From: Not_Al_Crawford@ed.ac.uk (Not Al Crawford)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Some Peeves
Date: 8 Sep 92 18:24:13 GMT
Reply-To: Not_Al_Crawford@ed.ac.uk (Not Al Crawford)
Organization: Penicuik People's Revolutionary Sheepdog Liberation Front

Peeve 1: Being unable to think of a more interesting subject line.

Peeve 2: Well, Claudio has just left the office to buy something for his
dinner in the Peevacentre. We may never see him again. For, lurking amongst
the shoppers is...the "Jesus Loves You" woman.

She's back and worse than ever! I didn't notice her this morning until, as
I walked past her on my way into the place, the familiar strains of "Do you
know that Jesus loves you?" (*) were heard beside me. Fortunately I can
walk a lot faster than she can, so I escaped, which is probably just as
well since her little speech went on for about a minute this time and was a
miracle of miniaturisation, packing what seemed like the entire new
testament into three extremely long and tortuous sentences.

The woman is the religious equivalent of a proximity mine. Walk within 5
metres of her and she'll start talking at you. As I proceeded away from her
down the centre of the shopping centre towards Peevacentre itself, she
could be heard assailing anyone who came within that radius with "Do you
know..."  etc etc etc. I doubt that she was even there to shop - she
probably just goes there to annoy the shoppers. Well, not *intentionally*
annoy them, I know, but this self-appointed zealous missionary has probably
done the cause of Christianity in the Kings Buildings campus area more
damage than, oh, let's not beat about the bush, than the Inquisition did
for Catholicism in Spain.

What I'd really like to do is persuade her that the place she should be
doing her preaching is Roslin, or maybe Auchendinny (see the next peeve).
Then at least she wouldn't disturb anybody.

(*) Correct response, delivered in a suitably sepulchral voice, is "Yes,
but my master Satan, lord of darkness, pays dividends." If you can
accompany this with, say, glowing eyes, infernal breath or making your head
spin round whilst spewing green vomit, so much the better. Bonus points for
managing a suitable echoing evil laugh to round it off.

Peeve 3: Last Thursday I had a Sublime Bus Peeve Experience. Not content
with being late on a particularly cold and stormy night, it managed to
break down half-way home. This meant transferring to another bus, a bus
that went through....Roslin and Auchendinny (if you can imagine the
Twilight Zone music playing over the last few words of that sentence it's
much more effective).

On my now not-so-recent visit to the US, I remarked more than once on how
it was quite nice being somewhere where it got truly *dark*. Travelling
along unlit roads in the depths of the night is something you can't do too
easily in this part of the UK, since the population density is such that
there's almost always at least the lights of one town in sight and most of
the roads are lit anyway.

I'd forgotten about Roslin. After a bus drive along a dark and winding road
we hit Roslin. I can see no good reason for the existence of this village.
In Roslin there's the historic chapel and...houses. Oh, and a high security
mental hospital nearby. That's all. Penicuik, godforsaken armpit of the
world that it is, can at least justify it's existence by once having been
the site of a large paper mill (now cunningly disguised as a Scenic
Industrial Wasteland), but Roslin has no similar excuse for it's landscape
blemishing presence.

Just what *is* the point of Roslin? I did once think that it's proximity to
the mental hospital might have something to do with it. Perhaps it existed
so that unjustly incarcerated (and invariably amnesiac) heroes, having
escaped from the Gary Stollman Memorial Rubber Room at the hospital, might
observe the Strange Goings On in the village, discover that the population
have been taken over by Bloblike Bodysnatchers from the planet Zog and call
in Professor Quatermass to save the day? But I had to rule this one out
since the simple fact is that there're hardly any Goings On in Roslin at
all, let alone Strange ones. A bit disappointing that, since the prospect
of a huge green vegetable-creature stomping Roslin into a heap of rubble
did hold a certain appeal.

The quiet you get in Roslin at 9pm on a Thursday night is the sort of quiet
that in any normal town you'd have to wait until after 4am on the coldest,
darkest night of the year to experience. This is strange, since the high
school I went to was the same one the kids from Roslin went to and it was
pretty well known that if you came from Roslin you were either a) a
homidical psychopath or b) worse. You could tell the school bus that came
from Roslin quite easily by the steel bars on the windows. Yet here was
Roslin, quiet and peaceful. Where were the yobbo...erm, children? In
Penicuik smashing windows probably...

Worse was to come though. For not only did this other bus go through
Roslin, it went through Auchendinny. The quiet you get in Auchendinny at
9pm on a Thursday night is the sort of quiet that in any normal town you'd
have to wait until some time after a major nuclear exchange to experience.
Of course, compared to Auchendinny the town of Roslin is a bustling
metropolis. What puzzles me is just why Auchendinny needs a bus service
anyway? The village is only a couple of hundred metres from the main road,
diverting a bus through there is like diverting a bus along my street
because I can't be bothered walking round the corner to catch one. Besides,
it's not as if anybody actually *lives* in Auchendinny - a multi-seater
hearse would be a more apt public transport service than a bus. Those who
*do* live there make it impossible for the bus to get through the village
anyway, by parking their cars along the road.

The answer usually trotted out is that most of the (live) population of the
village are elderly and that since Auchendinny nestles in a very deep,
narrow valley (i.e. everyone in the village lives on a steep hill) it's
unfair to expect frail elderly people to have to walk up/down this hill to
get to the bus stop.

So why can't they move? This is quite straightforward - most of these
people have been living there for as long as the village has been there
(since sometime in the 18th century, I think) and not only would it be
callous to expect them to leave the homes they've lived in for the past
couple of centuries, but there's also not much market demand for
unrefurbished, unmodernised 18th century hovels these days.

So they can't move out. Surely, however, there must be a cheaper solution
than running bus services five minutes off their routes? (not a major
problem in the case of the 15, a council-subsidised service that visits
every minor village or hamlet in the area, doubling back on itself once in
the process). I have the solution!

I propose that the inherent potential energy in living halfway up a hill be
used to the benefit of the inhabitants. If each pensioner were given a set
of roller skates and pushed off down the hill, they'd *almost* be able to
get up the other side. A simple solid fuel rocket booster would give them
the required extra push to get right up the hill at the other side. Hell,
if you made the boosters big enough and could vary the amount of fuel you
could probably dispense with the buses altogether and use the hill as a
launching ramp to deliver the old dears directly to their desired
destinations, and a lot more quickly besides. Returning to the Auchendinny
Geriatric Launch Facility wouldn't be a problem, since they could catch a
bus for the first part of the journey and then trundle down the hill again,
perhaps to be caught by arrester wires when they passed their own house.

It may perhaps be slightly more expensive than re-routing the bus, but I'm
sure that the speed, convenience and sheer excitement of this option make
it a viable alternative. Besides, if you sell tickets and let the
pensioners control the firing of the boosters themselves (giving the
fascinating possibility that one might ignite the booster while still going
*down* the hill) the service'd probably run at a profit.

Peeve 4: A sneaking suspicious that certain individuals may think the above
solution falls under the broad heading of Being Disrespectful To The
Elderly. I beg to differ, since the Auchendinny Geriatric Launch Facility
would create jobs and improve services as well as providing considerable
entertainment value. Even the "Aged People Crossing" roadsign that Claudio
has just sketched out, depicting a ballistic grandmother on rocket
propelled roller-skates going down a steep hill has a dignity all of its
own.

--
		Not Al Crawford - Not_Al_Crawford@ed.ac.uk
      "Brothers, sisters, we don't need this fascist sheepdog thang"
Newsgroups: alt.peeves