Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

This one’s for Seema… Sarah Palin Facts: Little-Known Facts About the Alaska Governor. Here are some samples:

• Sarah Palin uses French Canadians as bait to catch giant king salmon.
• When Sarah Palin booked a flight to Europe, the French immediately surrendered.
• Sarah Palin knows who was on the grassy knoll.
• Sarah Palin’s finishing move in the VP debate will be pulling Biden’s still beating heart from his chest & taking a bite.
• Russia sold Alaska to America because Sarah Palin would not bow to autocracy.
• Alaskan wolfpacks give Sara Palin first dibs on their kills.
• Sarah Palin will give birth to the man who will lead humanity’s war against the machines.

Bill at Switchback explains how September starts early on the T.

It’s not clear whether the real Endless September is still going on, or whether the internet has reached an equilibrium of newbie stupidity vs. BOFQ mortality. My guess would be that the net is just so big now it’s impossible to take an average, know a subculture, and write the manifesto.

I’ve added two new (or at least newly revived, betaed and uploaded) episode additions to the Firefly page. Whupping and Catalyzer leave only four episodes and the movie to go.

She Said Her Name Was Saffron, a filk by Marc Gunn, is briefly free at The FuMP.

You can find Serenity: The Other Half on Dark Horse Comics’ MySpace page. The browncoats at FireflyFans.net recommend that you read page 5 very carefully.

Although it seems like just my kind of T accident, I wasn’t on the B line last week when lightning struck it.

At first I thought this was some kind of programming joke, but it’s even funnier than that: Python Trek.

Thanks to Universal Hub for covering the squishing beat so I don’t have to. They inform me that today’s squishing was brought to you by the Needham line. Two pedestrians were walking on the tracks and one only is escaped alone to tell us what the frak they were doing walking on train tracks.

Lest anyone forget, in the eternal battle of man against train, the train wins.

Rare is the Green Line collision in which I am not somehow involved, but I managed to miss the fatal rear-ending on the D line today. There’s not much left of those trains, and considering how they just roasted a B train two weeks ago, it looks like the MBTA is going to have to send away to Breda for more rolling stock soon.

[Update:] The visiting Feds Eye Possible Cell Phone Use In MBTA Crash. They’re also eyeing some Smoking Cell Phones. Cell phone use was my favorite theory, though I also considered the rumors of recent signal problems on the D line. As I noted back when I got rear-ended on the Green line, rear-ending is always the rear-ender’s fault, even underground in the dark, never mind aboveground in broad daylight on a half-mile of straightaway while allegedly using a cell phone.

Also, Switchback has before-and-after pictures of car 3667, which looks like a Kinki Sharyo (Type 7). (CharlieBlog confirms that 3667 was a Type 7 I, and that the rear-ended car, 3703, was a newer Type 7 II, also totalled–with pictures.) I’m impressed that NETransit already lists both cars as wrecked.

Imagine if any of the cars had been a cheap, more squishable, more derailable Breda…

I figured I’d be like the Boston media and report the flaming B train as late as possible. The train jumped the tracks and knocked down some power lines on the last outbound run Tuesday night (technically, very early Wednesday morning).

Service on my lines was unaffected, but rumor has it that the E-line was disrupted, probably because there was no way to get trains from the trainyards around Cleveland Circle onto the B-line, and whatever trains were running from downtown to Washington Street Wednesday morning had to have come from somewhere.

In other late-breaking news, the Giant G3 Cube on Boylston opened tonight. I was thinking of going, but I chose dinner instead.