Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

This is a late-night update from Boskone. Clam Chowder, the filk guests of honor, were more folky than filky. Fortunately, I also like folk music.

I missed David Brin’s reading, but I did get to hear him lecture the attendees about fen going extinct because they aren’t attracting enough young people. “Look around you,” he said, and I looked around and saw a sea of greasy pony-tails, grey beards, thick glasses and ample waistlines. I’ve never felt so attractive in all my life, and I’ve been to my share of academic conferences.

I’m not saying that to be snarky. I’ve never been to a con before, but in any case I don’t believe in doing things for the children. No one made any efforts to attract me to Boskone - I signed up all on my own. I’ve tried to get involved in NESFA in the past and gotten little response and no encouragement. A group that has a clubhouse that isn’t on the T, gatherings at people’s houses that aren’t on the T, and, until this year, even conventions that weren’t on the T, is aimed at an older, suburban crowd and is going to get one. It’s no use trolling high schools for proto-geeks when the problem with fandom is…fandom.

There are plenty of teens in on-line fandom and a huge sci-fi section when I visit the bookstore, so I don’t buy the doom-and-gloom scenario. The genre of science fiction has a permanent audience in the N’s, one that will never get much larger but will also never shrink, because personality type is more nature than nurture. The cult of science fiction may be dying out, but if that concerns the faithful they might want to start by attracting 30-year-olds and work their way down to teens.

That’s just my two cents.

Cool link of the day: Immigrant by Kyohei Abe, a winner in the .Mac HomePage Creativity contest

If you’re bored in Boston this weekend, you might want to consider SF28, a 24-hour sci-fi movie marathon starting Sunday at noon at the Coolidge Corner theatre. If you can drag yourself away from the contradancing at Boskone, the SF28 movie list looks interesting.

Thanks to Rocky for the title. This morning, true to my word, I got on a train that smelled like it was on fire. (I hear the brakes are the trouble.) I didn’t see the conductor or check for rooftop nukes. It was cold outside and the T was warm and crowded - not quite as crowded as the hajj, but well-packed nonetheless.

I still haven’t bought any duct tape or plastic sheeting, or begun hoarding foodstuffs. Maybe next week…

Cool link of the day: c s s / e d g e, cutting-edge CSS layouts that will probably only work in Mozilla-based browsers. Another cool link is favelets, a collection of bookmarks that do cool things.

It’s after midnight and I haven’t even blogged yet. It’s been one of those days. Besides the usual insanity at work, I just missed a D train this morning. D trains are fast, but it takes forever for another one of those things to come along - that’s what I get for taking the alternate route. On the way home, Park Street station was unusually crowded. At first I thought it was some sort of sick fascination with the street magician, but it turned out that there was a disabled train on the tracks at Arlington. Somehow it was blocking traffic in both directions.

So I stood around and waited, and waited, and waited some more. If it were just the waiting, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but next came the smell. I think they towed the disabled train to Park Street; either that or it was in flames down at Arlington and the toxic plastic fumes drifted all the way past Boylston to us. People covered their faces with their scarves, and waited some more.

Of course, that’s the point where I started thinking about terrorist attacks. Maybe that occured to you a couple of paragraphs ago, but I was still annoyed about my bad day at work. But toxic fumes and terrorist alerts don’t scare off a real Bostonian. I paid $57 for that Combo Pass and there was no way I was walking home from Park Street. If a burning train had come through the station with Osama Bin Laden conducting and a North Korean nuke strapped to the roof, I would have taken it, as long as it was going my way.

It took me a total of 2 hours to get home - I think that’s a personal record. As an extra special bonus, my bad day at work was still going on in my inbox when I got home.

Today was nightmare day on the T. The Red Line was running late this morning, and then tonight I was running for the train at an open-air station and it just drove away. It was barely 5 degrees out, with a windchill twenty degrees below that, and the conductor couldn’t wait fifteen seconds for me to reach the door.

So I was faced with the choice of waiting ten minutes for another train, or spending an equal amount of time walking home in the cold. I decided to walk. Fortunately I made it home with all appendages intact, and decided to take a nice warm bath.

It sounded so simple at the time. There was this annoying car alarm going off in the courtyard, but otherwise it was just me and The Hobbit. Then the car alarm went up about a hundred decibels and I realized it wasn’t a car alarm, it was the fire alarm.

So I got out of the tub with my wet hair and put my cold clothes back on and went down to the foyer to shiver with some of the other human residents and a few cats. Word was it was just a burst radiator, so the evacuation was half-hearted at best. Considering the weather, we’d be better off inside a burning building than out in the wind.

So the firemen left without turning off the alarm. They said to call the management company to do it. I went back upstairs and resumed my bath, and eventually the alarm stopped. The heat is even still on, despite the exploding radiator problem. It’s not doing much good against the wind that blows straight through the walls, but you can’t have everything. At least I have my fingers and toes.

As anyone who has ears to hear has heard, Cardinal Law resigned from the archbishopric of Boston. He tried many months ago, but the pope rejected his offer the first time.

Victims’ groups, please don’t lambaste me for this, but the person I feel most sorry for in this undying local scandal is…Pope John Paul II. I imagine what a loop this whole sordid mess threw him for - because the pedophilia story is not, at its bottom, about the Roman Catholic Church.

Consider the Crusades, or better yet, the Inquisition. Those were events the Church fully intended to occur, planned out, went out and did, and blessed people for participating in (provided they were at the right end of the Temporal Arm). The Pope has apologized for all that, hundreds of years after the fact, but for the intevening centuries such things were church policy.

It’s never been church policy to molest little boys. Priests who join (or found) NAMBLA are not the result of aggressively-interpreted Biblical texts or canon law. This scandal is uniquely American and, especially, Bostonian.

On the American side, consider a superficially unrelated phenomenon - the co-education of the all-male colleges. The Citadel aside, this social revolution was completed by the mid-seventies. In fact, the last few bastions of the Y-chromosome fell precisely because all-male schools had begun to attract a certain kind of student. A decade or two later, the all-female colleges felt a similar statistical pinch - the applicant pool dropped sharply, driving schools like Wheaton to co-educate.

What, then, did the all-male priesthood attract after the fifties - a period of American history when the marriage rate was higher than ever before or since? The church has suffered from declining vocations for decades since. As any college-admissions officer knows, a declining applicant pool means a declining quality of applicant.

Add to that the sexual revolution, which gave everyone ideas and, perhaps more notably, led to such openness from victims of abuse. I assume victims are quieter about the whole matter in countries where being a victim attracts less moral support. I’m not saying that’s a good thing - I’m just explaining the Only in America aspect of the scandal.

There are little scandals scattered across America, but the big scandal is Only in Boston. Only in Boston do we have the Boston Globe, and only in Boston did we have an archbishop who was the clerical equivalent of Billy Bulger, with Paul Shanley playing his not-estranged-enough brother Whitey.

Family comes first here, and then the law. At least, it’s been that way for a long time. I hear things are changing, but I’m not sure I’d turn in Veronica if she were on the lam. I certainly wouldn’t do it over some trumped-up Federal charge like racketeering.

New at zendom: R. J. is stunningly rational and pellucid on the topic of plagiarism.

I did my democratic duty and voted tonight in a special election for City Council. Voting is a challenge in a state where everyone is a Democrat, except for the occasional Republican trying his best for a Democrat look-and-feel. (Speaking of look-and-feel, I surfed across this pretty website today at work.) How do you choose between five gubernatorial candidates in a primary when they have exactly the same stands on all the big issues? When it’s a local office, it’s a bit simpler - you vote for a friend of a friend of a friend.

I left out a couple of Boston facts last time: a third of the office space in Boston is vacant now. We have very low rates of property crime and murder, considering. Oh, and Amtrak didn’t even put a bid in on the commuter rail contract, and the MBTA was their biggest customer. All I can say is, don’t let the caboose hit you on the way out.

On to the official topic - Veronica was asking about filks. These were the most notable so far:

• “When I Stop Reading SF” by Nate Bucklin, from Rainbow’s Edge
• “The Actor” by Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, from Retro Rocket Science
• “The Sexy Data Tango” by Voltaire from Banned on Vulcan

I’m behind on the Boston news - Bernard Cardinal Law is in deep doo-doo. I say revoke his citizenship while he’s still in Rome, and solve all manner of problems for the diocese. I think the latest release of church documents has turned even the most forgiving of public opinion against him. You have to live in Massachusetts to appreciate just how exhaustive the coverage of the pedophilia scandal has been. This is not the place to be if you’re a priest.

And the bad news doesn’t end there. The state is raiding training funds to pay for something or other. One-third of the office space in Boston is available for rent at the moment. Unemployment is up 40,000 instead of down 40,000 as predicted. It looks like this will be a real winter, not the farce of the last few years - as the 24 hours straight of snow last week foreboded.

I had the world’s worst T experience today. In the morning 4 teens got on the train, one of them crying like a baby. I was looking around for the papoose-in-a-sack, but it was, indeed, a teenager imitating a baby. At first I thought she might be retarded, until she swore up a storm at an Indian passenger.

Then, on my way home, I got into one of those conversations with the crazy people who ride the T. He said you can make $10-$20 an hour begging at Harvard Ave. Maybe I should switch careers…

There was an FBI raid last week that I forgot to mention on a South Shore software company - fortunately not mine. A piece of advice - don’t take VC funding from Osama bin Laden, no matter how hard-up you are. If you’d like to fund my company, please email me at…

Word count: no comment

Cranberries are local, native, and semi-inedible. They’re an acquired taste—a bit pointless, unless you’ve learned to appreciate them. Most cranberries come from the Ocean Spray cranberry growers cooperative. On this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for cranberries.

Jay Leno was just saying that Thanksgiving is an ideal holiday—you eat, you watch TV, you fall asleep. There’s no controversial content to Turkey Day—no presents, no guilt, no fasting, and, to quote Douglas Adams, nobody had to get nailed to anything.

I’ve been thinking, as the lights come on and the SUV’s drive by with dead evergreens tied to their tops, about how little the trappings of Christmas have to do with Christ. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, has such a low content level that it’s hard to miss it. You eat the appropriate harvest foods and be thankful about it. If you know anything about Pilgrims, you know they didn’t believe in freedom of religion. They tossed people out of the Massachusetts Bay colony just for suggesting that freedom of religion might be a nice thing. So there’s no need to feel either patriotic about our freedoms, or doubtful about our patriotism. Thanksgiving is just about having survived the year to date, and all my readers can feel grateful for that much. It’s a very accessible holiday.

And nobody had to get nailed to anything.

Word count: 27,000

I was going to go watch the Leonids then write some more, but it turns out that the Boston Leonid chart recommends 5 a.m. over 11:30 p.m. I don’t trust myself to get up that early, no matter how impressive they’re supposed to be. And what’s more important - catching up 3,000 words or watching space dust?

Writing sf gives me all sorts of science guilt, but the worst by far is comet and meteor guilt. I had a bad comet experience in my youth where an astronomical event advertised as once-in-a-lifetime was a total let-down. I just can’t get excited about the sky falling anymore. Besides, the city lights here are a killer.

Just one peek, then back to the novel…