August 2006 Archives

In order to balance out last week’s Worldcon nerd/nerd/nerd edition, here’s an all-geek installment... and it’s all Keith Olbermann. Keith was on fire last night -- I caught his show on DirectTV on the flight home from Los Angeles (thank you, JetBlue, for your seatback satellite television) and I was stunned and delighted to see him even more justifiably angry and wonderfully articulate than he usually is. He was channeling the spirit of Edward R. Murrow as he took defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to task for his speech, earlier in the day on Wednesday, in which he impugned the patriotism of Americans who disagree with the Bush administration’s take on, well, just about everything.

You can watch a video of Keith’s entire rant on Crooks and Liars, but here’s a choice excerpt:

[T]o date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes?

I always get a huge kick out of Keith’s throwing in little commentaries on the day’s events via quotes from The Simpsons or Internet in-jokes, but it’s when he’s dead serious, like he was last night, that his geeky intellectualism -- which, in a way, redefines intellectualism as geekiness -- is at its pinnacle.

(Technorati tags: geek, Keith Olbermann)

08.31 UPDATE: The book is already up on Amazon: click here to buy it there. Or buy at Barnes & Noble.com.

Finally and at long last, I am happy and proud and giddy and all that to announce the publication of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride. Yes, I retitled the book -- it was like getting rid of a husband’s surname during a divorce. Plus, I kinda like this “totally geeky guide to” thing and may start a series. The Totally Geeky Guide to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings? The Totally Geeky Guide to Bruce Campbell? The Totally Geeky Guide to The Prisoner? The Totally Geeky Guide to Max Headroom?

You’ll only encourage me if you buy this first one.

Here’s the deal. You can buy the book right now at Lulu.com. The price is $9.95 (plus postage) for, if I may say so myself, a rather handsome-looking POD book. Content aside, the quality of the physical item is absolutely on par with any traditionally published book you'd find in any bookstore. And Lulu’s service is superb. FlickFilosopher micropatrons have been getting a sneak peek at the book for a couple weeks now, and here’s what one, Frank, had to say about Lulu:

Wow, that was fast! My new book, The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride, is already available at Amazon.com. If you've been waiting to order through a venue other than Lulu, here ya go.

(Technorati tags: Princess Bride)

The con is over -- really over. Although programming and official events ended, well, officially Sunday afternoon, there were still plenty of fans to be found in the hotel, and plenty of that collegial con feeling still to go around. The con suite -- which is a kind of hospitality suite and ground zero for hanging out, grabbing some snacks or a can of soda, finding someone interesting to talk to -- was still going strong on Sunday night, when Bonnie and I returned from dinner with a friend in Laguna Beach. Since we were hosting room parties, our room was on the party floor, just down the hall from the con suite, so we had constant reminders of the nonstop five-day party going on all around us, like the fun signage directing fans around, which featured retro rockets:

And then there were the signs directing sentient beings of all excretory needs to the restrooms:

In the exhibit hall, many examples of fannish creativity. Like these paper-bag puppets representing characters from The Lord of the Rings. Why? Who knows:

Cars made by fans to honor famous SFnal cars, including the Marty McFly’s time-traveling DeLorean:

The 2054 Lexus Tom Cruise drove in Minority Report:

I may not be home, but don’t worry: I left the TV on a timer for the birds so they won’t be so lonely during the day. It’s tuned to the SciFi Channel, cuz they love watching stuff with lots of explosions and machine-gun fire and people yelling at one another -- they get real happy when there’s lots of noise on the TV.

The female on the left is Celery; the male on the right is Snowbird. They're pretty cool, as birds go.

(Technorati tags: birds, parakeets, SciFi Channel)

Can you believe it? The bag I bought to replace the one with the ripped strap has a ripped strap:

Fortunately, there is another load-bearing strap, but still: sheesh!

The Hilton we’re staying at is quite nice, and they’ve really made an attempt to ensure that us science fiction nerds feel at home. Like this: in the lobby there’s a sort of hall of fame of celebrities who’ve stayed at the hotel, and the very first one is fan favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger:

Which really made me appreciate how perfect a place California is to host Worldcom -- the state’s governor is the Termination, for pete’s sake. How cool is that?

The convention center itself is characterized by the usual fascist-airport architecture you find in these kinds of structures:

Not all robots are nerds, of course, but all these are. Fred Barton built these incredible lifesize replicas of movie robots -- Gort, Robby the Robot, and a Dalek -- all of which are on display here at Worldcon, as well as several others. (Lots of info about Fred and his extraordinary work at his Web site.

(Technorati tags: nerd, Worldcon, Gort, Robby the Robot, Dalek)

It’s been up and down, good luck and bad all day. Good luck: My friend Jorge volunteered to drive me and my con pal Bonnie to the airport at an ungodly hour this morning, when there should have been no traffic to speak of... and we got caught in a major traffic jam when the cleanup of a really horrendous car accident stopped us cold in the middle of the Major Deegan Expressway for half an hour, which more than ate up all the extra time we had allotted ourselves. We just made our flight, after being delayed some more by JetBlue, who had neglected to inform us of some basic check-in procedures... like if you’re checking cardboard boxes, you can’t do online check-in (JetBlue’s Web site, which lets you check in online, doesn’t mention this.) We had cardboard boxes, because Bonnie was hauling art to the Worldcon art show, where she’s showing her work. (You can see some of her stuff at her Web site; oh, and she just published a piece of short science fiction in an anthology called Watching Time.)

Oh, and guess what else you can’t bring in an airplane cabin these days? Butter. As in butter on the bologna and cheese sandwiches you might bring because JetBlue doesn’t serve meals as a cost-cutting measure but does encourage you to bring your own food. Just don’t bring anything of a gel or paste consistency. Like butter. Or peanut butter. Or mayonnaise.

Is the criminal code more code than criminal, or more criminal than code?

(Technorati tags: geek koan, Bill Gates mug shot)

Poor Pluto, about to be demoted to a "pluton." Leaving room for Mercury in the nerd slot (with Jupiter as the geek and Mars as the dork).

(Technorati tags: geek, dork, nerd, planet, pluton, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury)

Speaking of girl geeks and their toys: I just bought myself a birthday present, an unbelievably gorgeous Olympus Stylus 710 digital camera, a long-time-coming replacement for my absurdly old Olympus Camedia D-360L with its ridiculous 1.3 megapixels. And I’m already in love with it.

I bought it so I could do some blogging from Worldcon next week, complete with images that people wouldn’t have to stand still for 10 minutes for, which the old Camedia daguerrotype-maker has been requiring of late. And I’m so incredibly backlogged trying to get ready to head to the con that I figured the first chance I might have to play with the thing and read the manual and such would be on the plane out to Anaheim. But I couldn’t wait.

First image taken with my new digital camera:

When I was putting together the concept for this blog, it seemed only natural to connect Generation X and geekiness, and not merely because I’m a geek and an Xer. The two concepts just felt right together, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at the time. But now I’ve got it -- I figured it out by looking at the kids coming up behind us, the Millennials.

I spent the day Tuesday with my friend Sheila, today, for instance -- she’s 12, and she spent her day shackled to her cell phone and her iPod, which she wields with easy panache. (This is the kid who, when she was maybe six or seven, discovered features on my cell phone that I had been hitherto unaware of.) The array of music on both devices is amazing: she’s got audio clips from Grease and the Olsen twins singing from god knows where, the Carpenters and Billy Joel and the Shangri-Las, and music so new that I couldn’t even identify it, having pretty much given up listening to the radio when I sold my car. She makes no distinctions between oldies and today’s hits -- she doesn’t have to: everything is available to her on an equal footing whether it was produced 50 years or 5 minutes ago. You just download it from iTunes, duh.

She’s typical of Millennials, and particularly Millennial girls, as a fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times reveals:

Assuming that we don’t go to a terrorism red alert that grounds all global air traffic, I will be flying out to Southern California next week to attend L.A. Con IV, the 64th World Science Fiction Convention, aka Worldcon, which runs from Wednesday 08.23 through Sunday 08.27. (If you’re familiar with Worldcons in the past, they typically occur over Labor Day weekend, when they’ll run from Thursday through Monday. Since this year’s is the weekend before the holiday, it’s taking on the unusual schedule of Wednesday through Sunday.)

I’ll be attending the convention with my bestest pal and frequent congoing companion, Bonnie-Ann Black. Bonnie is an artist (and writer and poet and chef and general all-around Renaissance woman), and she’ll be showing her work in the Worldcon art show. Get a look at her art at her Web site, Dubhsidhe Studios.

If you can only come to the con for one day, make it Friday the 25th. I’ll be doing back-to-back (-to-back-to-back-to-back) panels on that day, and Friday evening I’ll be hosting a book-release party for my new book, The Totally Geeky Guide to ‘The Princess Bride,’ which will make its debut at the con and be available for sale online starting next Wednesday, the 23rd.

If you're looking for me around the con at times when I'm not scheduled for a panel, you'll probably find me at the Hilton hotel bar. I'll even let you buy me a drink.

My convention schedule:

Do we control our toys... or do they control us?

[image from squigley.net]

(Technorati tags: geek koan, remote control)

I don't know what that title means either. It's just that so little rhymes with "snakes."

(Technorati tags: geek, dork, nerd, plane, Airplane, William Shatner, Twilight Zone, Tattoo, Fantasy Island)

Damn, it’s hot. Dogs for the dog days: Gromit, K9, Snoopy.

(Technorati tags: geek, dork, nerd, dogs, Gromit, K9, Snoopy)