World of Today (through the eyes of teenagers from the 1980s)

I've been lacking inspiration this week; today I'm calling on a Quora colleague, Ian Lang, to help out once more. (I do have Ian's blanket permission to use his Quora answers here.)

The question:
If teenagers from 1980s could see our modern-day world, what do you think that they would be shocked by the most and what kind of questions would they ask?



By Ian Lang, Leading Technician:

So, here I go with my spotty face from 1982, travelling into the future and —— it’s 2019!

What the feck-

Why is everybody staring at a little glowing box and typing out vacuous messages to one another rather than talking? What the feck is a Facebook and how can you possibly have eighteen bajillion friends?

Hang on. Last time I looked at the top forty, we had Madness, The Police, Blondie and Adam and the Ants. Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Now it looks like you’ve got a bunch of bland pretty boys and clone-women all singing the same bleedin’ song. And what do you mean you don’t go down the record shop? Download an MP3? Knob off. I want my boom-box.

Your mum and dad drive you everywhere? Have you never heard of a bus? Where’s all the Wimpys gone and what the feck is sushi? Or burritos? Starbuck was the cocky bloke on Battlestar Galactica- what’s he doing selling coffee? What do you mean they remade it and turned him into a girl?

You want to work in what? Marketing? Do you mean advertising? No? Well, what the bloody hell is it, then? Holistic sales promotion? You’re just talking bollocks, aren’t you?

Why in the name of all that’s holy do you say everything as though it’s a question? What are you babbling about when you say “OMG, LOL, it’s like you’re a caveman, dude?”

Why are you all dressed in running shoes when your parents drive you everywhere and how come you’ve all got five bleedin’ computers but hardly any of you know how to program them? Or change a fuse. How come you all go to university but none of you can change the wheel on a car? You’ve all got twenty million A levels each? So how come when I ask you a question the answer’s always, “oh, I dunno? Google it?” And what’s a bloody Google anyway?

God almighty. Send me back to 1982. You’re all at university now, even if you don’t pronounce the -versity bit, so there must be someone who knows how to do it.

No, I’m not bloody Googling it. Google off you spoilt little bleeders. And go and vote in this Brexit thing. Whatever it is. I’m going to see if anybody’s got work for a turner.

The Future: "like the present only longer"

Wikipedia tells that: January (in Latin, Ianuarius) is named after the Latin word for door (ianua), since January is the door to the year and an opening to new beginnings. The month is conventionally thought of as being named after Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions in Roman mythology, but according to ancient Roman farmers' almanacs Juno was the tutelary deity [guardian, protector, patron] of the month.


In the mythology of ancient Rome, Janus, god of new beginnings was associated with doors and gates, and first steps. Janus is usually depicted as having two faces, looking in opposite directions. In one legend, Saturn bestows upon him the ability to see both the past and the future.

"I have seen the future and it is very much like the present, only longer."

~Kehlog Albran, The Profit

Predictions, predictions...how many come true? Not many, in my experience, at least not in the time scale of a year. Over a period of 5 or 10 years, some of the wider ranging ones come true, but in a mere 12 months, it's unlikely. Narrower predictions, relating to individuals, "celebrities", politicians are often just good guesses; most of us could take a stab at such predictions, if sufficiently interested.

For a fun read, prediction-wise, try the following: Man Claiming to Be Time Traveler Makes Fascinating Predictions About 2019,
by Sherene Buffa. Some of the predictions stretch much further into the future than 2019 - it's all very sci-fi.

Lots of it is quite silly, but I rather like one prediction for 2019: that there will be more UFO sightings which cannot be dismissed as fake, or as weather balloons, or whatever.

Be prepared for UFO sightings in January 2019
Noah specifically states that HUGE, massive UFO sightings will start to hit in the new year. And they do not look fake — which is why we will begin to believe what we see.

The "time traveller" also claims that the biggest snowstorm in history will hit the Midwest in February. He says multiple cities will be “wiped out” by this storm. Well, winter is winter, climate change threatens, so this prediction isn't too way out. Travelling to the future wasn't strictly necessary to predict something of this nature.

We can only hope that this claim of the time traveller does not come true:

On November 3, 2020 — President Trump will serve a second term in office.

For a more level-headed piece on future, far-flung, possibilities do go read the answer written by Robert Blevins, at Quora to this question:

What is something that is science fiction today that we could see in the next 20 years?

Time Travelling with Ian Lang

If you have a Time Machine would you use it or not? Why?

A question asked at Quora this week, with an answer from the inimitable
Ian Lang, "Forced to do relativity at school, college and polytechnic.Still don't know much."
[Used with Mr Lang's kind (blanket) permission.]

I have got a time machine. I started building it negative three years ago, in 2021, and sent it back to myself last year. In theory it doesn’t exist yet but since my wife is always grumbling about not being able to get the Hyundai Getz in the garage for it (and has will have been for the next two years, whereafter she will has been grumbling about not getting in the Rolls-Royce which will has had been bought on the proceedings of temporally questionable legal procedures) it does, in practicality, exist even though it hasn’t been invented yet.

The crew consists of me, Fat Dave, and a blonde woman in her early twenties called Paula, who runs around wearing figure-fitting outfits that don’t quite border on indecent but are just enough to catch the interest of a male demographic 16–30 because as you know, any self respecting time traveller has to have one of those on board, and sometimes she does something good.

The Co-Op are getting very suspicious about why, once every couple of weeks, we go in with an handful of lottery tickets with small value prizes on them and get about £300 back a time. So are WH Smiths, GT News and the convenience shop down the road in which we somehow always get three numbers over ten tickets.

Ladbrokes thinks it blacklisted us last September after we scooped a massive whack on a seemingly impossible round-robin at 30,000 to 1, but that’s not a bother because there’s always the year before that and of course, William Hill and Paddy Power are still taking our bets on, although PP will have has kicked us out too by the time (from this reference at least) that one on the end result of Brexit comes to fruition. No spoilers, but you won’t believe the way that turns out. I’ll just say if you’re from Iceland or Madagascar, it’s going to be great, if you’re French or live in the northern bits of Athens then, yeah, sorry.

So anyway. Last year we went back and got a load of stones together and dumped them in a circle in Wiltshire about four thousand years ago, just to have a laugh at the archaeologists today, and about two thousand years ago we told a bloke called Julius that everything in an island just over the water from Gaul was made of rubies and that nobody defends it.

Dave and Paula don’t speak German but I do, and I realise now that acting as interpreter for a conversation they had with a certain Herr Marx wasn’t my cleverest act. We enjoyed ourselves in Switzerland at the turn of the twentieth century though, even though Paula left her dissertation for her physics degree behind in the tea-rooms of a hotel next to the patent office. We went back to look for it but it had vanished, so she had to print it out again. Could have been a lot nastier, glad we didn’t radically alter any time-lines on that like we did when Fat Dave left his i-Pad behind in California in 2004.

We’re sorry about 1929 and that stock market crash thing. Rest assured we sacked our accountant over that, if it’s any consolation.

The best jape was the Brink’s Mat robbery. We didn’t actually do it, we just nicked most of the three tonnes of gold afterwards. Nobody knows where it is, because it’s currently in a barn near Inverness. In 2063.

Oh yes, I suppose I ought to mention April 23–26th 2087. Just get a lot of spam and boiled water and some electric torches, and stay indoors with the windows boarded up and the doors bolted. Get some batteries and an FM radio too. You’ll be alright if you don’t emerge again until about 10:00 GMT on the 27th.

If you see what looks like a Vauxhall Viva appearing out of thin air, and a fat bloke, and another with a scruffy beard, and a woman wearing a mini-skirt get out of it and probably go straight to the bookies, come and have a word. There might be a big drink in it for you.

Timely

This post might be a ham-fisted segue from the weekend's post - the one wandering around the idea of history's rhyming habit through time. So...time travel. Could it ever be possible to travel backward through those rhyming centuries, decades, years, or even just months or weeks? Novelists and film makers like to think so, scientists are less confident.

An intriguing idea, presented by Stephen King in his novel 11/22/63, featured (HERE) in my recent post is fascinating. King proposed that:
The past is obdurate.
In his novel the past had "pushed back" against the time traveller's mission to change an event, it seemed that the traveller's task was continually being made especially difficult, near to impossible. He persevered, with the best possible of intentions, yet eventual consequences proved dire.

Should someone, sometime, somehow find a way to travel back in time with the intention of changing... something, the past could well "push back" to prevent change. It makes sense to me , but my husband objected to (what he terms) "personifying the past". I responded that it doesn't really entail "personifying" the past. It's treating the past, or man-made time, as a natural entity, something akin to a gale-force wind, or like gravity, or a tornado which, if one tried, rather foolishly, to change its track, would appear to push back, physically. Intention to change something already in our timeline or time cycle - even a minor thing - could disrupt future events out of all proportion to the change made. The so-called Butterfly Effect applies.

We accidentally watched a time-travel-related film on Amazon Prime a couple of evenings ago. I say "accidentally" because Amazon had categorised its genre simply as "drama/mystery" :
I'll Follow You Down. We enjoyed the movie well enough, though it was another of those low-budget affairs, its interesting storyline could have been much enhanced with more $$$$$$$ available for sets and effects.
IMDB's nutshell synopsis:

After the disappearance of a young scientist on a business trip, his son and wife struggle to cope, only to make a bizarre discovery years later - one that may bring him home.

Expanding on that a wee bit: the scientist had discovered he could travel into the past via a wormhole he'd found a way to create. He decided to travel from the present (2016) to 1946 with the sole purpose of meeting Albert Einstein, to tell him of his discovery. He did successfully travel through time to 1946, but found that Einstein was not at home; before he could try to locate him the time traveller was mugged and killed. He, of course, never returned to his wife and family. 12 years later his wife, who had not recovered from the shock of her husband's disappearance, committed suicide. Her father, also a scientist and her son - a scientific whizz-kid, after much effort and research, found out what had happened to the boy's time travelling father. They were determined to make things right by the son travelling back to 1946, using the reconstructed research of his father, in order to stop his Dad from doing anything at all, other than travelling back at once to the present.

The son travels back, finds his father before he attempts to meet Einstein...I'll not reveal the ending.

My initial reaction was: "that story is different from the idea of the past pushing back, as in 11/22/63." But then I realised that the past had, indeed, pushed back via the murder of the time-travelling scientist, before he had opportunity to meet with Einstein. Had he succeeded in meeting with Einstein, what would have ensued in years following that meeting, due to matters discussed between the two? The future could have been majorly affected. Though the ending of the I'll follow You Down seemed to turn out as desired by all, we are not enlightened about events during the years after 1946 - in the "new" version of the time cycle. Similar patterns to those already set and experienced in the original cycle after 1946 might again emerge, via different kinds of events - the mother might fall ill and die, the son might have gone on to discover a cure for cancer...etc. Someone should write a sequel!

It's Music Monday.....Time? Bottled?

Warning: Rabbit hole! ~ 11-22-63, Time Travel, George Wallace, Donald Trump, et al. - & Al!

The weekend found me rolling down one of those easily stumbled into internet rabbit-holes.
(NOTE: As the post is longer than normal, with numerous links, it'll remain on top for a couple of days.)

It all started after having watched DVDs of the TV miniseries based on Stephen King's novel 11-22-63. I read and much enjoyed the novel some time ago, was keen to see how the film version stood up, so acquired the 2xDVD set. It stands up reasonably well, in fact, though some detail had to be omitted due to time constraints, even though the mini-series is 450 minutes long. Some elements, including an extra character, have been added in order to better fit the new format. The bones of the story remain easily recognisable, especially in its final turns.

Teeny-tiny nutshell of storyline: Time: the present. A single strand time portal to a certain date in October 1960 is discovered in a Maine diner. Someone decides to use it to try to stop the killing of JFK in 1963 by exiting present, remaining in past for 3 years +, changing past, then returning, having been away from present for only 2 minutes.

In case a passing reader might not want the full story "spoiled", don't read the links above. All I'll say here is that, after the mini-series ended, I was left with a question. "Why was George Wallace so bad?" I was strongly advised by husband to Google for information. This I did. Wiki has it all, also worthy of perusal, an NPR article by Debbie Elliott: Is Donald Trump a Modern-Day George Wallace?

“Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

Fork in rabbit-hole led to: George Wallace's natal chart, HERE. First glance indicates this is the chart of an unbalanced type, with awkward potential! I notice that Wallace had Moon conjunct Regulus. Regulus is what I've always thought to be the catalyst beneath Donald Trump's surprising success. I note that Wallace's time of birth at Astrodatabank, though given "A" rating is based "from memory". I suspect the time could be a bit off at 26.6 Cancer - early Leo rising would be a far better fit - this from my own experience of living with Cancer on the ascendant! Wallace had no Air in his natal chart - that's an important difference between his chart and Trump's.

A blog post at Ohio Astrology next slowed my rabbit-hole descent:
A Fire Moon in the Crowd. The blogger's take on rabble-rousers' astrology is intriguing - do take a look! Wallace is included there, along with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

At this point, a random "George Wallace" link led me down yet another rabbit-hole fork, to a forum (a few do still manage to exist in this Facebook-heavy world). This forum is, I discovered, a newer version of an old-established forum taken down by its creator fairly recently, perhaps due to net fights or bad feeling surfacing, and lack of a moderator. The new forum :
Generational Theory Forum: The Fourth Turning Forum: A message board discussing generations and the Strauss Howe generational theory.

I gathered that Neil Howe, co-author of that door-stopper of a book "Generations" as well as a later volume, The Fourth Turning, once participated in the forum, as I think did the author of Horoscope for the New Millennium, E. Alan Meece (both books sit on my bookshelf). The forum offers a few good reads, though some exchanges tend to fall into the the tl;dr (too long, did not read) category, when debates arise.

The forum had no focus on George Wallace, I'd landed there due to a single mention of Wallace in a post on the forum by an astrologer. I think this link should go to the thread in question. Forum member "Eric the Green" (E. Alan Meece perchance?) had done extensive research into the natal charts of USA presidents and candidates, historically, allocating a scoring system based on various astrological factors (which I've yet to find detailed). Explanation of his system perhaps existed on the original forum now defunct. George Wallace appeared in a list:
1968: Richard Nixon 17-6*, Hubert Humphrey 11-4**, George Wallace 2-6 J (+ Mars rising)
Didn't convey much to me, but I found a few interesting items while rolling around the forum generally - having fallen down this rabbit-hole, may as well take full advantage of surroundings!

Back on surface ground, what conclusion, if any?

Having been thoroughly disoriented after reading of 1st 2nd 3rd and 4th Turnings I'd almost forgotten about George Wallace! He certainly does appear to have had things in common with Donald Trump. He drew on similar popular feelings of disenchantment with the establishment, and fears of "the other": African Americans in Wallace's time, Muslims and/or Mexicans in 2016.

SPOILER (don't read if looking forward to reading or seeing 11-22-63).
When the time traveller of Stephen King's novel returns to the present after spending 3 (or 5) years in the early 1960s, managing to prevent the assassination of JFK, he finds, to his horror, a very different city (and world) awaits him. He's told that JFK was president for 2 terms, then George Wallace was elected. During intervening years the city had been laid waste through bombing, the population left homeless, starving. We're not told detail in the mini-series, but the novel has it all, and it's pretty darn scary! The sight of what had happened was enough to propel our time travelling character back to 1960 once more, to reverse all that he had wrought.

Time itself had tried, again and again, to warn him that the past should not, could not be changed. The past had "pushed back" against change, made his task difficult, near to impossible, yet he had persevered, determined to carry out the important mission his old friend, Al of the diner, had set for him, and with the best possible intentions.

“The past is obdurate.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

Thoughts: why would a guy like Wallace have been elected after 2 terms of JFK? The novel has an explanation. Basically, though Republicans were determined to reverse things. Do we have something akin to that now?

The novel and film are pure fiction, of course.

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dream-clock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

That was one messy rabbit-hole!

Netflixing ~ Off time travelling once more...

I enjoy a bit of "timey-wimey", so when I noticed a recently added movie, titled Flight World War II in Netflix's catalogue, with a hint that time travel is involved, I had to investigate. The movie is a low-budget 2015 release, a tale about a present day 757 on a flight from the USA to the UK. The plane travels through a mysteriously violent storm and afterwards occupants gradually discover that they've travelled through time, to find themselves over France in June 1940. Not a healthy place to be!

In spite of the drawbacks of its low budget, we found it an enjoyable movie. Husband spotted a few flaws, disbelief definitely needs to be suspended. Some anachronisms and "goofs" can be covered by the fact that the 1940 they experience wasn't exactly the same 1940 as the one we know about.

The Doctor, written by Steven Moffat

After reading around a bit, I found that the movie has some similarities to a 1980 film, The Final Countdown. That one was a bigger budget movie with starry cast including Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen. It was a tale of an aircraft carrier in the Pacific... occupants also mysteriously finding themselves transported back to...well you can probably guess the rest. I've ordered a second-hand DVD of The Final Countdown to check it out. I never could resist that old timey-wimey!

Cycles Will Be Cycles

Keeping in mind the previous post's main theme: fictional attempt to change history, in particular to prevent a corporate oligarchy from permanently establishing itself in the world, for generations to come. If a reliable time travel device were available today, to what point in American or UK/European history would seem to be the most useful stop-off point in the past? Which individual(s) would be the key to prevention of a headlong gallop into global corporate governance?

I don't know enough US political history to be able to answer that in respect of the USA. A simple, obvious but not complete, answer would be to travel back to 2009/2010 when the Citizens United case was being decided in the Supreme Court. Could time travellers influence a change that would reverse SCOTUS eventual decision?

In the UK I'd head for 1975 to try to stop Margaret Thatcher's rise in Conservative politics. With regard to Europe - I have no clue. Europe has always been a complex bag of tricks.

Alright...(fantasising): say SCOTUS decision on Citizens United had been reversed, due to time-travel related intervention. That would have moved us onto a new timeline. But, cycles must cycle on, nature decrees so, astrology records it. Life, whether individual, communal or global, moves in cycles - or spirals. Something else would take the place of the Citizens United decision, a few steps further ahead. Events themselves might be vulnerable to change by time travellers, but nature is highly unlikely to be vulnerable in the same way.

Imagine a stream or river flowing towards the sea. Something prevents it from following its established course; it doesn't suddenly begin flowing backwards, or simply stop in its tracks and become a stagnant lake, it carves out a different route for itself, to reach the same sea.

Fascinating, entertaining and distracting as time travel themes are in novels and films, tempting as it is to imagine there'd be a way to change things, in reality I doubt there would be. Most novelists and screenwriters hint at this. Detail might be changed, course would remain the same.

We, as a species and as a civilisation, warts an' all are probably at exactly the stage we're supposed to be right now, in our place on the developing spiral. The best we can hope for is a smooth and relatively painless transition from one stage of the spiral to the next, when it becomes time for that to happen. A reasonable aim for which to struggle now, I guess, would be to develop circumstances most likely to lead to smoother transition into natural changes.

Netflixing & Continuum ...a bit of the old timey-wimey + corpy-worpy!

We're on our first month of Netflixing, and discovering all manner of delights! We've binge-watched the first season of True Detective - a cop series with a difference. Leading actors will change season by season. First season of 8 episodes starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson - a wonderful pairing of two superb actors.

We occasionally dip into first season of the long-running medical series, Grey's Anatomy. One episode at a time is quite enough for me of any hospital centred series, this one included. It's just so-so for me, but audiences must have absolutely loved it - it survived for 11 seasons!

My favourite discovery, so far, is Canadian sci-fi series, Continuum. I'd never heard of it, didn't expect much, but it didn't take long to realise that this is an intelligent piece of quality writing. Time travel is the series' main theme, with aspects of politics, friendship, family relationships closely intertwined.

Continuum is good in every respect, but the political slant, in tandem with time travel, is what is fascinating me most. Series creator is Simon Barry, a British born Canadian. A quick look at his noon natal chart (25 September 1966) shows a Libra Sun and Mercury; Venus conjunct Uranus/Pluto in Virgo; and Moon in Aquarius (whatever his time of birth). What a great combination for a science fiction writer!

The story's setting is Vancouver, initially in the year 2077, on November 5 in fact. The city, and presumably the country (maybe also the world, or at least North America), are governed by the corporations. A towering skyscraper housing the corporate congress has been blown-up resulting in many thousands of deaths. Perpetrators were Liber-8, a group of eight freedom fighters - or terrorists - depending on one's point of view. They are caught and ready to be executed in a high-tech communal execution chamber.

One female police officer is detailed to stand close, as guard. Seconds before the execution is carried out a blinding flash... when the screen clears those about to be executed, and the police officer, have disappeared.

We then find ourselves with the police officer, Kiera, as she finds she, and Liber-8 have been hurtled back 65 years to 2012. She looks distinctly out of place in her high-tech police uniform in Vancouver's streets, 2012.

That's how the story begins. After the first couple of episodes we began to wonder if this was going to be our cup of tea after all, or was it a series created for more conservative-leaning viewers who consider a city, country or world world totally run by corporations could be a good thing? After all, it seemed we were being led to see Kiera, avid supporter and defender of a corporate police state, as our heroine, with those painted as bad guys being the ones fighting an oppressive corporate oligarchy. Liber-8 might now have an opportunity to crush 2077's corporate governance in its infancy, if they can steer clear of Kiera.
Kiera manages to infiltrate a local police department to aid her search for the "terrorists", and her equally important aim of returning to 2077, her husband and family.

Simon Barry has said, in interview:

...."Our goal was to create a group of points of view. From our point of view Kiera is the lead because she is driving a lot of the storytelling perspective. That’s not to say Kiera is the emotional or political nexus of the show. Her journey is one of discovery; it is one of change. Therefore this grey area is not designed for Kiera but for the audience. Kiera has entered a world that we’re more familiar with than she is. That’s an advantage because now your main character is coming from a point of view that she’s open to new ideas, to a journey and exploration, and education. The audience is set in their ways in how they see the world that their living in at that moment. If the show can at all change the way people perceive things or force them to experience something through a different perspective then we’ve accomplished something small but important in terms of the themes of the show. We’ve always looked at those grey areas as being something that you define not that we define. We wanted to put everything out there in a way that felt more honest. There’s no all good and all evil. But there are always shades of grey and if you look around the world you’ll know that there is.”

It's this "grey area" that makes the series special, for those interested in politics and history. The corporate society of 2077 is controlled in every aspect of life and strictly policed. A liberated future, in 2035, of which we are given a glimpse later in the series, is a dark and dirty shamble of freedom with widespread horrendous abuse. Neither of those futures would be desirable.

 Rachel Nichols & Eric Knudsen (Kiera & Alec Sadler - the two key characters )

There's lots of other good stuff too, besides the political angle. My single criticsim of the series is that the fight scenes, roughly one per episode, are too long.

Rachel Nichols who plays Kiera said about her part in the series:

"Portraying someone who is unfamiliar with the present day requires playing a mental mind trick on oneself............ We try to find those little areas and nuances where her futureness can come out - whether she doesn’t know what the Bat signal means, , or she can’t drive a car, or she’s amazed by running water, or she has never seen a horse before. We find those moments and keep that thread going throughout the show.”

I don't want to give away more of the themes, twists and surprises, which do increase in complexity as the show develops. One mustn't become distracted from concentrating on the screen for even a few seconds. We have had to re-wind several times to make sure what was going on and why!

This must surely be one show that is far better watched several episodes at a sitting as we are doing. With a week's wait between episodes I'd have probably given up on it quite quickly. Simon Barry has mentioned, in that regard, that writers these days do have to bear in mind that they may be writing for two distinct audiences: those who watch episodes on TV weekly, as aired, and those who watch the series in larger chunks (binge-watching) via Netflix and similar outlets.

We're into season 3 now... and, so far, are feeling thoroughly confused! A layer of complexity is added to the already complex mix. Now, as well as a different timeline unfolding we have Freelancers, an ages old/ages new group or sect whose sole purpose is to act as guardians for the correct (as they see it) unfolding of time. They aim to prevent "glitches" and stop those whose purpose in time travel is likely to cause change and disruption.

In the episode we watched last night a company called Sonmanto was manufacturing, and selling chemical weapons...Sonmanto...re-arrange these letters to make a familiar word or name!

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... timey wimey... stuff.

There's something that doesn't make sense. Let's go and poke it with a stick.
          ~ Steven Moffat (Quotes from Doctor Who)

NOTE: For anyone who'd like more detail on Continuum's themes, there's a good piece with lots of photos and spoilers HERE.
There's also a good review of the opening episode of Season 3 at The Disgruntled Individual blog HERE