Ill wind that blows no good; my local Call of Cthulhu RPG game had a fine time with the "Servants of Jasper" on Saturday.
mcpye @ #148 : on the touch-screen machines here, one can select "write in" and a screen keyboard appears to type in the name. On the old mechanicals I used in New York decades ago there was a little window that exposed a paper tape to write on, which got changed after use. (I don't know how the scribblings on the tape got related back to whichever race it was for, perhaps there were row number markings that didn't show in the window.) Paper based systems (mark sense or punch card) are of course easy.
Uh, that number is "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 0". That's not an "unintentional" typo for some real number, it's a intentional fake. (This almost certainly violates the terms of service from whoever they plug their robot into, but I'm sure they don't care because it will take more than two weeks to be found out and cut off.)
Ah, I found the quote that was buzzing around in my head @18: "The Wall Street Journal editors lie without consequence." (Vince Foster, who killed himself a few days later; that was the consequence.)
When you're reading FiveThirtyEight also check into Princeton Election Consortium where Sam Wang occasionally complains that because he's an actual statistician he can get the same results as Nate without having to run the simulations. I have enough math left to agree with Sam, but I have enough doubt in my remnant math abilities to be comforted that Nate's simulations agree.
Oh, and TNH mentions "an article from the Wall Street Journal opinion section ...I can’t believe it’s in good faith." I've read the WSJ, including the opinion section, almost every day for the past 25 years (it is, in a sense, my home town newspaper.) I can assure Teresa that things on the WSJ opinion section should not be presumed to be in good faith; I cannot count the times where "facts" proclaimed there were contradicted by news stories in the same edition.
In Italy last year we ran into a restaurant with English translations of the menu; the British-influenced translation of "zucchini" was "dwarf marrow." Eew. Reminded me of the time, having just finished Courtship Rite, I noticed the local supermarket had an aisle offering "baby meats."
Besides Delirium Tremens, the other great Belgian beer with an ironic name is Mort Subite ("Sudden Death.") Like other lambics, it comes in some fruit-enhanced varieties which should be approached with caution; try the unenhanced version first.
Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming up on September 19th. Skip the rum and lay in a supply of Piraat.
"the 12 oz soda used to be the most common"? I remember when a 6 1/2 oz coke was standard and a 10 oz was King Size. (I'm actually pleased I can now get 8 oz Coke cans, but it ticks me off that they cost more than the 12 oz ones.)
Well, I've been stuck with the problem of a book too pretty to read before. The solution is to buy two copies.
pnh @ #14: I admired the the shortness of "pnh@tor.com" back in 1994
when I was "rfm@sun.com"
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.fandom/msg/797eb27d26a989f3
Neither rfm @sun .com or rfm@eng.sun.com works for me now, but I don't have to get up in the morning...
The best beef and horseradish sandwiches are Buffalo's "beef on weck", where the "weck" is "kimmelweck" a Kaiser roll with salt and caraway.
So.* I was in a Buffalo airport hotel a couple weeks ago. We ordered two Manhattans, up. (A distressing number of places think the default for Martinis and Manhattans is "on the rocks." The bartender asked "whiskey?" (I guess we were close enough to Wisconsin for a brandy Manhattan to be "normal".)
"Rye, if you have it; else Bourbon."
No rye of course. She ignores the "bourbon" and starts to pour Canadian whiskey into an Old Fashioned glass. No sign of ice or a shaker. Our jaws drop, visibly enough she actually notices. "Did you want that shaken with ice?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Well, you should have said so."
She puts ice in a shaker, pours the whiskey back out of the glasses into the shaker and starts looking around for a strainer.
"Uh, vermouth, too?" At this point I don't even hope for bitters.
She, offended: "Well of course. I've been a bartender for 20 years."
(She never found the strainer, but surprisingly managed to do a reasonable job with a makeshift Boston shaker rig.)
* Yes, I just read the Seamus Haney _Beowulf_ translation.
So, drive to Vancouver or Toronto. No car, can't rent one? Fly to Buffalo, Detroit, or San Diego, take transit, walk across the border. Once across buy a ticket and go.
Linkmeister @ #185: A Westercon was held in Honolulu in 2000; there were only a couple locals. Westercon isn't Worldcon, but I'd expect it to be enough to bring the locals, if any, out.
Michael Weholt @ #170 more conventions will take place in ever more remote (from the U.S.) locations Of the last 15 Worldcons, 6 have been outside the US (Winnipeg, Glasgow twice, Melbourne, Toronto, Yokohama.) So non-US Worldcons aren't much of a novelty anymore, and it is pretty hard to get much more distant than Melbourne. What is still rare is Worldcon in non-English-speaking places; that's only three in history so far: Heidelberg 1970, The Hague 1990, Yokohama this year. And the Netherlands hardly counts since one is more likely to bump into somebody with no English at all in California. Montreal now coming up, but legally bilinguala and practically not a place a strict Anglophone is going to have much trouble.
This is great, and too long coming.
BTW, the full Hugo voting numbers are already up at The Hugo Awards site (pdf link) -- there were some very close votes.
#61 Leah Miller : It seems to me that rich people used to tend to bug out and get creative more often... building castles, founding eccentric museums, financing plays and movies simply for their own amusement.
Well, John Fry (of Fry's Electronics) is building a replica of the Alhambra in Morgan Hill, California, just so he can fill it with mathematicians...
Stephanie@14: Don't see the 5th as being a big deal; can't convict him again for the same offense anyway, and Fitzgerald already determined there's not enough evidence to charge him with anything else. So giving him immunity wouldn't actually be giving him anything. On Countdown, John Dean even suggested Fitzgerald should do that -- grant Libby immunity, and ask him all the same questions again. If we get different answers, we learn something; if we get the same answers, convict Libby of perjury again (new offense.)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind not SF? It's a story about the effects of a hypothetical new technology -- voluntary selective memory erasure -- on personal relationships. How could it be possibly be more like SF?
(please add "weird" to Spelling Reference.)
At Potlatch last weekend I ran into an Author (anonymous here because I don't remember his name) who had a fairly large inventory of novels he was not submitting on his agents' advice. His agent's theory was that publishers might buy his novels now at the same price they bought his first, but if his first (not yet published, but bought, and out "soon") does well he could sell the current novels for more money. All that sounds reasonable, but it seems that a prolific author could definintely write 4-6 novels a year while the Big Publishers could only consume 1 or 2. It seems to me that PoD could be a way for a reader like me who liked the 1 or 2 novels from that Author to get at those 3-4/yr excess novels...
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