or..
The ironic thing would be if accidents went up as motorists all turned their heads to see what all the fuss at the side of the road was.
Christian group declares jct 9 on M25 cursed
A group of Christian evangelicals has declared junction 9 of the M25 "hexed" and is staging regular prayer meetings to cleanse the benighted interchange. According to the Surrey Advertiser, Gerald Coates of the Pioneer Engage Church in Leatherhead has attributed a rash of accidents and footbridge suicides around the junction …
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Monday 27th September 2010 13:57 GMT rpjs
Life imitates Pratchett and Gaiman
Although they had it in _Good Omens_ that the *whole* M25 was cursed: specifically that the demon Crowley and arranged for it to form the exact shape of the dread sigil odegra, which in the language of the Black Priesthood of Mu means "all hail the great beast, devourer of worlds".
Makes sense to me.
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Monday 27th September 2010 14:02 GMT CD001
Good Omens
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Many phenomena – wars, plagues, sudden audits – have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for Exhibit A.
- from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
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... via Wikipedia
IIRC the whole of the M25 was one huge occult symbol that slowly emitted evil as it was traced by the traffic driving along it.
... odds are, this being El Reg, 280 other people will be familiar with Good Omens and there will be 273 posts all but identical to this one.
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Monday 27th September 2010 14:02 GMT David Barrett
Return To Mean?
"I do believe we will see far fewer incidents"
Would that be return to the mean then? If something is at its worst it is likley to get better... no amount of chanting will change this... but Im sure that when it does get better it will have been the almightly sky pixie that did it.
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Monday 27th September 2010 14:14 GMT James O'Shea
send 'em to France
If they think that any road, any road at all, in Britain has a traffic problem they should see Paris. Or even Marseille. And when they're done with France, they can go to Rome. If they dare. In the unlikely event that they survive Rome, the whole of Montreal is a haven for dark Satanic forces, a.k.a. Quebecois at the wheels of large American cars. They'll never be heard from again. Guaranteed. (Argg. It's almost October. That means that the snowbirds will soon be coming south. Brain-dead Quebecois driving Buicks and Cadillacs. The horror. The horror. The horror.)
Where's the 'fish with legs' icon?
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Monday 27th September 2010 19:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Actually driving in Quebec
wouldn't be so bad if you could figure out where and when you are allowed to turn right on the red traffic light. As for old people driving large cars, you are still way more likely to get killed by a young person driving a smaller car here. Those snowbirds as we love to call them don't have the habit of street racing, engaging against the current of traffic or simply to commit suicide by crashing their vehicle. As the the horror, I'm with you on this one: the huge fifty tons American SUV are a real threat (including when they fill-up their gas tank).
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Monday 27th September 2010 19:14 GMT Blue eyed boy
It was sweet, pure and innocent in the beginning
like me. I can remember as a kid (approx age 10), navigating for my dad to get him to some place the other side of London, bemoaning the lack of a decent orbital road and having to take him through one traffic-choked town after another. When we did finally get there I showed him the route I had had to take him, then traced a rough circle around the edge of London saying something like "There ought to be a motorway all round here, a continuous circle, so it's easy to get past London to reach somewhere the other side.
Just a childish daydream. It was never intended to become the nightmare reality that we know today. The forces of chaos must have looked into my mind, picked up the idea and said something like "Verrrrry interesting. We'll get that built but......."
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Monday 27th September 2010 14:15 GMT Skizz
Return to the Mean
"I do believe we will see far fewer incidents" - or, use a statistical phenomonen few people are aware of to make it look like what you're doing is working.
And as we all know, it's not just J9, the whole M25 is in the form of the dark sigil Odegra and is often considered Exhibit A for the existence of Satan!
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Monday 27th September 2010 14:18 GMT jake
You have got to be kidding ...
"Coates believes the malefactor has been recording evil messages onto cassette tapes which are then unspooled to enclose and hence curse their target areas."
And people actually pay attention to this nutter? I think we've finally found proof that the human race is ultimately doomed to extinction ...
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Monday 27th September 2010 14:19 GMT Ball boy
I'm just amazed they've only recognised Jcn 9 as cursed!
Frankly, I'm amazed it's only one junction for Gerald Coates & his lot: me and my church - The Saints of the Potholed Blackstrip (membership conferred automatically by using any British motorway) - condemned the entire road as unholy many years ago.
The Pioneer Engage Church you say? Bleedin' Reformists: miles behind us progressives (probably all stuck in traffic!)
;-)
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Monday 27th September 2010 14:20 GMT Disco-Legend-Zeke
Evil Spirits Infect...
...the designers of roads, not the roads themselves.
We have a similar interchange here in Las Vegas (Eastbound Sahara exit from I15 North.) The local TV chopper guy calls it the Bermuda Triangle; a minimum of three accidents per day.
I have been using the exit for 10 years and still can never figure out which lane to be in. The exit signs with lane designations are not visible untill just a few hundred feet from the commit. Just to add an additional risk factor, the express lane ends a few miles before, requiring that drivers negotiate crossing 5 lanes to make the ramp.
Add a tier of tired tourists trekking up from California and you have a Devil's cauldron of trouble.
And, as an afterthought, wouldn't a passel of preachy pretenders distract drivers even more?
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Monday 27th September 2010 14:24 GMT LinkOfHyrule
OMG
Cassette tapes? Unspooled cassette tapes? Hex? Surrey? Stockbrokers?
Now, I must admit, you do very occasionally do still see an unspooled cassette tape laying around in odd places like canal footpaths, back alleys and railway sidings but its nowhere near as often as you used to. However I've never thought of it as a sign of evil, more a sign of bored children destroying their parents '80s mix tapes for a laugh!
Oh and I'm sure the evil spirits used to use mini-disc too! Actually, some used to use DAT tapes too as it gave better fidelity evilness before CDRs and Mini-discs came along!
I live in Surrey, and I still have loads of cassettes! Hence the flame icon!
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Wednesday 29th September 2010 13:14 GMT Wize
And the cars that still have tape players...
...probably jam, causing the driver to look down at the player and not see the car he is about to hit.
And as he gets out the car, he throws out the remains of the chewed tape at the side of the road.
Maybe junction 9 is one where you are most likely to get standing traffic without much advanced warning.
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Monday 27th September 2010 16:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Signs of the apocolypse
1) A plague of Locus
2) A plague of Frogs
3) A plague of Un-spooled Audio Cassettes
4) A plague of Commuter-belt Suicides
5) A plague of Fundies
(Numbers three and four are actual more a sign of the times since un-spooling obsolete audio cassettes is the only good use of them, and a recession will tend to increase the national desperation rate along with all the other national measures of suck.)
Anywho, every Londoner will happily tell you that the M25 is _entirely_ cursed/damned, by the devil himself, and that any time you venture beyond the M25 your are in fact entering hell, which is to say, all parts of the UK not in London... just ask Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
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Monday 27th September 2010 18:51 GMT James Howat
Regression to the mean
I love their criteria for success - "if the accident rate goes down, it's obviously the work of dark forces and we'll take credit. If it doesn't work, then it's obviously the work of dark forces and we'll keep coming back."
Looks like the old witch-ducking logic still works, eh?
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Monday 27th September 2010 18:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Titles are irrelevent.
"Cassette tapes? Unspooled cassette tapes? Hex? Surrey? Stockbrokers?"
This is Leatherhead we're talking about. I had the extreme misfortune to go to school there as well as work in the area for a time before I escaped. It was at the time a den of catastrophic idiocy and wasn't at all rich, or full of stockbrokers. It was the arse end of Surrey and full of all the things you'd expect to find in an arse.
OK, so that was 30 years ago, it may all be jolly and full of rich shitheads now. So, still full of shit!
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Monday 27th September 2010 19:22 GMT Lukin Brewer
Python got there first.
Anyone remember Terry Gilliam's animation :"There's a five-frog curse on the motorway!"
As for unspooled tapes, those had been appearing, an all classes of roads, for donkey's years. You'd see them in gutters and strewn across the tarmac all over the place. I think lads in passenger seats would loop a tape around something before the car drove off, or let it stream out behind when the car was moving at speed. I've only ever seen it happening once: I was cycling along Cross Deep towards Twickenham when I suddenly got the weird impression that the whole road to the right of me had been cordoned off suddenly. Then I was able to get a proper look at the thing that was hanging in the air beside me, and saw that it was a cassette tape, and was already dropping towards the ground.
Heh. It would be funny if the god squad actually caught someone in the act. "Hello, police? I'd like to report an incident of littering and abomination in the eyes of God."
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Monday 27th September 2010 22:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
WELL DONE YOU TWATS!
Now every Satanist and occult nutter will congragate at said junction! There'll be black masses and goats blood all over the shop in no time! Every 14 year old prat with a black-walled bedroom and floppy haircut will be down there next week causing more grief for an over worked Police force!
Don't these bible-bashers ever think?
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Monday 27th September 2010 22:26 GMT sisk
So THAT'S how it works
"Coates believes the malefactor has been recording evil messages onto cassette tapes which are then unspooled to enclose and hence curse their target areas."
So if I start unspooling the casettes from some old as seen on TV get rich quick scheme and wrap them around my house will I win the lottery? Hrm...
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Tuesday 28th September 2010 09:08 GMT Winkypop
"He could not think of another reason"
"He added that he couldn't be completely sure that a hex was the cause of the problems, but he could not think of another reason for the disproportionate number of crashes and suicides between junctions 10 to 8 compared to other areas."
Ahhh religion, explaining the world and all its wonders since the days of talking snakes.
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Tuesday 28th September 2010 22:55 GMT Scorchio!!
Yes
It does have a tendency to flood, take it from me, I live around here some of the time, and did so before the motorway was built.
The Mole Valley (and the Thames Valley come to that) is not a clever place to site a motorway, since there is a significant problem with mist associated with the River Mole (duh), never mind the flooding that affects lower lying parts of the road. Add to that the persistent, head banging stupidity of drivers who over take on the inside, drive at 60 in the third and fourth lanes, drive at whacky races speeds in any of the lanes, and there we have a recipe for disaster.
It is the most dangerous car park in the western world. I'd say the fastest, but Tesco Aylesbury late at night is probably faster.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
