bunsen_h

"If you hear a fire alarm..."

Clear enough.

"If you discover fire..."

Perhaps you should stop banging the rocks together?

(I'm safely home again from FilKONtario.  I had a good time; I am very tired.)
 

Home again.  I'm only beginning to catch up on sleep; the idiots doing construction near my house made a horrible crashy thump a bit before 7:30 this morning that my earplugs weren't enough to block.

It was a fun convention.

My concert went okay.  I had less voice control than I should have; I really need to do more singing to keep in shape.  The starting notes that I'd carefully worked out beforehand to make sure that everything was in a good range... didn't work at all.

My children's programming adventure, helping kids to make sock puppets, was mostly a waste of my time.  We almost always had more adults than children there, and I generally felt that I wasn't getting into things -- I didn't have any strong inclination to interact with these completely unknown-to-me kids.  My greatest contribution came when one child burned himself with a glue gun ("I know how to use a glue gun.  I'm from London, we're all about glue guns there.") and after I got tired of him running around and yelling about it, I decided that I was going to make an ice pack for him and repeatedly nagged the "panel moderator" until she okayed it.

I was too tired for my Saturday-evening open filk, and abdicated from my "moderator" position a bit after midnight.

Only half of the panelists showed up for the Sunday-morning "Realism in SF" panel.  We all agreed that though realism in SF was important, it was hard to define, and that the suggestion in the program-guide description (that SF had a "duty" to do realistic portrayals of things like global warming) was silly.  Once we got that out of the way, we had a good discussion.

The Monday-noon workshop on filk song writing went well enough despite everyone seeming to be running out of steam.

A few pictures:

Googly-eyed brownies for the Making Lumiere party

cadhla  giving safe shelter to a couple of baby plush giant squid

My Winslow-cultist plush giant squid

Someone else's picture of me with the squid and its hat

Last Friday afternoon, flying Ottawa to Detroit on my way to OVFF.  There's a guy two rows behind me who unfastens his seat belt while the plane is still ascending.  The flight attendant tells him to do it up again, and he refuses.  Gives her the finger.  When the plane is starting its descent, she tells him again to fasten it, and he tells her that he doesn't know how, and tells her to do it up for him.  She tells him, "I can't do that."  While the plane is taxiing to the gate, the pilot again tells everyone to keep their seat belts fastened.  The attendant checks, and again tells the guy to do his up; he refuses.

Well, it's one way of getting off the plane before any of the other passengers.  In the company of a large Detroit police officer, who is professionally a jerk.  "YOU GOT PROBLEMS FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS, MR. [XXXX]?"

It is, of course, a federal offense to refuse to follow instructions of flight crew.  And since the guy was kind of swarthy and middle-eastern-looking, I wouldn't be surprised if he were to start encountering other complications in his life.  Not that his appearance or heritage should make a difference there (just being the asshole that he is would be sufficient), but these days, in the U.S., they do make a difference.

Monday afternoon, flying Columbus to Detroit on the way back to Ottawa.  The flight is without incident but passengers start getting up and grabbing luggage while the plane is still moving at speed on the ground.  The pilot stops the plane and tells everyone to sit back down and do up their seat belts, that the plane will not proceed until they've done so.  Most sit back down; one heads for the washroom.  And the plane just sits there, passengers getting annoyed, until the guy comes back from the washroom and sits back in his seat.

No charges there, as far as I know.  Maybe the guy just suddenly really REALLY needed to go, and couldn't wait a couple of minutes.  But... sheesh.

Is there something about passengers going to Detroit?

No, not that one.  The one for people who suspect that a joke might be in poor taste, and might be taken badly, and might be going too far, but go ahead with it regardless.

Oh well, it's been fun.  And I can bring the thing along to this month's OSFS meeting about "Bizarre sexuality in SF".  Because there are aliens living among us.  And some of them are doctors, and some of them are computer geeks.

My latest plush penguin project: Txulhu.

I've got another penguin in mind, but it will require a difficult-to-find fabric: fuzzy or plushy bright green, patterned with black spots (approximately loonie-sized) which look like animal skin patterns rather than polka-dots.  This project will probably be on the back burner for a while.

I donated one of my hacked "Easy" buttons to the Interfilk auction at FilKONtario this weekend past.  It sold for $35 -- a reasonable amount, I think.  I'd still like to find an MP3 player which: is small enough to fit inside the standard "Easy" button; can be activated with a single button press (i.e. momentary electrical contact); has enough power to output through a small speaker; can store multiple sound files and play a single random one of them when activated.  The first three criteria are absolute requirements; the last is highly desirable.