A New, Improved, X

I mean the old one, well, it's just an X painted on the floor to show the spaceships where to land or something. But I want to use things that aren't letters as letters if I can.

Welcome to Switzerland! Take a Swiss flag (it's the only square national flag by the way) and rotate it through 45°.

Now make it bigger. Much bigger.

That's what those crazy Swiss bods have done in Lausanne. Not content with almost destroying the world by creating a black hole, they've gone and made a bloody big red flag with a white cross in it.

No chance of them being bombed by mistake, that's for certain. Or is that the Red Cross?

As ever, the little link below will centre your google earth thing on it.

46°30'1.09"N, 6°28'54.44"E

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S

Well the "S" had to be good. I found a small S shaped slide at a German swimming pool the other week, but rejected is as too crap.

Yet the S is a useful letter to have here. So for now, I cheated. I did a google search for "S shaped building" and found a lovely one in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That's alright, isn't it? I mean, it's not like anybody's actually reading this or anything?


Of course, when I find a better one, I will replace this tainted, plagiarised S, but for now, it's just going to have to do.

This link will take you to it...


24°38'46.27"N, 46°42'6.69"E

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D and swastikas

There's a swastika shaped building in a navy base in Coronado, California, that's created a bit of comment over the last year. It's actually 4 L shaped buildings, each at an angle of 90° to the next. The controversy has been well documented elsewhere. For more information do a search for "swastika shaped building" in the search engine of your choice.

A swastika, although very much a symbol, is not a letter or number. Here's what Kurt vonnegut had to say about it.

''Socialism''is no more an evil word than ''Christianity.'' Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women and children are created equal, and shalt not starve.

Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a two-fer. He named his party the National Socialists, the Nazis. Hitler also had crosses painted on his tanks and airplanes. The swastika wasn’t a pagan symbol, as so many people believe. It was a working person’s Christian cross, made of axes, of tools.

About Stalin’s shuttered churches, and those in China today: Such suppression of religion was supposedly justified by Karl Marx’s statement that that ''religion is the opium of the people.'' Marx said that back in 1844, when opium and opium derivatives were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him. He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic or social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictum.

When Marx wrote those words, by the way, we hadn’t even freed our slaves yet. Whom do you imagine was more pleasing in the eyes of a merciful God back then: Karl Marx or the United States of America?

Stalin was happy to take Marx’s truism as a decree, and Chinese tyrants as well, since it seemingly empowered them to put preachers out of business who might speak ill of them or their goals.

The same naval base contains two swimming pools. They could have formed an "i" shape for me, but I have a lovely "i" in the South Pacific already. The "." of the "i" is shaped like a "D", in a stylised, art decoish font.

So I can now make words like "DAViD" and "GiDDY" or even "ADDiTiVE"

Here's the link...

32°40'34.82"N, 117°10'13.95"W

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uʍop ǝpısdn ƃuıʎlɟ

If you use the flight simulator, and just let the plane fly itself, it will eventually crash. It just does. It becomes unstable and eventually nosedives into the ground.

But there is a way around this. Here's how you do it...

1. Take off using the SR22.

2. Get up to a height of about 1500 to 2000 feet (about 500-700 metres.)

3. Put the plane into a nosedive. The Elevator setting should be just a little bit away from right up to the top of the slider.

4. Well that's all really. Make sure the plane is at full power, that the controls are centred, the landing gear is up and the flaps are at 0% and do nothing.

The plane will do an upside down loop and will fall away to one side, but all the time it will become slightly higher and slightly steadier. Eventually it will fly upside down and very slowly gain altitude. The propellor plane will max out at just a shade under 25,000 feet.

Despite you pointing it in a straight line, it will actually travel in a huge circle. Since it doesn't really exist, it doesn't use any fuel, and so you can leave it for hours or days or weeks, and because it goes slowly around in a miles wide loop, it will still be more-or-less in the vicinity of where you left it. Handy if you need it in a hurry.

By the way, if you're wondering how I managed to write "uʍop ǝpısdn ƃuıʎlɟ", it's because of this neat little website...

http://www.revfad.com/flip.html

8

I keep finding them! These numbers and letters keep on appearing. But I'm having to work quite hard to find quality examples.

Today I have none, but fortunately, I had something in reserve. A day when I found lots but didn't use them all. I kept my powder dry. I didn't give away the goods too soon.

And now I can reap the rewards of my prudence. Today's the day when I give to you, dear reader, the number "8"

As with all the symbols I'm collecting, it's not directly an 8. I could find all the numbers and letters quite easily just be looking for road markings or helipads or whatever. Indeed this 8 does have a perfectly good "H" inside it, which I will not be using. It forms a near right angle when lined up with the locations of my "Q" and my "T". Spooky huh? Never mind leylines. My alphanumeric symbols will spell out the Truth and we will all be saved. Maybe.

The BBC's postcode used to be W12 8QT. Coincidence?

Nope. Totally contrived. By me.

Anyway... the "8". Here it is.

It's just to the South of Chester, England; close to a small Cheshire village called Boughton Heath, and just to the south of the A55.

53°10'13.17"N, 2°51'28.28"W

I think it's an old army camp or something, so perhaps it was formed by the boots of hundreds of men marching round and round in circles.

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