Timeless

Monday night Hawk and I watched the pilot of the TV series Timeless. She was already 10 minutes into the episode when I came downstairs and said, "Hey, that looks interesting!" At first I thought maybe it's a new series as I'd never heard of it before, but it's not. Timeless aired on NBC for two seasons, in 2016-2018.



Timeless is a scifi show set in the current day featuring time travel. A team of engineers led by a character meant to resemble Elon Musk (one of the characters gushes upon meeting him, "I own one of your cars!") has constructed a device capable of traveling through time. But a small group of thieves/terrorists with unknown motives steals it and promptly travels ~80 years back in time.

Connor divulges what has happened to the DHS, who assemble a small team to pursue the thieves, figure out what they're up to, and thwart them from changing any important historical events. The team who'll chase the thieves in an older prototype time machine Conner built are Logan, a military commando; Lucy, a young professor of modern history; and Rufus, one of Connor's programmers who can pilot the device.

Spoilers? Not really. That was just the setup revealed in the first 10 minutes of the first episode. Oh, wait, they also reveal where/when the time-thieves traveled to. It's the date & location of the Hindenburg disaster. What would happen if the time-thieves stopped the explosion, the characters wonder. What if a key person who died that day lived? What if a key person who escaped was instead killed? And what could have happened differently in WWII a few years later if German aviation hadn't suffered that humiliating setback? Again, this is just the first 10 minutes of the episode. I will not spoil anything else here.

I liked this episode and I'm looking forward to watching the rest of the series. It's got some good imagination about the possibilities and paradoxes of time travel. The bad guys are mysterious enough that there should be a good arc across the season of the protagonists figuring out what they're up to and always falling a step behind. I can see it's going to have an "adventure of the week" structure. It's kind of like "the monster of the week" in Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossed with "magic artifact of the week" in Warehouse 13. Here it'll be "The epoch of the week".

Money, the Easiest Souvenir

I don't have much in the way of souvenirs from our trip to Australia late last year. I mean, I've got tons of memories and gigs of photos. I don't have much in the way of tangible stuff. But that's par for the course for me. I tend not to buy a lot of stuff overseas. One thing I always try to do, though, is bring a bit of money home with me.



Money's kind of the easiest souvenir. Virtually everyone has some to sell. And if at some point I decide I don't like it, I can sell it back for what I paid for it. 🤣

But seriously, I've always been curious about money from different places. I started collecting odd coins when I was a kid, setting aside the Canadian money I'd sometimes find in my change when I bought something small in the northeastern US, or some other foreign coin I'd be lucky enough to find lying in the street. More recently I've pocketed a small amount of money like 2 Dinar from Jordan and the notes and coins I brought home from the Cayman Islands.

One of the practical challenges with "collecting" foreign money as souvenirs is not being stranded with too much of it. I shared a photo of Australia's colorful paper money several days ago. As I noted at the time, that was way too much money, $105 AU equal to roughly $70 US, to call a simple souvenir. In the photo above I've got two $1 coins and 50¢, 20¢, and 5¢ pieces. $2.75 AU = $1.80 US, a much more economical souvenir.