Web Fed News Yearbooks - July 2003

THE MONTH IN BRIEF

We introduced a new color poster during July, which you can download, print out on the now oh-so-cheap color inkjet printers, and stick on your wall... or on the noticeboard at your school or college, or anywhere else you can think of! Download the colour poster, or the original black and white one, at http://www.ibgames.net/federation/fedinfo/fedposter.html.

Apart from that, it was a quiet month!

PILGRIMS FLOCK TO CHEZ DIESEL TO SEE MIRACLE PIZZA

The streets of Mars city are clogged with pilgrims, all heading to Chez Diesel (the Social Centre of the Solar System) to see a miraculous pizza which bears the image of the demi-goddess and, it is claimed, has spiritual powers.

The pizza - one of Diesel's standard cheese, tomato and moose-meat delicacies - has an image formed out of the various topping ingredients, which appears to be the face of Hazed. The image was discovered by one of the bar's waitdroids, who was carrying the pizza to a table and preparing to spin it onto the table when it took a closer look, and spotted the remarkable sight of the demi-goddess's face gazing up from the depths of the melted cheese. The waitdroid showed it to Diesel, who immediately alerted the galactic media, declaring that the pizza was "a modern-day miracle".

The pizza has now been preserved in a stasis field and displayed in a special room upstairs at Chez Diesel. Pilgrims are allowed into the room to view the miraculous pizza in small groups, for a reasonable fee.

Dramatic claims have since been made that the pizza can heal the sick and even resurrect the dead. We spoke to several people who said they had been made well and visiting the shrine and gazing on the artistic bread.

Mrs Trellis, from North Wales on Earth: "I had a very bad cold last week, I just couldn't stop sneezing and coughing, but after I saw the miracle pizza my cold just dried up completely and now I feel fine."

Mr Artemis Gangle, from Cepheid: "My uncle crashed his spaceship on the way to viewing the pizza and died. I went and prayed to the image of the demi-goddess, and miraculously, my uncle was revived and is back piloting his ship as if nothing had happened."

Glurg Fleebox, a triped from Betelgeuse VII: "Recently I have become completely incapable of klamming my fluxton, to the extent that my wheejure was totally strummoxed - but after I went to CDs and looked at the pizza, I was suddenly able to picole the trenchly, and now I am all rigelly round the rolbow."

Diesel herself refused to say whether she believes in the healing powers of the pizza, but the effect on her takings has certainly been miraculous, as CDs is doing more business than ever before!

SPOTTY ALIENS SUE DIESEL

A group of teenage aliens who suffer from acne have sued Diesel, proprieteuse of the popular Martian bar Chez Diesel, accusing her of knowingly serving food that gave them zits.

The lawsuit has been filed in the Galactic Court on Earth. It says that Diesel misled customers by enticing them with greasy, unhealthy pizzas.

"Diesel has wrecked my life," Dilb Hedgfork, one of the plaintiffs, told the Chronicle. Dilb, 16 Earth years old, from Aldebaran IV, has been a frequent visitor to CDs for the last few years, and says he regularly ate her pizzas. Now his face has erupted with pustules, and his dermatologist has told him the pizzas are to blame.

"I always thought pizza was good for you. I never thought there was anything wrong with it," he said. "Why is that evil woman allowed to sell food that has such a horrible effect?"

Fargel Bling, from Ceteganda, age 18, is another of the plaintiffs. His face is covered with scars from acne he suffered during his early teenage years. "What makes it so much worse is that my friends tease me and call me names like pizza-face," he says. "When I realised that it was eating pizzas that had made me look like this, I was just so upset. There is no warning displayed in the bar to say that pizzas are bad for you."

When we sent a newsdroid to CDs to talk to Diesel about the lawsuit, she was laughing so hard she couldn't speak to us. Or to anyone.

HOW DO YOU FIRE YOUR MISSILES?

If you've got a fighting ship, if you take part in the fighting events, if you've ever shot at a space mobile... have you ever stopped to think what mechanism is used to instruct your ship to let rip with the missiles or twin lasers? Oh, sure, because Fed is a text game you have to type in a command: FIRE MISSILE or FIRE TL. But how do you imagine that would really happen if your space ship were real? In the movie that plays in your head when you are in Fed DataSpace, what does it all look like?

Most people probably envisage a big, red button they have to press in order to set off their mighty weapons. Years of jokes about the big red button world leaders have access to, which will unleash nuclear armageddon onto the planet, have made it a kind of cliche.

And yet, it turns out not to be true after all. Ccruise missiles on board the British Royal Navy submarine HMS Splendid are fired by the click of a mouse. How very mundane! One crew member, interviewed for a documentary about the recent Iraq war, said: "A left mouse push fires it. Kinda crazy really. We actually asked for a great big red button, but they wouldn't give us one."

I hope this fact doesn't destroy your illusions and change the movies running in your head when you play Fed!

REAL LIFE NEWS: WHY DOES MY COMPUTER CRASH?

I have spent the last few weeks recovering from a computer meltdown. My old computer had been getting flakier and more unreliable, with frequent crashes, so I ordered a new computer. I intended to take a few weeks to get the new machine up and running properly, transfer data over, install programs, before switching it to prime position in an orderly fashion.

In a fit of pique and jealousy, however, the old computer decided to die completely the same day the new computer arrived. I had just enough warning of its imminent expiration to grab all the data off the rapidly decomposing machine, and then I had to get the new computer up and running right away so I could carry on with my work.

All this simply serves to put into context a fun little poem that I found on the net, entitled "Why Does My Computer Crash"? Anyone who has suffered from computer problems will appreciate it. Go take a look at http://yc2.net/crash.html.

REAL LIFE NEWS: DUCK FLOTILLA NEARS LAND

Here's a real cute story. Back in 1992 a container ship en route from China to Seattle got caught in a storm, and some of its cargo was washed overboard. The cargo was a consignment of rubber ducks, along with other bath toys such as frogs, beavers and turtles. Ever since then, the flotilla of rubber ducks has been sailing the seas. Scientists have been tracking them as they travelled, through three oceans, and have learnt valuable lessons about surface currents.

The ducks fell overboard near the 45th parallel 11 years ago, and then floated along the Alaskan coast, reaching the Bering Strait in 1995. It is thought they were trapped by slow moving ice for several years - it took them until 2000 to reach the Atlantic ocean. A year later, they were tracked in the area of the north Atlantic where the Titanic sank.

During this voyage, some of the ducks broke away and headed for Europe. Others have surfaced in Hawaii. But the majority stayed together, and now they are likely to wash up on the coast of New England, finally ending their long, long journey across the seas.