I found a script (for those of you in the back who are not maniacal geeks as well as ludicrously literate blognoscenti, it’s from Return of the Jedi) which gives the spelling so differently that I’m not persuaded it’s the right script. Or it may just be the actors didn’t bother to reproduce the fake alien  language accurately… damn their lack of professionalism!

Anyway, the reason it’s in my head is that Yorba Linda public library is apparently getting a copy of The Gone-Away World.

Now, I had no idea there was an actual place called Yorba Linda. In so far as I was aware of it at all, living over here in sleepy, grey-skied English-land, I thought that name was either from Star Wars (hence I was going through the script trying to figure out if someone was having me on) or a lyric from a song by the Pixies.

I’m still sure it’s in the bit in that really great song where he goes somethingorother luna!

Sure, but quite aware that I’m wrong.

So wrong that I’m not even going to identify the song in order to give you the name.

Yorba Linda has a population of around seventy thousand, and it’s about fifty miles south of LA. Also, the website plays birdsong and shows pictures of a placid green space. It made me think Yorba Linda was some kind of earthly paradise.

Why am I also thinking it’s Greek?

All the same, I kept expecting Palpatine to arrive and smite someone, or Darth Vader’s space ship to land on the golf course.

I feel kinda bad about that, even if any place in Southern California that green probably only exists by feeding off water from somewhere else. Which turns out to be a vice really not restricted to SoCal…

Did you know the average UK citizen uses approximately 4,600 litres of water per day?

No, it’s not because we brush our teeth too much. It’s the way our waterfootprint sloshes all over the globe and uses water in a bunch of places which, you guessed it, have no water. Lots of our yummy eaty things come from places which have limited water supplies. Which we use to grow yummy eaty things. Which we then export, leaving behind money – which you cannot drink.

So this is yet another way in which we screw up the world. Say one thing, though, this one has the benefit of being intriguing and non-obvious.

Still, Yorba Linda looks nice.