...
My thanks to the 9 who contributed items for inclusion, and particular thanks to Paul (Borg) who initiated the tradition whereby a 250th review draws on contributions from other members, a practice that certainly saves a lot of effort.
Fellow Ciao members may wish to pit their ... Read review
Advantages: Back to the future Disadvantages: Forward to the past
...initiated the tradition whereby a 250th review draws on contributions from other members, a practice that certainly saves a lot of effort.
Fellow Ciao members may wish to pit their wits against the following PUZZLE – to identify which of these members suggested which of the items included in the time capsule:
Borg
carcraig
claiiireee
greenierexyboy
koshkha
MarcoG
pgn0
... ...The PRIZE is rather a paltry one, I’m afraid: a place on my own Circle of Trust to go to the entrant with the highest number of correct answers.
1. www.ciao.co.uk/Arkopharma_NTB_No_Tobacco_Herbal_Cigarettes__5829500
2. www.ciao.co.uk/Happy_House_British_English_Level_1_Audio_CD_Stella_Maidment__6721356
3. www.ciao.co.uk/Apple_iPod_shuffle_1_GB_Blue__6755898 more
For some time now I have been indebted to my good friend Fiona, who entertains us here under the pseudonym Tallulahbang. What I owed her was a favour; very probably I still do. I asked her how she would like it to be repaid. With a characteristically original idea of what might constitute a favour, she opted to ask me to write her a story.
“What kind of story?” I enquired.
“I would like to be in the story, and I would like you to be in it. You can pick other Ciaosters to feature at some point. The 60s in London would be a good time slot. Failing that, though, 2080 (when I'll be 100) would be interesting. Might I suggest 'Fiona is Brill' as a working title?”
Brill? I looked up ‘brill’ in the dictionary. ‘Flat-fish resembling a turbot,’ it said. Modest as I knew her to be, this was surely taking modesty to excess, and was in any case at odds with her photograph, unless flat-fish were far more attractive in reality (or, at least, in photographs) than one would readily suppose.
Putting that on one side, I thought about period: 1960s or 2080, or both? The requirement to include characters from Ciao decided this one. Few current Ciaoists were around in London in the 60s, and even fewer would remember being so, and those few would be unlikely to thank me for drawing implicit attention to their advancing age. Above all, Fiona herself wouldn’t have been around, not even as brill-spawn.
Of course, fewer still might be around by 2080, but by then they might have left something for the world to remember them by….
It was PFL Day, 2080, and Belfast was celebrating the 100th anniversary of the President’s birth. No one was quite sure what the initials PFL meant. Some said they stood for President For Life; others – their minds maybe full of folk memories of 1960s London – for Peace Flowers and Love; others still offered more obscure versions, such as Pancakes For Lent. Actually, it was none of these, but the true interpretation was buried under 70 years worth of entries in her private guestbook, never to see the light of day again. However they interpreted it, her countrymen were happy to celebrate the day. She had brought peace and unity by applying in government the skills learned during years of teaching kids with special needs, essential skills that her predecessors had unaccountably neglected to acquire.
As the crowds gathered in the streets, the President herself was lounging in her boudoir, amusing herself by watching the florescent film on her fingernails. It was programmed to display whatever whimsical combination of colour and pattern passed through her mind – so much more fun than the nail varnish of her youth, and so much less laborious. In some ways, she reflected, there had been progress during her lifetime. In other ways, of course, the world had deteriorated, but the deterioration was beyond her power to control, so she could shrug it out of her mind with a clear conscience.
A low hum from the wall told her that her private secretary was outside, reporting for duty. She nodded her assent, a doorway formed to admit the secretary and it rolled in to stand beside her chaise-longue. Strange, she thought, this human preference for tangible objects. She could just as easily have given her instructions telepathically to the processor that animated it, but she felt more comfortable when it was there in…. well, not in person exactly, but at least in physical form.
“Good morning, your Honour,” it intoned. On a whim she had had it programmed to speak in the plummy, pompous tones of an elderly English butler of a bygone age. “May I offer my congratulations on your birthday? A notable day for our nation, if I may say so.”
“You may,” she consented graciously, “which is just as well for you, since you already have.”
“Thank you, your Excellency. I thought you might like to confirm your programme for the day. We have your address to Parliament at 11.00 a.m., luncheon with your Ministers and senior officials, then your broadcast to the nation at 3.00, followed by a personal appearance to wave to the crowds, sign autographs and so forth. Then in the evening there’s the state banquet with all the visiting foreign dignitaries.”
Was that a presidential sigh? Or a presidential yawn? It was certainly a sound that signified scant presidential enthusiasm. “Where’s the craic in that?” she demanded. “That’s no way to spend a hundredth birthday. When she was a hundred, my grandma passed her days by plotting revolutions and stealing cake, and I intend to live up to her example. Well, maybe I’ll skip the revolutions now I’m president, but let no one imagine their cake is safe while I’m around.”
“No, your Grace.”
“Get my hologram double to do all that official stuff. She does it just as well as I do, probably better, since she doesn’t get bored and tease the Panarabian ambassador, steal cake or fart at the wrong moment.”
“Whatever moment your Highness chooses is by definition the right moment,” asserted the private secretary loyally.
“Not according to the Panarabian ambassador, to judge by the way his nose twitches. In any case, I’ve had enough of the lot of them. They’re all pains in the arse, and I’d rather they were pains in each other’s arses than in mine. I shall stay in this morning to open my birthday pressies in private, then later go out incognito to celebrate with a piss-up at the Crown Bar or Morrison’s. Meanwhile, bring me a large Black Russian and some stolen cake.”
“Very good, your Majesty. I shall arrange for the requisite sustenance. And your presents will be with you presently.”
And presently they were, a huge jumble of packages of every colour and shape, piled high until they tested the elasticity of the ceiling. She was just about to select the first of them to open, when a discreet cough from the automated lackey drew her attention to a separate object standing beside the pile, and explained: “In addition to the gifts and tributes, there’s this. It’s been in storage for decades, but a note on the file instructed us to retrieve it and deliver it to you today.”
The factotum withdrew as she inspected the object. It was a black box of indeterminate size. Inscribed on a metal plaque set into its lid were the following words: “Time capsule. Will open automatically at opening time on PFL day, 2080. Contains memorabilia of the first Ciao era, 2000-2009. All the items within were listed on Ciao, March 2009, and were chosen by current members at that date to represent those times.”
Ciao. For a moment she could hardly place the word in her memory, then it all came flooding back. Those early carefree years when she would relax after a hard day with her charges, burning the midnight oil over tongue-in-cheek reviews, chewing the guestbook fat with her online friends and acquaintances. Yes, it had been fun; for a moment her mind was suffused by a warm nostalgia of an intensity only normally experienced by those who were around in London in the 1960s. Then she was brought sharply was back to the present, as the black box in front of her emitted a sudden whirring sound and its lid swung open.
She gazed inside, but could see nothing. The interior was opaque, a murky haze. As if fishing for a prize in a lucky dip, she reached down into the darkness until her fingers found and grasped the first object. It was small and light, easy to lift out. Up it came, and she found herself staring at a small packet wrapped in archaic materials – cardboard and cellophane – with the contents proclaimed in period typeface:
1. NTB Herbal Cigarettes. Attached to the packet was a label that read: “chosen to represent cigarettes generally because no tobacco is listed on Ciao, the reason for the choice being that, hopefully, in 70 years time, this poison that some of us willingly put into our bodies will be extinct, and it will be a fascination to the current generation that this was once an accepted pastime.”
She opened the packet and took out one of the cigarettes, which promptly crumbled into herbal dust and fell from her fingers to be absorbed by the self-sweeping carpet. Cigarettes, she thought; yes, they were indeed extinct, but not for the reasons the author of the label seemed to have imagined. After tobacco was finally banned by the nanny-states of the early decades of the century its illicit use had burgeoned, supplied by a vast network of clandestine growers and smugglers, who fought among themselves to control the lucrative trade. By 2030 it was estimated that 70% of crime world-wide was tobacco-related, while international efforts to curb it were subverted by corruption and intimidation. No, it was neither self-restraint nor suppression that had brought humanity’s cigarette addiction to an end. It was the global famines of the 2040s and 2050s, when every square metre of arable land had been pressed into service to grow food, leaving none for tobacco any more than for coca or opium poppies. Addicts of all kinds, in any case, had generally been among the first to perish.
Since then, all drug production had been entirely synthetic. Even the Black Russian that the President sipped was these days made from…. well, never mind, perhaps better not to think about it. Her hands returned to the container to grope for the next item and pulled out:
2. Happy House. A primer for British English produced by Oxford University Press in two Audio CDs. Audio CDs? Clearly some long-forgotten technology, but probably there was a techno-historian on the staff who could sort them out into something playable. And this package too bore an explanatory label, which in this case read: “The onslaught of crappy American English and irritating Aussie-English is chipping away at what we think of as the so-called 'proper' language. I would put the adverb on the at-risk register. How many times did you hear a Yank say 'How ya doin'?' and his friend reply 'I'm doing good'. I keep telling my friend Kris (from Colorado) that unless he's down the soup kitchen handing out food to the poor and needy he's not doing good, he's doing well.....anyway, at least it's not an Ipod.”
British English? Ah yes, the Queen’s English, as she’d heard it described in the days when there had been a Queen, though even then it struck her merely as a statement of the obvious. British English, American English, Aussie-English – how curiously quaint even the names of such archaic dialects sounded now. Perhaps traditional British English of the kind apparently set in stone, or rather in Audio CD, by OUP was still spoken in parts of that larger island across the Irish Sea, perhaps not. After the chaos of the middle decades of the century it was hard to know what was going on there, as in so many places on earth. Certainly it was known that American English and Indian English were still spoken, at least in pockets in their lands of origin. But none of them were likely to replace the President’s English in the North of Ireland any time soon. Again she wondered for a moment who had been the ‘I’ of the label, then she put the item on one side and fished again.
3. An Ipod Shuffle. “No doubt,” said the label attached, “this little bit of technology will be out of date in 70 years, but I for one marvel at mine (which I have had for a few weeks) - so many songs within such a small object.” Ah well, at least it was an Ipod, a device she could remember from its heyday all those decades ago, even if she couldn’t remember how it worked. Another task for the techno-historian. She dipped again into the dark recess of the time capsule, only to come up with….
4. Spice Girls’ Greatest Hits CD. “This is my quintessential contribution,” or so proclaimed its label, without identifying the author of the ‘my’. Yet another example of outdated audio technology, but in this case that need not be an obstacle to hearing the music – if music was what it was – since all music ever recorded could be instantly retrieved from the database of the Presidential Palace and replayed on demand. She demanded it. Instantly the boudoir’s walls resounded to the once-famous ditty: “Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want, So tell me what you want, what you really really want, I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want, So tell me what you want, what you really really want, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really really really wanna zigazig ha.” She ordered it to cease before it drove her zigazig, or worse. Was that really really what people had wanted to hear in that benighted bygone era? Maybe the world hadn’t deteriorated all that much after all. She hurried on to retrieve the next item:
5. A steak pie. A tinned steak pie, as it turned out, which was probably as well or it would not have survived 70+ years in edible condition. It was a brand with which she was familiar, having at one point in her youth written a review of it, though not still not a brand she had ever sampled. Now she could do so; all she needed was a tin-opener, if such an obsolete implement could still be found. But what was this message on the attached label? “The issue is global warming …. despite strong evidence that humanity is facing catastrophe and severe hardship people continued to increase consumption of the very products that would worsen the effects. Partially that would be out of ignorance - people will look back in anger, yet humour, that we saved carrier bags whilst failing to notice what we put in them like products that used vast resources and produced huge levels of pollutants such as the greenhouse gas methane. By the time the capsule is opened, many millions will have died directly and indirectly from a rapid rise in global temperature.”
Yes, well, whoever had written those words had been right about some things, but not exactly right about others. Methane had been far too valuable to be allowed to drift skywards unused for fuel. She thought of the vast concrete cattle-batteries that had been built after the pastures had been ploughed up for crops, super-efficient in their soulless balancing of inputs and outputs, with each inmate piped to capture every last whiff of methane, so that not even the Panarabian ambassador’s nose would have twitched. He might, though, like anyone of delicate sensibilities, have been sickened to his stomach by what else went on there. With a shiver at the thought, she quickly delved again into the time capsule, and pulled out a book of the antiquated printed variety.
6. We need to talk about Kevin, by Lionel Shriver. The accompanying label stated: “An odd choice, but I think with two cases in the news in the last week of high school massacres it would be a brilliant book for explaining these sorts of cases to the future generations.” Wryly, the President shook her head. High school massacres needed little explanation as far as she, a former teacher, was concerned. The only miracle was that they hadn’t happened more often. In point of fact, they had happened more often as the century had progressed, until they became quite commonplace and an alienated kid practically had to take a nuclear weapon into class to make the headlines. Sociologists offered all kinds of explanations – family dysfunction and in-home isolation, psycho-video games and role-playing – but explanation didn’t stop it happening. It had only stopped during the famine years, so maybe it had just been one of the side-effects of over-population all along.
A further swig of Black Russian, and she felt again inside the capsule. This time, she found no small objects to retrieve, but she could just touch a polished surface that stretched away beyond her easy reach. Leaning forward, she pushed her arm in further, until her fingertips found the edge of the polished surface, with a tantalising space beyond. Her head and shoulders, she discovered, would just fit into the cavity and, as she manoeuvred the top half of her torso inside, she found to her surprise that the interior gloom, which she had assumed would become darker as her body blocked the light, cleared like morning mist before the sun.
The space within was large, much larger than could be imagined from the capsule’s exterior dimensions. Having pulled herself wholly into it, she found she could stand upright without difficulty. Curious, she thought, I didn’t know the Tardis had been invented in those days, though had she checked she could, of course, have found it listed on Ciao. Meanwhile, she was now able to see what she had been touching. The polished surface that her fingers had detected was revealed to be the sleek side of a vehicle, the edge one of its wheel-hubs. It was a car, an old-fashioned petrol-driven car of the kind that had ruled the roads before fossil fuels were finally exhausted in the 2030s. The emblem on the bonnet and chrome lettering on the boot proclaimed it to be a…
7. BMW Z3 Roadster. A sticker on the windscreen labelled it further with the simple message “Here is my item.” Whose item she couldn’t guess, but that didn’t prevent her opening the door and easing herself into the driver’s seat. How she had once enjoyed driving. Why, in days gone by her battlewagon had been the terror of the roads all the way from Belfast to Malin, while citizens of towns en route would dive down and keep their heads below the parapet whenever it was rumoured she might be passing through. The key was in the ignition, and she gave it a playful twist. The engine fired instantly. After 71 years! They had been good at making cars, those Germans. Stollen cake too, even if they didn't seem to know how to spell it. A shame really, what had since become of them. Banishing the thought from her mind, she eased the car into gear and drove it forwards.
In front of her, as to either side, she could see little, as the road quickly vanished into a translucent haze, but undaunted she drove on. Suddenly a dark shape loomed up ahead and her foot instinctively stamped down on the brake pedal. The car screeched to a halt just centimetres from a quaint old stone-built edifice in a style she could recognise as once having featured on every high street in the days when towns had high streets. Beside the doorway a device was inset into the wall which seemed familiar. Suddenly her memory came to her aid: it was an ATM, a hole-in-the-wall cash machine from the days when there had been such a thing as cash in physical folding form. Above the doorway, a sign proclaimed the building to be…
8. HBOS. Below it, in smaller print that looked as if had been added later, ran the legend “Just to demonstrate the financial porridge we were in.” This was not, presumably, the HBOS company slogan, but a bit of labelling from the Ciaoist who had selected it as an example of its age. Yes, she could remember the financial porridge of the period and the alphabet soup of banking initials in which the forced mergers had resulted, and all the other unpalatable fare from the same mercenary menu. Of course, there had been many ups and downs since then. Booms had boomed and busts had busted. The only thing that people seemed to learn from their mistakes was how to repeat them.
Sighing, she put the car back into gear and swerved past the derelict bank to find herself a moment later confronted by a wrought iron gateway, topped off with lettering that spelled out:
9. Botanic Gardens, except without the 9. With fond recognition she saw it was the old entrance to her own, local, Belfast Botanic Gardens as it had once been before the rare plants within had succumbed to climate change and the land had been turned over to other purposes; being on higher ground to the south of the city it had at least been spared inundation when the sea level had risen.
But here were the old gardens, miraculously brought back to life, a place of refuge as she could recall it from her youth, and much as the poster/label beside the gateway described: “Alternatively, if I haven't already mentioned the rain, this is a place to hide out of the rain and forget about the sights you could be seeing.” She stepped out of the car and through the gates, finding as she did so that there was a fine soft rain beginning to fall, refreshing the air and the vivid green of the shrubbery. She strolled through to the gorgeous Palm House, now over 250 years old – “older than that at Kew” – although of course its counterpart in the contemporary city outside had long since been a heap of rubble. For a wee while she browsed around inside it, until she stumbled upon a…
10. Time machine. A strange device with a label – indeed a banner – attached, enticingly inviting her to decide where she would wish to go in it, and why. “Where?” she thought, as she jumped in and inspected the controls; surely whoever had written that meant to say “when?” Well, perhaps both when and where could be selected, since there appeared to instruments calibrated for both, and looked easy to operate.
Where/when then? She could, if she so chose, go forward to her 200th birthday to see if they was still any city of Belfast to be seen, any environment surviving and any cake left to steal. No, better to wait for that to come round in its own time or not as the case might be. Better not to anticipate the future; finding out in advance would in any case spoil the surprise. The past then. Perhaps the Ciao era? No, she could still vaguely remember it from the first time round, and why repeat the experience? She wanted to try something new, or new to her at any rate. How about London in the 1960s?
Footnote – Time Capsule contents. It is said that if you ask 10 economists for their opinion on any question you will get 11 answers. Only 11? Clearly, economists can’t begin to compete with Ciaoists for intellectual fecundity. In order to stock the time capsule, I asked 10 Ciao members, chosen from Fiona’s Circle of Trust, to suggest items for inclusion, the one proviso being that the items had to be listed on Ciao. In response, I received no fewer than 29 suggestions, and that was from just 9 people, since one did not reply. I decided to accept only one item from each person, and made the total up to 10 by including one of my own.
My thanks to the 9 who contributed items for inclusion, and particular thanks to Paul (Borg) who initiated the tradition whereby a 250th review draws on contributions from other members, a practice that certainly saves a lot of effort.
Fellow Ciao members may wish to pit their wits against the following PUZZLE – to identify which of these members suggested which of the items included in the time capsule:
Borg carcraig claiiireee greenierexyboy koshkha MarcoG pgn0 muttleythefrog Shoka torr
The PRIZE is rather a paltry one, I’m afraid: a place on my own Circle of Trust to go to the entrant with the highest number of correct answers.
This is or ‘was’ my 250th review. A good Ciao buddy asked me why update it, well I have decided to keep it updated due to the ever changing world of Ciao and its new members… See some new ones added at the bottom (these aren’t just new members, but others that have added their bits via comments or by me nagging at their guest-books… lol). So… welcome to what was my 250th review celebrations. Before the main event, why not pop over to the bar, they ... ...my first choice for the 250th though – I had asked other members for ideas and received some good ideas from the likes of Karimkha. ScottishWestie suggested a big bash with booze and loose women. But the username idea stayed with me and I was hooked. I placed a message in my ‘About me’ and also personal messaged a few who I thought had particularly intriguing names. Now, if I missed you, sorry, however I guess some names are pretty obvious as to ...
Borg 10.03.2009 (21.09.2009)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of 250th Ciao Review
Advantages: Acknowledge I've overrated, at ease, I use a strong range of scores Disadvantages: GameFAQS top ten list quality filler - I'm only really doing this for 30CP
...sites like this). For my 250th review (or not-really-a-review) however, I decided to compile a top ten list of products that I've reviewed which I felt I have overrated, and contemplated taking a star off the rating. There have been reviews that I've gone back to and changed the rating - these would be next in line, though my laziness means I might never get round to these. 10. Metallica - Ride The Lightning. Production values aside, the second half ... ...I wouldn't classify Ride The Lightning as a consistent, and thus not a classic, album. **** 9. Valkyrie Profile for PlayStation. More from the dungeons and towns (and maybe even the endings) would not have gone amiss, and the lack of structure sometimes hurts the game as I was left to repeat the same dungeons so as to prepare my army for the Sacred War. *** 8. Final Fantasy X for the PlayStation 2. When a challenging boss does come along, it doesn't ...
scream4bruce 27.08.2009
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of 250th Ciao Review
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Advantages: 2 years on the site, and I've enjoyed pretty much every minute of it Disadvantages: Ciao gremlins, Ciao surveys and some problems with members
When coming up with something to write for my 250threview I was stumped, even with the help of some brilliant friends on the site, I still had no idea what to write. I even started to write a review for the Product of the Month and call this my 250threview, as this is the best summer I?ve ever had, however it just didn?t seem to work. That review was written and discarded to the side. I then began to think, I have never written a review about my time on the site. With it being my 2nd year anniversary on the site recently, why haven?t I done this review before I kept on asking myself? I hope it?s good and I hope you enjoy it.
As I couldn?t decide what to write, I did end up writing two reviews, both of which turned out alright, so this is Part 1 of my 250threview.
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DixieChick10 07.09.2009
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: exceptional Review of My Ciao'ing
Advantages: The best summer I've had in my lifetime Disadvantages: Don't want it to be over
second anniversary on Ciao. After 2 years I had written, about 140 reviews, had met a lot of brilliant people on the site and have had the time of my life. If you read Part 1 to my 250threview, then you will know that I originally began on Ciao, of course, just looking for a little extra money to feed my electronic items habit (hey some people smoke, I buy very expensive electronics). It has now completely changed for me, I do still need the cash and it has increased a lot over the 2 years month by month, however, it is not the main reason why I come on the site.
It?s now more about the community and talking to the brilliant people on the site, and of course reading and rating other people?s reviews. Some are amazing, I have read some fantastic pieces in the past 2 years, and some are not so brilliant. It still amazes me today, how people ...
