Traffic

The state of TIAH

November 4th, 2006

Alternate Historian's Note: November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. In 2004, we produced our novel Warp, and last year we got a start on The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion during this annual event. Both of these novels were based on timelines from TIAH – Warp was based on the Mlosh timeline, and Protocols on the Greater Zionist Resistance timeline. Although we posted numerous links to these novels on Lulu, TIAH didn't post any excerpts from them. We're going to do it a little differently this year. This year, the November posts on TIAH will be excerpts from the novel that is being written by us for NaNoWriMo. We will still have Guest Historian entries – Stephen Payne has some already written and waiting – so, if you want to make a Guest Post this month, go ahead and send it to us, and it will appear along with our novel post.

Before(cont.)
Traffic was bunching up early this morning. Steph sat in a line of several other cars. George, getting impatient in the back side, undid his safety belt and slid up behind Joan to read her magazine over her shoulder. Steph tried to crane her head around to see if there was anything blocking her progress that she could move around. She turned on the radio to see if she could find any traffic information, but only got static. “Radio's busted again,” she told the kids.
“We should get one that can play MP3s,” Joan said, not even looking up from her magazine.
“Or satellite radio – that'd be cool, wouldn't it, mom?” George slid over to her now, eagerly smiling at his own suggestion.
Steph looked at him disapprovingly. “I can't help notice you ain't got no seat belt on, boy.”
He flopped back in his seat. “Mom, we haven't moved in, like, ten minutes.”
“Doesn't matter. Your Uncle Chuck'd have an entirely different wife if his first fiancée had just listened to me about that.”
George groaned, but fastened his seat belt. “Not the dead lady story again.”
“She'll keep tellin' it till you listen,” Joan said, her face still buried in her magazine.
“Chuck loved that girl with all his heart,” Steph said, lost in memory. “We all loved her; she was so sweet. But she believed that BS that you can survive a car crash better if you get thrown clear. Guess she learned the truth about that.” The car in front of her backed up a tad, then pulled off a very imperfect 5-point turn and headed back the way they had come from. “I gotta learn a different way to get y'all to school.” She looked around at the other cars in line. Traffic was heavier than usual today. Lots of people looked like they were packed up with junk. “Did the college session let out or something?”
“No, they're still going till December,” Joan said, finally looking up and examining the cars around them. “Wow, they do look like they're moving. Is there another hurricane?”
“We're in the center of the state. Hurricanes can't reach us here.”
“Rita went all the way up to Arkansas, didn't it?”
“Yeah, but it was following a river.”
“Austin has a river.”
“Not one that reaches the coast.” Steph thought about following the guy who vacated his position in front of her, but didn't know another road into town. “Why did I have to live in the country?”

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In 2013, the City of Mississauga reported a dramatic fall in vehicular mansalughter. Put simply, drivers were notorious for ignoring white lights permitting pedestrians to cross. Corners were taken very quickly after light changes in order to beat oncoming traffic. Also by “beating the lights” drivers chose not to decelerate if they did not see pedestrians actually crossing, even if they were approaching the kerbside. Both of these scenarios had caused a large number of accidents for immigrants who thought that the white light might it was safe for pedestrians to cross. The rising population of immigrations caused the Department of Transport to take action, and they turned to telegram technology as a draconian measure. Images of children were picted just after light changes. This huge rise in virtual deaths led to widespread traffic calming. And not a few fender benders, which insurance companies recovered from increased premiums.

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In 1905, the Japanese attack on Port Arthur is frustrated by the arrival of Russian reinforcements. At one stage it looked as if the Tsar would be humiliated by defeat, but after Port Arthur, the Russo-Japanese war drifted into a stalemate.

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In 1979, punk rocker Sid Vicious goes on trial for the murder of his girlfriend/manager, Nancy Spungen. Vicious attempts suicide several times during the trial process, until he is finally placed into custody and put under a suicide watch. He is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. He was paroled in 2002, a shell of his former self.

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In 1727, James Wolfe was born, a British general remembered mainly for his role in establishing British rule in Canada. By 1942, British rule only existed in Canada, with the British Government in Exile, headed by Lord Halifax unexpected guests of the Governor General at his residence in Rideau Hall, Ottawa.

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Stephen R. Donaldson	In 1968, Stephen Reeder Donaldson languished in Vietnam. By inclination a conscientious objector, he had been compelled to serve in the armed forces. Much later, and after dropping out of his Ph.D. program and moving to New Jersey in order to write fiction, Donaldson made his publishing debut with the first "Covenant" trilogy in 1977. That enabled him to move to a healthier climate. He now lives in New Mexico. Donaldson's two year compulsory military duty would be the deep undercurrent of his escapist fantasy writing. In “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever”, the protagonist was a leper struggled with disempowerment in a Land he did not really believe in.
Unbeliever

She came out of the store just in time to see her young son playing on the sidewalk directly in the path of the gray, gaunt man who strode down the center of the walk like a mechanical derelict. For an instant, her heart quailed. Then she jumped forward, gripped her son by the arm, snatched him out of harm's way. The man went by without turning his head. As his back moved away from her, she hissed at it, "Go away! Get out of here! You ought to be ashamed!" Thomas Covenant's stride went on, as unfaltering as clockwork that had been wound to the hilt for just this purpose. But to himself he responded, Ashamed? Ashamed? His face contorted in a wild grimace. Beware! Outcase unclean! ~“Golden Boy”

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In 1727, James Wolfe was born on this day in Westerham, Kent, England, the eldest son of Colonel Edward Wolfe and the former Henrietta Thompson. Around 1738, the family moved to Greenwich, in London.

From his earliest years Wolfe was destined for a military career, entering his father's marine regiment at the age of 13. No other British Officer in North America was to achieve Wolfe's level of disreputation, following his decision on September 13th to destroy the city of Quebec after the winter threatened to overtake the besieging British red coats.

In Wolfe's own condemnatory words, he said “I propose to set the town on fire with shells, to destroy the harvest, houses and cattle, both above and below, to send off as many Canadians as possible to Europe and to leave famine and desolation behind me; but we must teach these scoundrels to make war in a more gentleman like manner."

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In 870, the infidel rulers Ferdinand and Isabella fall to the righteous forces of Caliph Boabdil. Allah saw fit to give the Moors control of Espagne, and from there, a foothold on the rest of Europe, so that His word might reach the poor northerners who had not heard Its beauty.

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In 1903, after appointing a black postmistress to the post office in Indianola, Mississippi, President Roosevelt sent reinforcements along with her to ensure that she would be able to do her job. Roosevelt’s commitment to the civil rights of the African-American population of America gave him a hitherto unmeasured degree of support in the south. His Civil Rights Act of 1904, ensuring the voting rights of blacks across America, is credited with landing him his unprecedented 3rd term of office in the election of 1908.

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In 1960, Senator Joe Kennedy, Jr. threw his hat in the ring for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Kennedy’s inspiring tale of recovery from injuries suffered in a horrific plane crash during World War II made him a natural choice, and he won the nomination handily. He had a little more difficulty defeating Vice President Nixon in the general election, but squeaked by with a margin of half a million votes.

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In 1920, Исаак Озимов was born on this day in Petrovichi, Russian SFSR. Isaac Asimov as he is more commonly known in the West is generally considered by many as the father of Psychohistory. During the 1940s, Asimov's research determined that the House of Romanov was in terminal decline. Without intervention, the Tsarist Empire would soon fall giving way to a barbaric interregnum of one hundred years before a Second Empire would arise. He concluded that it was too late to prevent the fall of the House of the Romanov. Secretly, Asimov put in place the Asimov Plan to reduce this interregnum to as little as a decade, by setting up Foundations within continental Russia.

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StrawBerry	In early 1999, Canadian company Research In Motion (RIM) released the first StrawBerry, using the same hardware as the Inter@ctive pager 950, and running on the Mobitex network. Today the device supports push e-mail, mobile telephone, text messaging, internet faxing, web browsing and other wireless information services. RIM settled on the name "StrawBerry" only after weeks of work by Lexicon Branding Inc., the Sausalito, California-based firm that named Intel Corp.'s Pentium microprocessor and Apple's PowerBook. One of the naming experts at Lexicon thought the miniature buttons on RIM's product looked "like the tiny seeds in a strawberry," Lexicon founder David Placek says. "A linguist at the firm thought straw was too slow sounding. Someone else suggested blackberry. RIM went for strawberry."
Revolution

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In 1958, the following notice was published ~ with due respect to sworn testimony of God-fearing citizens, -
Mr Paul Adolph Volcker is found guilty as charged of usury,-
by magistrates of this good parish of Cape May, New Jersey, -
persuant to Holy Scripture, Mark 8:36 refers, -
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?,-
on this day of our Lord, 1958. Not the potter, but the potter's clay. Amen.

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Brugh Born In Nebraska; Mortensen Enters Rehab

The state of TIAH

August 5th, 2006

in 1911, famed actor Spangler Arlington Brugh was born in Filley, Nebraska. Always an iconoclast, he made his name starring in such costume dramas as Ivanhoe, Quo Vadis, and Knights of the Round Table. His unusual name and quirky sense of confidence endeared him to critics and audiences alike, in spite of initial misgivings at MGM, which wanted to rename him something more common, like Robert Taylor.

in 1962, 36-year old actress Norma Jean Mortensen enters a rehabilitation clinic to straighten herself out. Her husband, comic playwright Arthur Miller, tells the press, “While I may make light of those who drink to excess in my plays, there is nothing humorous about it in real life. Norma Jean needed help, and I was glad that I was there to suggest she get it.” Thanks to this intervention, Mortensen emerged from the clinic 6 weeks later a much more stable person, and later won an Oscar portraying herself in Little Secrets, the movie about her turmoil written by her husband. Miller's first dramatic script was also Oscar-nominated, but lost out to Frederic Raphael for Darling.

in 1981, President Ronald Reagan, after several efforts to force striking air-traffic controllers back to work, fired the 11,000 who had failed to return to the job. PATCO, the traffic controllers' union, immediately brought suit against the Reagan administration, because in addition to firing the controllers, he had tacked on a lifetime ban on the strikers ever being hired as air traffic controllers again. The Supreme Court agreed with PATCO that the lifetime ban was unconstitutional, and forced the FAA to reinstate them in 1986. This defeat, coupled with the Iran-Contra hearings in Congress, is widely believed to be responsible for the downturn in President Reagan's health in 1986, when he was forced to resign and hand the White House over to Vice-President Bush.

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