Balticon Diary: Day Two

I spent Memorial Day weekend at Balticon, a major science fiction convention. I talked my family into staying onsite so that we could experience the con 24/7. Some of us more than others it seems as I tell in the summary of our second day:

Sunday

8:00 I wake up and head down to the hotel gym. I do 20 minutes on the stairmaster and a couple of circuits of the weight machine.

9:00 I return to the room to shower and then go down to the hotel snack bar and eat breakfast. They have the TV tuned to the SciFi Channel.

10:00 I go to the lecture on building self-replicating machines. The few pictures of real examples look like a garage workshop gone fractal. We’re still a few years from needing the Three Laws.

11:00 The artist guest of honor Joe Bergeron is giving a slideshow of his artwork. Larry Niven slips in to watch.

11:45 I sneak out to go stand in line for autographs. The line is already down the hall and around the corner, but nowhere near as chaotic as for Neil Gaiman last year. I chat with the guy behind me in line. We decide a comedian could do well re-telling Jeff Foxworthy jokes as science fiction fan jokes. The audience never thinks the put-downs are aimed at them.

12:30 My wife wanders down from the room and buys an iPod case from the dealers’ room.

12:40 My turn to get stuff signed. My wife gets my picture.

12:45 I get in line to sign up for the Kaffeeklatsches with the guests on Monday.

1:00 I walk in on the comedy singers Funny Music Project in progress. The FuMP is groups of song parodists trying to become the next Weird Al. A song about Quark’s Bar cracks me up so much that I buy a CD from The Great Luke Ski, on of the better members of the ensemble.

2:00 I catch up with my wife and we decide to eat lunch. The main restaurant tells us they are closed but I can see Niven, Pournelle, and other VIPs still in there finishing up. We go to the lounge to order bar grub instead. The whole hotel is now smoke-free, so the atmosphere is breathable. Last year, just walking through the bar made us nearly pass out from the fumes. The Eastern European waitress doesn’t know what a Smirnoff Ice is, so I just order Coke.

4:00 Larry Niven gives his talk to a mostly full ballroom. One of the other fans in the audience is wearing a great Battlestar Galactica costume. There were relatively few media themed costumes. I saw one Jedi knight, but it was mostly pirates and generic elves and fairies.

5:30 We drag our kid out of the game room and head out to Silver Spring Mining Company for dinner. Good food in a fake western motif. My son says he wants a samurai sword for his birthday. He pouts the rest of the meal when we tell him absolutely not.

7:30 I head down to the con to kill some time. There is a roast for some podcasters that seem to be popular. A storyteller retells an old joke very well. One of the music parodyists from earlier in the day does a solo show. He does a take-off on a song by internet sensation Jonathon Coulton. The crowd is into it.

9:30 I make my son take a break to come listen to a scientist from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab give a talk about his doodling on the physics of the Ringworld and how seasons could be simulated by oscillating the ring along the axis of rotation but the inertia from the dirt and water would eventually dampen it down. I tell my son to go apologize to his mom for being a jerk at dinner or he is going to have a short evening.

10:30 I scarf some munchies as Niven and Pournelle do their half-hearted talk about the science of Heinlein.

11:30 Larry Niven is in a nearby room listening to the open mic filking. The Bohnhoffs are among the players. They do their Eagles tuned tribute to vintage Cadillacs called “El Dorado”.

12:00 My son is back in the game room. I tell him not to stay out too late. He warns me that his cell phone battery is nearly dead and that he might go over to a different game soon.

12:15 I take the long way back to my room to check out some hall parties being thrown by future conventions. The look lame so I head back. In the far stairwell I have to step over a couple making out on the steps.

2:00 I read about half of my new Niven book and fall asleep.

4:15 My wife is trying to reach my son on his cell phone. I tell her that it’s probably dead, so I go out looking for him. The air conditioning in the game room has failed, which is usually the most fragrant room at a con anyways, so they have spread out into the hallway, but he’s not there. I wander way down towards the 24-hour con suite and find him at a table at the bottom of the escalator playing a complicated looking game. One of the players is a girl he knows from school and they claim the game would be ruined if he had to leave.

4:30 I reassure my wife that he is fine and I go back to sleep.

6:00 My son makes it back to the room. Dawn is cracking through the window.

If my kid is going to stay out all night, it's better in the relatively safe environs of a science fiction convention. As for the sword, his eighteenth birthday falls just short of next year's Balticon. If he wants a bladed weapon, he is on his own once he is an adult. I take a lot of heat for being the "fun" parent, but even I was a little concerned about him just wandering around all night. I think if he wasn't with someone we knew, I might have been more reluctant to let his stay out.

Be sure to read my previous posts about Larry Niven and Day One.

Tomorrow: Balticon winds down.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Your opinion on the late hours or the sword lust?

Balticon Diary: Day One

There was more to do at Balticon than just stalk Larry Niven. With the help of the program guide, I have reconstructed my weekend immersed in the world of fellow science fiction geeks. To avoid boring you all at once, I am going to post my recap in three parts starting with:

Saturday

9:30 I rouse my family out of bed at least two hours before their normal wake-up time. We grab some bagels and head up to Hunt Valley.

10:30 We get in line for pre-registration pick-up. My son was registered under his internet alias, but I don’t have the courage to go as yellojkt, so I’m there under my real name. I am wearing a Yellow Jacket tee shirt just in case. My son says he’ll be in the game room. My wife takes the car keys and heads off to the Talbot’s outlet store.



11:00 Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle give a joint interview. I ask a question about who comes up with the story ideas. They say they both do, but Jerry focuses on plot continuity and character development. Niven concentrates on the big “wow” ideas.

12:00 Time to cruise the dealer room for first editions to get signed. I had brought with me copies of The Ringworld Engineers and Footfall that I had bought second hand earlier. I find a copy of The Gripping Hand and a previously signed copy of The Smoke Ring. The book dealer has a $30 minimum for charges, so I pick up a paoerback of Draco’s Tavern, a Niven story collection I had never heard of.

12:30 I run into a girl in my son’s marching band. She shows off the artwork she has on display in the gallery. They are some small drawings of elves and furry-ish creatures that she is selling for five bucks each.

12:45 I try to check in at the hotel front desk, but they don’t have any rooms ready. I wander the halls checking out the costumes. Since Pirates of the Caribbean 33-1/3 opened the same weekend, lacey shirts, head scarves and eyepatches are very popular.



2:00 The musical guests of honor, Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, give a concert. Their gimmick is that they do science fiction-y parodies of classic rock songs. “Hotel California” becomes “Hotel Dealer Room”. Their retelling of the Charlotte’s Web story to the tune of the Firefly/Serenity theme song kills.

3:15 The hotel room is finally ready. About the same time, my wife returns from her shopping spree. I help haul her booty up to the room. We leave a message for our son to come get a key. No response.

3:30 Jerry Pournelle gives his talk on inventing the future.

4:30 I go up to the room and munch on the snacks my wife got at the Amish market.

5:00 My son finally shows up to get is room key. He shows off the prize he got in the tournament for a game he has never played before. We all leave the con to take him to a graduation party a friend of his is throwing.

6:30 We show up at Claude’s pig roast, which both he and I have already blogged about.

9:00 The mosquitoes start coming out so we have to get my wife back indoors.

9:30 I check out the Masquerade costume competition but it’s standing room only and they are only on the kid’s costumes. My son calls and tells me his party is winding down so I go pick him up.

11:00 My son heads down to the game room. I head up to the room exhausted.

12:00 Our son calls to tell us the game he is playing is running late. I tell him to come up as soon as the game is over. I fall asleep.

1:30 My son comes up to the room and goes to bed. I sleep through all the change rattling and bedtime routines because I am exhausted. I had no idea how long my day tomorrow would be.

Tomorrow: The big day at the con including a little domestic drama.

When Worlds Collide

My Achenbuddy (and occasional blogger herself) kb sent me this comic because she knows I love strips with blogs in the punchline.


They make a great way for a comic artist to make quick joke about lame self-absorbed people.


I'm not sure I agree with that stereotype, but it's out there. The problem is that many of our family, friends, and coworkers don't know we are bloggers. While I don't blog at or about work, I would dread letting my boss know about my secret obsession. And while my wife knows I have a blog, I'm not sure she realizes the extent of the community I formed.

On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, fellow Baltimore blogger Claude of Baltimore Diary had a housewarming pig roast that he invited me to (and he of course blogged about it). I had a hard time explaining to my wife how I actually knew Claude. Since she knows I read the Comics Curmudgeon a lot, I explained that we both read the same blog and left it at that.

As an ice-breaker, I explained that Claude and she both worked in education, just at opposite ends of the bell curve. With NCLB as a common enemy, they got along fine. Claude's girlfriend and daughter were wonderful hostesses and his girlfriend's daughter is just a riot.

The pig roast was great. It was mostly neighbors with a few bloggers. Since I am not very social in the Baltimore blogging community, I didn't know anybody, but everybody was great fun. I even promised Malnourished Snay that I would get him added to my blogroll. It turns out he is even funnier in person than he is on his blog. If hadn't known that a good part of the crowd was bloggers, you would have mistaken us for old friends sharing some drinks and some great pork.

I just want to make the point that bloggers are just people. People with the overwhelming need to overshare in public to complete strangers. Is that so wrong?

Stalking Niven

Just like last year, I spent Memorial Day weekend at Balticon, the Baltimore area science fiction convention. Last year’s guest of honor was goth rock star Neil Gaiman. This year they went completely the other direction with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, two old-school rock-hard science fiction writers. Last year we just daytripped to the con in Hunt Valley from our home in Ellicott City. Since that is a long roundtrip and many events run pretty late, this year we ponied up for a room onsite.

Larry Niven is easily one of my top ten favorite science fiction writers and his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle are landmarks. I made it my goal to get to every event possible that featured one or the other.

A good convention really makes the guests sing for their supper (in the case of the musical guests, literally). Larry and Jerry were booked into at least three events a day. We blew off the first night of the con, but made sure we arrived early enough Saturday to catch the joint interview. I don’t know how it is when they are working together, but it’s good thing Niven is a fairly quiet individual, because nobody gets a word in edgewise when Pournelle has the floor.

At the joint interview they were very proud that the final draft of Inferno 2 (the sequel to a book I haven’t read) was delivered to the publisher. They are also pitching an epic-sized novel that will examine the response of society to a clear and present danger and if and how society can return to normal once the threat has passed. I expect the plot will involve an extinction event sized threat from space since, as they admit, they have made a good living throwing things at Earth.

Pournelle recycled a talk he gave to a group of international secret agency types that want to guard us against future threats. The theme was that the future can’t be predicted because too many random events disrupt the linear progression of events, but that the future can be invented and shaped if you know your goals as a society. He gave a personal anecdote about how the need for precise guidance systems for ballistic missiles created the computer industry. He also tiraded against Homeland Security, No Child Left Behind, and Robert McNamara.

Niven recycled a speech about how our only defense against the Deep Impact/Armageddon sized meteor is a serious space program. Larry is a pro-space advocate and thinks any excuse to be up there is a good one. He had some good science to back-up his ideas but admitted that raising the sense of urgency in the general public is a daunting task.

Both did a full hour of joint book signing. This attracted the usual smattering of people trying to push up shopping carts full of books of everything they wrote. A three item or less rule got the line moving again.

I had been scouring used book dealers for the past few months and came up with first editions of Footfall, The Gripping Hand, and The Ringworld Engineers. I had plenty of time to try to chit-chat with Larry while waiting for Jerry to find the right page in a very old issue of Byte to sign. I asked Pournelle if he remembered Joel Achenbach interviewing him at a book signing earlier in the week for the Achenblog post called The Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Show. Jerry could barely remember that there was a reporter there.

Click on the picture to read my tee shirt.

They both showed up for a talk ostensibly about Robert Heinlein’s contribution to science. They found the topic baffling saying that the science in Heinlein’s work was clear and lucid and rarely original. Most of the gee-whiz ideas he used were around all the popular science magazines and showcased in the 1934 World’s Fair. Jerry went on another rant and Larry slipped out claiming it was late. After Pournelle finished pontificating and getting huffy with the unruly audience, I found Niven a few doors down listening to the open filk music session. It seems he likes participating in all the other stuff the regular fans do and knew the musical guests.

The next morning I had signed up for Kaffeeklatsches which are small group sessions with the guests. Pournelle’s was first and got off to a bad start. The room didn’t have any coffee or water or snacks. Jerry had a Ziploc bag of about a dozen pills to take and no way to swallow them. Without caffeine or any way to take his meds, Jerry moves from his normal crankiness right into cantakerous. After a fan ran off to get him a cup of joe, he resumed his rant against public education and pissed off a special ed teacher in the audience. After a long digression about dyslexia and ADD, he finally got steered back to writing. He feels creative writing classes are useless. He sees science fiction magazines as good ways to get into the business because they are so desperate for material since they pay so little. Nevertheless, he’s not keen on the idea of posting his stuff on the internet for free and is especially miffed at other people that post his stuff on the web. He gave some nice personal stories about the early days of Byte and other computer magazines before his time was up.

Because of scheduling confusion, I missed the first half of Nivens’s small group talk but I still got a lot of good insight. He talks slowly and measured but always has a point. Unlike Pournelle, he is quiet and thoughtful when others talk and it sometimes takes effort to steer the talk back to his opinions. Larry just wants to see us in space. It's the mindset of a fan that grew up reading the Golden Age giants. He likes the idea of private enterprise in space aviation because that is how it was always envisioned in things like "The Man Who Sold The Moon" and Destination Moon. He writes short stories just to keep his writing skill sharp.

It was great to see two of the masters still at the top of their game. They sound enthusiastic about their upcoming work and still think the future has a chance. For more pictures of Niven and Pournelle and other sights from Balticon, check out my Balticon 2007 Flickr set.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What author would you like to stalk?

Cracked Closet

In the biggest celebrity non-news since Lindsay Lohan jumped the gun on her 21st birthday by about half a decade or since Paris Hilton did something retarded again, David Hyde Pierce (seen here signing my wife's Playbill after a showing of Spamalot) came out of a very large well-ventilated bay-windowed throw-pillowed closet.

It seems some AP news story made a reference to a partner with a decidedly masculine name. Now if this is news to you, you have managed to miss every episode, promo, and awards show clip ever from Frasier. I have always insisted that show only made sense if you pretended that Frasier and Niles were estranged former lovers and not brothers, not that those premises are mutually exclusive.

I last got this outraged over this trend of petty outings of extremely low hanging fruit (I can’t stop using that pun) when the Washington Post’s Hank Stuever got his panties in a knot because Sean Hayes from Will and Grace continues to coyly act ambiguously talented. Since then Neil Patrick Harris (who was fantastic on Broadway in Assassins not realizing it was his character in the crosshairs) was delicately shoved into the public to declare he was never meeting anyone's mother.

That’s after the shock that only one Backstreet Boy was wasting the time of all those screaming tweener girls. There was also some hunky actor from Grey’s Anatomy that got called a faggot behind his back and had to ‘fess up. You could trampled standing in front of the celebrity closet door lately.

This weekend also marked the passing of Charles Nelson Reilly who, with Paul Lynde, was the centerpiece of my naïve 70s gameshow obsession. I also had no idea as a child how campy the entire Sidd and Marty Krofft Saturday morning line-up was. The gayest moment in TV history could have been made if there had ever been a Lidsville/Sigmund And The Sea Monster crossover and I would never have noticed. Now I just wouldn’t care. I have just gotten beyond worrying about who sleeps with who and why. This stuff just fails to shock anymore.

However, I have learned that if you combine the word ‘gay’ and the name of any random celebrity, you get a certain amount of guaranteed drive-by Google traffic. In the interest of internet irony and blatant search-baiting, I have come up with my own version of the Death Pool I am going to call the Shallow Pool. All you have to do is pick one of the following celebrities and if they are the first to publicly announce their homosexuality, you win absolutely nothing. As a disclaimer, I have no idea whatsoever if any of these people are really gay. I am only interested in the media frenzy over all this silly outing. Repeat: I DO NOT KNOW IF THEY ARE GAY, NOR DO I CARE. Now make your choice.

Jake Gyllenhaal
Anderson Cooper
Kevin Spacey
Bradley Cooper
Richard Gere
Cindy Crawford
Hugh Jackman
Tom Selleck
George Clooney
Ricky Martin
Clay Aiken
Kenny Chesney
Randy Travis
Kanye West
Andre 2000
Derek Jeter
Mike Piazza
Brady Anderson
David Souter
Condoleeza Rice
Senator Larry Craig
Senator Tom Coburn
Tinkie Winkie
SpongeBob SquarePants
Bert or Ernie

In order to “win” the celebrity must declare their homosexuality or bisexuality either in person or through a publicist. In order to lose, continue to act shocked every time some phony newsrag tries to make headlines by outing some poor shmo who wasn't fooling anyone anyways.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Make your own nominations.

Random Seven

Nearly a week ago, used*to*be*me tagged me with a meme to post seven random things about me. I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with suitably entertaining randomness that I haven’t covered when I had to come up with Five Weird Habits or Six Weird Things about me. Somebody keeps upping the ante on these lame memes.

Probably about the only reason I fall for these memes is that it gives me a chance to unload some minor thoughts that don’t merit a whole blog entry. It also lets me linkback to older posts to catch people up to date. Here goes:

1. I’ve ridden my bicycle 137 miles so far this year. I know this because I keep a spreadsheet log of all my bike rides. I 2005 I had only managed 231 miles because I had torn my ACL. In 2006 I rode 251 miles after recovering from my zombie knee surgery but before cracking my helmet in September. The spreadsheet from 2004 got destroyed in a hard drive crash before I rode the Seagull Century. Since I did two 50-mile training rides that year, I probably rode at least 500 miles.
2. I once shared an elevator with Jerry Pournelle, noted science fiction writer and computer journalist. It was in 1992 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando. I recognized him from his trademark bolo tie and pencil thin moustache. This is not an entirely random memory since he was co-guest of honor at Balticon this weekend. More about my time at that later.
3. I could probably go a week wearing only Georgia Tech themed apparel. Every time I go to Atlanta I buy one or two items at the bookstore. Currently I own four or five tee shirts, three golf shirts, two dress shirts, three hoodies, one pair of sweatpants, two pairs of socks and a biking jersey.
4. My childhood home got buried in volcanic ash. From 1976 to 1979 I lived on Mactan Circle on Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. In 1992 Mount Pinatubo erupted and covered the entire base in volcanic ash. My house probably looked like this picture I found on the web. Time magazine ran a picture of my sister’s elementary school with ash up to the top of the doors. You can’t go home again.
5. I know my high school GPA to the third decimal place. At my fifth year high school reunion our class salutatorian got very drunk and told me how much the 0.004 difference in our GPAs destroyed everything he had worked for. Out 25th reunion is next month. I wonder if he will be there.
6. I’ve touched the space shuttle. I did an HVAC design project to replace the air conditioning in the elevator machine room on the cargo bay hoist. During one trip they had a bird on the pad and we could look right into the cockpit windows. I used the have a picture of me standing in front of it wearing a Georgia Tech tee shirt.
7. I own at least four different editions of Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. I have an uncorrected proof, the leather bound Franklin Press edition, the first trade hardback edition, and a trade paperback reading copy. Iown multiple copies of several other Vonnegut novels as well including two different audiobook versions of Slaughterhouse Five.

I made it to seven, barely. Whew!

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Add your own random fact.

Rocket Kid

Nerd Month at the Yellojkt household continues. Coming right off the BotBall competition, my son and a team from his school qualified for the Team America Rocketry Challenge (that name makes me want to see the marionette movie spoof). The sponsor of the Rocketry Club is also the teacher of the Engineering Robotics class.

Nearly 700 schools and organizations registered teams at the beginning of the year and about half of those sent up rockets that qualified. Of those, the top 100 teams got invited to Nationals. Fortunately for us, Nationals were in nearby Northern Virginia, so our travel expenses were limited to a night at the Manassas Fairfield Inn and dinner at the Country Buffet, so no expense was spared. Several teams came from Florida and one came from Washington State.

Since you can’t see all that goes in a rocket, my son made a cardboard mock-up of all the parts that are needed. The big ball of tape at the top is a raw egg “passenger” that has to survive the launch and recovery. The egg is very important. Without an intact egg, they don’t even count your score.

The next item from the top is an altimeter. The goal of the competition is to send the rocket to exactly 850 fifty feet in the air. Every foot away from the goal is a point of penalty and the lowest score wins. Every rocket also has to have a parachute and the flight has to last exactly 45 seconds. Finally, no rocket flies without an engine or “motor” in the hobbyist lingo.




Like all these engineering competitions, the contestants tend to be estrogen deprived. The girl in the group picture is the team captain and was single-handedly responsible for the team making Nationals. While my son was off touring colleges, she went out on the last day of qualifications and set off two successful witnessed launches.

One team was all female and each team member had a cute nickname like the Princess of Payload, Engine Empress, and the Diva of Dogbarf. That last nickname was not a slur on her looks, but rather an inside joke about an obscure rocketry accessory. Another team was called 50/50 because half the team was female. Other than that most of the teams had one or two female members if they had any at all.

Team Honeywell (the local sponsors of my kid’s team) drew a late afternoon launch window. By then, the beautiful cool but sunny day had turned a little breezy and a gust of wind right at launch made the rocket fall short of the target altitude. A final score of 69 put them into 57th place, but at least the egg survived unlike the dozen or so teams that disqualified. As good parents we kept insisting that they were winners for just being in the competition, but the kids were disappointed nonetheless.

All-in-all I spent a very pleasant day sitting in a lawn chair in a huge meadow aggravating my hayfever. When the spectators got bored, there was an exhibitor tent filled with a who’s who roster of various cogs in the military-industrial complex. There were colleges like Embry-Riddle and University of Alabama-Huntsville. Plenty of defense contractors were giving out tchotkes. And there were the ubiquitous military recruiters showing off the toys you get to play with if you wear a uniform.

Throughout the day, they were frequent PSA’s about the need for future aerospace engineers. It seems all those NASA era baby boomers are about to retire and the industry needs to fill the ranks. For the awards ceremony, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates came out to help hand out over $75,000 in scholarships. Our kids went home empty handed but exhausted.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Name the nerdiest school activity. Extra credit if you took part.

List Of Lists

I’ve been running across a lot of lists on the internet lately. When I was in grade school, I read The Book Of Lists and its sequels by the Wallace clan and I’m still addicted to that level of trivia. One of my favorite lists lately is Dave Marsh’s The New Book of Rock Lists (which is actually pretty old). Just recently I posted my comments about the Entertainment Weekly List Of Best Science Fiction Movies Of The Past 20 Years. Here are some more lists worth checking out.

25 Books To Make You Look Like A Poseur

The first list I ran across got me angry. It was on a website aimed at recent college grads and was a list of books that would make you look good to have. While the article was called 25 Books That Look Good and Read Even Better, I called it 25 Books To Make You Look Like A Poseur But Might Get You Laid because the while some of the books are good, the reasons they give to have them are so cynical. I’ve read about half the books on the list and I did get a chuckle out of the category called 'Has Anyone Ever Really Finished This?’ because despite my best efforts, I have never finished Gravity’s Rainbow no matter how many times I have started it. And I finally decided that I’m not qualified to even try Ulysses until I go back for that PhD in Literature.

10 Books That Keep Your Seat Clear On The Subway

Christopher Hitchens has a new book out called God Is Not Great. Thanks to the fortuitous death of Jerry Falwell, he has taken the chance to flog this book while letting everyone know what he REALLY thinks of organized religion. This book title inspired Trybecca to list other books guaranteed to get you stares in public. I found the book amusing because I will often try to pick just the right book to read when I am taking a long flight or will be in public. Just yesterday, I had to spend the day at my son’s rocketry contest and I needed a book to read. I’m currently reading Ten Days In the Hills (full report to come during my next BooksFirst post) but since the book is a little racy, I decided to take a science fiction anthology instead.

10 Worst Ten Americans

Captains Quarters is that rarest of animals, a thoughtful and insightful right-wing political blog. It seems there is some sort of wingnut meme out there where you have to name the worst ten Americans of all time. His list is actually well-reasoned and spans four posts that you are welcome to navigate on your own, but his number one pick is very interesting.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Give me some more lists to read.