The Babel orifice

Again, another of those things that spawned from a peculiar dream. It was about wings, cultists and killing people. And lights, I think.
---
Time are changing, the population is growing. While we're getting by these days, the future may tell a different story.
In the early months of 2059, a worldwide initiative began. In order to make more room for housing, areas of beauty and historic interest would be remodelled into cheap apartment blocks. The original articles would be recreated using the latest virtual reality technology, allowing the world to experience them in the utmost comfort and convenience.
One of the last areas to be destroyed was Barden tower, North Yorkshire. A simple enough job, just run a wrecking ball through the base and watch as the upper half of the tower slid out of sight...
Wait, what?
Experts travelled from around the globe to witness and study this apparently natural phenomenon; a hole in reality, about 200 feet across hung in the sky supported by nothing. It didn't even appear to be doing anything interesting. No unspeakable horrors burst forth from it, nothing fell out, it was just a hole. Early scouting operations revealed that it lead to a curious land, a place where the sky was a perpetual, unbroken blue and the ground consisted entirely of what appeared to be discarded plastic, metal and rubber waste, spotlessly clean but damaged and bent beyond all use or recognition.
A few things happened. As word got out, the army were the first to take action, deciding to conquer this new land in the name of the crown. They set up small base camps, small strategic areas were fortified, others were destroyed. This achieved next to nothing. The army withdrew a few months after their initial occupation, leaving the site free for all manner of oddness to enter it.
The first civilians were the adventurers. People leading expeditions, trying to discover anything of interest. The regular explorers soon realised that it was rubbish all the way across. A neverending landscape of waste roughly three quarters the size of our Earth but lacking any water. Digging machines were deployed, most by wealthy oil tycoons attempting to cash in on an untapped landscpae. This revealed, several broken machines later, that it was garbage all the way down, too, but some of the metals were composed of an alloy unlike anything known to us. It could be bent slightly but seemed completely resistant to any attempts to pierce or otherwise damage it.
Second to enter was the media. For a few weeks, the news was filled with helicopter footage live from what had been dubbed "the Babel orifice". This lead to the occasional dogfight between rival sky-bound news reporters, but casualties remained minimal.
Soon after came the free spirits, thinkers and outcasts. Some were using this hole as final proof of the existence of God (or gods) almighty and would argue long into the night. Some saw it as the universe extending us a warm greeting, welcoming us to a new plane of existence, believing it to be a utopia, free from air pollution and commerce. Many believed the hole to be a god in itself and formed a number of cults.
Science, however, stood in the background. It observed all the little people flitting around the hole and it waited. Waited for them to lose interest. Science constructed a rocket. It would discover the source of this madness once and for all.
As the mighty space rocket Chronicle was rolled up to the launch structure, the assorted men, women and crazies looked on in interest. Men in severe white suits with clipboards who weren't even interested about what was in there, they were just building barricades and erecting a missile of some sort, all in complete, eerily professional silence. The rocket was built, the call went out to our world's fittest and bravest individuals and fully trained, suited and booted, they took their supplies and boarded the Chronicle, bidding a tearful farewell to their families. A flash of fire, a rush of smoke and the rocket took off, leaving a plume of smoke in its wake through the endless cerulean skies.
Up it went. Instruments and crystal clear broadcasting equipment from the rocket told the world how far they went.
10km
30km
65km (jettison the primary fuel tank
70km (the primary fuel tank fell to Earth with a thud, taking out the launching apparatus)
90km
The world looked on in awe. Another minute was all they had before they ran out of fuel and had to eject, but the sky showed no signs of ever ending. Onward they flew, ever upward, ever towards shining blue oblivion.
And then it vanished.

The rocket stood, suspended by some unseen force but still trying to spend its fuel payload. This ran out and was ejected, but the rocket rmained suspended gaining no further altitude. Instruments indicated an atmosphere was still somehow present, so cautiously they opened the airlock and peered out. Peered out at two large towers exerting some kind of invible force, holding them steady. In the near distance, a small city and below them a crowd of humans. A man broke off from the pack and addressed them through a loudhailer.
"Well howdy! Took you long enough to find us, guys."
After a long discussion, the crew of the Chronicle learned what had happened. The Bermuda triangle and almost every area fabled for causing people to vanish were actually freaks of nature. Holes that opened up onto a parallel world. People had spilled through slowly but surely into an alternate world, almost identical to ours but lacking any civilisation. Since the only people to find this place were generally explorers, thrillseekers and people looking to debunk urban myths, the population was made up of, generally, brave and learned citizens, causing technology to advance at an alarming rate. This world had already cured cancer and developed an AIDS vaccine, but was unable to return home.
"It's the holes, y'see" said their leader as the rode the train towards the city. "They're like... kinda like valves, right? Stuff goes through 'em one way but it can't go back, so people fall into this world all the time but damned if we can open the doors again. We owe you pretty big for that."
"You do?"
"Yeah! We learned how to detect dormant holes a couple decades back. We've been building the force towers around each of them now hoping to trap and object in there to keep the portals active, if you see what we mean. Kinda like a vacuum cleaner salesman jammin' his foot in your front door."
Slowly, a tunnel was built. A huge tube that was expanded to increase the size of the hole then extended to the surface where the Babel orifice lay. The constant stream of media and military attention had been enough to hold our hole open for around 16 months, since its discovery, so coming back was no trouble.

Some years later, the reason for all the waste in the garbage dimension was discovered. A hole on the other side of the world from our portal opened periodically, spewed out some waste and closed within moments. An attempt at communication was made by firing a message capsule through (sending a manned craft was impossible, the hole opened barely wider than was reuired to unleash its heavy payload then closed again). After a week, they wrote back. This world was a celestial rubbish tip, the dumping ground of the gods (or some sufficiently advanced race, at least), and while they were interested to know that people were living on their tip, they had no wish to communicate with us further.
They did note, however, that we were very lucky to have chosen to live on their non-biodegradable waste site. Apparently the celestial compost heap unleashed an odour so powerful that its strength could be measured in newtons.

Culinary ballet

Hello again you lovely people.
Well, maybe not all of you. Maybe you're not all lovely. Maybe there's only 3 or 4 of you, maybe there's... yeah, I've seen my readership stats. There's about 3 or 4 of you.

Hi! It's been a while, so let's break into this gently.

I thought today that we'd discuss ballet. Now I'm not gifted with toes that twinkle, much as I'd like to believe, but I think we all have the spirit of ballet in us, and it's unleashed whenever we're in a small kitchen.
Picture the scene. You're cooking something, someone comes in to do one of the following:
Ask how long it is 'til dinner
Get a drink
Have a chat
"Help"
ACTUALLY help
Look like they're helping so there's less chance of them being on dish duty

Now picture that it's not a big kitchen. That you've sensibly got room for one person working the stove and one at the worktop if NOBODY MOVES. But you need a pan now and they need a knife.
Oh dear.
What follows is quite extraordinary. You will either collide and argue or slide around each other perfectly in synch, tracing a quite beautiful path in an attempt to reduce undesired physical contact. Or to increase it, whatever floats your boat. You'll twirl, sidestep, maybe a little piroutte but you'll barely notice it.
Cooking can be, at times, a quite complicated and beautiful thing, even before you've decided on what you're going to eat.

Everyone's a winner

Luck and religion, I reckon, go pretty much hand in hand. They're both completely nebulous concepts, you can neither see nor interact directly with luck or your chosen deity(ies), but they're terrifically powerful concepts that, for many of us, are a tremendous source of strength.
Let's look at this in depth:
Religion normally centres around the worship of one of more figures which are the personification of certain concepts. Like Christianity, God isn't any one thing, he's a combination of 3, each of which kind of represent all that's good about humanity. Luck tends to be given an idea of a physcial form, too, in the form of the Lady.
Religion rarely works when you appeal to it directly. Luck is much the same.
Religion is far more powerful is you receive something that appears to be as a direct result of your worship when you're really in need. If you pray for an ailing relative and they recover, it's miraculous, but if you pray that it won't rain on the day of your trip to the beach, it's just a nice coincidence. Likewise with luck, getting a free coke from the vending machine's pretty groovy, but having your number come up on your last stack of chips on the roulette wheel is amazing.
Luck and religion are only really efective if you believe. Faith is key. If you don't truly believe, it's easy to pass off good fortune or apparent divine intervention as coincidence.
Being overly reliant and vocal on the subject of luck or religion is an instant ticket into and out of some social circles.
A whole lot of people have made a whole lot of money out of capitalising on people's needs in this area.
Both have prayers. Gamblers will offer up bargains and pleas, as will the most devout worshipper in times of crisis.

Is luck, fortune, fate, whatever you call it a kind of religion in itself? One with no concept of an afterlife, one eternally devoted to the now, to the fragile balance of hope and limitless despair?
This one's really been interesting me, lately.

The Fear

I fear a lot of things. Awkward social interactions (if I think someone's going to be annoyed with me, if they've a history of being annoyed with me, if I think things are going to go badly quite quickly and so on), fire, the people I care about getting hurt, my bank balance... normal stuff. But fear is a primal reaction, isn't it? It's something we've had for years that's mean to trigger a fight or flight response and while it's possible to overcome your fear, so stare it down and make it something you don't fear any more, it's a little difficult depending on what degree of brown it may or may not inflict upon your trousers.
So why are we also afraid of really stupid things?
Triskeidekaphobia makes me wonder how neurotic we've become as a species that some people actively fear the number 13. I mean, that's in the same realm as burning people for witchcraft because they're old and have a cat, in a way. It's a superstitious throwback to an old time, surely it shouldn't dominate your life.
Phobophobia is confusing. That sounds like a perpetual motion mechanism to me. Being scared of phobias... it's like that speech about having nothing to fear but fear itself.
I wonder if there's a fear of facing your fears? A fear of not actually having any phobias? When society advances, will we have words for fear of new things? Cyborgs? Clones?

My own fears are, I feel, largely rational, but there are some very odd ones:
Butterflies - I've never been able to understand this. The way they flap in your faces freaks me the hell out. I've woken up as a child with a spider crawling on my FACE and I'm not scared of them. It was a little traumatic, too.
Pob - I can't explain this, either, but I'm probably more terrified of him than anything else. Google it, it's a puppet from an old channel 4 TV show that used to spit at the TV screen. It's by the people who made Rosie and Jim, the Teletubbies and in the night garden and every character in that night garden show has his eyes... ugh...
Rotten food - I think this relates back to a time when I didn't realise that my milk had expired, then tried to drink it 2 years ago. This one makes sense, my body should realise that this is bad food and that it shouldn't be eaten, but for it to actively make my skin crawl...

And yet we're sort of obsessed with fear. We have horror movies depicting horrible, horrible ways to die, we have theme park rides that have health warnings, we tell ghost stories and are fascinated with the odd, the strange and the surreal. I've done it myself, I've actively gone seeking things that scare me a little. Is it some desensitisation mechanism? Do we need that little rush every so often to feel more alive? Maybe we need that primal connection at times.
I hope someone, somewhere decides to start a university course on "weird shit that people do", because I'm sure this goes beyond the realm of psychology. I really am.

Someone's in the kitchen with Bio

I cook sometimes. I'm not very good at it, but I keep trying. I thought that this might be an interesting place to host a few of my recipies. I REALLY wouldn't recommend trying these unless you're very desperate.

Bachelor Chow

You're gonna need:
Instant noodles. Spaghetti or regular noodles won't work, you need that packet of flavour powder.
2 Tomatoes
Half an onion (diced)
1 can of tuna
Soy sauce to taste
Strong cheese

Put the cheese in the bottom of a bowl, add the noodles then cover the whole thing in the flavour packet. Add water and microwave. This'll take, like, 5 minutes, so this is a good time to start on the other ingredients. Cut the tomatoes up a bit, open the tuna, then dump everything on the noodles once they're cooked.
If you're quick, you can have this cooked in less than 8 minutes. It's pretty filling, too!

Origin:

During my first weekend of living in my second new flat, I had a little free time before work started. I also had a kitchen full of various foods, a need of lunch but no desire for any food in particular.

Pasta El Diablo

You're gonna need:
A LOT of pasta. Seriously.
Strong cheese
2 tomatoes
Half an onion (diced or in rings, it's all good)
Garlic to taste
Ham
Plain flour
Milk
Anything in the cupboards/fridge that you kinda want to get rid of but don't want to eat.
A sense of adventure. Or alcohol.

Boil the water for the pasta. It should give you time to do everything else. Cut up the tomatoes and onions, shred a nice amount of ham. When the water boils, dump in the pasta and add a fair amount of flour and a good amount of milk to another pan. Get that heating and drop in the cheese in small bits (it melts faster that way). This is your base, a pretty bog standard cheese sauce. From now on, summon up all your courage and dump in anything else you like (into the sauce, I mean), but bear this in mind:
Don't add tomatoes until 2 minutes before the pasta is about to finish. If you do, they'll boil away to nothing and be tasteless.
If you like strong onions, add them with the tomato. Otherwise, about 5 minutes before the pasta is done will do.
Never, ever stop stirring that sucker or you'll get a ring of burned cheese sauce around your pan. This is, however, entirely edible but an acquired taste.

Origin:
I wanted pasta. I had no sauce. I also decided that I needed some nutrition, so added everything in my salad drawer to the pan.

Dire Risotto

You're gonna need:
Rice
Mild cheese
Onion
Mushrooms
Peppers
Courgette
Chicken slices
1 can of tuna
2 tomatoes
2 sticks of celery
Milk
Plain flour

So what I did was cook the rice and add everything to the cheese sauce again, adding the tuna and chicken at the end. I'm now halfway through the initial run of this dish.
I'm starting to feel a little bit funny. I really, REALLY wouldn't recommend this one to anybody. It seems like it might be pretty healthy, though.

Origin:
God only knows.

Exp

People seem to like giving advice to children. It's like the song says, they're our future, teach them well and let them lead the way. The problem I have is that the advice we give to our kids is always useful, yes, it's stuff you need to know, but it's never the really PRACTICAL stuff. The stuff you have to learn through life experience.
I reckon I should start making a list. A list of things that, if I ever have kids, I will tell my child on their 16th birthday. I think there's alesson here for all of us:

If something's genuinely fun to do but it's a job, don't expect to get paid much for it.
If it's tedious or unpleasant to do, you might get paid a lot for it. You're not forced to.
Find things that are both cheap and fun to do, then do them a lot. I take drinking pints of bad coke in pubs and laughing at nothing in particular, for preference.
Work is work. Social time is social time. Personal time is personal time. If you're going to mix them, only mix them with their immediate neighbour and only one at a time (make friends at work, spend your personal time with good personal friends, but don't work when it's time to be yourself and don't mix your personal friends with your work friends as they'll not likely have much in common).
Once you hit 18, meet as many people as possible. Talking to strangers for some reason becomes alright after you've hit a certain age.
Sometimes you'll grow up and not notice it at all and sometimes you'll wake up, feel completely different and never look back.
Never buy a drink that has more than 3 colours in it.
Never buy a drink that has more than 8 colours on the label's logo.
Make as many mistakes as you can while you're young enough to get away with them and to recover from the results.
If it seems like kind of a bad idea, it might not be. If it GENUINELY seems like a bad idea, if you kow deep down that it's a stupid thing to do, it most certainly is.
Do things that scare you. It's unpleasant, but it'll make you a lot wiser and staying in your comfort zone is a great way to never develop.
Don't worry about the little things, but don't ignore them or they turn into the big things. Prioritisation is the key thing.
Be careful about trusting anyone who really seems to want to be your friend. Like, to the extent that they're almost being aggressive about it. They're trying to sell you something.
Likewise, don't trust anyone who starts a conversation with you when you're walking down the street. They're DEFINITELY trying to sell you something. Or trying to mug you.
People who actually look very strange normally aren't as strange as people who look entirely normal apart from one or two very slight things.
Cheese is a reasonable thing to add to anything.
Do something embarassing on occasion.
Find the people that matter in life and make every effort to keep in touch with them no matter what. There's little worse than finding a good friend and then one day having to say goodbye.
Reinvent yourself a few times until you find a style that you're comfortable with, regardless of what other people think of it.
Try new things whenever you can.
And finally, no matter what happens in life, there's always going to be a cup of tea, a bed and a new day around the corner.

E2M3

I don't really know where to go from here.
I've been lucky in a lot of ways. I've always known where I am and where I need to be next. Either the next year of school, college, university, getting a job, whatever, life has been a series of clear goals, nicely laid out.
But now I'm here, I've done everything I wanted to when I was a kid and I've just realised that, really, I've largely done everything I intended to by this point. I've got a car, the social life's sorted out, I lost a bunch of weight, got a job, have a bunch of little adventures planned, so... now what?
Is that it? Game over? But no, that's not right somehow. Life, to me, has what I always thought of as chapters. You're born, you spend most of the first few years learning to walk and talk and such. Then someone plunges you into school and you have to start interacting with strangers, all your life goals change and suddenly the old rules don't quite apply in the same way. It's funny how your entire life can suddenly change in 5 minutes, but still be so very familiar.

There are a lot of different opinions on the afterlife. Most seem to think it's a place where you go and just stop caring about things. I always personally wanted it to be like a holodeck, this big open area where you got whatever you wanted. But part of me hopes that when I die, I'll see the end credits. That my theme tune will play, I'll see the people responsible for making this little adventure, I'll see all the important people involved and then I'll maybe get my score. Someone will stand there at a podium and bring up a screen showing all the things I was meant to have completed, all the little bonus objectives, then I'll get a score or a grade or something. Maybe some xbox live achievements. Perhaps there'll be a new game+ option. Maybe I'll finally get to see the great celestial punchline, because I really do hope that someone, somewhere is finding this whole life business to be amusing.
As I sit here, for the first time with no idea what the future holds, I'm feeling more content than I ever have. Maybe I thrive on a vague sense of confusion. Maybe too many goals are a bad thing and we should just, occasionally, improvise our way through life. It's nice to sit back sometimes and not worry that you're not acheiving much, but you're not failing to acheive anything, either.
I will say one thing about life and goals, though. I've probably learned more (and most of it's had IMMENSE practical value) by going out of an evening than I have in university. It's funny how you can spend 4 years in an educational institution, spend your days researching and wind up being so very naive. But then, I suppose I'm just naturally easy going and gullible like that.
At least, that's what folk tell me.

Man, I'm turning into an old fart. Next blog, I'm just going to talk about booze, cartoons and girls. Lower the tone a bit, even out the average some.


Some day, I will build a time machine. It will be large and shiny and silver and look a little like a dodgem car. I will buy a shiny silver suit and I will visit the past. Approximately 7 months in the past from this date. I will find myself sitting and writing my first entry to this site and thinking "Hey, alliterative blog tags, there's a fun idea!".
I will punch myself over and over until I'm incapable of PRONOUNCING the word "tags". Although I suppose I was stronger back then, so I might just end up having my ass kicked by myself, which would be embarassing.