A couple of Italians kid hacked the Space Race… this is officially the coolest thing I’ve read in a long time
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/1302/lost_in_space.html
Then, on 28 November 1960, the Bochum space observatory in West Germany said it had intercepted radio signals which it thought might have been a satellite. No official announcement had been made of any launch.
“Our reaction was to immediately switch on the receivers and listen,†said Achille. After almost an hour of tuning in to static, the boys were about to give up when suddenly a tapping sound emerged from the hiss and crackle.
“It was a signal we recognised immediately as Morse code – SOS,†said Gian. But something about this signal was strange. It was moving slowly, as if the craft was not orbiting but was at a single point and slowly moving away from the Earth. The SOS faded into distant space.
17 hours
I watched with a rather perverse fascination as the liquid yellow tentacles felt their way along the aisle towards my feet.
I should probably do something, I thought.
Fortunately, the train leaned over as we started down a sweeping left turn, and the stream of urine abruptly tracked right. It disappeared under a row of seats, promptly reappearing between the feet of the man across the aisle from me. He gazed at it bemusedly for a moment before jumping up with a startled oath and plucking his briefcase off the floor.
The wellspring's mother, meanwhile, bounced her giggling child a few times on her knee to get the last drops onto the floor.
That was hour three of seventeen.
The Shanghai World Expo is in full swing, which makes things like getting to and from Shanghai -- even if you're just passing through -- a little more difficult than normal. Hotels are mostly booked solid, so overnight layovers are tough to arrange. Tickets for planes and trains are unusually expensive, if they can be had at all.
And so it came to be that Jing Jing and I had to buy tickets from Shanghai to Wuhan, normally not too difficult, a few days in advance.
We first tried the normal lower middle class preferred level of train travel, an overnight hard sleeper (ying wo / 硬å§). These are 3-tier bunk beds, essentially a thin futon mattress slapped on top of a sheet metal plank and bolted to the side of a train carriage. Not terribly uncomfortable, and you get to save money on a night's accommodation.
No go. All sold out, even for the goober train that made all 16 stops between the two cities, leaving Shanghai at 1pm and arriving in Wuhan the next day at 5am.
So we looked at the middle class preferred level of travel, a soft sleeper (ruan wo / 软å§). These are rather thicker futon mattresses folded onto sheet metal planks bolted in two tiers to the side of individual compartments, and as a final luxurious touch they usually put a rose in a little plastic vase on the compartment's table. Posh.
But also no go; they were just too pricey. To be fair, they were only 400RMB per bunk, which works out to a little under $60. But seeing as we were both without steady income, it made sense to save money where we can.
So we opted for the only other available option, seventeen hours of hard seat ( ying zuo / 硬座 ) goodness on the goober train.
Hard seats are the working class berths, cloth-covered benches that fill a train car end to end; 3-person and 2-person benches across an aisle, with tiny tables between them. Also common in these cars are "standing tickets" (zhan piao / 站票), which are exactly what they sound like; standing room only. You get to take a break in someone's seat when they get up to go to the bathroom, but otherwise you're pretty much on your own.
These rides are usually hot, sweaty, noisy, and crowded. The babies and toddlers in these cars, unlike those of richer parents on planes or the soft sleeper cars, wear pants with slits cut in them rather than diapers, and they generally just whiz on the floor whenever they feel like it. Shoes with waterproof soles are a good idea, and keep anything you even remotely care about off the floor.
Likewise, many people in this economic bracket tend to be fairly blase about littering and spitting, and you'll get a fairly rich mixture of mucus, chicken bones, ramen wrappers, and other assorted treats under and around the seats, so heading to the bathroom can quickly become a game of "let's not step on the slime."
Once you actually get to the bathroom, that's where you learn to really appreciate the value of the saying "it's about the journey, not the destination." The bathrooms on these rides are notoriously filthy; the cars generally run out of water before the final stop, so you can usually expect a fair amount of piss and shit to welcome you upon your arrival.
After one or two visits to these restrooms, I started the practice of fasting for about eight hours before any long haul train ride.
At any rate, if you're not one of those lucky individuals who can sleep anywhere at any time, you quickly learn to adopt that half-conscious doze which, if not exactly restful, at least fends off possible small talk from your neighbours.
Anyway. No point to this post, I'm just killing a little time while I wait for Portugal to finish sending North Korea home from the world cup.