Sorry I haven’t posted since October. We’ve been traveling. We’ll be back in the States in November and you should see more of me then.

Many years ago I got tired of dealing with ordinary comic book storage boxes, especially after some minor flooding in the room where I stored a lot of mine. I built myself a great big waterproof box that held a significant portion of my collections, as seen in the picture here, and set it up on some shelving:

(That picture was taken when I was in the middle of emptying it. Notice that it even had a Masonite lid I could set on top — that’s what’s behind it, against the wall, in the picture.)

It was useful. I overflowed it almost immediately, of course, but it definitely helped keep everything in order and manageable.

In 2009 we moved from Gaithersburg to Takoma Park, and I sold off 12,000 of my 14,000 comics, and once again the box could hold most (but not all) of my collection. It was equivalent, I eventually figured out, to about nine standard long boxes.

Then this year, 2018, we started preparing to move again, but this time we’re going across the continent instead of across Montgomery County, and we expect to wind up in a much smaller home. So I had to prune the collection again, and sold off four long boxes, and trashed a few that were seriously damaged.

That actually got us to the point where I could fit all my comic books in the box and even have a little space left (maybe half a slot).

But it also brought up the question of what to do with the box. Taking it with us didn’t seem very practical. Julie didn’t even want to consider keeping it, and I had to admit she had a point.

So I started talking to people I thought might be able to use it. My local comics shop didn’t want it; they already had enough storage. They asked a few customers, but no one was interested. We talked to some neighbors, but got no takers. It was just too big and awkward for most comic collectors.

But I had an inspiration. If I stood it on end, it could be a bookcase!

The only problem was that it would be eight feet tall, and since most people have eight-foot ceilings, or less, that was an issue.

But then I had what I think was a really clever idea.

I cut it in half, and had two four-foot bookcases, with shelves exactly the right height for paperbacks. See?

Of course, they’re kind of deep, but that just means you can shelve books two rows deep and still have a little room in front for knicknacks.

Now that it’s a pair of fairly normal bookcases, it’s much easier to re-home. If we don’t find anyone who wants them, we can just donate them as if they were ordinary furniture.

Problem solved! And my comics are (at least for now) back in standard boxes, ready to be shipped to the west coast.

From a newsgroup post dated February 17, 2011:

I have a beard, as anyone who’s met me or seen my picture probably knows. I’ve had it a long, long time.

I started out with just a mustache — and when I say “started out,” I mean I have literally never shaved my upper lip (though it was once, and only once, shaved for me), so by the time I graduated from high school I had a mustache.

That was 1972.

I got kicked out of Princeton in February, 1974, and that was when I grew a beard — a Van Dyke.

Then when I dropped out in 1977, I stopped shaving entirely and grew a full beard. I eventually started shaving again when my neck got excessively fuzzy, but I still have a full beard, and except for two brief interruptions I’ve had it since 1977.

I used to have long hair. I started growing it out in 1969. It got cut back somewhat a couple of times, but basically stayed long until 1984, when I cut it for my youngest sister’s wedding, and so Kyrith, who was then a baby, would stop grabbing and pulling it.

I kept it short for a few years, and honestly, I don’t remember exactly when I grew it back out, but it was long (below my shoulders) through most of the 1990s and well into the 21st century. In 2008, though — I think it was 2008, might have been a year or two earlier — I saw a picture of the back of my head and realized I had a bald spot, and that, combined with the long hair, had me looking uncomfortably like Riff Raff from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” So that October I cut it short, and it’s been fairly short ever since.

There were other variations along the way, such as color, but we won’t go into that right now — the basics, long hair and full beard, were pretty much as described above.

And here’s the weird thing: People don’t see this.

The first time I encountered this was when I was readmitted to Princeton in the fall of 1975. People who hadn’t seen me since February of ’74 got to see me with my new beard.

Some people didn’t notice. Some saw that there was something different about me, but couldn’t place it exactly. The strangest was the girl who exclaimed, “You cut your hair!”

I pointed out that no, I hadn’t, my hair was still halfway down my back, but I’d grown a beard. She stared and said, “Didn’t you always have a beard?”

I never did convince her that I hadn’t.

Then at my sister’s wedding in 1984, nobody noticed that I had cut my hair, that it was at least eight inches shorter than before. I mean, nobody noticed. No one. When I finally mentioned it to someone, he asked, “Didn’t you cut it back in 1972?”

He’d seen me several times between 1972 and 1984. It was long every time.

I mentioned two interruptions in my beard. One of them was when I sold my beard to Gillette, for research, and there aren’t any odd stories about that, but the other one, well, one morning I just decided to experiment, and shaved half of it off, trimming it back down to the old Van Dyke.

No one noticed. It was like the wedding, except that this time even my own kids didn’t notice anything. So I grew the full beard back, because why bother maintaining the trim if nobody notices?

And I bring this all up now because at Capricon this past weekend, someone I hadn’t seen for a few years saw me and exclaimed, “You grew a beard!”

She had never, ever seen me without a full beard. The actual difference was that I’d cut my hair since she last saw me. Well, that, and I’ve gone mostly gray.

But she saw a difference, and somehow that became I’d grown a beard.

I find this phenomenon baffling.

From a newsgroup post dated April 23, 2009:

Over on rec.arts.sf.written there’s currently a discussion (in a monster thread entitled “Socialism in SF” that’s 90% crap) about the decline of the West as evidenced by the sorry state of the fine arts.

That’s a subject I find interesting, even though I think 90% of everything everyone says on the subject is wrong — not the alleged sorry state of the fine arts, but what it says about the state of our civilization.

I’m trying to give shape here to a bunch of complicated and conflicting ideas on the subject, and I’m not finding the words. Instead, let me ask everyone out there for opinions:

Are the fine arts in a state of decline?

Does it matter that opera and ballet are now largely the province of a tiny faction of old-fashioned elitists, given that we have movies and other new media?

Does it mean anything for the health of civilization as a whole if the arts are in a state of decline?

Does it mean anything for the health of civilization as a whole if people think the arts are in a state of decline?

Feel free to bring up historical examples like Ming pottery and Byzantine literary forms.

==

This did not yield any discussion. I suppose I misjudged my audience.