Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Where I live:

Notwithstanding the fact that about 85% of the things people use day to day are shipped from here, almost nobody knows about La-a. Some of the people who LIVE here don't even know how to pronounce it.

On the earth, in pre-squirt days, people still looked up at the stars with wonder. A couple of companies actually went so far as to give themselves the responsibilities for assigning naming rights. Yeah, right. As if that made a hill of beans difference to anyone.

Problem was, companies like International Star Registry had made fairly detailed location maps of star locations, and had assigned names to the visible stars, and quite a few that were invisible to the naked eye. Once the squirt drives had been perfected and the cost associated with moving from star to star had been minimalized, the Star Registry was the only body with an accurate positional listing of many of the stars that had been visited. And a brief but flamboyant court battle made the names stick.

Fortunately, the odds were good, and a lot of stars with really horrible names had no habitable or mineable planets. Sure, some poor bastards got stuck with "James Earl Carter" and "Bart Simpson" but for the most part the systems just had simple names.

Our system was, painfully, not as lucky. We ended up La-a Williams. It's pronounced LaDasha. I kid you not. But we don't mind. We ship millions of metric tonnes of machines, can openers, barbecue grills, pocketknives, deodorant, window glass, and artifical limbs, among many other things. They all proclaim proudly: "Made on La-a". Six trillion people prounounce it "LA" "A"

We don't care. It pays well. At least we're not "dildo-1"

1 comment: