The state of TIAH
July 5th, 2006
in 1865, Christian radicals William and Catherine Booth, preaching that “He comes bearing a sword,” founded their Christian Militia, which later turned into the radical terrorist organization the Salvation Army. Their tactic of recruiting the down-and-out of London's slums and turning them into “soldiers for the Lord” swelled their numbers in the 1870's and led to the Prime Minister calling for their arrest. When police came for them, though, armed resistance from hundreds of men and women drove them out. The government called out its own forces, and the Booths were forced to flee to America, where they reorganized in Pennsylvania. Many of their soldiers from England had followed them, and they found willing recruits among the poor in Pennsylvania's mine country. In 1881, they took over Carbon County and organized it as a theocracy under the Booths. Although the US government was more tolerant that the English, they had to step in when the SA began making raids on surrounding communities, ordering the Booths to disarm or be arrested. The Booths backed down, maintaining their hold on Carbon and contenting themselves to send out recruiters to the larger cities in the north. Although they still have the occasional flare-up with the government, you can still see these Christian Soldiers in the larger cities of the northern US, with little buckets set up to ask for “money for the Army of Salvation.”
in 1946, Micheline Bernardini turns heads at Paris' Piscine Molitor swimming pool when she shows off the latest creation of fashion designer Louis Reard. The revealing two-piece swimsuit, allegedly “smaller than the world's smallest bathing suit” in Reard's words, barely covered the young dancer, and was quite popular with the young men at the pool. Soon, liberated women across France and Europe were ordering the new suit from Reard, who named it the Atoll. He derived the name from the atomic testing on the Bikini Atoll, saying that “my design is like an atom bomb going off in the world of fashion.” Critics said that the bomb seemed to have stripped away all sense of modesty, leaving only tiny little scraps to cover oneself with. Nevertheless, the Atoll became standard beachware over time, and indeed, Reard's original creation looks excessively modest in comparison to some its successors – if the Atoll gave the critics fits, some modern suits would cause them to have heart attacks.
in 2017, after 2 days of talks, broken only briefly by sleep, food and calls back to the Pokor to let everyone know they're all right, the Quarai translator is able to carry on a conversation with the aliens from the Dyson sphere. They are curious as to where the Quarai and humans came from, and how they got to the sphere. “I haven't been able to translate astronomical data,” the Quarai translator told them, “so, I don't know where we are. But I get the impression from them that there are no stars near Pr't'(whistle) that sustain life. We are very far from home.” The Quarai are almost quivering from excitement at this, but Commander Patterson and the humans of the Eagle are dismayed. “How do we get back?” At this point, she would settle for the cold moons of Amandara again; her hope of seeing earth once more was becoming a dim memory. The translator held out hope - “They think they've seen this golden device before. Race visited them, long time ago, same way we did, but they knew how to operate the device. They want to take a look at it.”
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