Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

There was one Stargate (SG-1 and Atlantis) panel at Noreascon, and it was one of the most entertaining events I attended. Because most of the attendees I know are Real Writers, the comments on media fan writing have been snide at best, so it was great to see panelists get up in front of a huge room of people and admit to writing fanfic and lusting after Michael Shanks.

The most interesting comments were about the future of Atlantis—that the characters are blander than the SG-1 cast and the situation inadequately dramatic. More than one comparison to Voyager was made, and outside of VOY fandom such comparisons are not positive.

Unfortunately I had to leave right after the panel, so I didn’t get to meet my fellow SG fans. I suppose there’s always the Internet.

Now that was a crowd. The Hugo Awards were given out at Noreascon tonight, with only a few glaring technical difficulties. Though I’m not particularly thrilled by Neil Gaiman as a writer, he made a terrific Master of Ceremonies. He’s quite cute, and the accent doesn’t hurt, either.

I wouldn’t say that the best stories won, but at least the worst stories didn’t win.

WorldCon is big. Very, very big. And yet it’s like Boskone ate the little cake that said “Eat me” and grew to fill the Hynes. (The AC at Hynes was nasty; I think I caught something.) The schedule is similar to Boskone’s, but with more of everything.

Everything doesn’t seem to include TV fandom, unfortunately. If only I could find a panel of Stargate fans, I’d be in fan heaven. Instead I’ve been going to writer-oriented events—writing tips and general info (e.g., elves in mythology, cool science, etc.). I even ran into a fellow non-fen.

I went to a couple of readings: Connie Willis, who filled a small room, and Walter Jon Williams, who had just a handful of people in the same room. In a perfect world, WJW would be as popular as Connie Willis. I’d love to write like he can, and yet, it would be depressing to write like he does yet have so few people show up to my WorldCon reading.

It’s moving time again in Boston. Every spring and fall the dumpsters fill up with discarded furniture and the other detritus of migrant student life. Permanent residents pick through the leavings. Neon tickets for overflowing dumpsters collect on the doors of apartment buildings, though how they get back to the absentee landlords is beyond me.

This year, however, there’s a new participant in the dumpster-picking ritual: bedbugs. Allston is the hotbed of bedbug activity, but I spotted the new bedbug warning label [bottom of the page] on a lovely blue loveseat as far east as Back Bay. Somehow I doubt the Allston bedbugs are that close to Beacon Hill.

Gnomi provides a guide to Boston for the newbies, but she leaves out both the bedbug risk and another vital piece of information. As explained previously in this very blog, the wooden ties with long steel rods laid across them are train tracks. Trains run on them. If you are on the tracks when the train comes, you get squished. Surly T employees will have to scrape you off the rails, and that only makes them surlier.

I mention this because a New Zealander electrocuted himself at Haymarket station this weekend. The NZ news and the young man’s mother blame inexperience with the third rail of Boston transit. I fully admit that the DANGER THIRD RAIL signs are small and poorly-lit, and that they date back to a time when Bostonians were expected to read, understand, and obey simple English imperative sentences. Yet the unfortunate Kiwi does seem to have had a rudimentary knowledge of the English language—certainly enough to handle “no trespassing” and “danger,” if not up to the subtlety of “third rail.”

In any event, the argument from ignorance is bosh. Matthew Gallagher died because he was walking on the train tracks. The third rail was merely a complication—a bonus, if you will. The MBTA cannot save people from their own stupidity. Bad Transit should be recommending a Darwin Award for Gallagher, not a lawyer.

Question of the day: Why does the MBTA have schedules? (by way of Boston Common)

Many thanks to Eric Talbot for reminding me of the “dramatic derailment” of yet another Breda train this Sunday. I have been remiss in not blogging about it, considering that I saw the wreckage with my own eyes.

Veronica and I were at the MFA Sunday morning for the Art Deco Exhibit. Sometime after noon we made our way to the MFA stop on the E line to head back downtown. No train came for a while, but on the E line you think nothing of that during rush hour, never mind on a quiet Sunday in August. But then a woman walked down the platform telling people there had been a crash.

On the other branches of the Green Line, if the T breaks down or goes out of service for repairs, then the MBTA puts up signs and runs replacement buses. Free replacement buses. Not so on the E line. We wandered over to a nearby bus stop and waited for the 39 to show. The first bus was full—not surprising, since it was carrying all the displaced subway passengers. The driver let on a few folks, then shut the door in our faces.

The next 39 to come along had some space on it. We had to pay, and we spent most of the ride speculating about the route of the 39, where it might leave us, and what had happened to that corpse of a Breda car we’d passed at the Northeastern stop. It looked to me like the far side of the car had been shorn off—I had bought the “accident” story—but it turns out that it just derailed. All over the rails.

Take a look at that bottom picture [BadTransit.com, same link as “the wreckage” above]. I’m surprised there was only one hospitalization. Imagine if we’d been standing on that platform at the time. There were little tourist kids at the MFA stop with us (not to mention my mother and a friend riding the T for the first time).

The stop pictured (Northeastern) is a really nice one. Most trolley stops are only a few feet wide, with (if you’re lucky) a low concrete barrier between you and a busy street (Comm. Ave, Beacon St., Huntington Ave.). Picture with me a Breda train derailing and scraping 25 people (or worse, students) off the platform into oncoming traffic at rush hour. It would be the end of the entire trolley system, and everyone would be taking the 39 or the 57 downtown from then on.

And none of it would have happened if we’d just bought the 100 new trains from Kinki Sharyo.

Don’t forget that this Saturday, August 14th, is going to be a tax holiday here in Taxachusetts. You can spend up to $2500 (under certain restrictions, such as not being a business).

This isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. Food (outside of restaurants) and clothing (priced under $175) aren’t taxable in Massachusetts. Since back-to-school shopping is mainly a clothing thing, the mobs at the mall this Saturday won’t be saving much. On the bright side, the Apple Stores in Cambridge and Chestnut Hill and at the Northshore Mall will be open 24 hours for the holiday.

Saturday is a good day to buy a Mac. Just don’t try to write it off as a business expense afterwards.

The party’s over, and it turns out no one showed. A blizzard of Democrats blocked the roads and derailed the T; all the actual residents of Massachusetts paid attention to the weather scare and stayed home. There weren’t enough Democrats to make up for the loss of regular business downtown—the restaurants were empty. This is a second-hand report based on the Metro (all the bias of the Globe in a fraction of the space!), because I didn’t venture any nearer downtown during the DNC than Coolidge Corner. Why risk a strip-search by riding the T?

In other local news, there will be a Lord of the Rings exhibit at the Museum of Science from Sunday through October 24th.

The MCFI (Mass. Con. Fandom, Inc.) put up a list of reasons of why Noreascon 4 is not like the DNC. Noreascon is the upcoming Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention), which is being held this September in Boston.

Now that sort of endless list (70 items and counting) generally isn’t all that funny, but some Patrick Nielsen Hayden and company seem to think it’s also Not Funny. I’m not a big sci-fi fandom fan (you can tell because I call it sci-fi for clarity, rather than the fandom term sf—and I admit to being a Trekkie), but I am a Bostonian. I can attest to the fact that the list is not about Democrats, or, Ghod forbid, “expressing science fiction fandom’s traditional contempt for normal democratic politics.” It’s about the DNC logistical hell that we locals are going through at this very moment, because our city is designed around insecure cowpaths from 375 years ago.

If Patrick Nielsen Hayden says fans are generally contemptuous of democracy I’ll take his word for it, but sometimes a joke is just a joke. I don’t know a single soul on this side of I-495 who can pass up the opportunity to laugh at the latest shenanigans downtown. That’s what you bought when you voted to hold your Worldcon in Boston; please keep it in mind for next time.

If you don’t like New Englanders, there are 44 other states available.

It’s like a horror movie descending on the city: The Democrats Are Coming! I’m happily out of town at the moment, but my lovely sister Veronica will be fetching me from the woods just in time for the DNC. I’m not as worried as I thought I’d be about the city getting blown up by terrorists, because the cure is sounding worse than the disease: shutting down the highway, half the commuter rail network, and part of a subway line, needing ID to take the T and not being allowed to carry a backpack downtown, and worst of all, smiling T employees. Now that’s horror.