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Lyle Zapato

Monorails = Cute Puppies?

Lyle Zapato | 2006-03-01.4140 LMT

It's a well known propaganda tactic to inculcate a desired emotional response to something through its repeated juxtaposition with a known emo-response stimulant. I touched on this in my post about Pixelito, the microcopter that's friends with hamsters, where the Belgian Conspiracy was leveraging the psychoevolutionary construct known as "cuteness" to elicit a maternal response to Black Helicopters.

Now agents of the Monorail Society are trying the same tactic with monorails, only instead of hamsters they're bringing out the big guns: Puppies*...

Puppies riding a minimonorail. Photo credit: James Horecka, known Monorailist
It's unknown if the puppies survived the inevitable
spontaneous monorail combustion that followed.

Presumably the puppy monorail (which is non-functioning and was thrown together "Hollywood style" -- in other words it's just like a normal sized monorail) will be deployed wherever the public is having doubts about monorailization. "Oh, look at the cute puppies!" the public will say, "Monorails can't be all that bad if cute puppies ride them. Let's hand over our property rights to the nice men with the odd hairstyles who make bizarrely pompous speeches."

Well, two can play at this game. I encourage all citizens concerned about Monorailists stealing your houses and enabling unwelcome elements to infiltrate your community to propagate the following picture designed by top paranoid memetic experts to undo the psychological damage caused by the Monorailists' "puppaganda":

Anti-puppaganda

Oh, and for any pet owners who may be wondering, there is a more sensible alternative for animal transportation -- one that can be built underground, leaving any private property above unseized.

*Observant users of MindGuard know that the canonical psychotronic enamorment memeplex involves "cute kittens", usually the petting thereof, so the nonstandard choice of puppies could signify a disassociation between the Monorailists and more mainstream forces of mind control. Then again, slightly off-kilter modes of conduct and technology might just be part of the inherent nature of Monorailism. I guess we should be surprised they didn't use sugar gliders or some other unnecessarily odd cuteness vector.

UPDATE: Monorails = More Cute Puppies?

The Monorailist

Ray Bradbury: Monorailist

The Monorailist | 2006-02-05.1550 LMT | Technology

In a Los Angeles Times editorial, Ray Bradbury -- author, futurist -- calls for an end to the City of Angel's disastrous love affair with freeways, subways, and other misbegotten ways. His solution to all of L.A.'s traffic woes: The Monorail!

Ever since he was thrown out of a 1963 L.A. County Board of Supervisors meeting for daring to voice the dream of Elevationment aloud in the presence of benighted automotorists and boring subwaymen, Bradbury has championed the singular vision of a singular rail that will lift Angelenos above the smog of decadence that has sooted their souls for so long.

At that 1963 meeting, M wasn't for Monorail, but Missed Opportunity. Alweg Monorail Company offered to build a monorail system at no charge. A free monorail! And yet the Board rejected the offer, choosing instead to side with the special interests of car peddlers and third-rail salesmen. Oh, what could have been! Oh, what could still be! While the Monorail was cravenly spurned in the past, Bradbury predicts that something monorailular this way comes:

The freeway is the past, the monorail is our future, above and beyond.

Above and beyond indeed! Society must rise above future-disrupting traffic and replace its thunderous din with a sound of woosh. In a previous interview, Bradbury sings a city elevated, comprised of not one, but ten monorail systems that will engirth L.A. in machineries of joy, bringing about the downfall of automotive tyranny: "We're talking about eliminating cars here." But will Los Angeles join in Bradbury's vision? When the Monorail Chronicles are written, will the current generation of Angelenos be counted among those who dared embraced Humanity's Monorailular Progress?

EXTRA! More exciting monorail news from India:

The Chennai Monorail Project will cover 300 km in 18 corridors, making it by far the largest monorail system on Earth. The Motherland of the Monorail will have the Mother of all Monorails!

Lyle Zapato

Manatee Monorail?

Lyle Zapato | 2006-01-31.2980 LMT | Nature | Pneumatics

Sufferin' Sirenia! Florida's Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park wants to build a monorail for their manatees:

Although the state plans improvements to make the manatee treatment pools work better for the animals, [park manager Art] Yerian's wish list includes a $100,000 monorail system that would allow park officials to slip manatees into slings, hoist them with pulleys and use the rails to move them from the spring run to the holding or treatment pools.

Aren't these gentle creatures endangered enough without exposing them to the risk of collisions, spontaneous combustions, or abductions? Even worse, the manatee's closest relative is the elephant -- do park officials not know how poorly elephants take to monorails?

I propose a better, more manatee-friendly, less manatee-cidal, way to get them from pool to pool: a Pneumatic Manatee Distribution System. Given their fusiform shape, you wouldn't even need pods; just stuff them in the tube, close the hatch, and press Send.

Zapato Pneumatic Manatee Distribution System

Radical Sasquatch

HOWL: THIS BLOG IS DISINFORMATIVE!!!

Radical Sasquatch | 2006-01-28.3130 LMT | Sasquatch Issues | Cephalopods | Cascadia

OTHER BLOG CONTRIBUTORS, HEAR MY HOWLS!!!

HUMAN LYLE: You are wrong about the GIANT FOREST OCTOPUS being a myth! I HAVE SEEN IT MYSELF!!! Other Sasquatch howl that I am crazy but I KNOW WHAT I SAW!!! I was walking through the forest one night ENGAGED IN PRIVATE SASQUATCH BUSINESS THAT IS OF NO CONCERN TO NOSEY CRYPTOZOOLOGISTS when I heard the DEEP CLACKING OF A BEAK in the distance and smelled a STRONG ODOR OF AMMONIA on the wind! Then all of the sudden A GIANT ARM AS THICK AS A LOG WITH A THOUSAND SUCTION CUPS lunged out of the dense trees towards me! Although it was dark I was able to find a nearby boulder to defend myself! I SMASHED THE ARM BEFORE IT COULD GRAB ME!!! There was a GURGLING SCREECH in the distance and the arm started to retract back into the trees! Before it could get away I took a bite out of it! IT WAS DELICIOUS!!!

SILLY LOOKING HUMAN WITH STRANGE FIXATION ON MONO RAIL: Vanara would never build a mono rail! WHAT SORT OF FUNGUS HAVE YOU BEEN GATHERING?! Vanara are proud Hominoids like Sasquatch! If you ordered Sasquatch to build you a mono rail WE WOULD CRUSH EVERY ONE OF YOUR BONES and howl at your floppy corpse: "THERE'S YOUR MONO RAIL!!!" Vanara would do the same, I am sure! Anyway, IN MY HUMBLE OPINION, what Cascadia needs is a SYSTEM OF GONDOLAS traversing the forest canopy! THIS WOULD MAKE IT MUCH EASIER TO GATHER TREE OCTOPUS!!!

TYPING OCTOPUS: I know you are using one of our Hominoidnet kiosks... IF I FIND YOU I WILL EAT YOU!!!

The Monorailist

Ramayana, Monorailayana

The Monorailist | 2006-01-27.2500 LMT | Technology

According to the Ramayana, around 1.75 million years ago a bridge was built from mainland India across the sea to Sri Lanka. This feat of engineering was accomplished by the vanara architect Nala with the help of an army of monkeys, chief among them Hanuman, so that Lord Rama, prince of Ayodhya and avatar of Krishna, could save his wife, Sita, from the clutches of the island's dastardly, ten-mustachioed demon-ruler, Ravana.

While conventional Indologists theorize that this bridge was merely a walking path, I am certain that careful reading of the epic shows that the bridge was in fact India's first monorail line -- perhaps the grandest the world has ever witnessed.

NASA satellites have documented the bridge's remains: a chain of shoals of unnatural formation -- variably called Rama's Bridge, Nala's Bridge, or, in the West, Adam's Bridge. However, there is an interesting discrepancy; while these limestone shoals sit securely on the sea floor, tradition describes the bridge being made of "floating stones". Some scholars wildly infer that the shoals must have been formed later with the sinking of the presumably buoyant stones, but offer no mechanism for this transformation. They are like blind men unable to identify an elephant by its dissimilar parts. A true synthesis comes only with the realization that the shoals and the "floating stones" represent two different aspects of the same structure -- pillar footings and an elevated monorail track.

Consider the Monorail, with its track gliding through the air like a gentle breeze solidified, held aloft on slender pillars that hardly inconvenience the ground below. Is there any better description for this graceful, elevated state than to say the track is floating? I think not. Clearly, the chroniclers of India's history, faced with the awe-inspiring splendor of that majestic monorail stretching insouciantly Ceylonward, could not have described the rock that made up its track any other way than as "floating stones".

Read the epic with eyes open to the monorailistic possibilities and more details come into focus. Behold Nala's Monorail floating over the sea on pillars made of whole trees, some of them still bearing blossoms, uprooted by the monkey army and planted on shoals newly formed with elephant-sized boulders torn from the mountains by the most powerful of the vanara and plunged into waters tumulted with their alacritous monkey business. Five days! Five days was all it took the army of monkeys -- heroes all -- to build 30 miles of monorail track. Oh! If only Seattle had such a bold visionary as Nala!

(Some skeptics -- no doubt fearful of the coming Monorail Awakening and the massive social transformation it will bring -- will desperately protest that the bridge, described as being 10 yojanas or 80 miles wide, could not have been a monorail. But the same sources claim it was 100 yojanas or 800 miles long when we know the crossing to be only 30 miles. Obviously, exuberance for such an exalted structure has led to an exaggeration of the measurements over time. Do not attempt to explain away the reality of ancient Indian monorail technology with these untrustworthy figures!)

After the monorail line was built, Rama and his younger brother Lakshmana are said to have rode across it on the backs of Hanuman and Angada. As Sugriva, King of the Vanara, tells Rama: "These monkeys can hold both of you while flying in the sky." A clear reference to the elevated nature of the bridge, to be sure, but what are we to make of this? Was this a monorail track without monorail cars? Was it merely an elevated path for monkey porters? No.

We know from the epic that the vanara employed "mechanical contrivances" or "engines" to transport the largest boulders to the sea, so they had the technology to produce a monorail car. As Hanuman and Angada were instrumental in the endeavor to reach Ravana, what better tribute than to name the newly crafted monorail cars in their honor. Thus Rama rode in the foremost monorail car Hanuman, not on its monkey namesake -- a distinction that become understandably confused over time. Mind you, this doesn't lessen Hanuman's bhakti, for he did much in the service of Rama, but I think Rama would find traveling in the sublime, transcendental luxury that only a monorail can provide more befitting of him than riding on the back of a monkey, no matter how loyal and noble the monkey may be.

Having established the antiquity of monorail technology in India, I say: Let Mr. Zapato continue his tired tirades against the Monorail! Let him try to lead the good people of India away from their deserved place among the Monorailized Nations of the World! He will fail -- he already has failed! For you see, the Monorail is the warp woven through the very fabric of Indian culture; an intrinsic part of her national heritage, though today only dimly remembered. India is the homeland of Monorailism and the cycle of history shall be completed with the Monorail's rebirth in Chennai.

Lastly, an interesting note: Lava, the name of the Malaysian consulting firm behind the Chennai monorail deal, is also the name of one of Rama's two sons, both reunited with Rama after being born to Sita in monastic banishment. How fitting that a company bearing the name of one who would not have been conceived had it not been for Nala's monorailular ingenuity should be helping to return the Monorail to her ancestral home, reuniting the Past with the Future.

Lyle Zapato

More Chennai Monorail Revelations

Lyle Zapato | 2006-01-20.5580 LMT | Politics

The Tamil Nadu Government is now claiming they went with a monorail because they feared a Chennai earthquake. Obviously, when the Big One hits, the best place to have multi-ton metal vehicles is balancing over the heads of pedestrians (not safely ensconced in pressurized, quake-resistant underground tubes).

Also, after a government assembly where critics were denied the ability to raise questions, PMK member G. K. Mani revealed that the monorail "bogies" the government plans to purchase are currently sitting abandoned in Malaysia. It's unknown at this time if they're in the same state of disrepair as the ones found in France, but considering how desperate Lava is to unload them, it would be wise to check the cars for vagrant orangutans before signing for them.

Lyle Zapato

Madras Monorail Malfeasance

Lyle Zapato | 2006-01-15.3330 LMT | Politics

DMK opposition party president M. Karunanidhi says the Tamil Nadu government, which recently threatened a new monorail project for the city of Chennai, has been involved in shady deals with monorailmongers Lava Consultants and Consortium Limited, a shadowy organization operating out of Malaysia, possibly from a secret layer hidden deep inside an active volcano, although this hasn't been confirmed.

According to Karunanidhi, the government had already completed talks with Lava prior to accepting bids for the project and there will be "kickbacks":

The project is estimated to cost around Rs 20,000 crore [200 billion rupees, or ~4.5 billion US$] of which Rs 1,000 crore will be given to a person in Tamil Nadu, and an individual living in Malaysia is holding talks with the government to finalise the project, as per information reaching us.

Will this turn out to be yet another monorail project mired in corruption and fiscal shenanigans that will ultimately leave citizens in transportation limbo? Undoubtedly yes. If only governments would consider wiser alternatives...

The Monorailist

India Has The Monorail!

The Monorailist | 2006-01-12.2270 LMT | Cascadia | Politics

News from the East! Chennai will be the first city in India to be monorailized!

The Tamil Nadu Government today announced it will implement the Monorail Rapid Transport System to reduce traffic congestion in Chennai city, making it the first in the country to have such a system.

Congratulations, and welcome to the Future! The concept of the Monorail, still largely unfamiliar to most Indians, was explained to Chennaites by News Today:

Monorail, the single-track upraised train service, is popular in many advanced countries (Japan, Malaysia, Australia, USA, to name a few).

This charmingly naïve tautology -- for to be advanced necessarily means embracing the monorail -- shows that India is finally awakening herself to Monorail Consciousness. And sure enough that consciousness will spread as two billion eyes open to the possibilities of the monorail; ND also reports that West Bengal, Karnataka, and Punjab are expected to follow Chennai's bold lead.

What effect will this have on tensions between India and Pakistan, who are planning their own monorail in Lahore? Will a common monorailular cause -- tying together the subcontinent in a glorious ribbon of unity made, and made of, concrete -- bring these two bitter adversaries together? I am certain the monorail holds forth to mankind the prospect for global unification -- uniting the divergent rails of social discord into one common path of agreeance -- and this could be the beginning.

But what of us? What of Seattle and the rest of Cascadia? Are we to outsource the Monorail Revolution? Will we be left below, to fend for ourselves on the cold, unforgiving streets, molested by biker gangs unguided by the rails of law and surrounded by the accumulating detritus of our failed technologies as India and others pass over us in luxurious comfort into humanity's destiny? We must not let this be our fate! We must get back on track! A dream derailed is a dream denied!

With Seattle going on it's 25th consecutive day of rain, could this not be a sign that we have disembarked at the wrong station? Need I point out that monorails, held high aloft the lapping waves of the flooded streets, are not hampered by such deluges?

While my primary concern is with the Elevationment of Humanity, this setback has affected me personally. The closure of the Seattle Monorail following that suspicious accident -- I suspect there is more going on than just pilot error and that Mr. Zapato has information he is withholding -- has left me stranded in my apartment since November.

Unable to reach the West Lake Center food court, I am living off of canned goods and what meager scraps I can come by. I would order take-out, but the local delivery boys have black-listed me since I mocked their primitive automobiles and bicycles. My neighbors have suggested I use the busses, but that is not an option. Once one has been elevated on a concrete beam of hope high enough to touch the very robe-hems of the Gods, one cannot -- no, will not! -- go back to those debased forms of transportation which one had transcended.

I have faith that the monorail will one day run again, but the situation seems as if it will only get worse before it will get better. Please, send fresh supplies and monorail technicians!

Lyle Zapato

Nanomonorails

Lyle Zapato | 2005-12-05.2540 LMT | Technology | NWO | Black Helicopters

Yet more on the Monorailist agenda operating inside of Cascadia. This time, they want you to wear nanoscopic monorails woven into your clothing:

Imagine clothing that repairs itself when damaged. Or structures that grow and change to adapt to changes in the environment, in much the same way as living things.

A key area of research leading toward this vision of the future involves building nanoengines and tiny shuttle systems that could be woven into the fabric of objects to transport materials at the molecular level. [Viola Vogel, director of the University of Washington's Center for Nanotechnology,] and her colleagues have been working on such systems -- a monorail at the nanoscale, as it were -- with some success.

Self-healing clothing is all fine and good, but what happens when your warp collides with your woof and spontaneously combusts?

Even more troubling, this development exposes strange new dealings between the Monorailists and NWO, makers of the Black Helicopters. Black Helicopters, as you will recall from the link you just clicked in the previous sentence, are grown from seed crystals using nanobiotechnology -- that is, nanotechnology that incorporates biological elements to create nanoscopic cyborgs. This is exactly the same technology, undoubtedly provided by the NWO, that Vogel is using to develop her nanomonorails:

In delving into the concept of nanoshuttles, Vogel and her team studied two motor proteins used for transport in the body: kinesin and myosin. Kinesin is found in all of the body's cells and moves along a cell's cytoskeleton -- a network of rigid microtubules that help impart shape and structure to a cell -- to carry neurotransmitters to where they are needed. Myosin is found in muscles, where it interacts with another protein, actin, to cause muscle contraction.

Vogel has already built a prototype nanomonorail shuttle powered by ATP and made of microtubules propelled by a stationary rail of kinesin (an inversion -- or should we say perversion -- of normal biology). She also used the cell growth factor biotin to bind cargo to the nanomonorail shuttle. All of these are biochemicals present in the human body, thus making her abomination a cybernetic human-monorail nanohybrid.

Clearly all this talk of structures that change to adapt to the environment is just an innocuous sounding cover story for the continual, gradual public acclimation to a new nanobiotechnological paradigm, one in which everyone will have nanomonorails coursing first through their homes, then their clothes, and eventually their bodies. Why bother with that messy business of inoculating cows with seed crystals when the NWO can simply transmogrify any one of us into a Black Helicopter at will?

Lyle Zapato

Carpetbagging Monorailists: A Cascadian Tradition

Lyle Zapato | 2005-11-29.2150 LMT | Cascadia | Technology

There was a story on Evening Magazine last night about "The Northwest's 10 Greatest Unsolved Mysteries". Besides yet again bringing up D.B. Cooper -- whom you should all just forget you ever heard about -- it had one topical mystery I had somehow missed: the details surrounding a prototype monorail built on the Tacoma tideflats in 1910 or 1911.

William H. Boyes monorail prototype, from monorails.org

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