Fulcrums
This piece was written very much on a whim and crowd-edited by several unwitting friends of mine (thank you, Jen :). On a slow day I was drawing up a fictional calender system for Iapetus, when I began to ask myself: Who would live there? The marginalized peoples. The big nations have their eyes on the prime real estates of the solar system: Mars, Luna, Europa, Titan and so on. What about all of those other moons and all of the other people’s of Earth? Where will the Africans and and Mexicans and Uzbekhistanis go? Triton, Iapetus, Callisto? Or Janus, Prometheus, Miranda? Even further: To Pluto or Sedna?
I’ve tried to envision a world where the Bengalis were ”helped” to colonize Iapetus.
Fulcrums
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Excellent CS
”Good morning, this is Commuity One FCU, XXX speaking, how may I help you?”
“Hey, good morning. I’ve been trying to contact your Sahara branch, but the number given on the website has been disconnected.”
”I see.”
”I’ve actually tried all of the listed branch numbers and none of them work. Some are disconnected and some just ring out to a voice mailbox. Why are there numbers listed if none of them work?”
”They’re there so that you may contact our branches directly.”
”But none of them work. At all.”
”We have those numbers so that you may contact your branch directly.”
”But it doesn’t work. None of them do.”
”Those numbers are there so you may contact us.”
Community One FCU, you suck.
How many degrees of separation, you say?
One fact about Ireland that I’m at pains to stress is that, within a few degrees of separation, everyone on our fair isle knows virtually everyone else, especially within given communities. Idon’t feel that it’s a stretchto saythat most of the gaming (roleplaying/war games/ccg) community knows almost everyone else, at least by sight. I vividly remember being in Dublin or London over the yearsand meetingby chances a person whom I met at Gaelcon or Gencon.
My mum cranks, as they say, all of this up a notch. We could (hypothetically…of course) drop her out of a helicopter into a pack of ravenous African lions and, lo andbehold, she realizes that why aren’tyou thatbeautiful lioness I saw all those years ago in Dublin zoo? And sure how are the cubs? Great, fantastic! Would I like to come in an havea cuppa?Absolutely! And then they’d talk until the giraffes came home.
Twice now in Las Vegas, a full seven thousand, eight hundred and thirteen kilometre from Galway as the crow flies, have I encountered people who know mum. One in McMullans Irish pub when mum was visiting here, she met some norn fellows who knew her and behold, they talked for half an hour like old friend. Yesterday, I met the O’Connell from Clifden in county Galway, who are touring the whole west coast by car. After a financial windfall through work they decided to take off to the United States for the summer. The two parents in the family both knew mum by sight as they often eat at her workplace when they’re in Galway.
’tis a small world.
Me, elsewhere
