#IfIHadATimeMachine: My Temporal Mystery Tour, Revisited.

BBC America is asking what viewers would do if they had a time machine. Heck, I've been refining my mental checklist of destinations since high school, over 35 years ago. I wrote about a few of them in my first blog, Musings from Mâvarin, back in 2004. I think that list is overdue for an update, don't you?


Destination One is, and pretty much always has been, a whistle stop tour of Beatles prehistory. We'd start off at the Woolton Parish Church Garden Fete, in a field behind St. Peter's Parish Church Hall, Woolton, Liverpool on 6th July 1957. This is where John Lennon first met Paul McCartney, and was impressed that Paul could play the Eddie Cochran song Twenty Flight Rock. Paul was soon invited to join John's band, the Quarry Men, and eventually accepted. A reel to reel recording of the Woolton Fete gig actually exists, but how much better it would be to have a state-of-the-art digital recording. Of course, when I first had this dream, "state-of-the-art" for portable recording was a cassette tape recorder!

From the Woolton gig we'd move on to some Silver Beatles era gigs in the Cavern Club and elsewhere. Then it would be on to Hamburg, to record the Beatles in their five-man line-up with Pete and Stu, as well as a Ringo gig with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, before finishing up with the very day at the Cavern in Liverpool when Brian Epstein went to check out the band that recorded My Bonnie for Polydor.

My other time travel destinations, most of them, are a bit less iconic, except for the really obvious one. Yes, I'd want to visit first century Galilee and Judea. If I go there, my time machine had better be the TARDIS, because I'll need those translation circuits.

But never mind all that, because there is fun to be had closer to home. Did you know that James Thurber played himself in 88 performances of A Thurber Carnival on Broadway in 1960? Well, he did. That's pretty remarkable considering the man was blind by then, and died the following year. File and Forget is one of my very favorite Thurber pieces, and I'd love to see it performed by the great man himself.

And who could resist a few dozen visits to Disneyland throughout its history? I want to ride the phantom boats and the flying saucers, take a rocket to the moon, and be shrunk inside a giant microscope, singing Miracles From Molecules. And I wouldn't be done there until I had Walt's autograph!

Aside from checking in on historic and cultural events, a time machine would be handy for shopping, particularly in the 1960s. John and I would undoubtedly buy some Eames and Miller furniture, a few copies of Amazing Fantasy #15, and every toy, game or china animal figurine we ever owned as kids, or wanted to own. We'd bring back stock certificates, exotic clocks, original Disney art from The Art Corner, and rare Tiki mugs.

But perhaps the most important thing to do with a time machine, assuming that something like the death of JFK is a fixed point in time that should not be messed with, is to visit the BBC in the early to mid 1970s. Faced with a storage problem, and unaware that such home video formats as VHS, DVD and Blu-ray would soon make many of their old recordings commercially viable, the BBC junked many early Doctor Who episodes, along with Jame Burke's coverage of the Apollo space program and other important programmes. My plan would be to sneak in just before the junkings started, digitally reproduce every Doctor Who tape I could find, and make multiple return trips to retrieve things from the trash and preserve spare copies of everything. The first lost Doctor Who serial I would watch would probably be Marco Polo (1964), but there's tons more beyond that. One I'm particularly looking forward to is Power of the Daleks, which is both the first Second Doctor story and the one that helped to inspire Mark Gatiss to write "Victory of the Daleks."

Look at me, saying I'm looking forward to the results of a time travel trip, just as if I thought it would actually happen. But the time is, silly thing that my brain is, I kind of do.

And yeah, eventually I would get around to checking out the future. And, if I could, go sideways in time as well to check out alternate realities. That's the only way to meet face to face with certain people who loom large in the imagination: Zorro, Doc Brown, and, if we allow for realities with completely different laws of physics and biology, Mary Poppins, Gandalf and, of course, The Doctor!

Karen

Karen and Dalek at Gallifrey One. Photo by John Blocher, February 2004.

Weekend Assignment #300: Best of the Memes

Way back in April, 2004 (I think it was April 15th, but it's hard to tell from the surviving evidence), John Scalzi posted the very first Weekend Assignment writing prompt on his AOL Journal By the Way. Nearly six years later, it's time to post the 300th Weekend Assignment, with particular attention to the memes we've been using ever since to fill up our blogs:

Weekend Assignment #300: In 2004, John Scalzi proposed the first Weekend Assignment, designed "to give AOL Journalers something to post over the weekend." Over the years the blogging community has had a huge proliferation of blogging "memes" - questions to answer, themed photo challenges, lists, writing prompts and quizzes of all sorts. What internet memes, if any, do you participate in these days?

Extra Credit: Is there a particular category of memes you particularly enjoy, as a blogger or as a reader?

The shot above happens to be my only known screen capture of John Scalzi's old blog By the Way, taken one night during a temporary AOL glitch. (Ya think?) When Scalzi started the Weekend Assignment in April, 2004, the AOL blogging platform, AOL Journals, was officially less than a year old. Blogging was a new concept for most of its participants. To help them find things to do with their new electronic soapboxes, Scalzi started posting a Weekend Assignment every Thursday night, and a roundup of participants' results the following Monday or Tuesday.

I learned about By the Way and the Weekend Assignment about six weeks in, posting my first response on May 31st. The first WA I did asked for vacation recommendations for places you've never been. My entry, Temporal Mystery Tour, was for trips that could only be made by traveling in time.

I'm not quite sure whether I participated in every single Weekend Assignment from then on, but I certainly haven't missed any since that spring and summer. The weekend Scalzi won the Campbell Award, he understandably had other things on his mind, and forgot to post a Weekend Assignment. I pinch hit with one of my own, which he graciously picked up in By the Way a day or so later. When AOL Journals shut down at the end of 2007, Scalzi stopped posting Weekend Assignments (except for once) and gave me permission to continue the meme myself. Two years later, here we still are, although I post later in the weekend now. The Weekend Assignment no longer has the dozens of participants (occasionally more) that Scalzi used to garner, but I very much appreciate those of you who do play along, and everyone who turns up to read the entries.

Over the years I've only had a few other memes I participated in regularly. Scalzi's second weekly meme, the Monday Photo Shoot, was one of the first themed photo challenges. I was there from the first week in 2005, and have never missed one, although occasionally I've squeaked in at the last minute. That's another one I took over from Scalzi, only to pass it on to Carly, who does a much better job with it than I did. Her Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot is still posted each Sunday night. The third meme I always, always do is, of course, the Round Robin Photo Challenges, which Carly and I started together in 2005.

Beyond that, I've mostly avoided taking on my memes, largely because I didn't want to feel obligated to put in the time and effort for them, in addition to the three mentioned above. For a while I was answering a Writer's Weekly Question, but I didn't do it every time and the meme eventually folded. I was even more spotty in participating in Feline and Furball Friday, balancing other people's cat photos with my canine ones. I like both the photo shoots and the writing prompts, as long as they offer scope for me to write something with a little depth on a particular subject. I tend to approach both writing and photo memes the same was, with both words and pictures, albeit with more emphasis on photos for the photo memes. I have zero interest in memes that call for a series of one word or one sentence answers.

How about you? Do you play along with some of the photoblogging memes, generate lists of random facts when prompted, or ponder literary writing prompts? Do you do as much meme-blogging as ever, or not so much, or more and more? Please tell us about it in your blog, or in the comments thread below.

While you're thinking about that, let's have a last look at last week's assignment. For Weekend Assignment #299: Time's Up!, I asked whether there was anything you wanted to get done before the "aughties" were over. Because of the holidays, only Julie managed to post a response this time out. Click on her name below to read the full response:

Julie said...

Long ago I learned to resolve not to make any resolutions. Long-term plans, yes. Even those fail, but long-term plans and goals are - for me - more achievable than those spur of the moment "it's a new year and I must do something!" plans.

1. Please post your entry no later than Friday, January 8th at 6 PM. (You can also post your response in the comments thread, but a blog entry is better. )
2. Please mention the Weekend Assignment in your blog post, and include a link back to this entry.
3. Please come back here after you've posted, and leave a link to your entry in the comments below.
4. Visiting other participants' entries is strongly encouraged!
5. I'm always looking for topic ideas. Please email me at mavarin2 on gmail.com if there's a Weekend Assignment theme you'd like to see. If I use your idea, you will be credited as that week's "guest professor."

I hope to hear from you soon. Happy New Year!

Karen

Weekend Assignment Results: When You Went

It was a somewhat light turnout for Weekend Assignment #200, which makes me think I should steer away from more sf topics for a week or two. I've created a file of future WA questions, and will select one shortly. Meanwhile, let's see what people decided to do when offered a trip in a time machine:

Would it matter if the offer came from this guy?

Saqib: "For my first trip I would want to travel into the past. But I probably wouldn't, due to concerns about contaminating the timeline."

Mike: "My first trip would be back to see Apollo 11 go to the moon. I'd want to be where I can see it launch and then watch the footage as it happens on TV."

CV Rick: "With all these possibilities, I have to go with my own curiosity. I would go back four thousand years and find out just what the hell those nutty islanders were doing with Stonehenge, and how it looked when it was maintained."

Florinda: "But if my friend were to persuade me to take a ride in the Wayback (or Way-forward) Machine, I think I'd like to visit when and where my parents grew up - New York City in the 1940's."

Unfocused Me: "Stay home? Are you kidding? This is the opportunity of a lifetime! See important historical events, resolve debates, maybe even engage in a well-placed assassination or two!"

Kiva: "If I only get one trip, it would be to go to Florence, Italy in 1504. Florence was clean and new. I'd use various disguises so I could experience it all."

I must say I was surprised by the level of caution exhibited by some of you about changing history. While it's true that many a science fiction plot, from "The City on the Edge of Forever" to "Back to the Future," has shown disastrous results, somehow I thought you guys would be willing to ignore or explain away the dangers. I will leave you with words of wisdom on the subject from two veteran time travelers:

"Tell you what, then, don't step on any butterflies. What have butterflies ever done to you?" - The Doctor

"The future is whatever you make it - so make it a good one!" - Doctor Emmett L Brown

I'll be back in a bit with the new Weekend Assignment. Hmm, now which one shall I....

Karen

Weekend Assignment #200: When Are You Going?

Here we are at a milestone: the 200th-ever Weekend Assignment. John Scalzi assigned the first 196 of them, which makes me very much the new kid still in that respect. I've been participating since Weekend Assignment #7, though. In honor of the 200th in the series, I'm going with a topic that's been on my mind since high school, over 30 years ago.

Weekend Assignment #200: You've recently become friends with someone who unexpectedly reveals that he or she has a time machine, all tested out and ready for adventures. Your friend offers you one round trip to anywhere, anywhen, backwards or forwards in time. What's your destination? Or would you rather just stay home?

Extra Credit: The first trip is so wildly successful that your friend offers you one more trip, this time in the opposite direction. When are you going this time?

Okay, so it's not the most original topic evah. Scalzi actually wrote a time travel assignment, back on February 24, 2005; but its focus was a bit different, limited as it was to witnessing an historical event. Also, for Weekend Assignment #100, he asked for future facts about yourself. And I gave time travel-related answers to a few topics that weren't really designed for that, including the first Weekend Assignment I ever wrote about. Nevertheless, I think there's enough play here for some fun entries, especially from the science fiction fans among you.

As for me, if I only get one trip, I'm going for the sure thing, something I know I can see on a specific day, and that will have emotional resonance. That all boils down to one key word for me:

Beatles.

We know what the Beatles were up to, day by day in 1962.

Thanks to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn and others, we know where the Beatles were and roughly what they were doing pretty much every day from 1961 on, and a lot of days before that. With my friend's help I could arrange to visit the Garden Fete at St. Peter's Church, Woolton on Saturday, 6 July, 1957, just in time to see John Lennon meet Paul McCartney for the first time. Skipping over the Quarry Men and Silver Beatles eras, and their Hamburg gigs at the Indra Club and the Kaiserkeller in 1960, I could zero in on Thursday, 9 February, 1961 at lunchtime, when John, Paul, George and Pete, unadvertised, played the Cavern Club for the first time as Beatles.

But I think I'd have to go for Sunday, 19 August, 1962, their first Cavern appearance with Ringo instead of Pete Best. The following Wednesday, the 22nd, Beatles were again at the Cavern Club, appearing before television cameras for the first time as they performed Some Other Guy. Maybe my friend would let me stick around for that session, too.

For a trip to the future, of course, I can't look up the most likely date and place in advance. I would skip the next fifty years or so, on the grounds that there's a good chance I'll see that chunk of the future in the normal course of events. Too far forward, though, there's a chance the planet isn't there any more, or is uninhabitable. Assuming my friend has already done some exploring, I think I'd simply ask him (or her, but I think it's him) to surprise me.

So how about it? Travel in time in your mind, or, at least plan the trip! Write it up in your blog or journal, and come back here and leave a link to your entry in the comments. (A link to this entry in your blog would also be appreciated.) Then stop back in a week to see what everyone else came up with.

Karen

What Do You Want?

As I left work this evening (a little early because I worked through lunch, I was at a stopping point, and hey, it was Friday), I found myself asking myself the following question:

If I could have anything I wanted right now, what would it be?

It was one of those almost-random thoughts my brain throws at me when I'm tired; it doesn't necessarily mean anything, except in a very vague and general sense. Nevertheless, I decided to try to make sense of the question, and answer it.

First of all, what kind of "anything" did my subconscious have in mind? Anything to eat? Any situation? Any possession? Any goal? Any experience? Perhaps I meant all of them, so I started answering each of the variant questions:

Food? Not hungry right now, thanks.

Situation? There's always the world peace thing. But I also found myself wishing for an equally implausible, more personal situation, such as suddenly turning up in another world.

Possession? Well, a time machine, obviously, and a personal teleportation device (transmat).

Goal? Well, you know that one: Karen Funk Blocher, author of the bestselling Mâvarin books, the first of which she has adapted to screen as a major motion picture, coming soon to a theater near you! Yes, that's another world too, isn't it?

Experience? That's the big one. As I got in my car, I thought of a number of ways life could suddenly get more interesting, if the multiverse would only cooperate:

• Driving home beneath a swirling pink sky
• Having a conversation with a talking dog
• Really, really meeting Kate and Ariel
• Visiting Mâvarin
• Meeting Walt Disney
• Saving the world from some surprising menace, with the help of a mysterious stranger
• Discovering I can do magic

See, I don't want much, just the impossible! I want to do something ever so much more interesting than making numbers add up, or watching DVDs, or even going to Disneyland. I want excitement, adventure and really wild things, but not the sort the real world has on offer. I'm never going to go to Guatemala with other St. Michael's parishioners, hike into remote villages and set up clinics. It's just not gonna happen. But I can handle chatting up a talking dog beneath a swirling pink sky, as long as neither one kills me or totals my car.

And it occurs to me that this is one of the main things fiction is for. We can't go around traveling in time or saving the world; at least, most of us can't. We can't meet a handsome and mysterious man on a windswept hill, or thwart the plans of Russian spies, or solve a murder that baffles the local police. But we can read about those things and experience them vicariously, in the safety of our own homes.

It's probably not that rare a dream, either, wanting outrageous adventures without sacrificing personal safety. I was thinking tonight about good old Del Merden, Rani's best friend. He's always been a sort of Tom Sawyer character, a teenager with an active imagination, a sense of adventure and a knack for getting into scrapes. But there's more to him than that. Sure he's bored with doing chores in his uncle's stable, but when he leaves home it's not just wanderlust. He wants to help Rani, and he wants to find the missing King. In short, he wants to do something that matters, to really make a difference in the world.

And what about you? What do you want? Tell me what Food, what Situation, what Possession, what Goal, what Experience would please you about now. Better yet, write it up in your blog and leave a link back here. Do you want a safe and comfortable life, or a dangerous and fantastic one? I really want to know!

Karen

typos fixed later, after 9+ hours of sleep!

More Pictures from A Scrapbook of Impossible Travels

"So, Karen," said Ariel Allegra. "After all your whining last week about my not taking you to see the Beatles at the Cavern Club, I find out in your blog today that you've been much further than 1961 Liverpool. You've impersonated an alien and met a Dalek. I'm not so sure about that black hole, though. It could be a wormhole, maybe, but not a black hole per se."

"Oh, it's fake," I said. "It's all fake. The bald alien prosthetic was part of an attraction at Universal Studios over a decade ago. The Dalek belongs to a fan who was at the Gallifrey One convention in 2003. The vortex wormhole thing was a camera flash in a mirror."

"In other words, you lied," Ariel said. "You lied with pictures."

I have visited the Old West.

"Did you read the text at all?" I asked. "I didn't lie. Not exactly. The Weekend Assignment was to edit a photo into looking different and unusual. I tried to edit them into being illustrations for A Journal of Impossible Travels, or, failing that, photos in A Scrapbook of Impossible Travels. It's not a lie if you tell people you're being deceptive."

I am a Leaper - or possibly I'm immersed in the Time Vortex.

"I see you're doing more of the deceptive photo editing tonight," Ariel said. I'd already uploaded my pictures by that point, after several prior attempts ended in failure due to a Blogger glitch.

Walking on the Moon is much easier
with a force field than a space suit.

"That's right," I said. "I was up way too late last night, and I wanted more time to mess around with the topic."

"And these five pictures are the result," Ariel said. "You overused that cowgirl pose rather badly, don't you think?"

Thomas Jefferson and I relax during a three hour tour.

"Yes, I did, but it saved me a lot of time, and I don't have all that many pictures of myself to work with," I said. "What do you think otherwise?"

Walt Disney shows fourteen-year-old Karen
a maquette of an animatronic pirate.

"Oh, they're passable, I suppose," Ariel said. "But what you've done is more an exercise in wish fulfillment than in photo editing."

"It shows, huh?" I said. "But that's what I do. I can't really travel in time and space, so I invent ways to do it vicariously, with words and pictures."

"And fictional daughters of pandimensional wizards," Ariel said.

"If you like, yes," I said. "As far as this world knows, you exist only as a foil for my ideas."

"Flatterer. See if I take you to meet James Thurber after this."

"But you weren't going to do that anyway."

"Probably not."

"If I am your foil, how is that working out for you?" Ariel asked. "I turned up tonight without Kate, and now I can't help but notice you're stuck for an ending to this blog entry."

"Yes," I said. "I blame you."

"That's gratitude for you," Ariel said.

Karen (with Ariel)

Real sources:

• photo of Karen at Little Painted Desert County Park, 1986
• photo of an Old Tucson tour guide, 2005
• Little Painted Desert again, originally without Karen
• 1970 photo of Karen and her dad, with Thomas Jefferson portrait previously used in this old blog entry.
• 1971 photo of Karen by Joel R. pasted into a scene from the Disneyland 10th Anniversary‎ show.

Stop MDC

Black Rose Kate has no problem dispatching history's villains

"Aye, I thought ye'd be at the computer," Black Rose Kate announced. I looked up, startled. There she was, standing in front of my L'Engle books, my semi-fictional pirate friend, looking down at me with her usual air of amused tolerance. It was Thursday night, ten minutes past one in the morning. "Ariel said that you wanted to see me," she explained.

"Hi, Kate," I said. "Yes, I did. But how did Ariel know that?" Our mutual friend Ariel travels in time and between universes, meanwhile attending Croatoan College, which is itself transdimensional.

Kate shrugged. "She reads your blog. You mentioned me in tomorrow's entry. And that black cloth rose of yours was in one of your photos this week, so we knew you were already thinking of me. So tell me. Am I here for a particular reason, or is this a social call only? Did you want my expert opinion on that Johnny Depp movie Ariel has spoken of for the better part of an hour tonight?"

"Oh, I didn't go on about it that long," Ariel said, coming into the room behind Kate. "Hi, Karen."

"Hi, Ariel. And no, it's not about Pirates of the Caribbean. I have a Weekend Assignment to do, and I thought Kate might be able to help. You too, Ariel."

"Oh, one of those," Kate said, looking none too pleased.

I pasted the relevant text into this entry, and let them read it over my shoulder:

Weekend Assignment #168: For reasons best left unexplained, you have been allowed to excise one and only one person from the course of history. Which person would you choose to remove from history and why? That's right: Any one person you think history would be better without, you can now expunge. So who would it be -- and how do you think history would be changed with their absence? See. Told you it was one that would make you think.

Extra Credit: Favorite historical-themed movie. Because why not?


"I see," Kate said as she finished reading. "Because I have dispatched my share of enemies on the high seas and elsewhere, it pleases you to seek my advice before murdering some historical villain before he is ever born. Is that it?"

"Pretty much, yes," I said. "And you're right. I do think that preventing Nero or someone like that from being born is a kind of murder."

"But you don't have a problem with--" Ariel began. I was starting to think she was a mind-reader.

"Shh," I interrupted. "I don't want to talk about that. The point is, I wouldn't have the right to stop someone from ever existing."

"And you think that I, the bloodthirsty pirate, would be more ruthless about such things, and thus could give Scalzi an answer in your stead," Kate said.

"Yes," I said. "And if not, you can at least discuss the idea with me, and I can report on that."

"As I notice ye be doing already," Kate observed.

"Your problem with this is that you lack perspective," Ariel said. "There are plenty of worlds in which there was no Hitler, or no John Wilkes Booth, or no Nero. On the multiverse level, it's not that big a deal."

"It is if you're in a world where he did exist, and now you decree that he doesn't," I insisted. "That creates a whole new universe, right? And that's on top of the loss suffered by family and friends."

"I have known several families," Kate said, "that benefited greatly from the death of a father or brother or son. A woman my own age once thanked me for killing her husband, who had chained her and beaten her. Pick someone sufficiently awful, and the world is certain to benefit."

"Well, I did think about choosing someone whose nonexistence would mean lives saved," I said. "I could go with Adolf Eichmann or Josef Mengele, but that violates the spirit of disallowing Hitler."

"Who were these people?" Kate asked.

"Eichmann helped Adolf Hitler, the ruler of Germany, organize the murder of millions of Jews and Romany and other people," Ariel said. "Mengele conducted horrific medical experiments on some of their victims before killing them."

"Right," I said. "But it's all part of the same horror. And I don't think there is an equivalent person in more recent examples of genocide. Usually it's groups of people killing other groups for the crime of being a 'them'. So I was thinking along the lines of a Richard Speck, or Timothy McVeigh - you know, someone who personally killed a lot of people."

"Aye, that makes sense," Kate said. "But ye didn't need me to figure that out."

"I still don't like it, though," I said. "I still wouldn't do it. Would you?"

"Aye, with hardly a moment's thought, nor any regrets," Kate said. "Oliver Cromwell is another one I would not mind seeing gone from the world."

Ariel was rereading the text of Scalzi's assignment. "You know, I don't think you read this very carefully," she said. "It doesn't specify that one person was never born. It only says excised from history. There might be other ways to do that."

That got me thinking. "Such as?" I prompted. I was starting to have a few ideas, but wondered what Ariel had in mind.

"Lock the person up so he or she can do no harm," she suggested. "Send the person back in time, or forward, or to another universe."

"Where the person can do even more harm in unknown ways," I said. "That's no good. But if we can stop the person from becoming crazy or evil or both, that would take him out of the history we know."

"Mark David Chapman," Ariel suggested.

I nodded. "I suppose I should go with McVeigh or someone like that anyway," I said, "or the older of the two DC snipers, or one of the serial killers up in Phoenix last year. But Chapman...I don't know. If you could catch him young, get him the right treatment, keep him on the right medication and away from the Dakota, that still only saves one man's life, technically."

"Yes, but what a life you'd be saving," Ariel said.

"Whose?" Kate asked.

"John Lennon," Ariel and I said together. "Of the Beatles," I added.

Before I could explain further, Kate pointed at me, a look of triumph on her face. "Aye, that's the one!" she said. "I like the Beatles. Ariel even took me to the Cavern once."

This made me angry. "Why didn't you take me with you? You know how much I want to go."

Ariel shook her head. "We bend the rules quite a bit even just coming to see you, even for a quick conversation. Your version of the world isn't meant to have time travel, and I can't let you go wandering the multiverse with me. We're pushing the fiction boundary as it is."

"Fiction boundary? What's that?"

"It's a way of gauging relationships between realities, and the relative safety of certain kinds of interactions," Ariel explained. "As my supposed creator in the context of this reality, you can receive my visits, as long as they can be passed off as fiction. But the moment you actually go into the past with me, or off into a world in which the Beatles have been reunited for the past twenty years and are currently in the studio, you damage every timeline you touch. Sorry."

"Whereas I have no such restriction," Kate said. "Say the word and I will take this Chapman person from history, my way."

"You know I won't condone that," I said. "Much as I'd like to."

"And anyway, you can't do that either," Ariel told Kate. "John Lennon wrote a song about you. That makes you fictional to him, too."

"He did? When was that?" I asked.

"1982."

"But he died in 1980," I said.

Ariel looked thoughtful. "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Kate does go after Chapman," she said.

"Then that's my choice, if I have to choose someone," I said. "Just don't actually kill him if you can help it."

For a moment Ariel looked tempted. Then she shook her head. "No, sorry," she said. "His death is too well established in your world. But we might be able to do it in another world, a few universes over. Are you game for it, Kate?"

"Aye, always. Let's go, then."

"Bring me back a CD," I said.

Ariel laughed. "Can't do that, either," she said. "but if you're very good, I'll find a way for you to at least hear a later album, at least once."

They left, then, and I was alone again, finishing up this entry. I don't know how serious Ariel was. She could easily have been making up all those rules as she went along. And I'm still a little worried that Black Rose Kate will kill Chapman rather than try to get him into treatment, or at least locked up.

Imagine there's no murder.

But oh, wouldn't it be something, having another 26 1/2 years and counting of new music by John Lennon?

Oh, drat, I didn't ask my guests about the Extra Credit. I'm not big on historical movies, unless you count Back to the Future or Camelot. Lawrence of Arabia was kind of amazing, although the long version really is too long. Oh, I know. My Favorite Year. That's based on a very specific history period: the days of early television, and the live comedy variety show.

Karen

Stories of the Weekend Assignments

Weekend Assignment #156: Repost your favorite Weekend Assignment from the past three years. Or, if you can't choose, post the first Weekend Assignment you ever participated in.

Extra Credit: Should we keep doing the Weekend Assignments? Or after three years, should we give it a rest? Let me know; I'm curious.

When I first saw this assignment this afternoon, I thought it would be quick and easy. All I needed to do was look up Holiday Picnic with Tom and Abby and Friends, repost it, and I'd been "rolling with puppies," or whatever it is that Willow says in that one Buffy episode. Then I decided I ought to actually look and see what else I've written at Scalzi's behest since June 2004. I started with a search for Weekend Assignments on Musings from Mâvarin, and never really got beyond that. After all, between the two blogs, I've written well over a hundred of these things. It really wasn't possible for me to read (or even skim) all of them tonight.

But I did read or skim a bunch of them, and I found two contradictory patterns emerging:

1. Despite the occasional overlap, there really has been a huge variety of subject matter in Scalzi's assignments.
2. Despite #1, I personally tend to write responses that hook in to my own obsessions. Several times I've worked in some kind of time travel story or premise, relating to The Beatles, Disneyland, Doctor Who and certain early U.S. presidents. I've written about my novels, about books by L'Engle and others, and about friends, teachers and relatives of the past and present. And when the assignment was something that didn't interest me, such as pie, I tend to dispose of it as quickly as possible and find a tangent to carry us someplace more interesting.

That last thing under #2 led to the entry I'll be reposting tonight instead of the picnic with Thomas Jefferson. Oddly enough, it involves the same "Scalzi's clone" photo that Scalzi himself reposted today. I don't like it much, and wasn't terribly interested in captioning it, but that was the assignment that night. So I did it, and then I had an interesting conversation about it with my pirate house guest, Black Rose Katie Specks. Enjoy.

Thursday, November 3, 2005
9:17:00 PM MST
The Clone and the House Guest

Weekend Assignment #84: Take a look at the picture below. Tell us what you think is going on in the picture. You can write as long as you want, or as short as you like -- even a photo caption works. Now, it's a fairly weird picture, but I thought that would just give you more to work with. Ready? Here you go:

John Scalzi is finally forced to admit it was a bad idea to crib
his cloning experiment from a Treehouse of Horror episode of
The Simpsons.

Extra Credit: Would you like to see more "explain what's going on in the picture" sort of assignments?

No. Not as such. There's not enough material here for writing one of my patented long entries. Yet somehow I'll manage anyway, especially with my nosy house guest asking questions!

"Tell me again who John Scalzi is," Black Rose Kate orders.

"He's AOL's designated, professional blogger," I tell her. "He's there to encourage and inspire people to post in their AOL Journals, give tips on how it's done, point the way to interesting or amusing stuff online, and generally entertain us."

"Then by what authority can he assign you to do anything?"

"Oh, it's completely voluntary. But it gives me something to write about that I might not have thought of otherwise."

"Is this something you wanted to write about, now that he's thought of it for you?" she asks pointedly.

"Not really, but I'm proud of the caption I came up with for it."

"I do not understand it. What is a clone?"

"A clone is an exact copy of a person, like a twin, but made by science instead of nature. It's been done with a sheep and other animals. Nobody's ever really cloned a human being yet, as far as we know, and a lot of people say we shouldn't even try it."

"But the monster on the left isn't an exact copy," Kate points out.

I decide not to mention that "monster" would not be a politically correct term for a "cloned American," even a wonky-looking one like Scalzi's. "That's because the premise of the photo is that the cloning experiment didn't quite work out," I explain. "It's supposed to be a joke."

"Well, I fail to see the humour in it," says Kate. "What does your caption mean, about The Simpsons? You have DVDs with that name on them. Are there clones in The Simpsons?"

"Not that I recall," I admit. "But the fake clone in the picture looks a little like the drawings of Homer Simpson in the tv show."

"There are drawings in the tv show?"

"It's nothing but drawings. You can watch some of the DVDs tomorrow if you like."

"And the treehouse of horror? What, pray tell, is that?"

"It's a series of Halloween episodes of The Simpsons, in which horrible things happen. If a cloning experiment went wrong on The Simpsons, it would probably be in a Treehouse of Horror episode."

Black Rose Kate shakes her head. "I think I have done very well so far in understanding your century; but this explanation remains unclear to me."

"It's not important," I tell her. "Nothing kills a joke faster than trying to explain it."

Kate nods thoughtfully. Then she hits me with a question that I should have expected but didn't. "Am I a clone?"

I look at her. There is no denying that Katie Specks looks enough like me that she could indeed be my clone. It is also true that she still doesn't know how she got here. I can't blame her for wondering whether she might not be who she thinks she is.

"You're not a clone," I tell her.

"Am I a twin?"

"Not of me, you aren't. Perhaps we're related."

"Aye, perhaps. Were your ancesters from England or Ireland?"

"Some of them. I used to jokingly refer to the Irish ones as Viking Irish royalty, the ones who got tired of returning north and became landed gentry instead."

"Aye, I come from the same hardy stock," says Kate. "Mayhap we are relatives. But stay, I have one more question for ye."

"What's that?"

"Am I fictional? You told people that I was a fictional character."

Uh-oh. "How do you know about that?"

"I read the emails you sent to Paul and Gem."

Poor Kate! I'll have to approach my explanation delicately.

"I didn't think you would learn to use my computer so quickly," I admit.

"I find your keyboard difficult to operate, especially the keys with the letters missing. But even I can point and click with the mouse. What is your explanation, Karen?"

"What would you have me tell everyone, Kate? If I post the truth, that you're really here but we don't know why or how, people will either assume that I'm lying, or that I'm crazy, or that I'm telling a story. As a fiction writer, I'd rather they think I'm writing fiction than that I'm lying or crazy."

"You think people will not believe the plain truth?"

"That's right. People just don't turn up from centuries past, alive and well and asking questions."

Kate chuckles. "Fair enough. All right, then. We can pretend that you're spinning a yarn, an it helps you preserve your reputation."

"Thank you."

"But you should have asked me, Karen."

I nod. "Yes. Sorry."

"Aye, well, 'tis unimportant now. Tell me more about The Simpsons. Do these drawings you mention move, like the images in Buffy?"

I think I'll spare you the rest of that conversation.

Karen

Extra Credit: please don't stop handing out Weekend Assignments. It would make me sad.

Some Fictional and/or Time Travel W.A.'s:
Holiday Picnic with Tom and Abby and Friends
Not Your Usual Subscriptions
With the Beatles

Black Rose Katie Specks
An 18th Century pirate looks at the modern world.

• On Halloween and Modern Life
• On Technology and Fictional Pirates
• On Love and Death...and Life
• The Clone and the House Guest
• A Pirate Incognito
• Kate Weighs In
  
• Absent Friends

Portrait of a Fictional Friend

Here's the result of my silly project of the evening: a photograph of Ariel Allegra. You may remember her as the interdimensional traveler who brought Black Rose Kate here for a visit on Halloween night. Ariel is the 20-year-old daughter of a wizard and a ghost - at least, that's the short version of who they are. Ariel has black hair like her father, but it's less curly. Her eyes are green, and occasionally they glow a little.

"Yes, yes," Ariel says impatiently. "They can see for themselves that I have black hair and green eyes, even if you didn't catch them glowing. What else are you going to tell them about me?"

"Well, I mentioned your parents."

"They're my parents. I asked what you have to say about me personally."

"Well...."

Ariel sees my hesitation, and pounces on it. "You don't know what to say, do you? You named my fictional counterpart nearly thirty years ago, but you still know practically nothing about me. You mostly think of me as a multidimensional taxi service for your pirate friend, and secondarily as Joshua Wander's only daughter. I think I'm insulted."

"All right, then tell me what you want me to know about you. And while you're at it, tell my readers."

Ariel chuckles. "That's one way to get out of it."

"Fine, we'll do it together, interview style. Fair enough?"

"Right," Ariel says. "Are you interviewing me, or am I interviewing you?"

"Troublemaker. First question: do you really attend something called Croatoan College, as I wrote at the end of Mall of Mâvarin? Or is that apocryphal?"

"No, it's as real as I am, in quite a few universes."

"Meaning you've been to more than one version."

"No. One version, multiple universes. "

"So you can't change which Croatoan College you attend, in case you get a bad grade or something?"

"There's only one Croatoan College. It's kind of hard to explain, but it vibrates through a whole series of similar timelines, so that it's accessible from all of them."

"What do you study there?"

"You mean, do I study potions with Professor Snape? No. There is a series of four courses in Applied Magic, but overall Croatoan has nothing in common with Hogwarts or Mâton or any other fictional school for wizards. We have comparative physics, and biology, and literature, all the normal courses other schools have, except that they take into account the variations among the worlds Croatoan touches."

"But who would go to a school like that? Wouldn't that curriculum be inappropriate for anyone other than a time traveler?"

"You mean an interdimensional traveler. Yes, it's a little weird, but it turns out there are quite a few of us. Plus Croatoan has a very good reputation. A number of heads of state graduated from there."

"Which reminds me. What about Carl and Cathy, the students who almost became Carli and Cathma? I seem to recall your mentioning them in a note to me. Do they really go to Croatoan with you?"

For the first time, Ariel looks a little embarrassed. "Ah, well, that was sort of a joke." I read about them in Mall of Mâvarin."

"So they're not real."

"To say that for sure, I'd have to visit every universe there is. But the Carl and Cathy I go to school with never traveled via shopping mall."

"I see. Is there anything else you'd like to add?"

"Yes. It's five o'clock in the morning. Stop watching the Benson marathon and go to bed."

"Will you still be here tomorrow?"

"Oh, I never know that. Good night, Karen."

"Good night, Ariel."

And good night, gentle reader.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Photos, Writing, Fiction, Reality

More Adventures in the Old West

In case you think that all I did while visiting Arizona Territory in 1888 was ogle a train and watch a hanging, I've got some more pictures for you.


A good time traveler dresses appropriately for the local norms. But I could not have brought myself to wear this! I dressed ranchhand style, as seen below.


That's me in the cowboy hat, dressed fairly appropriately for one of the most famous boom towns of the era. This is Boothill Graveyard in Tombstone, not the one in Tucson where they took the man I saw strung up. (Boot Hill, a play on the idea of "dying with his boots on," was a fairly common name for cemeteries in the Old West.) The "residents" here include Billy Claybourne, Billy Clanton, Frank & Tom McLaury, someone called Stinging Lizard, and...


...good old Lester Moore. Moore was a Wells Fargo agent in the border town of Naco, Arizona. He was shot to death for delivering a package that was damaged in transit. Ah, those were the days, huh?


Educational opportunities in those days weren't what they are now. Here's one of the first public schools in Arizona. I'd be wary of a classroom where the concept of a right angle is not fully understood.


I'm pretty sure these guys were getting ready to rob a bank. Would they have found something better to do had they had a better education? Hard to say.


These buildings were in a place that was already a ghost town by 1888. Perhaps the fact that the gun shop was next door to the funeral parlor provides a hint as to why the town didn't last.


If you do go visiting the 19th century, try not to get sick or injured - and if you do, don't rely on the local medical facilities. The doctors, surgeons and apothecaries aren't going to have what you need.

Yeah. Arizona Territory. It's an interesting place to visit. But I wouldn't want to live there!

Karen

Eyewitness to History: Arizona Territory

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Share some of your favorite black and white photos. Older pictures are good, but what you also might think about is seeing how some of your favorite color pictures look in black and white -- most computer photo editors will let you make a photo black and white (or sepia-toned -- that's monochromatic, too). This is an opportunity to look at some of your best photos in a new way.

Time to hop in the TARDIS (or the Wayback Machine) for a trip to Old Tucson! As you can see from the quality of the photos, I stuck to the technology of the time rather than bring a digital camera to the past with me.

The railroad engineer, Old Man Funk, shows off his locomotive.
Unfortunately, a desperado set fire to it some years ago.

Another view of the burned-out locomotive.

The train station.

I arrived in Old Tucson just in time for some frontier justice.

From his haircut, I suspect that the man in front of me was another time traveler.

This man was arrested, tried, and hanged in the course of about ten minutes.
He never even saw the inside of a courtroom.

A judge sealed the man's fate from a second floor balcony.

After the hanging, the unfortunate criminal was carted off toward Boot Hill. The child in the photo is another suspected time traveler. I assume he did not visit the past by himself, but he appears to have wandered off. This could have had severe consequences to the timeline, but everything seems to be okay.

The U.S. Marshall, who wasn't a party to the hanging, was philosophical about it.
"These things happen all the time around here," he said.

More time travel photos to come!

Karen

(All photos by KFB, 3/20/05)