As we know from a great percentage of the time travel canon – knowing when and where an eclipse is going to happen is of supreme value.
You can win bets at the local public house, trick a tribe of natives to worship you as a god, or convince the Knights Templar that you have a red-phone connection with The Guy In The Sky.
Seriously, in the need-to-know ranking of all time travel knowledge, with the exception of how to make gun powder, knowing when the next solar eclipse will occur is the thing you need to know.
And so I thought I was going to be all clever and list for you here every solar eclipse that has happened since the dawn of civilisation.
The above photo was taken in 1940. But look at the guy in the at the right with the hip shades. He’s not even trying to fit in, or disguise the fact that he’s from today times. He’s just standing there in all of his future-looking glory and acting like he fits right in.
But he doesn’t fit in. And he’s demonstrating exactly why it’s so important to plan ahead.
Today we know those crazy two-wheelers with a giant front wheel and tiny back wheel as a “penny-farthing.” But back in the 1800′s when people were insane enough to ride these things on the regular, they were called… bicycles.
It wasn’t until well after enough people had taken a “header” – which basically means they tried to stop and were thrown head-long over the handlebars – that the modern equa-wheeled, or “safety” design became popular and the big-wheeled bikes became known as “ordinary” bicycles.
You’re going to need a few things with you when you travel. You can’t take everything, and it would be best if what you take fits in your pockets.
Your kit should focus on two things – keeping you alive, and keeping you sane. Ideally, we’d want to stick with things that do both.
So you may be wondering… how would my smart phone fit into this? I mean, unless I travel to a time in a very narrow range, it’s not going to work as a phone anyway. And the batteries barely last a day. Why would it be so important?
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that
of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no
problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a
broadminded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is
also no problem about changing the course of history – the course
of history does not change because it all fits together like a
jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things
they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the
end.
The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main
work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time
Traveller’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you
for instance how to describe something that was about to happen
to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward
two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described
differently according to whether you are talking about it from
the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the
further future, or a time in the further past and is further
complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations whilst
you are actually travelling from one time to another with the
intention of becoming your own father or mother.
Douglas Adams – The restaurant at the end of the Universe
Ok look. You need to understand one thing about me. Well, two things, but we will get to the other thing in a different post.
So one of the things that you have to know about me is that I love Dr. Who. The new series, and even more the classic series. I might have even stayed up to watch a classic Dr. Who on my honeymoon when they used to air it on PBS at 1am after Saturday Night Live. Im sure most of you understand. My ex-wife didn’t. Go figure.
And Dr. Who obviously travels through time. All the time. That’s his thing. So the show is totally on topic here and fits right in.
But this is not a Dr. Who fan page, so I want to treat Dr. Who as I would any other pop culture representation of time travel. If I am not deliberate and careful about that, this will become a Dr. Who fan page. And I don’t want that.
That having been said, The trailer for Dr. Who Season 7 is finally out!!!!!
Holy man-alive it looks awesome too. It has everything – tons of Daleks, Weeping Angels, Amy Pond, River Song, dinosaurs on a spaceship!
Seriously, I want to watch the whole season beginning to end… tonight.
So, the cover story here is that a british duo, Dave Askwith and Alex Normanton, invented the “fictional” Jacob Von Hogflume in their book, ”Signs of Life.” This book, according to Amazon:
is a book for anyone who has ever wondered whether pulling that lever would really summon the guard or just pour gravy on the driver’s sausages, a hilarious compilation portraying one man’s crusade against a world of senseless public notices and warnings.
And they supposedly made crazy signs and posted them all over Britain, took photos of them and published a coffee table book of them.
When I was a kid, I made bows. And arrows. Of a sort. I’d find a springy stick, pull some threading from a rotting old carpet I’d found in the woods, and fashion it into a functional weapon. Well, technically functional. It would shoot the arrows that I made out of sticks.
For a time, if you were a cousin or family friend near my age I would eagerly offer to make one for you, and we would spend an hour of our afternoon shooting sticks up into trees and across the yard.
It was fun. But if I had gotten sucked back to Robin Hood days… i’d probably have been SOL with my springy stick and carpet thread.
You don’t want to be in the same boat. A well-made bow and arrow could allow you to catch larger game, or defend yourself against agressive cavemen.
Soooo… they found it. The Higgs Boson. The God Particle. The last piece of the Standard Model puzzle. The end of the road for particle physics research. Ok, not that last one. Turns out there are yet still a few crumbs to be found in the couch cushions of the cosmos.
But what does the finding of the “Aitch Bee” (as we call at it around the WAIN? water cooler) mean for time travel?
Could this be an actual photograph of the real Rudolph Fentz, Accidental Time Traveler?
So, if time travel were real, if it actually happened, we would know it right? I mean, all the Big Events of History would have tons of time travelers showing up to see them. If there were a way for folks to pop back and watch Old Abe give his Emancipation Proclimation in person, or watch Shakespeare’s players pounding the boards at The Globe – who wouldn’t do that?
(Of course, this brings to mind an interesting possibility… maybe no-one in Will’s time was interested in his work at all? What if the majority of the attendees were time travelers in perfect period garb. Perhaps their attendance made his plays popular, which made future time travelers want to see them, which made for more time travelers in attendance, continuing on in a positive feedback loop… Maybe Hamlet would have been a bust if it weren’t for time travelers? But if this is so then how did they know how to fit in in Elizabethan England? Why, by reading When Am I Now?, of course! Im going to call this, The Popularity Feedback Paradox. We can explore it in future posts.)
Anyway, if that’s happening we don’t know it’s happening. Either it isn’t, or time travelers are really sneaky (and have access to excellent period costumes, and read all the great posts to appear on this blog in the future.)
But aren’t there some signs? Some evidence that time travel happens? Hasn’t anyone leaked through the sands of time and appeared out of place in the space-time continuum?
Well, funny you should ask. Indeed, this has happened many times, and they have been documented.
