Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

The big news this week is the announcement that the new ‘Doctor Who' is a lady.

Being active Time Travellers ourselves, we're excited about the prospect of a female doctor, although a little apprehensive about her ability to parallel park the TARDIS.

Now that the new Doctor Who is a woman, they're going to have to change the name to ‘Dr Who What When Where Why and How'…

Who are you texting? What are you doing? When are you back? Where are you now? Why did you not answer my calls? How much did you spend?

Re-calibrating

We've been recalibrating the Time Machine to the Rogers Decimal Time System to make our time travel calculations easier.

Maths was never my strong point and it's critical when travelling through time to be able to do fast sums, so a decimal time basis is certainly easier. It is critical to avoid accidently landing in the disco era. Arriving unexpectedly in the 70s, without protective equipment such as an afro* and flared trousers, could result in a time traveller being kicked to death by leg warmers on a glass dance floor by friends of Tina Turner. Ironically, while being tortured with the soundtrack of ‘Stayin' Alive'. And unless Cher is on standby to turn back time, you're as endangered as a Bee Gee.

Adjustments to history

It has been necessary on several occasions this week to go forward in time, to check the outcomes of certain events, then go back in time to make ‘adjustments' to world events, to ensure a better outcome.

Just on Tuesday our Time Travel team managed to pull off some retrospective, preventative actions, ensuring Donald Trump was elected president. While some may think this a failure of the good intent of the Time Machine Travellers, believe me it was better outcome than the other two options for President of the United States: Sarah Palin or Homer Simpson. Especially considering half of America still hasn't worked out that neither of them are real. The team decided a bad option was still better than a ridiculous option. We'll see how this result plays out in coming months. It may transpire that we'll have to re-adjust and have Homer after all.

Altering the past

We've had many requests from astute readers and Time Travel believers to alter past events. Alas, it is not always possible to achieve better results. And the ramifications of messing with some past events can have unforeseen catastrophic outcomes.

Such as the time we tried to save the Titanic. That resulted in the subsequent demise of Leonardo DiCaprio's acting career as there was no movie about the sinking for him to star in. Worse, because the Titanic did not sink, thousands more ships just like it were built and caused massive destruction of icebergs, accelerating global warming a hundred years ahead of its natural conception.

We've also ventured to a farmhouse in Dipton over several decades to try to subvert the use of spaghetti on pizza, only to find that a worse disaster evolves: baked beans on pizza. And you thought the pineapple was bad enough.

Cake Tin demolished

Then there was the second test, ABs v Lions, when we ‘tweaked' history so that Sonny Bill Williams' shoulder missed Antony Watson. Unfortunately, because there was then nothing left to stop SBW's shoulder, it continued on to demolish a wall of the Cake Tin, crash through the Wellington Cable Car, ricochet off Te Papa and dented an Inter-Island ferry at the wharf. Worse, several hipsters on Lambton Quay were mildly startled.

In a tragic and ill-conceived effort to advance political correctness and save people from themselves, the Time Travel team attempted to improve home and workplace safety and decided to reduce the danger to the world posed by scissors.

We decided to avert the attention of Leonardo da Vinci to prevent him inventing the scissors, only to find that he didn't actually invent them. Spring scissors were being used in ancient Egypt about 1500BC and the Romans developed cross-bladed scissors around AD100. So we apologised to Mr da Vinci for interrupting his work on the parachute, told him to carry on because Tauranga Tandem Skydiving will eventually be very pleased he did; travelled further back in time to have a word with the Romans about the danger of the scissors (and asked them to re-think the whole tacky sandal fashion thing) and they were very understanding. The upshot of that was, however, no new buildings were able to opened anywhere in the world since about AD101 because no-one could cut the ribbons.

Messing with time

So you see it's not as straightforward as it seems, messing with time and history. There are a lot of unknown and unexpected side-effects of interfering in the natural course of history. You may now understand why we still have gorse, Daniel Corbett reading the weather, tourists driving on the wrong side of the road and Crocs.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants some entertainment, a ride in the Time Machine, we're popping back again to 1998 to the Presidential Drycleaners across the road from the White House. There's an anxious White House aide, frantically trying to get a couple of stains off a blue dress. It's priceless.

We're taking requests

Any requests for potential changes to historic events you'd like to see email [email protected]

Or if you are writing from a pre-90s time zone, use the old-fashioned postal system to write a letter with a stamped, self-addressed envelope or Aerogram to Mr B Rogers, 1 The Strand, Tauranga.

For those communicating from the future, please autoteleport your brainwaves direct to our orbiting ThoughtTank 2525.

*Afro. The publishing of this word in a 2017 perspective will have to be reported to Dame Susan Devoy and the Racially Descriptive Hairstyles Commission.