“First they came for the verbs and I said nothing, for verbing
weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns and I speech
nothing, for I no verbs.”
The weather grayed out yesterday evening, and something inside said, “Oh well, so much for summer weather: now the normal Irish autumn starts.” But not yet. Got up this morning to bright, warm sunshine…but with that strange, blunt, “mellow” quality on it that says, “Get ready for the leaves to start turning. Though not just yet…”
The cats are back from the kennel and have either slept all over us (as usual for the females) or spent all night out peeing on things to mark them (as usual for the males). Now most of them are lying around in that sun, luxuriating. Be nice to do that myself, but too much is going on today. Finishing novels, scanning Wizard’s Holiday for the people at Recorded Books, other such stuff. Oh well…
Memo to self: Catch Goodman, put sunblock on his ears…
A tale of bats stuck in windows… and unstuck.
What joy to be home. Worldcon was fun…but to stop traveling, after two weeks of being more or less constantly on the road, is more fun yet.
The kitchen is full of suitcases. The cats aren’t back from the kennel yet. More FedEx packages (mostly full of books from Harcourt) have been erroneously delivered to the local pub instead of being held for redelivery tomorrow. Peter has gone upstairs to get some sleep. I have no clear sense of why I’m awake now, as I was falling asleep in the cab on the way home after six hours’ worth of KLM “redeye” YYZ-AMS, a three-hour layover, and then an hour and a half AMS-DUB; but just being back in the incredible country silence (and the clean air) seems to have given me my second wind. Who cares if I stopped the fishpond pump to clean it, and now can’t get it to start again? Who cares if incredible amounts of spam have piled up in the getting-ready-to-shut-it-down email account? We’re home. I’m happy.
(sigh) Happy memories from Toronto: A3 and Sparks & Co., Ben, Janis Ian and the excellent Pat, TR, the Accordion Guy. Lloyd and Yvonne, Kurt and Nancy, the Bird, hugging many NA-based pros whom I haven’t seen for a number of years, and discovering that even Cory Doctorow sometimes has trouble with WiFi. Memorable eats: the Japanese restaurant Nami on Adelaide Street. Things that didn’t get done: getting Peter a Tilley jacket; getting any serious shopping whatever done, either in Toronto or Schiphol; seeing any number of other people at Worldcon who were there but we just couldn’t find, or find time to hunt for.
(double sigh) Never mind. Next year in Boston.
“‘I’m a little disappointed,’ [Al Franken] told CNN. ‘I had hoped they would keep it going a few more news cycles.’
“‘It’s time to return Al Franken to the obscurity he’s normally accustomed to,’ a Fox spokeswoman later told CNN.”
Peter’s comment: “Can our books please have some of that kind of obscurity, too??”
The usual pre-Worldcon madness is setting in while I’m still finishing work on this book… (Sigh.) Blogging at the end of the week may be more sporadic than usual, due to running into people and hugging them constantly, or less so, due to being surrounded by WiFi hotspots. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, Jim and Abby’s wedding went very well: they’re off in the Algarve somewhere now, toasting themselves. I have barely unpacked from this trip (and indeed I barely unpacked from the last one before leaving for the wedding in Glasgow): most things are just getting fired straight into a bigger suitcase. At least, since we’re flying straight from Dublin to Toronto, I don’t have to leave any bags unlocked… 🙂
So yesterday, after some delay, my new laptop showed up. Ryoh-ohki II (aka Ryoh-chan) is the US version of the Sharp Mebius MT1 — a Sharp Actius UM32W. Slightly bigger HD (40 gig instead of 30), faster processor (1 GHz), onboard 802.11 (one less dongle to carry), Firewire, USB 2.0, various other bits and pieces. Her chassis is exactly the same size as Ryoh-ohki’s, her weight just a shade more (about three pounds).
The only thing that’s slightly off is the case, which is plastic rather than (as in the older machine) metal, and feels less…reassuring, somehow. It’s also going to be less forgiving of scratches and so on…which is a nuisance. But I may be able to do something about it. If I’m not mistaken, there was a slightly older version of this machine which Dynamism carried for a while before Sharp started marketing the “Actius” line (just the Mebius “Muramasa” machines rebadged) directly into the US. I’m betting that the Japanese version had a metal shell, and (if it did) I’m going to see if it’s possible to send the new one to Japan to be recased. We shall see…
Jeez, look at me, finding fault with the poor thing before it’s been in the house for even a day. Oh well…don’t have much time to worry any further about it: I have this book to finish before the week’s out. While I busy myself with that, Ryoh-chan is undergoing a “brain transplant” from Ryoh-ohki via PC Relocator. This should take another couple of hours to finish, according to the countdown clock. After that, Ryoh-ohki gets wrapped up in the new machine’s packaging and sent off to Dynamism to get that poor sake-soaked keyboard taken care of…
Anyway, the big machine is not so much “over” its disk crash as it’s had most of the important things replaced. It remains to get some data recovered from the crashed hard drive, which is going to cost mucho dinero, unfortunately…but it needs to be done. Sigh…
Well, only insofar as the people responsible for his movie scripts won’t be getting any residuals from TV showings until the recall is over, as FCC regulations (specifically the “equal time rule”) mean that Ahhhnold’s films won’t be airing in California until the dust has settled. Just as “Star Trek” was removed from the LA airwaves in ’73, while George Takei was running for LA City Council…
“…somebody…told me she was reading [Coraline] to her 8 year old son and got rather upset, and nervous, and freaked-out, and her son patted her on the hand and said ‘It’s okay, it’s only a story.’ Which I thought was a very reassuring place to be. Kids understand that. Kids are really good at fiction.”
You tell ’em, Neil. A nice interview on SuicideGirls.com with Mr. Gaiman, one of my favorite people and a very smart man (though I do sometimes wonder why he used to keep his sunglasses on all the time: even in the breakfast room at Claridges. Ileen Maisel is still talking about that, Neil…).
Harcourt is beginning to reissue the “Young Wizards” books in a digest format (they’re still being issued in standard mass-market paperbacks as well, but with covers by Cliff Nielsen, who’s also doing the hardcover editions). The first piece of work by the new artist, Greg Swearingen, was the cover for the 20th-anniversary edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard (you can see the digest version of it below). Here also are his covers for Deep Wizardry and High Wizardry.
I like them all well enough, but I think I like the “Deep” cover best.