Number 53 - October/November 2008
For Point of Divergence #53
In keeping with tradition, deadline kinda snuck up on me, so I'm busily
writing away here at the last moment. Fortunately, this provides a
convenient excuse for any grammatical amusements, unclear comments,
and other problems I might have to otherwise own up to...;)
We
haven't been doing too much 'round here but trying to avoid the heat.
However, back in August, we headed down to San Pedro to see the Los
Angeles Festival of Sail – specifically the “Parade
of Sail” where a whole flock of “tall ships” come
into the harbor, “parade” down the channel, and finally
dock at San Pedro so that you can take tours of them.
It actually proved to be quite fun. Oh, because they were deep in the harbor (and quite a bit down the relatively narrow channel between San Pedro and Terminal Island) they were hardly coming down under full sail. But they still mostly managed to have at least some canvas up and the parade of fifteen, sixteen ships (ranging from actually historical sailing ships to movie reproductions, from eighty feet to nearly three-hundred) was a nice Friday's fun.
Oh, and I got to see that most AH of sailing ships, the Coast Guard Barque Eagle...
After the parade, we went on tours of some of the ships (including the “HMS Bounty”) and generally mucked about Ports 'O' Call before heading home later that afternoon, day of fun complete.
Now, we were going to head back a second day, catch some of the ships we missed and so on, but unfortunately I discovered that perhaps not applying sunblock when you're going to be spending six, seven hours standing in the sun right next to the water is ill-advised.
Worst sunburn I've had in at least two decades.
Well, because it sounded interesting, I bought the book Lost States: Real Quests for American Statehood as it promised to have some interesting “What If” potentials for states that didn't quite make it.
Problem is, it turned out to be interesting all right...but not that useful. Every “wannabe” state in it is limited to two pages in the book – one of those a map of where it is/was/would have been, the other a one page description of where it is/was/would have been and why it isn't. But one page isn't nearly enough in most cases.
Oh, I guess a “Lost Dakota” (a scrap of the Dakota territory that didn't get assigned to anyone when the territory was broken up into states) can be handled in that one page. But covering the whys and wherefores of “Franklin” or “West Kansas” or “Baja Arizona” proposals and eventual failures can't really be (from a AH standpoint, anyway) handled on a single, two-column page...especially when he usually takes up a big chunk of that page with another picture related to the ur-state.
To sum: It's a nice book to kill about an hour with on a slow afternoon, but from our – admittedly, rather non-standard - viewpoint, not a really useful one.
Now, on with the show!
We
haven't been doing too much 'round here but trying to avoid the heat.
However, back in August, we headed down to San Pedro to see the Los
Angeles Festival of Sail – specifically the “Parade
of Sail” where a whole flock of “tall ships” come
into the harbor, “parade” down the channel, and finally
dock at San Pedro so that you can take tours of them.It actually proved to be quite fun. Oh, because they were deep in the harbor (and quite a bit down the relatively narrow channel between San Pedro and Terminal Island) they were hardly coming down under full sail. But they still mostly managed to have at least some canvas up and the parade of fifteen, sixteen ships (ranging from actually historical sailing ships to movie reproductions, from eighty feet to nearly three-hundred) was a nice Friday's fun.
Oh, and I got to see that most AH of sailing ships, the Coast Guard Barque Eagle...
After the parade, we went on tours of some of the ships (including the “HMS Bounty”) and generally mucked about Ports 'O' Call before heading home later that afternoon, day of fun complete.
Now, we were going to head back a second day, catch some of the ships we missed and so on, but unfortunately I discovered that perhaps not applying sunblock when you're going to be spending six, seven hours standing in the sun right next to the water is ill-advised.
Worst sunburn I've had in at least two decades.
Well, because it sounded interesting, I bought the book Lost States: Real Quests for American Statehood as it promised to have some interesting “What If” potentials for states that didn't quite make it.Problem is, it turned out to be interesting all right...but not that useful. Every “wannabe” state in it is limited to two pages in the book – one of those a map of where it is/was/would have been, the other a one page description of where it is/was/would have been and why it isn't. But one page isn't nearly enough in most cases.
Oh, I guess a “Lost Dakota” (a scrap of the Dakota territory that didn't get assigned to anyone when the territory was broken up into states) can be handled in that one page. But covering the whys and wherefores of “Franklin” or “West Kansas” or “Baja Arizona” proposals and eventual failures can't really be (from a AH standpoint, anyway) handled on a single, two-column page...especially when he usually takes up a big chunk of that page with another picture related to the ur-state.
To sum: It's a nice book to kill about an hour with on a slow afternoon, but from our – admittedly, rather non-standard - viewpoint, not a really useful one.
Now, on with the show!
In theory, this special issue of Metachronological Geographic does a compare & contrast of three different alternate world's Californias. In the "real" world, all three of the "Island California's" in question have been discussed at one point or another in POD.
The top left one (where it's next to Alaska) is, in a weird way, a "future" California (after it's drifted north for another fifty or sixty million years) mapped onto current day. Mind you, had California drifted like that, Alaska (and especially the Aleutians) would look totally different as well...but then no one would recognize it as Alaska, so I cheated. When I was making it, the file got named “Alaskalifornia.”
The middle-right one is of course from my Isle of California timeline.
Like previous covers, the barcode actually does read "POD 52 200807." There's also a "Verse 218 Edition" as a nod to Charlie Jade's terminology.
There's a bunch of cities named on all three islands, but one city on each is named (as you move down) "Point," "Of," and "Divergence." And, no, you can't see them on the cover as printed.