CROSSOVER OF THE WEEK

'NORFOLK-SOUTHERN' & 'DOCTOR WHO'

There's a commercial airing now on the various news networks, like CNN, FOX, and CNBC, from Norfolk-Southern, the railroad shipping company that has taken over the old Conrail routes up in New England and which has been operating for years throughout the rest of the country.

The Norfolk-Southern ad, known as "Tree", shows trees removing cargo holds from trucks. It highlights the service, capacity and environmental benefits of Norfolk Southern’s work with its trucking partners to move freight from the highways to the rails.

During the blipvert an animated tree moves the freight from the trailer beds of the trucks and gets them over to the railroad. Thus the trucks are lighter and this cuts back on the amount of fuel they burn into the atmosphere which could have been harmful to the trees' environment.

Both commericals are availabe to be seen only for high-bandwidth connections (T1, LAN, Cable, DSL). Visit the Northern-Southern [http://www.nscorp.com/] site to see them.

In the early 1820s, the renegade Gallifreyan known as The Rani was in England taking advantage of the dawning of the "Industrial Revolution". One of her nefarious devices were land mines which combined science and magic - upon detonation, they would transform the victim into living trees; trees which could move their limbs and were still capable of sentient thought and memory of their human past.

The Rani also mentioned that she had visited the Earth's past at least ten times before, and I'm fairly certain that she had probably been to other countries and continents. So if she had used these land mines, which she admitted having stolen from another planet, in those other places, then similar trees with human DNA would be found.

And that would include not only the North American continent but also the rain forests to be found in South America. And so here we have another inner connection which 'Doctor Who' makes to itself. The Rani was defeated (that time) by the sixth regeneration of the Doctor, but it was the ninth regeneration who met the descendants of those human/tree hybrids.

Approximately five billion years into the Earth's future, when it was about to be destroyed by the explosion of the Sun, the Doctor and his companion Rose Tyler found themselves on board a viewing platform to watch the final moments of the planet. Among the other specially invited guests was a contingent from the Forests of Cheem.

The delegation was led by Jabe, who claimed that her ancestors had evolved from the rain forests of Earth, and therefore she had a vested interest in coming back to watch the end of the world from which her family had begun.

I don't know where The Rani found those land mines, but I'm wondering if they had been used far enough in Earth's past to trigger the creation of the Ents and the Huorns at the dawn of the First Age of Middle Earth? Could it be this combination of science and magic was actually the power of the Valar?

("The Lord Of The Rings" is part of the TV Universe, much as those who loathed the Rankin-Bass cartoons would hope otherwise. And for those who'd rather just consign them to the Tooniverse, I've recently found proof that Middle-Earth existed in the live-action version of Toobworld. More on that anon.......)

At any rate, the land mines used by The Rani in 1822 were probably the cause for the creation of those trees found in the Norfolk-Southern blipvert. Perhaps they were railway workers, or descended from railway workers, who were laying track to connect the country by rail to further its "Manifest Destiny". Perhaps The Rani was trying to stop the historical event involving the Golden Spike.

It sounds like one of those lost adventures of The Doctor!

BCnU!
Tele-Toby