Trouble in Spacetime
January 9, 2012 in Blogs
As Blackadder and Baldrick travel to the future, our Examiner temporal anomalies series follows them with Blackadder Back & Forth part 5: space, only to discover that they have nowhen to go. There being no past, there can be no future, and our story crashes. Don’t worry; apparently neither Blackadder nor his writers were aware of this, and so they continue their journeys in our next article.
My day didn’t exactly crash, but a substantial chunk was given to a family adventure, viewing a rising full moon in a heavily overcast night sky over a dark ebbed ocean, and as we returned westward from the shore snow found us at our dinner stop. It was not a major delay, but I do seem to be running late. Too, my youngest has come home with the request that I ensure he gets to work in the morning, so I can’t stay up too late.
I have started work on Watchmen. There’s not that much to it in temporal terms, but what there is can be entirely confusing. Just the one conversation between Jon and Laurie about her affair with Daniel which he does not yet know about but already knows he will learn about later in the conversation is enough to confuse any temporal analyst. It will be a short series, but a rough one to write, I think. After that, my sons have tracked down our copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time, so I’ll probably turn my attention to that bit of humor next.
On the home front, if Gaming Outpost is home, we have more from Eric Ashley. In Practise Bits: Knife he explores the other side of whether and when women might be soldiers. (This should not be confused with his earlier piece of the same title.) Practise Bits: Hunt puts a high-tech warrior on the track of giant spiders. Practise Bits: Ride reads like an interlude connecting parts of a longer story; but then, he gives this to us as writing practice, and it helps to practice all the parts.
–M. J. Young
JTM said on January 11, 2012
It’s possible that the interaction with Shakespeare eventually settled into one where Blackaddler asks the inventor of the ballpoint pen for his autograph and convinces him that making plays is a silly way to spend his time.
M. J. Young said on January 11, 2012
Eh. Maybe. But seriously, he recognizes the guy he bumps into because he picks up the copy of MacBeth with the cover page. Is he going to recognize the inventor of the ball point pen? I think I might recognize Edison, but I’m sure I would not recognize Bell, or Watt, or Daimler, or any of a hundred other inventors whose names I could attach to an invention; and there won’t be any photographs of him.
So if there is some way that he might recognize the inventor of the ball point pen, he might do that–but then, would he forget to take his pen, if he could say that he owned the pen with which the inventor of the pen signed the autograph?
–M. J. Young