The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: travel

  • Online Obscenity

    In this online review, Joe Brown of Wired waxes eloquent about the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport, a new ultra-high-end sports convertible.  The Grand Sport costs a cool 2.1 M$ and boosts appropriately over-the-top stats like a top speed of 217 mph and 1001 horsepower from a 16-cylinder engine.  It will come as no suprise to anyone who knows me, but I find this car — all cars, really — singularly unmoving.  I’ve never been an American in love with the road.

    Joe Brown is, or at least, he’s in lust with it.  His prose is rapturous while describing this overpriced, inefficient, and essentially unneeded major appliance:  He revels in the “isolationist joy, an out-of-body awareness that you’re moving faster than the world can react” and delights in watching “entire generations of insects die on your prow”.  A major draw seems to be that the car can outrun “not only the 5-0’s cruisers, but their helicopters, too”.  And it’d better, because driving that fast is liable to make your car an overpriced kinetic-kill weapon — the world’s largest and silliest bullet.

    But that’s OK, because no real person driving real roads would ever be able to get the car up to that speed, much less maintain it for anything but an infinitesimal time.  I’m always astounded by how crucial top speed seems to be to the ego of a car enthusiast, who must drool (at a distance) at the flights of fancy embodied in the speedometer.  Though the car will never, in any practical usage, reach this speed, the auto junkie needs to know that, by God, it could, if only no one else ever drove on the roads.  Of course, a car like this is by design the opposite of practical.  The admittedly impressive engineering involved (getting a convertible that can function at 200 mph is, I concede, quite a feat) is intended only to impress, not to achieve the elegant solution of a practical problem.  In that sense, it’s the exact opposite of engineering.  Indeed, this comes off as almost a streamlined Rube Goldberg machine:  What is the silliest way to move an individual between point A and point B?  The Grand Sport.  It’s not art in engineering; it’s just peacock feathers.

    Towards the end of the review, Mr. Brown admits “It is not perfect — no car will ever be.”  He laments that “We’re at the end of the petroleum era, the end of a golden age of supercars where speed can be sought regardless of consequence.”  Let’s certainly hope so.  Let’s hope we soon wake up from this delusional teenage fantasy of consequence-free open road indulgence.

  • Lunacon 2009 (4): Sunday

    After the hectic pace on Saturday, the con wound down somewhat before concluding on Sunday. I attended a panel on Galileo, another one on world building, and one on World Domination. Then I attended the dead dog filk and went home. Along the way I finally met up with someone I’d been on the lookout for all con.
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  • Lunacon 2009 (3): Saturday

    Today was the busiest of the convention. I gave blood; saw Mercedes Lackey and others hold forth on building fantasy worlds; participated in a discussion on financial crises in sci fi; participated (sort of) in the Masquerade after all; caught about half of a surprisingly good 1940 adventure film; and caught all of a not-at-all surprisingly bad 1979 space adventure film.
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  • Lunacon 2009 (1): Friday

    Well, Lunacon is officially underway. So far I’ve tried out a new card game (Fluxx) and attended one session (“Those Terrible Middle Ages”). I’ve also discovered that I can walk out my room (418), down two corridors, around a bend, and directly onto the 7th floor. It’s no accident they call the Hilton Rye Town “the hotel that Escher built”.
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  • My walking routes

    Part of my new regimen is exercising, which for me is going to mostly (entirely?) be walking.  Using a cool google maps feature/app called gmap-pedometer, I’ve computed the walking distance for various routes around my home.  All of these are, for the moment, hypothetical, until it gets warmer out.  And I will add others as they occur to me.

  • Contata (2)

    So, on to Contata proper. (See this earlier article for context.) A filk con is different from a regular con (assuming that my limited experience at Lunacon allows me to generalize about a “regular” con) in that the filk con is explicitly organized around the music. In a lot of ways, it was really just a rolling three-day concert. Unlike Lunacon, there were few panels or discussions per se (though I must admit I simply missed a few, on things such as tone-shaping or guitar-making). Instead, there were scheduled performances and “open filking” — which is basically an otherwise-unoccupied room wherein anyone could drop by and begin singing. And of course, the traditional midnight chocolate tasting.

    This put me in an odd position. As anyone who’s suffered through the Hun Talent Shows can tell you, I am every bit not a singer as I am not a songwriter. The only thing musical that I can play is an iPod. Thus I didn’t really have much to offer. (Only later did I come across Ian, who tells stories rather than sings. I thought, maybe I can do that, with enough prep work.) Indeed, the primary talent I brought to these sessions is my ability to clap loudly, honed at many a high school play. I could also join on the chorus — filk songs tend to have very crowd-friendly choruses — if there were enough other people to render my mangling anonymous.

    More below the fold.
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  • Contata (1)

    I spent this weekend at the hotel Hilton Parsippany, attending a sci fi con called “Contata 5“. In a somewhat strange co-branding fashion this was also NEFilk 18 — apparently, NEFilk is sort of an umbrella designation. Filk is an odd branch of music deriving from (originally, literally via typo) folk music — it’s folk with a science fiction / fantasy bend. Filking is one of those sundry ways in which being a science fiction fan is not the same as being, say, a New York Mets fan or an opera aficionado. It’s the shared culture and oral history that keeps the community close-knit and vibrant despite being spread over every known continent.

    Although I’d heard of the phenomenon, my first exposure to filk was at Lunacon this past March. Filking was a distinct thread woven through Lunacon — a chain of panels and sessions scattered among the calendar of events, at which more or less the same people showed up. I attended one late-night filking session to see what the buzz was about. To be honest, it was a little intimidating. This truly is an organized oral culture with multiple decades of backstory. Everyone knew the words and the anecdotes and the in-jokes — everyone but me, that is. My temptation was to high-tail it out of the room and write it off as a failed exercise.

    The story doesn’t end there though — more below the fold.
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  • Lunacon 51 (2)

    Lunacon 51 (2)
    Some thoughts on my second con (should that be “sec-con”?), jotted down at midnight, though they’ll be posted much later.

    The first panel I intended to attend was “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”, a documentary on the failed vision of futurists from the 1930s through 1960s. Due to the weird layout and unpredictable spacetime anomalies that have caused the Lunarians to christen this hotel the “Escher Hilton”, I arrived at the room far in advance of the panel. Indeed, I arrived at the start of “Not 2B Toyed With”, a 12-minute movie that the moderator assured us was absolutely hilarious. She had to assure us, because she couldn’t show us, because in the rush to pack for the con, she’d left the DVD at home. 🙁 But she was appropriately contrite and, at the suggest of a snarky audience member (me), proceeded to illustrate by sock puppets, stopping only when, well, she ran out of socks and hands to put them on.

    As it turned out, “Not 2B Toyed With” – even though it never actually showed – was a better presentation than “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”. The latter, it developed, was a 1999 documentary financed by Disney and shown on Showtime exactly once. The moderators liked to call it “the documentary Disney won’t let you see” (since the studio hasn’t released it at all) but there isn’t anything spectacular about it. Instead it was a bunch of self-involved baby boomers narcissisizing about their impressions of the vision of futurists. It had a lot of cuts to semi-celebrities pontificating, like you find in those “I Love the 80s” shows on VH-1. It was a true waste of my 90 minutes.

    I spent some time in the game room, watching some people play “Ninja Burger”, a Munchin-esque game from Steve Jackson Games. It looked pretty fun, actually, and funny and clever as you’d expect from SJG. I also played a round of BANG!, a spaghetti Western shoot-em-up card game. It’s one of those games with hidden objectives – no one knows who the outlaws or deputies are – that had a complicated but manageable cardplay system. I was “The Apache Kid” and the renegade, and I did well for two rounds, until I was accidentally blown up by the very same dynamite I’d put into play. *Sigh* It’s from Mayfair Games, and I think I’ll try to find it online when I get home.

    I dropped back to my room to get some dinner (the restaurant was closed by now – a costly mistake on my part) and then went to “Sex Done Right”, a panel on writing about, well, sex. And though it’s easy enough to dive for the gutter, it was actually a semi-serious writers’ craft panel. It had a certain self-involvement among the panel members, though, that quickly killed my interest in their thoughts on writing. I checked out as soon as one said, in all seriousness, “But then the werecat morphed and I had to think, will he rip through her? She couldn’t morph, of course, since she was a vampire….” That told me I’d wandered into a particular corner of fanspace, one that holds no attraction for me (and, to be snobbish, one that seems to draw poor talent).

    I was also reintroduced to that universal con character, Annoying Guy One Seat Over. There was a nebbish first-time con goer sitting next to me who was too enthusiastic, too eager, and too clueless to be tolerated. Many panels seem to develop such a guy – who has to comment on everything, who is clueless about his cluelessness, and who overrates his own intelligence/humor/relevance. The major ecological function of Annoying Guy One Seat Over is to spread humility – to remind us that we too can be annoying, overbearing, etc. Many a time in a panel I sit back and ask myself, “Is that really a valid point? Or am I devolving into Annoying Guy One Seat Over?” It’s a useful check.

  • Lunacon 51 (1)

    Well, here I sit in the Hilton Rye Town waiting for Lunacon to get started. If you are paying more attention to this blog than you should be, you’ll recall that I attended Lunacon 50 last year as well. This year I managed to reserve early, so I am staying at the correct hotel and don’t need to shuttle back and forth. I also arranged to come up on Thursday (the night before the con opened) so that I wouldn’t feel rushed. Originally, this was intended to be my entire Spring Break trip (before committing to go to Ocala to see my mom).

    It took longer to get here from NJ than I had expected — nearly four hours door-to-door. Some of that was just waiting for trains, of course; and some of it was being whisked around Rye, NY by a cab driver who, it turns out, didn’t actually know where the Hilton Rye Town is. 🙁 At least this time there wasn’t a sudden blizzard. 🙂

    It leaves me with the question of what to do until the con starts. Since I dragged this laptop all the way up here, some of the time will hopefully be spent writing (and more than just blog posts).

  • Alternate History: The Speech that Wasn’t

    In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly gave. There are two caveats:

    • I shamelessly cannibalized this for any rhetoric I thought actually worked, so the actual speech and this one overlap somewhat.
    • I abandoned this and never finished editing or, indeed, writing it. So the thing given is unpolished and the quality comparatively low.

    Without further hedging, let me give you the Speech that Wasn’t.
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