides a real occult protection which moves from passive to active if the property is under attack. Hopefully being confined underground, possibly for decades or centuries, wouldn't drive them insane otherwise demolition work would require superhuman effort and bravery.
• Sacrificial. My least favourite, real dogs are placed within the kennels and entombed when they are inserted into the foundations of the building. The sacrifice of the living creatures  is a compact with the gods and is supposed to ensure that their spirits are bound to the building which they then vigorously defend.

 

 And these are the things I think about when out for a walk.

Makes sense to me.

Out Of Toner!

Imagine...

Imagine that we found out that there was going to be a cataclysmic EMP* event, that every computer and electronic device on Earth would stop working at the same time.

Imagine the panic as we realised exactly how much of our information is stored in exclusively electronic mediums.

Imagine the logistics. No really, think about it.

If we knew we only had a finite time before all that information was lost to us forever how would we handle it?

Scientific and educational facilities would obviously start printing at a rate of knots.

The production and delivery of ink and toner cartridges and paper would be prioritised and possibly would require the use of armoured cars.

Government branches and public services would draft all their people into collating and stacking and waving fans at overheating printers.

Would it get to the point where they started commandeering or contracting civilian printers?

Would civilian businesses cooperate?

What about professional publishing houses? Those best set up to print large amounts of material in an efficient fashion.

Would they accept priority jobs from universities and the like?

Or would they be grimly printing as many of the classics and as many new novels and non-fiction resources as possible before technology is knocked back to the industrial age?

Would there be riots in book stores?

Would libraries be at risk?

Does anybody still know how to construct a reference card system on the dewey decimal system?

Would there be time for the companies that still print camera film to go completely buck wild seeing as digital cameras would soon be nothing more than inefficient paperweights?

What would we do?



*Electromagnetic pulse

Where To? Where From?

I've always been obsessed with doors.

Not with the different shapes, different materials, different colours, different fixtures - though those things are all lovely and also interest me - but with doors as portals.

The idea of a shape or item that stands between one space and another always presented a huge array of possibilities.

I used to wonder if it was possible to pass through a door, close it and when you open it again, find it looking out into a completely different place, possibly completely alien to the one you just left.
This of course led to wondering whether the room you were in still existed on the same physical plane of reality that it had originally and whether therefore you could return to the place you left by exiting via the window instead of through a door that may then strand you in a place you'd not be able to return from.

As you can imagine I wasn't a difficult child to keep occupied.
All you had to do was leave me to my own devices and I could spend hours theorising ways to keep track or hold of your original world, like Theseus using Ariadne's ball of thread to find his way out of the Minotaur's maze*.

Any book, movie or TV show that involved any kind of travel or access to such different dimensions or locations were therefore insanely interesting to me.

Sliders, The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe by C S Lewis, Stargate, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, The Weather Witch by Paul Stewart, The Fionavar Tapestry series by Guy Gavriel Kay, Goodnight Sweetheart, all of those crazy ABC kids shows that involved the characters stepping back in time or travelling to the UK or Canada** possibly whilst also stepping back in time...

I'm also pretty sure that despite my lifelong fascination with such portals, that if I found one, I would not have the guts to step through one.
Or if I did so by accident I probably wouldn't do so twice in the event I managed to get back to where I came from.
What can I say.
I'm a giant wuss.
Then again the curiosity and the fear of missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance would be warring with my terror of being trapped forever in an alternate reality or time.

I expect it isn't a choice I'll ever need to make but, y'know, never say never.

And never look at doors in quite the same way again either.



*Except I wouldn't douche-ily abandon somebody who saved my life and ensured I succeeded at an impossible task. I'm looking at you, pretty much every man in every Greek myth ever.

**You know, countries we just happen to have relationships with who also like weird shows like that and want to cross-market/co-produce their kids shows.

Curiouser And Curiouser

At some point about a week ago an ice-cream freezer appeared at the bottom of my stairs. The sort you get in get in milk bars*.

You know the type. One of those long bench affairs with the sliding glass top and the brightly hued casing that is supposed to remind you of the joy and brightness of a summer's day... or drive you into an ice-cream buying frenzy by hypnotising you with vivid colour combinations and dynamic shapes.

This, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, was all a bit of a puzzler.

I didn't order a large cooling unit for frozen dairy snacks and no-one else in the building seems to be doing anything with it. As far as I can tell.

I mean there is a blue plastic tarp taped over the lid.

Probably to protect the glass and to prevent people from opening the lid and leaving it open to the elements and potential damage.

Probably not to hide the fact that it is filled to the brim with carefully sectioned and stacked dismembered body parts, like a better padded version of the Parisian catacombs**.

I mean it's not plugged into anything so if it is full of cadavers it'll probably start to smell soon. It's been pretty cold recently but not that cold...

Y'know I'm going to be really disappointed when I sneak a look under that tarp and find out it's empty or full of old Tupperware or something.

I always assume abandoned items are full of bodies. Well, except for that shipping container near my Dad's work. I'd just watched Resident Evil 3 when that one turned up so I figured it'd be full of... other things, but technically they'd still count as bodies so...***

What with all the lovely exciting crime dramas we have entertaining us and giving us unrealistic fantasies about the heart-pumping excitement of forensic labs, is this assumption surprising?

You can't open a port-a-loo door, garbage skip, investigate an abandoned car, frolic innocently near the local storm drain outlet or wake up in a strange bed without having a cadaver leap out at you in an exciting way just in time to usher in the opening credits. Anywhere a body can fall out in a startling manner, a body will fall out in a startling manner.

Of course I probably shouldn't automatically follow my first instinct on these sorts of things given that I am the kind of person who whilst having a shower will wonder if my having Awakening by The Damning Well blaring away in the background makes it more likely that I'll be attacked by a psychopath****.

I know I'm just being fanciful.

There's probably a perfectly logical reason for the ice-cream freezer to be there.

I'm pretty sure one of the fellows downstairs owns a couple of businesses. He's probably just keeping the fridge there until it can be delivered to its end destination.

Or until I play something appropriate on the stereo so he can stab me up in the shower and then put my bits in the ice-cream freezer.

Either/or.

*Uh... corner stores? Small shops with overpriced merchandise. Like the 7-11 except independently owned so they get to use the excuse of being 'small business' and 'battlers' to justify charging $4 for a 1-litre carton of milk.

**I shouldn't have watched the entire first season of Dexter in one night, I really shouldn't.

***Does that count as a spoiler? Nah, I don't think it does.

****Or, y'know, vampires.