Monica

Dani: Do you want to go to Gencon with me?

Me: Ack. Gencon is huge. I'm much more comfortable at a convention with 1000 people than one with 50,000.

Dani: So you'd prefer Pennsic be smaller?

Me: At Pennsic the 10,000 people in attendance aren't all trying to move through the same corridor at once.

Dani: Battlefield.

Me: That's a feature. And the 3000 people involved chose it. I'm not one of them so I don't care. :-)

---

In principle I do want to join Dani at things that he enjoys and that might be interesting to me. It sounds like Gencon has a lot of interesting programming (gaming, filk, SF...). But I find Worldcons to be overwhelming and they're a tenth the size of Gencon... so maybe not this particular one.

I wish I didn't have an "ack, too many people!" reflex, but I do.

Cognitive dissonance: John Huff (of Clam Chowder), wearing fishnet stockings, a leather corset and briefs, and very little else (he lost a bet), singing "Sweet Hope of Glory", a pretty, sincere, and very Christian hymn. Nope, not dressed for church. :-)

(The apparel had to do with a performance earlier in the set of "Sweet Transvestite" from Rocky Horror Picture Show. And, as I said, a bet.)

This is a longshot. I welcome suggestions for better places to post this.

If you are going to the Darkover SF con on Thanksgiving weekend and are in or will pass through Pittsburgh, and you might have room for a passenger and musical instruments to be negotiated, would you let me know? I can drive and will if I have to, but if I can save myself the hassle, I'd like to. I'll pay for gas, tolls, and lunch if I don't have to do any driving.

1. How did you get into SF fandom? ( Read more... )

2. What made you decide to convert to Judaism? ( Read more... )

3. What made you decide to keep Kosher?( Read more... )

4. When you're not listening to filk, what kinds of music do you listen to?( Read more... )

5. If you were stranded on a desert island with only the essentials and were told you could only have one musical instrument or device, what would that be, and why? ( Read more... )

( Thanksgiving )

( aside: buying beer in PA )

Friday we (I rode with Robert) headed out to Darkover Grand Council, a science-fiction convention in Timmonium MD (near Baltimore). The name is a bit misleading; while the con has its origins as an MZB con, the amount of Darkover content has dwindled over the years. I'm not a fan of the series, but I can still find reasons to go to this con. It has the strongest music track I know outside of cons dedicated entirely to music. So I go to perform, and I go to listen. And I go to visit with friends.

( people )

( Clam Chowder )

( On the Mark )

( so *that's* where they keep the cushy rooms!, and hotel misc )

We had a new "interim" CD at this convention. Some of its contents will eventually go onto a "real" live CD, but that will be a couple years away and we wanted to have something for people now. So we did this one on the cheap (allowing us to sell it for $10), but had enough decent material to fill up a CD. It was fun, and it includs a bunch of stuff that we haven't previously recorded.

( Shabbat challenge: probably boring to most readers )

On the way to the con on Friday, the biggest challenge was the dense fog in the mountains. (I couldn't see the car in front of us, and we were following pretty close. Fortunately, I was not driving. Had I been, I would have had to wait it out, and then hope I could get to the con before sundown.) On the way home, however, traffic was worse than usual. It was still much worse going in the other direction; we counted a ten-mile stoppage at one point on the turnpike. I'm not really sure what caused our erratically-slow traffic; we saw two accidents and one near-accident, but there were also just some standing waves in the traffic. (Near-accident: note to driver: if your wheels are going up onto the jersey barrier, you are not centered in your lane.)

All in all, it was a fun weekend!

Addendum: extra bonus -- two nights completely free of the usual snoring soundtrack!

For those of you who were around CMU in the early 80s (or those in fandom):

This weekend I learned that Leonard Zubkoff was killed in a helicoptor crash shortly before labor day. There is more information here: http://www.puffin.com/puffin/lnz/Leonard.htm . (Thanks to figmo for the link.)

Leonard was a wonderful person who always had a kind word for the people he came into contact with. He was a fun person to be around, and he was one of the people I looked up to as an undergrad at CMU. I mostly lost track of him when he left CMU, though I bumped into him occasionally in the filk community. I will miss him. 44 is too young, dammit.

Monday: Choir practice.

Tuesday: Domestic junk. (Bills still aren't paid.)

Wednesday: Ralph's D&D game. Much fun was had.

Tonight: Board meeting. Pack for trip. Try to figure out what's an appropriate, plane-enabled small gift to give to the nice person who's picking me up at the airport in Chattanooga. Maybe I should buy chocolate at lunch time.

Tomorrow morning: fly to Galacticon. Filk guests of honor -- woo hoo! I hope the airline folks don't want to confiscate my Shabbat candles and matches. (I'm trying to do this with carry-on only.) Probably no net access until Sunday night.

Darkover was fun. It felt a little lower key than usual; Jaelle said attendance was down 10% from last year, but it somehow felt like more. I noticed during our concert that the audience wasn't really getting into it and I thought it was a failure on our part, but then the next night people were also mellower than usual for the Clam Chowder concert, and *that* is unusual. I'm not sure what was up. I felt like both we and Chowder gave good performance to polite applause, for the most part. Very weird.

I had Shabbat meals with Yaakov, Rivka, and their 3-year-old Aaron. We never saw some of the other Jewish regulars. I got to talk with Yaakov some, though we haven't had a really good, long conversation at a con or event since Aaron was born. We talked about the Sinai board thing, and his advice amounted to: find out the background to all of this. I still don't have a feel for whether the behavior I'm seeing is considered normal in the Jewish community.

There were some areas of "uncertain practice" involving Yaakov. One occurred when I showed up for lunch on Saturday. He asked if I had made kiddush yet and I said no, and he said he had so I should go ahead. I drifted to a corner of the room and started to sing quietly, but he made it clear that he had intended to listen to me (and he and Rivka said amein at the end). I felt awkward because as I was starting I realized I had no idea what the *Orthodox* practice is, and Reform tends to abbreviate some things, and I suddenly felt self-conscious that I might be making kiddush "wrong" from his point of view. (In fact, the reason I had not done this before going was so I could hear him do it.) I explained this afterwards and there was in fact just one sentence missing from what I know vs. what he knows, and he didn't cons ider it an issue. On a personal level *I* don't consider it an issue; this is the way I make kiddush and that's fine. Being on the spot in front of someone with a potentially different practice, and who comes from a tradition that says theirs is right and mine is wrong, made me feel funny, though.

There were some other awkwardnesses involving the lack of an eiruv and the use of the electronic keys in the hotel, but I won't go into them now. They boil down to this: I am comfortable with my practice, but I am uncomfortable in situations where I feel like I have to justify my practice to Yaakov. Yaakov is my friend and I'm sure he's not judging me negatively -- but it still feels awkward.

After this weekend, I have resolved not to share a hotel room with Kathy again. A year ago she had agreed to get two rooms next time (she snores loudly enough to bother me, and does so at length). Then a couple weeks ago she said she couldn't afford that, so we got one. Maybe my memories were exaggerated, I thought. Well, they weren't. So next time we *will* get two rooms, and if the rest of the group decides that I'm being unreasonable I guess I'll just get a room of my own, though I don't think that would really be fair. It may be the most expedient solution, though. We'll see.

There were some good concerts this year, and there was a jam session on Saturday that was a lot of fun. I'm not all that experienced with jam sessions (we're talking session-style, like you see in Irish pubs, not SCA-style where they hadn out music), but I did ok. We had a couple harps, a fiddle, a larger member of the viol family (might have been a cello), a few recorders, a bowed psaltery, and some percussion.

Saturday night at midnight was the traditional singing of the Hallelujah Chorus around the swimming pool. The pool is in the lobby area and has a 5-story ceiling and glass walls most of the way up, and the accoustics are pretty good. (Like singing in the shower, but much moreso.) I don't sing this any more, of course; I don't sing explicitly-Christian hymns. But I stood and listened, and it sounded pretty good. A few people asked me why I wasn't singing; that is an awkward question for which they don't really want the real answer, so I mostly just said I didn't feel like it.

Friday night at the filking I sang Michael Greenstein's "9/11" song; I had wanted OTM to learn it but some members thought it was too bloodthirsty. (It's kind of a revenge song, but more on the theme of "we will be united against you".) It went over very well at the filk. I didn't get an opportunity to sing it Saturday night.

The drive back was much longer than usual, but I've already written about that.

Thanksgiving dinner with my family was good. My nephew (Zachary) is still loud, self-centered, and generally obnoxious, but he has mellowed a bit. He is now merely an obnoxious pain in the ass, rather than an unbearable obnoxious pain in the ass. Kim (my neice) seemed to be more sociable than she has been the last few visits, which is good. I can't believe she's a junior in high school already.

My parents had a painting that Kim did not too long ago. She is a really good artist, at least when copying. She did an oil painting from a photo that looked *very* nice.

Dinner was quite tasty, as usual. There was some maternal angst because the turkey was taking "too long"; she thought the timer should have popped up an hour or so before it did. We checked with a meat thermometer and the timer was right; it just takes a while to cook a large bird.

D&D Tuesday night was fun. We didn't make much "plot progress", but we made "character progress" and it was fun to play through some of the interactions. I think I'm getting a better feel for how to play my character.

I'm headed out tomorrow morning for the con. On the Mark only has one performance this year (not our usual two), and it's Friday night. So we'll be able to relax the rest of the weekend. Clam Chowder will have its usual fabulous Saturday-night performance, I presume. Yaakov will be there this year (he wasn't last year), and I'm looking forward to chatting with him. He said we'd talk about the synagogue board thing; he's a past shul president, so he's familiar with the inner workings of at least one type of synagogue. (I had sent him mail and he suggested talking in person.) Maybe he can advise me.

The machine on which I'm typing this has a Sun logo on it and kind of looks and behaves like a Mac. (I haven't used a Mac in several years. There's no uber-menu with the apple icon at the top of the screen, but maybe that can be disabled. They really only want people to use Netscape here at the con, after all.) I wonder what the heck this box is.

The Harry Potter book won the Hugo for best novel last night. I am disappointed. I haven't actually read any of the nominees, so I can't say what the best novel was this year, but I am highly skeptical that Harry Potter was it.

The winner for drammatic presentation was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and they showed it after the awards. I didn't see it in the theatre because I wasn't willing to spend 8 bucks to find out whether I would be able to read the subtitles (size, contrast, and speed of deployment being highly variable in these things), so I went to the free showing at the con. I missed the first couple minutes, but I don't think I missed anything essential. It was a decent movie, but I'm not really sure what all the fuss was about. (I'm also not really convinced that it's SF or fantasy. If you replaced the swords with guns would the movie still be elliglbe, or would it be a western?)

I will admit to some puzzlement at the ending. I suppose that was intentional. If both of them had taken the action taken by the woman, I would know the result; as only she took that action, I don't know if he got the desired results. (I'm being vague to avoid spoilers here, but won't be vague in any followup comments.)

This has been a pretty good con for programming -- better than I remember Bucky (Worldcon 3 years ago) being. I've only been to these two worldcons, so I can't generalize.

We shared the convention space with a group called "For His Glory" this weekend. (They seem to have disappeared Sunday afternoon.) They are obviously a Christian group, though I don't know what specific denomination. (They were most prominent Sunday morning, when several hundred were gathered -- all wearing white robes -- and singing and drumming. Kind of neat to listen to.) They were very polite and easy to share space with; no proselytizing, no public evangelizing, no in-your-face tactics, no pamphlets. But friendly to talk to in the elevators and the like. I hope that the anti-Christian (and anti-religion-in-any-form) elements of fandom were paying attention; for a community that gets branded (often unfairly) as dangerous weirdos, you'd think fans would be a little more open-minded about other groups.

I was on two panels yesterday. The SCA/fandom one was poor; the other person did show up (late), but didn't go to the green room beforehand. So we had no opportunity to figure out what we were going to do. It turned into heavy audience participation, which is good, but the audience contained one annoying person who would not shut up or stay on topic, and we had to stomp on him a few times. That was kind of frustrating. (Also frustrating: I spottee some friends there, Justin and Caitlin from Carolingia, but I had to run off to my other panel so I didn't get to talk with them. And I haven't seen them since.)

The other panel, on performing with other people, went pretty well. It was a fun group of people to be with, and it looked like the audience was enjoying it. It would have been nice if we'd been able to continue the conversation informally, but there was a concert immediately after (that one of the panelists was in), so we all went to that instead.

Three Weird Sisters is a good band, by the way. I don't think I had heard them before. There are three of them (duh); all sing, and the instruments are wire-strung harp, guitar, bodhran, and string bass. I picked up their CD, which I gather they just released.

Apropos of nothing, I have noticed a much higher density of wheelchairs at this con than in the general public. I wonder whether this says something about who's attacted to fandom, or about Philly, or about Worldcon, or what. (It could be the last: Worldcons tend to be kind of spread out, so people who might normally not use a chair might need to here.)

I talked with Rabbi Berkun (at Tree of Life) this morning. He's very happy with the job I did last Friday and wants me to do this again. (That had been my impression, but it's nice to have confirmation.) I'm next doing this at the end of September.

Dani and I are headed off to Worldcon. I don't know what there'll be in the way of net access; on the one hand, it's a con full of geeks, but on the other hand, more and more people have laptops and the like, and there are data ports in the hotel rooms. So the days of public clusters at large conventions may be past; I'm not sure.

Well, whatever. I'm not all that worried about it. After all, there are (gasp) more important things to do at a con than surf the net. :-)