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Solving your writing problems since 1998! |
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The
Write Way
20 June 2008 The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round ...
Greetings, You're probably facing the same problems in your little corner of the world as we are out here ... petrol prices are going up faster than anyone can keep track of them, and roads are more and more congested. Our state government and city council have started investing in public transport, after they merrily ripped up our tram system in the 60s (we dwelt a while on this travesty of all things sensible some months ago). And one of the integral parts of this is a network of tunnels under the CBD for our buses. The latest of these, the Inner Northern Busway, opened amid great fanfare a few weeks ago. The powers-that-be are justly proud of this, since it opened ahead of schedule and only(!) cost $330 million. It's expected to cut up to 20 minutes off a trip in the congested peak times and should take several hundred buses off the city streets every day ... sending them down to the bowels of the tunnel system instead. Having watched all the news reports of pollies patting themselves on the back after spending a motza of our money, the Love of My Life and I decided it was time for us to see first-hand (if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor) where our tax money had gone. So a couple of weeks ago, we trotted up to a bus-stop that services what's laughingly called the City Express. The bus was meant to arrive at 9.25 ... and for the purposes of this story, I should tell you that we're only the third stop along its hour-long trip to the city. At 9.35 we were getting a bit restless. At 9.40, we turned to the other fellow waiting and made some comment about the bus, to which he gave a Zen-like shrug of his shoulders and muttered, "Oh, this bloke's always late." At 9.45, the massively misnamed "Express" hove into view. And as we boarded, we understood why it was always late when this particular driver was on duty. He's a lovely chap who likes to pass the time of day with all his regulars ... who, at this off-peak time of day, are mostly ladies of a certain age who wait until they step daintily onto the bus to begin the search for their purses (kept at the bottom of their handbags for security reasons), then their money, then their concession cards. Then they have a bit of a chat about the weather, the flowers in the garden near the bus stop and their plans for the day. Finally, they return the change to their purses, the cards to their folders and all to the depths of their handbags and make their way to their friends who are sitting right at the back of the bus. Being a kindly chap, our driver waits until they're safely seated before moving off. Sigh ... just as well we weren't in a rush. This was, after all, going to be our day On the Buses. We made up a little time once we got closer to the city and there were fewer and fewer old dears getting on, and we were only 10 minutes late arriving at our destination. After taking sustenance in the form of coffee, we were ready to tackle the next phase of our fact-finding tour, so we set off to find the new bus station that we'd admired on all the news footage. We expected it would simply be a matter of following the crowds who would all be beating a path to this multi-million dollar network that was going to save time and frustration, reduce pollution on the city streets and generally add to the convenience of city living. When we arrived at the entrance to the flash new bus station, we thought for a moment that it must have been closed down, because there was no-one else around ... However, in the spirit of adventure with which we'd started our day, we pressed on into the depths of the underground network where we spotted a lonely Transport employee, two security people and a couple of backpackers looking faintly bewildered. Since we were in the mood to just follow our noses, we headed for the closest escalator leading down deeper to the buses and chose, at random, our destination from the electronic timetables. We'd read a blurb on a leaflet we'd picked up that reassured us, "The stations are serviced by an intelligent transport system that displays and announces real-time information on bus arrivals, interchanging local buses and, if needed, emergency procedures." Groovy! So we looked at the electronic display above the door to the stop we'd chosen and saw with gratitude that the bus was due in 3 minutes. Then the display told us it would arrive in 2 minutes, then 1 minute, then it announced the bus was DUE. Peering happily out the window and up the tunnel, we saw nothing, and lo, the display had changed its mind and said the bus was now due in 5 minutes ... then we did the countdown again until it was DUE once more. Still no bus ... When we glanced up at the screen the next time, we saw to our dismay that our bus was now going to arrive in 12 minutes. Giving that up as a lost cause, we moved further into the tunnels until we found a stop with a display announcing its bus was DUE. We waited barely a moment and when it arrived, we leapt on before it, too, changed its mind. The point of this day's excursion was very much the journey, not the destination. We were whisked through the tunnel system in slightly less than one minute and promptly found ourselves back out on the normal road network. Undaunted by this minor setback to our dreams of a merry day spent exploring the labyrinth, we got off at the first stop, crossed the road and caught another bus back into the underground. After a total of two whole minutes underground, this one spat us out again and deposited us at the Roma Street station, so we admitted defeat and got off, having thoroughly exhausted the entertainment possibilities of underground bus tunnels. We wisely spent the rest of our day enjoying the Parklands adjoining Roma Street. (You'll find some photos here to show what you can do with old railway yards when you set your mind to it and here.) And it's obvious you haven't spent hours on a bus, because your mind's like greased lightning! Of course, we all know that it's a bit difficult to have a tunnel that's not technically underground. dictionary.com tells us a tunnel is:
The word itself comes from an Old English word tun meaning a 'tub, a large vessel.' It got me thinking about lots of other repetitive expressions we use ... and naturally, there's a word for these ... a couple of words actually. We call them redundancies or tautologies, and we're all guilty of slipping one out on occasions: empty gap, two twins, return back, leaky colander, verbal tongue-lashing, vendetta of revenge, the sun sets in the west, everybody was unanimous, mental thinking, free gift and my personal favourite ... wandering nomad. And a couple of bus stories ... A bus conductor was sentenced to the electric chair as he deliberately ran over one of his passengers. When the prison governor flicked the switch, nothing happened, and after trying this many times, still nothing happened. He survived and was eventually released. Later, a journalist asked him if he knew what had stopped him from being electrocuted. "Oh that's simple," he replied. "I've always been a bad conductor!" And ... "Maybe so," replied the woman, "but you won't get on and off me for thirty pence."
This week's Little Something Extra highlights some interesting tunnels! Did you know that every newsletter is archived? So if you've missed anything since 1998 or want to revisit some favourites, you can do so any time! Don't forget to bookmark the page when you get there ... or even make it your Home Page. (For Internet Explorer, just click on Tools ... Internet Options ... General ... fill in www.write101.com/archives/index.htm and click OK. For Netscape, select Edit ... Preferences. Then select Navigator from the left menu, click Home Page and enter the URL above next to Location and click OK. For all the flash new browsers, you'll have to do a search on my mate google to find what to do. There's a search box on the archives page!) If you've received this little missive from a friend, you can get your very own issue, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed every Friday morning by clicking here: mailto:WritingTips-subscribe@yahoogrups.com And I'm even prepared to offer a shameless bribe. An Ape that wants to play Hamlet after being type-cast as King Kong, a talking anvil and that rottweiller ... Dr Morgenes is still caught in the nightmare that is the casting couch. Help him find a plot! Just click on the Comments button at the end of the entry to add your contribution. If you have friends who fancy themselves as writers, invite them to contribute (just forward this newsletter in its entirety to them). I often trawl this for comments to post on my site ... so if you say something about the newsletter or site, be warned, you may end up being read by one of the 2,000+ unique visitors who visit Write101 every day! Make your Mark on the World. Then stop by our Map of the World and read the messages. (Just click List) and add your mark. This week's quiz: Let's see how well you'd do if you had to build a tunnel ... bedrock, caisson, mullion, abutment, cut and cover, anchorage, torsion, pendentive, tensegrity, vault 1. an action that twists a material 2. a triangular shape that adapts the circular ring of a dome to fit onto a flat supporting wall 3. a method of tunnel construction that involves digging a trench, building a tunnel, and then covering it with fill 4. the outermost end supports on a bridge, which carry the load from the deck 5. the solid rock layer beneath sand or silt 6. a secure fixing, usually made of reinforced concrete to which the cables are fastened 7. a watertight, dry chamber in which people can work underwater 8. the property of skeleton structures that employ continuous tension members and discontinuous compression members in such a way that each member operates with the maximum efficiency and economy; an array of tension cables and compression rods that supports a structure 9. a vertical member, as of stone or wood, between the lights of a window, the panels in wainscoting or the like 10. curved ceiling of a tunnel or underground building A sobering thought: the odds are five to six that the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train. Last week's quiz: speculators, call, delta, cartel, liquidity, condor, contango, stochastic, bull market, tariff 1. the amount by which the price of an option changes for every unit move in the underlying security - DELTA 2. being or having a random variable - STOCHASTIC 3. when several companies who dominate a market form an agreement between themselves to maintain price levels. Usually highly illegal; most countries will have bodies which attempt to ensure that there is competition within a market - CARTEL 4. people who trade securities for the express purpose of making a profit on some expected change in their value rather than for any interest in owning the goods themselves - SPECULATORS 5. readiness to buy or sell significant quantities of a security at any time - LIQUIDITY 6. an option that gives the holder the right to buy the underlying stock at a specific price for a specific period of time - CALL 7. where share prices are generally rising - BULL MARKET 8. selling or buying of two options with consecutive exercise prices, together with the sale or purchase of one option with an immediately lower exercise price and one option with an immediately higher exercise price - CONDOR 9. tax on goods as they cross a border; usually imposed on imports by a government to provide an advantage to its indigenous businesses - TARIFF 10. the postponement of payment by the buyer of stock on the payment of a premium to the seller; the premium or interest paid by the buyer to the seller, to be allowed to defer paying for the stock purchased until the next fortnightly settlement day - CONTANGO And this joke has been around so long, I can remember my dad telling it when I was at school! A woman gets on a bus with her
baby. The bus driver says, "That's the ugliest baby that I've ever seen.
Ugh!" A Little Something Extra If you thought tunnels were just for getting buses, cars, people and water from A to B ... think again! Read this wonderful account by Maciej Ceglowski of how burritos are sent across the US in an abandoned mail tunnel. Very clever. The Great Siege Tunnels have their feet a little more firmly planted in fact. And the Mount Cenis tunnel across the Alps showed how compressed air could be used to tunnel through the mountains (if not to send burritos across country). This was a lot quicker than building tunnels in Roman times: "The Fucine Lake was a large (c. 12 mile long) lake in the Apennines. It was hemmed in by the mountains, filled with runoff from them, and had no natural outlet. The locals had been asking the Roman emperors to drain it at least since Augustus' time so that they could farm the land covered by it. Claudius accepted the challenge, with inducement from some people who offered to pay for the work if he awarded them the land thus reclaimed. 30,000 men dug for 11 years through three miles of mountains, and leveled part of a hill, to create an outlet for the water. It was the longest tunnel in the world until the mid C19." (Source) Word of the week: Analemma (n) graduated scale in the shape of a figure eight, indicating the sun's declination and the equation of time for every day of the year and usually found on sundials and globes; an orthographic projection of the sphere on the plane of the meridian, the eye being supposed at an infinite distance, and in the east or west point of the horizon; an instrument of wood or brass, on which this projection of the sphere is made, having a movable horizon or cursor; -- formerly much used in solving some common astronomical problems This ever-so useful word comes from the Greek análémma meaning 'support.' Oxymoron of the week: convenience of city living And this week's Latin phrase covers everything we've been chatting about ... Motorolus interruptus [moh-toh-ROH-loos een-tay-ROOP-toos] (Hold on, I'm going into a tunnel.) Did you know that you can have your very own Latin reminders? How about undies proclaiming, Bene est rex esse? (It's good to be king) Or a shopping bag that warns, Emptrix nata sum (Born to shop)? Kind regards, Jennifer P.S. Want to donate to the upkeep of this newsletter? Just $17 a year seems a small price to pay for all this wit and wisdom, don't you think? C'mon, that's just a tad more than 30 cents a week! 1.Toss a few pennies into my Running Away Fund at PayPal (Send to jennifer @ write101.com ... without the spaces, of course) OR 2. Click here to subscribe for a full year OR 3. Use your credit card on my secure order form. (You can also access the PayPal subscription link from this page if the link above didn't work for you. With PayPal, you can use your credit card, PayPal account or pay online using your own cheque account.) OR 4. Send a cheque (made payable to Jennifer Stewart) To unsubscribe from this list, send
a blank email to: mailto:WritingTips- Copyright Jennifer Stewart 2008 Individual articles copyrighted by their authors. |
