Chapter Notes: South out of Tukwila (Destination Unknown) · 2:01am Feb 25th, 2022
A mare can’t stay in one place forever, even Seattle. It’s time for Sweetsong to find another train and keep heading west—the ocean is calling.
Special thanks to AlwaysDressesInStyle for pre-reading and penguincascadia for helping with Seattle sightseeing!
The Space Needle was built for the 1962 World’s Fair (as was the monorail), is earthquake resistant (up to magnitude 9.0), and was the tallest structure west of the Mississippi when it was built. It has a rotating restaurant which, according to Wikipedia, “[is] so perfectly balanced that the restaurant [can] rotate with the help of one tiny electric motor, originally .8hp, later replaced with a 1.5hp motor.” For context, the Ninja Mega Kitchen System blender has a two horsepower motor.
Some of you may remember this:
We got all our stuff put inside, and he drove us first to a tall white tower called the Space Needle. I didn't like the elevator, and Gusty was a little nervous about how high it was, but it was totally worth it when we got our table. There were big windows that looked out over the side, and the whole dining room slowly turned so that we could see everything around us.
...
After lunch we walked up one floor higher to the observation deck. I wanted to fly down, but there was a fence in the way that closed in the whole area so that I couldn't.
And yet now Sweetsong is landing on the observation deck? What new devilry is this?
It turns out that the Space Noodle Needle got remodeled. Gone are the fences up the sides and over the top; they’ve been replaced with lots of glass panels instead . . . but there’s no roof.
Greenland Whale Fisheries, or Ballad of the Greenland Whalers0 is a traditional sea song, published before 1725. In the traditional version, the captain is upset at the loss of his crew; however, in the version I know best—by the Chad Mitchell Trio—he is instead upset at the loss of the whale.
I could be wrong (often am about these kinds of things), but in general sea shanties feel like a forgotten art form, which is why I was happy when Wellerman made the rounds during the pandemic. They’re often fun songs to sing, and as far as I know are intended to be sung by everyone.
Which brings us to an interesting question, which Sweetsong noted. In general, these days music is to be listened to, not sung by the crowd, with the sole major exception being Christmas carols and church hymns. Sure, some of us sing along to music, maybe even when we’re in public, but for the most part if someone started singing and you or anyone in the crowd joined in, that would seem weird.
Why is that?
The Olympic Sculpture Park is located on both sides of the railroad tracks, not that far west from the Space Needle. It has both permanent and rotating sculptures, and an enclosed space as well. Given its location, sculpture maintenance is a constant issue; salt from Puget Sound isn’t good for many of the sculptures, and some of them are at risk of bird poop, too. On Google Maps, Eagle is one of the most visible sculptures:
The grass around its base needs to be cut with scissors to avoid damage. Or they could just hire a few unicorns who know a thing or two about cropping a lawn. . . .
HERE’S their website; if you click on the ‘map and guide’ button, it gives you a pdf which has pictures and descriptions of all the sculptures and their artists.
The Aburiya Bento House is right next to Cloudburst Brewing. One of the things they sell are bento boxes—I think (someone correct me if I’m wrong) that ‘bento’ is a take-out food option, and the ‘box’ part is that it’s in a box. Sort of like for us Westerners, lunch can be in a box, a lunchbox). There seems to be more to the concept than just ‘food that you take with you,’ though, and someone in the comments is welcome to set us all straight 
I’d seen them when I was watching videos on YouTube about taking Japanese overnight trains with their various sleeping accommodations, and when I looked the Aburiya Bento House’s menu, noticed that their signature boxes were served in a 9-compartment wooden box. [I don’t know if you can actually carry out that box, or if that’s what the give you in lieu of a plate.]
Don’t Sleep in the Subway is a song I knew, although I didn’t know any of the lyrics to it or what it was called.
Seattle has a number of pubic transit options. I’ve used their busses, and they’re nice, convenient, and cheap. You can get from the airport to the hotel for only $3.00, although there’s a little bit of walking involved. And we’ve already talked about the monorail.
They’ve also got Link light rail, which runs between Sea-Tac airport and downtown Seattle, among other destinations. You could see it from the old EFNW hotel, in fact. It also only costs $3.00, which is quite the bargain. Some of it is underground, some of it is grade-level, and some of it is on bridges. It’s electric, powered by overhead wires, and they’re planning on extending to Bellevue (where EFNW is now) by 2023 or 2024. They’re built by Siemens Mobility, who also builds some of Amtrak’s locomotives.*
You can bet that when they do their expansion, I’ll be riding the electric train to EFNW.
Seattle also has the Sounder, a larger train that runs on regular rails. Sweetsong doesn’t wind up riding it, but she’s seen some Sounder trains pass by.
IFR actually stands for Instrument Flight Rules, which apply when visibility is limited. The most basic flight condition (and most basic pilot’s license) is VFR [Visual Flight Rules] which mostly involves ‘see and avoid,’ [grossly simplified] which means that you can navigate by eyeball. In the Midwest, you can navigate from town to town by spotting water towers and reading the names on them.
Of course, the skies aren’t always clear, and once you’re below minimums, a trained and rated pilot can rely on the instruments in his or her aircraft to provide guidance. I am very much not a pilot, although I know that it’s easy to become disoriented in limited visibility.
It’s an old joke that IFR stands for “I follow roads/railroads/rivers” . . . which, in visual conditions, at least, can be a thing to follow. It’s not always the most efficient route, but if you want to go from A to B, and some ground feature also goes there, if you follow it, you won’t get lost. According to some sources, this theory also applies to birds, who have apparently learned that following I-75 is a good way to get south for the winter (and a more recent study discovered that pigeons in London follow the roads instead of more efficient straight-line flights).**
Maybe ‘as the crow flies’ isn’t the best saying anymore. . .
Also, ‘cause I got curious and did the math, if Sweetsong flew at an average speed of only 10mph (16km/h) for only 4 hours (1.7 metric hours) per day and flown in a straight line, she’d have gotten from Battle Creek to Seattle in about 46 days, which is longer than the publishing time of this fic. That’s got no relevance on the story at all, I just thought it was a fun calculation to do.
Besides being helpful at catching spelling mistakes and other errors, and doing some fact-checking for me, pre-readers provide another service as well. While it’s ideal as an author to describe what I know, that’s not always practical, and these days the internet is a great tool. In a story like this, Google Maps and Google Street View give me reasonably up-to-date pictures of a location and what’s there. For example, what’s close to Sweetsong’s train-catching spot is a Penske truck rental lot, a Days Inn, a Starbucks, and a Jack in the Box.
Jack in the Box is a fast-food chain in the Western US, although they’re expanding east. As far as I know, they’ve got no Michigan locations, I suppose if they want to try, they’ve got to fight Culvers and Tim Horton’s.
What I didn’t know, but AlwaysDressesInStyle mentioned while pre-reading, is that they got in a bit of hot water in 1981 for selling horseburgers and horse tacos.
Admittedly, that was a problem with their supplier, who cut costs by figuring ‘it’s got four legs and eats grass, it’s basically a cow.’
Today’s song is a real throwback: Freight Train by Rusty Draper. Written by Elizabeth Cotten between 1912 and 1920, and inspired by the trains passing by her home, it became popular in the 50s.
I was originally going to link the Rusty Draper version of the song, until I found Elizabeth Cotten performing it:
*in case anyone knows, why do the Siemens Chargers have a brightly-lighted mechanical room that you can see from outside?
**not a link to the study, ‘cause I’m too lazy, but some of y’all will remember that Silver Glow often followed roads, railroads, and power lines . . . as Equestria modernizes, do you think that pegasi and other flying creatures would begin to follow more obvious ground-based landmarks? Like, do pegasi commuting between Ponyville and Appleoosa just follow the railroad now instead of navigating however they used to do it?
Also, while I was looking for subway pictures for the blog post, I forgot to specify subway trains. Not disappointed that I found this:
derpicdn.net/img/2021/6/10/2632416/large.png
Source
You can just say bento. You only really need to say bento box when you're specifying that you want to buy that particular type of container in a store.
Funny you bring that up. I'm the guy that does that in real life. Usually someone will say a word or phrase that triggers a few lines of an '80s song to pop out of my mouth. Suffice it to say, I don't advise doing this unless you really, truly don't care what others think.
Cannibal Horse.
Another question is: do pegasi have cloud landmarks for traveling purposes? Maybe they don't need to follow roads or rivers because they've already marked the sky for the shortest routes between destinations. Or in Rainbow Dash's case, the routes that take her over the largest crowds of ponies to impress.
So adorable! So unsanitary, but so adorable.
I'm a little surprised the song for this chapter wasn't Pure Prairie League's Kansas City Southern, since one of their cars featured in the chapter.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pureprairieleague/kansascitysouthern.html
Oddly enough
1) There is no 1 standard horsepower. It varies depending on what you are measuring & if you're using metric measurements.
2) James Watt invented the currently used definition of horsepower to describe the power of steam engines. (He supposedly wanted to show his engines were more powerful & efficient.)
2A) He screwed up.
The average adult human has about 1.2 hp. Some pro athletes can briefly use about 2.5 hp.
The average horse has over 14 hp. (Depends on the type of horse. Bigger ones have more, sometimes LOTS more.)
Well now you got my atention. What would be this metric hour?
Joke or not it does sound funny.
Gutsy, singing a whaling song in the PNW. Not surprised not a lot of people joined in.
How do you follow roads on IFR? Isn't the ability to do that exclusively an eyeball thing?
I always thought birds would evolve to folow roads for long duration flight because of salmon.
The thermal updraft from a large width highway can compensate for increased glidelength needed so eventually you could end up with hypergliders that circle the country etc?
5639509
Last week, my son dragged me to the movie Sing 2. There is a scene at the end where the audience very much sings along with the performers.
By happy coincidence, I was reviewing a story chapter earlier today that included this sea shanty. Note how every generation in the audience joins in.
Bento is, essentially, a single-portion boxed meal of some kind. It can be as simple as a portion of rice and a piece of pickled fruit (umeboshi) or seaweed (nori), but the version people most often think of nowadays (especially outside of Japan) is roughly similar to what we call a "TV dinner" here in the USA; i.e. two, three, or more items served in a single tray with dividers to keep the foods separated. Although one major difference is that bento doesn't have to be something pre-made and purchased – it can (and often is) also made at home; mothers often pack bento lunches for their children and husbands. Schoolchildren may even have decorative bento boxes with favorite cartoon or movie characters on them, much like the old metal lunchboxes we used to carry around as kids back in the day.
The term refers to the presentation – a boxed meal for a single person to carry with them somewhere – rather than where it comes from or what specific food(s) are in it.
Here in the USA, a number of sushi restaurants have adopted the "bento box" as a way of serving a complete meal or a "lunch special" combo on the menu – but in those cases, the laquered wooden boxes aren't meant to be taken away from the restaurant; if you ordered such an item "to go" or for delivery, it would probably come in paper or styrofoam containers. (OTOH, I've never actually tried getting a "to go" bento order from a restaurant here, so maybe some of them do give you the wooden box. YMMV.)
In Japan, a variation called ekiben is often sold on trains, or at train stations, as an alternative to (or replacement for) the dining car. They were originally fairly simple, but the modern versions can be quite elaborate, featuring specialties unique to the particular region (or even created specifically for that location; i.e. you can only get this special dish on the train from A to B), and sometimes even coming in specially-shaped and decorated containers which are meant to be kept as souvenirs. (For example, ekiben served on the Shinkasen "bullet trains" may come in a container shaped like the front car of the train.) I don't know if any places here in the USA do anything quite that fancy, though.
On the last day of the last Bronycon, there was actually a group of people singing ponified sea shanties in the convention center lobby. I've not found any recordings of it, though, sorry.
(There are a variety of other modern recordings of sea songs online, though.
A few examples I found when looking just now, some of which I'd heard before, and thought you might enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMOyOlmBYCU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLGLUSzzuWU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ENmmkar0QQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFjnfsRoQo4 ...Though that's a bit tweaked. :))
And thank you, of course, for writing. :)
5639484
Still don't know about the first one, I'm afraid.
As for the second, maybe, though between major destinations where there's an air route significantly more direct than the land route, I could also imagine navigation towers being put up, or something like that.
...Actually, I think I remember...
Ah, yes!
https://sometimes-interesting.com/concrete-arrows-and-the-u-s-airmail-beacon-system/
https://www.dreamsmithphotos.com/arrow/
So I'm not sure if I thought of that independently just now, or if I was remembering it without realizing; either seems plausible. But yeah, definitely not the first to have that idea -- even if, as far as I know, pegasi weren't involved in the IRL version. :D
5639485
Cute, unsurprisingly. :)
Did you give up on finding subway train pictures for the blog, though? Or is it that first one, primarily a subway but with some elevated sections, one of which is shown in the picture?
5639514
Huh; there isn't? I thought there was. And there's a metric horsepower? Why not just use watts?
I also didn't know that horses had so much horsepower; thanks. How'd that number get so far off, I wonder?
5639495
Good to know! Thank you
5639509
You’re the exception to the rule
Truth be told, I do it sometimes at other work, although I usually just quote lyrics without singing them. I’ve got a pretty broad interest in music, and one of the other residential staff that I’ve worked with for years thinks I’m some kind of vast encyclopedia of 60s songs.
You are what you eat. Or, as a goth band put it, “You only eat the ones you love.”
To my mind, any cloud landmarks wouldn’t stay put (but that’s open to debate), not unless they were anchored. So I suppose a cloud marker could be tied to a tree or a rock or something, just like a buoy but for the sky. Another option, which 5640289 pointed out (and which I knew about but forgot) is markers on the ground, like giant concrete arrows. They could just also know local landmarks . . . interestingly, if you ever look at non-car maps (like boat maps or airplane maps), what they show and don’t show is far different than what car maps show. For example, boat maps (charts) are very concerned with water depth, but less interested in anything located on shore.
I feel like mouth-hold is something that would horrify some human tourists in Equestria.
I had no idea that song existed, but I do now.
Stay tuned for the next blog post!
5639514
This is true.
It was an observational and conditional measurement, and based on extrapolating from a pony turning a mill wheel. I suppose it was as good a measure as any at the time. AFAIK it now has a scientific definition, although not one based on an exemplar horse. It’s also worth mentioning that in all cases--especially with biological creatures--peak horsepower and continuous output are two different things . . . a healthy human can peak at 1.2hp and maintain a continuous .1hp output; Wikipedia says that a horse peaks around 15hp (presumably depends on the breed, measured in 1926) and they’re generally consistent at 1hp continuous output.
Wikipedia also says that there are many horsepowers: mechanical, metric, electrical, boiler, hydraulic, and air.
5639556
Basically, the day is divided up into 10 hours, each of which has a hundred minutes. Those minutes have 100 seconds.
If it wasn’t a joke, I would assume that the ‘hour’ would be the base unit (since that’s the most obvious choice), so each hour would have 100 centihours (minutes) and then there is no metric prefex to be used for seconds. Or you could use minutes as the base; each of them would be divided into 100 centiminutes (seconds), and 100 minutes would equal a hectominute (an hour); a full day would be a kilominute. A thousand days would be a megaminute, a hundred thousand days (273 years) a gigaminute, and a hundred million days (273,000 years) a teraminute.
Interestingly, metric prefixes are often used for less than a second measurements, as in ‘milliseconds’ or ‘nanoseconds.’
5639654
One of those mixed feelings things. On the one hand, killing whales is bad. On the other hand, traditional songs . . .
You don’t follow roads on IFR, that’s just a pilot’s joke about what the letters stand for.
5639661
Potentially, yeah, it could. I think there’d be a lot of variables in play, but in theory following road (and parking lot) thermals could make for a very lazy flight.
I have seen a bird of prey gaining altitude off our shop’s parking lot, which was pretty cool.
5639695
That’s a good song. I don’t know most of the verses, but I sure do know the chorus.
EDIT: that having been said, some sea shanties (like this one) have the ‘narrator’ start the verse, and then it follows a formula that the audience can follow and participate in. It’s vaguely tickling at my memory that those aren’t the only songs that do that.
5641110
Interestingly, we were taught in history class about french try to decimal time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
But it didn't last long. For I moment I though that you meant that when you said metric hour.
Interestingly french did try to decimal angle units as well. Where right angle would be 100 grads. I would believe it had some usage as most slide rulers had notches for angle unit conversions. I think I was even tough how to use grad units for angles along side radian and degrees. I still have somewhere angular function log tables around that have degree/grad and radian tables.
5639702
So in the broadest sense, then, it’s basically an overarching definition for ‘a packed lunch’?
I did see some of the fancy ones that they had on Japanese trains when I was watching videos about the overnight trains (which was towards the tail end of a long YouTube rabbit hole journey).
It didn’t occur to me until I was writing the chapter notes and trying to figure out more about bento/bento boxes that the restaurant probably doesn’t offer the wooden boxes for takeaway. Although their prices are kinda high, so maybe (but that could also just be because they’re a waterfront restaurant in Seattle).
5640289
That’s unfortunate . . . and I’m sad that I missed it.
Also, were you at Bronycon? And did we miss finding each other?
Ooh, I like them! I did know three of the four
Really like the “Drunken Sailor” one.
I’m sure I’ll be able to find out some day.
I think that the originals also had lighted towers on them for night flights, but I’m not 100% sure of that.
No, I did find real subway pictures. The first is tagged ‘subway’ . . . that does raise an interesting philosophical question, though; how much underground running vs. aboveground running does it have to do to be considered a subway vs. light rail with tunnels? I don’t know if there’s an answer for that.
I think part of the reason was that he was estimating from one pony doing one thing, and he also didn’t consider peak output vs. continuous output. The wikipedia article about it goes into some depth; even the 15hp number is debatably scientific, since as I recall, it was measured way back when.
5641172
I didn’t know or didn’t remember that they’d already tried it. I do have a metric clock at home; when my brother worked in Canada, I bought him one and kept one for myself.
That sounds like a terrible idea, although with a moment of thought there’s no reason not to. If you’re already changing weights and measures, why not change angles as well?
5641335
Ah, sorry. I do recall, I think, that there were people recording it, though. Maybe you could find something asking around? You've got a lot of followers (well, for FIMFiction (Er, no offense, of course. You have more here than I do on the entire internet, as far as I know. :D)).
"Also, were you at Bronycon?"
2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. Great times, for the most part! I was also lucky in that it was pretty conveniently located for me.
"And did we miss finding each other?"
I don't remember any extensive interaction with you, but we may well have bumped into each other at some point. If there's something I'm forgetting, sorry... though I guess you'd also not be remembering it, in that case.
Ah, glad you liked them. :)
Please do let me know when/if you do, if you don't mind!
Looks like it, from something in one of the links I posted:
Ah, thanks. And... aye, hm. Interesting question. Though I'm not sure light rail is the right comparison; at-grade heavy rail, maybe, since light rail is kind of its own thing. On the other hand, that could be added into the question to make it even more complicated. But, yeah, New York City has a subway, of course -- much of which is elevated. Chicago has the L -- which in places runs not just at grade but underground, and deep enough to dive under rivers.
Hm, thanks.
5641328
Essentially, yeah. (Though of course, there's nothing stopping it from being a packed breakfast or dinner, either.) The word actually originates from a Chinese slang term 便当, pronounced biàndāng, meaning "convenient" or "convenience"; when the word was imported from China to Japan, it was written in ateji (which is a form of kanji used to phonetically represent foreign loanwords) as 便道 and 弁道, pronounced "biàndào" and "bendō" respectively, and eventually it became 弁当, or "bentō".
So, basically... "convenience food,"
5642035
Breakfast bento boxes sound amazing . . . I just googled it and it turns out that Zippy’s restaurants serve breakfast bento boxes. Turns out that they’re only in Hawaii, though.
That sounds like something lice might use. Maybe, you meant "public".
5659204
Hmm, yes, I think you’re right.
That’s an amusing enough typo I think I’ll leave it.