Herein is contained a very oblique sort of rant, and it’s boring too.  Just skip over this entry.  You’ll feel better about yourself.

The MTA runs a number of bus routes.  Each one is numbered.  I regularly ride the 31.

The 31 runs from Penn Station to Halethorpe.  It goes down Cathedral Street, proceeds from there to Lombard Street, to Wilkens Avenue, runs along Maiden Choice Lane, through UMBC, and along a couple of other streets to its destination.  Oh, except that it doesn’t always go through UMBC.  Sometimes it just goes past it.  Oh, and sometimes it takes Leeds Avenue instead of Maiden Choice; this also skips UMBC.  The buses do have signs that indicate which way they’re going, except that they rarely mention whether or not they’re going through UMBC; you get to guess.  And half the time, the signs are broken or so dim that they can’t be read.

And did I say that the buses went to Halethorpe?  Well, sometimes.  Sometimes they go to Halethorpe Industrial Park, which is the same route, but goes a little further.  And sometimes they go to Beltway Business Park, and sometimes they just stop at UMBC and turn around there.  Mostly, this is indicated on the sign.  But when they go to Beltway Business Park, sometimes they turn onto Sulphur Spring Road and sometimes they head through Halethorpe and up Washington Boulevard.  The signs give no indication which of those it is.

So, the bus signs could say: “31: (UMBC|Halethorpe|Halethorpe Industrial Park|Beltway Business Park) via (UMBC|Maiden Choice|Leeds)” and they still leave out information.

Oh, and the schedules?  They indicate which subroute is being used by leaving out times.  Not going through UMBC?  No time in that column.  The bus that goes to Beltway Business Park via Leeds and Sulphur Spring has a schedule that reads: “[5 columns] <time> - - - - <time>” Yeah, all those blanks are really useful for the people catching the bus in the middle there.

And there’s stuff I don’t understand after over a year and a half riding the bus.  I don’t know what to make of the one line that has a time for UMBC, but not for Leeds and Maiden Choice.  There are footnotes on some of the lines.  “A - Via Goodwill” There’s one line with that footnote, and it skips every column between Wilkens & Caton and Beltway Business Park.  If you’re on that route, better hope you catch that one bus.  “F - Via DeSoto Road” Goes that way southbound in the early morning and northbound during the mid-afternoon.  I don’t know why.  “C - Cathedral & Franklin” “D - Charles & Saratoga” Apparently, sometimes the bus doesn’t go all the way to/from Penn Station.  Again, I don’t know why.

So that’s the simple approach adopted by the MTA.  I regularly see people confused by the plethora of meanderings that the buses can take, and I can’t really blame them.  I don’t have a useful alternative, and I can only assume that there are reasons for the current setup, but neither of those stops the status quo from being just the tiniest bit sucky.

Put very simply, Lucifer's Hammer is a book about a comet hitting Earth.  The book takes 640 pages to do this; there’s a lot of detail to the story.  The first couple hundred pages are all pre-comet and set the stage, introducing all of the characters.  (There’s a dramatis personae at the beginning of the book; I found myself referring to it frequently to see which characters were which.)  The strike itself occupies about another hundred pages, with the balance of the book dealing with the aftermath.

As might be inferred from the spacing of events, the book proceeds at a somewhat slow pace, ramping up so gradually that I didn’t notice the tensions in some scenes until I had to put the book down and realized that I was nearly breathless wondering what would happen.  The aftermath is where the meat of the conflicts occur, but the preceding half of the book is pretty necessary to lay the groundwork for later developments.

The science in the book is also good.  Niven and Pournelle spent a lot of time working out the details of a comet strike such as the one presented in the book, and it shows; the science is very thorough and believable.  This was somewhat surprising given how long ago the book was written:  1977.  Much other SF from that far back tends to be very dated, a fate Lucifer's Hammer seems to have escaped, for the most part.

There were some instances where I was reminded that the book was taking place three decades ago.  Racial tensions in the book are a lot higher; while the civil rights movement had succeeded, many people still weren’t accustomed to it, and a couple of the black characters have to deal with some uncomfortable situations.  The technology isn’t as good as that which we have today; while I can’t remember any specific examples, there were some things that I noted would have been different if the story had taken place in our present.  And someone makes reference to NASA’s perfect record of not having any deaths during their missions, a record that, sadly, has been broken a few times since then.

All in all, it’s a very good book, especially for fans of either SF or disaster stories.

Postscript: The copy I read was one I got from a used book store.  It’s the third printing of the Ballantine Books paperback edition, printed in 1985.  The inside cover has the following written on it:

Dec. 21st, 1990

To: Mr. Senior
After I saw that film on meteors I remembered this book.  You can look it over during the holidays.

Best Wishes,
Bob Vandervoort

I haven’t found any more information about who the people named are.

Yes, it’s true.  I hates software.  (Though, as of yet, not very much.)

Yep, get ’em all out of the way in one common place.

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I hope that’s all clear now.

I recently tried to set up a new account on Verizon’s web site.  In order to do this, you have to choose a login and a password.  Reasonable enough.  The page says that the password must be “Minimum 6 characters with at least 1 number”.  I run my password generating script (dd if=/dev/random bs=1 count=6 | uuencode -) and get VB3:Q-0".  Seems reasonable, so I enter it.  No.  “The password should contain one number, only three repeating characters, no spaces or email addresses and no other special characters.  Please try again.” Grrr.  So I run the program a few more times, get a password that’s just numbers and letters, randomize its case, and enter it.

And go on to create my account?  No.  Verizon’s is also one of the many websites that refuses to acknowledge the validity of the plus sign in an email address.  When submitting my email to a site, I usually use phil_g+sitename@pobox.com, just to track usage of that address.  Many stupid sites don’t like that.  Bah.  And the page was SSL, so I couldn’t easily mess with the parameters to see if they put their trust in client-side validity checks.

Now, of course, I’ve attempted to log in and the page is sitting at a “please wait” box.  Probably only works with IE anyway.  I’ll have to go through the site and try to find a contact email address to yell at.

Verizon sucks.  (Like everyone doesn’t already know that.)