Thank you all once again for the volume and the frequency of your posts! It always brings me such joy to respond to such insightful observations and hypotheses...
How about Florida. Only Tampa gets a pro sports team among the major sports by 1986, your determined end date. But, the AIP rise could have some ipact in the NFL's decision whether to put a team there or not. Perhaps Phoenix is considered instead? Then again Miami already had a team so perhaps it's not as bad. (And I don't think of Florida as a hotbed of racism in the '60s, anyway, though from reading "I Had A Hammer," Hank Aaron's book, there clearly was a lot in spring training in the '50s. Tampa reportedly didn't get the Giants in '93 because the then-league president vetoed the move out of bitterness over their treatment of blacks in spring training back then.)
Florida was a far less populous state in the 1970s than it is today, and far more dominated by the
native Floridians, particularly in the Northern part of the state, which even to this day is still culturally part of the Deep South. Obviously, the AIP isn't going to be winning statewide as they would in Alabama or Georgia, what with the Cubans and the Northeast transplants flooding in, but... well, I'm going to be devoting an entire update to the demographic situation, so I'll save the finer details until then
DTF955Baseballfan said:
Speaking of Cleveland sports, as a fan of the Indians, I wonder if you could get a comedy movie like Major League earlier in TTL with some political undertones about moving the team (the villainous owner wanted to get the team to lose and not draw fans so she could move the team to Miami - insert LeBron James joke here
)
Funny thing about the Indians. IOTL, one year before they were sold by Vernon Stouffer to Nick Mileti, one George M. Steinbrenner put in a bid for them. When that bid was rejected, he of course went on to mount a
successful bid for the New York Yankees, and the rest is baseball history. But ITTL? Well, that's another story
I was thinking about Deep Space - even though Roddenberry is involved, it's not Star Trek, so will it still have the utopian ideals or might we see some space religion like the Bajorans had on OTL's DS9?
Excellent question. We
will find out more about this in the next overview update, when we discuss the overarching themes of
Deep Space.
Very interesting update, Brainbin. At least Canada tries to go for some good in TTL.
Thank you, Dan! And yes, Canada pushed for the Ottawa Accord under Stanfield ITTL instead of devising a "Commonwealth flag" as Trudeau did IOTL (and therefore the Union Flag remains the
de facto symbol of the Commonwealth). Ironically, given that Australia helped to shepherd the present-day Perth Agreement IOTL, my original draft (which had the Ottawa Accord taking off and becoming law in the various Commonwealth Parliaments) had Australia as the
last Commonwealth Realm to pass the bill, which (in one of the allohistorical illusions I'm saddest to have lost the chance to make) would have been granted Royal Assent on November 11, 1975.
The OTL, equivalent, of course, was
Prince Michael of Kent, who got married in 1978 to Baroness Marie Christine von Reibnitz, who was not only Catholic but divorced as well. Their childrend remain in the line of succession since they (like Princess Anne's children TTL) have been raised as Anglicans.
Absolutely true. Though I was inspired by Prince Michael's Russophilia in choosing his TTL bride: Princess Natalia Romanova, daughter of
Prince Nicholas, (disputed) claimant to the Russian Imperial Throne from 1992. Of course, the Act of Settlement does
not prohibit those on the line of succession from marrying people of the
Orthodox faith.
NCW8 said:
Britain isn't in the EU and there's no Diana Death Conspiracy ! What on earth is the Daily Mail going to report on ?
Don't worry, it'll still have
immigrants to complain about
Nice update, was glad I could help.
Thank you, Thande! I always appreciate your help
Very nice and believable update. Fairly glad that Charles's marriage will be much happier TTL (albeit not idyllic).
Thank you, Professor! It should be very nice to have a
Queen for the next King, as opposed to a "Princess Consort"
The Professor said:
Always thought he got unfairly treated by the public since whatshername was so much more mediafriendly and savvy than him.
I absolutely and completely agree, without reservation. I have more that I'd
like to say along those lines, but I think it's best if I leave it at that.
The Professor said:
He'll probably have an affair that may go public and be the scandal of its day but he may come out of it alright.
He'll be
very discreet about his... indiscretions, much like Edward VII was. Granted, that'll be much harder to pull off in a far more unscrupulous and media-saturated era. You're probably right in that eventually
someone will want to tell all. Fortunately for me, that won't be happening until
after 1986
On a more serious note, I wonder how the Murdoch Empire is doing ITTL. In particular, does News Corporation still manage to buy the Times and Sunday Times from Lord Thomson of Fleet.
It looks like the Times were facing
extremely tough times in the late-1970s IOTL, but of course that was in circumstances which have been completely butterflied away ITTL. I
want to say that Lord Thomson keeps the
Times, if only because he is one of the
very few Canadians who has a peerage, on account of that
accursed Nickle Resolution...
Thanks for the warm welcome!
You are most welcome!
Spectator said:
IMHO, if business leaders had played their cards right and worked together, northern Ohio could have really become a hub for green technology -- Cleveland's history of precision machinery could have been parlayed into wind turbine production; Akron's polymer expertise (an outgrowth of the rubber industry) and Toledo's glass industry could perhaps be applied to solar cells; Eveready still has a research center in suburban Cleveland, and East Cleveland is still home to GE's lighting division, though most, if not all, of the production facilities have long since closed.
Well, I must say, that really
does sound like the perfect storm for a sustainable energy industry! A shame it was never exploited to its full potential IOTL.
Spectator said:
With next to no hockey coverage from the time the Barons left till the IHL Muskegon Lumberjacks moved to Cleveland in 1992, it was more of a matter of hockey becoming an unrequited love, though I'd have to say my primary rooting interest would be the Red Wings. They used to be carried on WJR AM, which was really picked up well in Cleveland. Of course, plenty of Leafs games could be had over the radio as well. As for the Pens, the signal doesn't carry too well across the hills, and, well, it's Pittsburgh.
Ah yes, of course! I keep forgetting how close Detroit is to Cleveland as well. And the Red Wings
are one of the Original Six - there were probably still
plenty of Red Wings fans living in Ohio through the 1980s and 1990s IOTL. But ITTL, the 1980s will cement the Battle of Ohio extending into
hockey as well as baseball and football.
Spectator said:
These days, my primary rooting interests are my kids' teams, the team from the HS where my DH teaches, and the Lake Erie Monsters (AHL). My NHL loyalties are still divided between the Wings and Leafs. If they meet for the Cup, I will have a dilemma, though I might fall on the side of the Leafs out of deference to my DH, who's half-Canadian.
The
Leafs? Compete in the
Stanley Cup Finals? Surely you jest. They couldn't even maintain a three-point lead for a single period. That's a Toronto team for you
Spectator said:
As for the Blue Jackets, well, one, they're the Blue Jackets -- not much to root for, though you've got to respect a team owner who publicly apologizes to the fans for the team sucking -- and two, there's no great affinity for Columbus in Cleveland.
Hey, they almost made the playoffs
this year! Not too shabby for a perpetual also-ran team. Besides,
there's always next year
Spectator said:
We got CFPL, but not that well, unless you had a big, fancy antenna that could be rotated, like the one my neighbors had. And once we got cable and ditched the rooftop antenna, there was no picking it up at all -- I gather cable in London carried at least some Cleveland stations, but most of the cable systems (I think all but one) in the Cleveland area didn't include channel 10.
CFPL disaffiliated from the CBC in 1988, so perhaps that might have played a part. I realize most households had cable by then, but it's something.
Well, Rotherham would deny being a suburb of Sheffield
I decided to check, and in fact Cleveland has been more populous than Pittsburgh since the Civil War - and of the two respective metropolitan areas, that of Cleveland has been larger from the 1960s. Therefore, in no respect could
Cleveland be described as a suburb of
Pittsburgh, demographically speaking.
I just learned that radio media icon, racist, and Raul Julia mustache aficionado Anthony Cumia's parents (he grew up in a dysfunctional house with parents who always fought) would come to a truce while watching Laugh-In and would laugh together.
So alternate reality Anthony Cumia of the Opie and Anthony show grows up with a sh*ttier childhood.
Thank you for sharing that detail, Your Imperial Majesty! Though I'm not particularly sure how deprived he would be ITTL, since
Laugh-In ran for just as long as it did IOTL. George Schlatter just left partway through, that's all. Perhaps the quality of the writing declined somewhat without his guidance, but it wouldn't be precipitous. By and large, his childhood will remain intact. Though I'll be honest, I did
not know he was that old; he always struck me as younger. You learn something new every day!
Thank you, Franscisco! I'm glad you think so
Francisco Cojuanco said:
Can't wait to see the implications of the ongoing Lucas case...
And I can't wait to show them to all of you!
After about twenty years that changed of course. Most of the writers and producers on the show grew up with the series. Once the fans have taken over the show, Continuity becomes more important, so you have more references back to previous episodes and more story arcs. There's a similar evolution in Star Trek, where the spin-off series are more concerned with continuity than the original series.
Part of this is cultural, of course. Continuity wasn't a big deal for
anything in the 1960s, except for soap operas. In fact,
Star Trek was one of the
most continuity-minded shows of its era. By the late-1980s, the precedents of
Hill Street Blues,
L.A. Law, and (of course) the primetime soaps like
Dallas and
Dynasty made it clear that purely episodic
Gilligan-style serialization was simply unacceptable. And, in fact, many people have
complained that certain of the spinoffs have been known to overuse the reset button.
Perhaps a certain young mayor might have been able to help.
Perhaps. But it wouldn't have been Jerry Springer, if that's who you were thinking; he was the Mayor of
Cincinnati, not Cleveland.
