Category: Miscellaneous
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Counting Down
Once again, it's time to link to the greatest Christmas Web site ever. I refer, of course, to the NORAD Santa Tracker. As I write this, their countdown stands at 6 hours and 41 minutes. The tracking begins at 6:00 a.m. GMT, which is when the sun is setting in New Zealand and the Pacific,…
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PhilCon 2017, Featuring MEEE!
This weekend sees the return of Philadelphia's legendary science fiction convention, PhilCon! And once again I'll be there. If you're anywhere in the mid-Atlantic region, come down to Cherry Hill, New Jersey and join the fun! My schedule for the con: Saturday, November 11, 12:00 noon, Executive Suite 623: Readings. I'll be reading at noon,…
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An Ancient Dessert
In the course of a recent bookstore raid I got a copy of Arcana Mundi by Georg Luck. The bulk of it is a compilation of writings by classical authors on occult topics. While reading it I stumbled across a passage translated from Homer, describing how the enchantress Circe turned Odysseus's men into swine. To…
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Commercial Holidays
One feature of American life during my half-century in it has been the annual complaints about commercialization of holidays. The primary subject is Christmas, of course. Christmas gift buying is such a key part of our economy that devout believers have given up trying to keep the focus of the holiday on its religious or…
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An Age of Wonders?
I grew up in the post-Apollo era of space exploration. Skylab launched when I was in elementary school, and the Shuttle made its debut when I was a freshman in high school. What this all means, among other things, is that I have spent most of my life hearing ambitious plans for space exploration which…
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Convention Report: Albacon 2017
(". . . Featuring ME!") I drove west through sleet, rain, and fog — but no snow, which was a huge relief as I was in a car without snow tires — to Albany, which looks as if someone decided to drop the 1960s capital city of a large post-colonial nation into the middle of…
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Albacon 2017, Featuring ME!
On Friday and Saturday, March 31-April 1 I'll be a guest at Albacon 2017, the long-running convention in New York's capital city. There's a really impressive lineup of people attending: Charles E. Gannon, Stephen Hickman, Lawrence M. Schoen, Ken Altabef, Ken Burnside, Debra Doyle, Jim MacDonald, Chuck Rothman, Ryk E. Spoor, Ian Randall Strock, and…
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Where’s My Flying Journalist?
This is slightly more serious-and-thoughtful than my usual posts, but it's something that has been bothering me more and more of late. It has become a rather tired joke, since 2000 came and went, to ask "Where's my flying car?" Or, more generally, to wonder why this or that gee-whiz prediction about Life In The…
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Future Creep
I recently spent an informative day sitting around a big table discussing medical robotics with a bunch of people who knew a lot more about medical robotics than I did. Since we were talking about modern cutting-edge technology or next-ten-years developments, the technical experts were all very clear that the "robots" in question will be…
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Some Bad News
It wasn't just 2016. It's not a "bad patch" we're going through. Your beloved childhood media icons are going to keep dying. FOREVER. Here's why. It's about television. Movies have been around for a century. Movie stars have been dying almost as long. But I submit that movie actors, even the biggest and most enduring…
The Cambias Digression 