The Mind Control Lasers Lied to Me

Theoretically, We Now Have Dates

Lawrence — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:07:00 +0000

I fiddled the settings so that comments should now have dates, as well as times. And the colors are no longer particulasrly weird.

So now you have no excuse for not posting! Say hello, ask a question, make a suggestion...

Yet More Guestblook

Lawrence — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 21:20:00 +0000

I wonder whether the color scheme is deterring comments? Let's change it and see...

More Guestblook

Lawrence — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 21:50:00 +0000

Hi! This is where you can stop in, say hello, comment on my work, whatever. Don't feel you need to have anything important to say.

Announcing Helix

Lawrence — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 06:02:00 +0000

I am pleased to report the advent of a new online SF magazine, Helix. I'm managing editor; William Sanders is senior editor. Our first issue has just gone live, and contains first-rate stories by Janis Ian, William Sanders, Richard Bowes, Adam-Troy Castro, Beth Bernobich, Robert M. Brown, and Bud Webster.

More About the Guestblook

Lawrence — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 06:06:00 +0000

Huh. SFF Net just fixed the configurator on the old Guestbook, so it's green again, but I'm still planning to abandon it and settle here unless some amazing anti-spam measures are installed.

In the process of fiddling with the poor old thing I happened to check on the four pages of Archives, and discovered that they've gotten far more hits than I'd have expected, ranging from more than 13,000 for the first one down to 3,300 for the fourth one, which has been up for fifteen months. (I haven't posted a fifth yet.) That's far more than I'd have expected. In fact, I didn't expect anyone to ever bother looking at those things. You people continue to surprise me -- unless it was all spambots hunting targets...

Anyway, we're here now. I'm figuring any time a particular "comments" page gets unwieldy, rather than trimming it the way I did on the old Guestbook I'll just start a new one and shift the links on the Misenchanted Page.

So -- even though any posts here are officially "comments," don't feel you need to have anything to say beyond "hello." Just drop by, check in, say whatever you like.

Welcome!

The Misenchanted Guestblook

Lawrence — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 18:22:00 +0000

The spammers have won a skirmish -- I have abandoned my old Guestbook.

I'm rather hoping, though, that I can replace it with a blog comment page.

Why I Haven't Been Posting

Lawrence — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 19:22:00 +0000

In case anyone's wondered...

I refuse to post to any blog unless people comment on what I've posted. I have no interest in diaries or lecturing, only in starting discussions.

The response here and on "Luncheon Ex Machina" has been a bitter disappointment to me, and I have therefore abandoned them both. You want me to talk to you, you've gotta talk to me, and it's gotta be substantive.

Everything Old is New Again

Lawrence — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 17:59:00 +0000

Julie and I attended a party last night, in honor of Harvey Mudd College's fiftieth anniversary. (There's a little more about it at "Luncheon ex Machina".) Had a very pleasant time -- and I realized that one reason I liked it so much was that I got to tell a bunch of my standard stories to a new audience. Julie even encouraged me in a couple of instances!

It helped that our hostess was a linguist by profession; that meant I could trot out lots of old tales about dealing with foreign languages: the Cancun cab driver, dealing with various Italian dialects, the Danish "Star Wars" story (which isn't really mine, it happened to a friend, but I tell it anyway), our encounter with various "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?" editions, and so on. I even dragged in my father's Grand Tour.

Someone mentioned the Manhattan Project, so I brought out the HTG copper story and the thing about the War Department owing my mother a day's pay.

I even got to tell about why my grandparents got married in Halifax. That's a favorite.

I've told most of these stories a dozen times, but it's still fun to present them to a new audience. I wonder, really, why it's so much fun telling the same old stories over again. I never get bored with them.

My kids sure did, though.

Girl Cooties

Lawrence — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 23:04:00 +0000

I have a full beard. It's going grey. It's going grey in a pattern that looks, well... stupid. It's grey on the sides, with a still-brown stripe partway down the middle, as if I've been drooling tobacco juice.

So Julie suggested I might color it, not so much to hide my age as to make it look less like I spilled gravy on it. By coincidence, I got a coupon for Just For Men hair color in the mail the other day, so today I went to the local pharmacy and looked in the hair-color aisle.

No Just For Men; no Grecian Formula; nothing aimed at the male consumer. Hundreds upon hundreds of brightly-colored boxes showing women with hair in assorted colors, including many never seen in nature; nothing for men.

After a moment's thought, inspiration strikes -- I ask a clerk where the shaving supplies are. She directs me two aisles over, and sure enough, amid the Mach3 Turbo razors and other machismo-drenched products, I find a decent selection of Just For Men.

The fact that it's hair color is less important than the fact that it's for manly men, who wouldn't ever set foot in the girly-girly, cooties-infested hair color aisle.

Sigh. Humans are so silly.

Where is everybody?

Lawrence — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 20:24:00 +0000

Okay, not exactly garnering huge amounts of commentary here, are we?

The Rest of the Story

Lawrence — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 22:11:00 +0000

If you got here from the link on my webpage promising some of my musings, you may be wondering, "Where the heck are they? Why isn't there anything here but beer reviews?"

The answer is that I'm in the process of re-arranging things. My old (very old) weblog, "Strange Days," didn't allow comments -- yes, such a thing was possible once upon a time -- and wound up more or less abandoned as a result. It was boring posting stuff there and getting no response.

So I've started this new one, which does allow comments, to see whether that works better -- and at the urging of some denizens of my SFF Net newsgroup (see "Discussions"), I've also started a third blog, "Luncheon ex Machina,", on LiveJournal.

The theory is that this one will run to mini-essays, while "Luncheon ex Machina" will be geared toward casual chat -- though of course it may not work out that way. I expect some duplication between them.

So the number of places for me to waste my time online, instead of writing, has multipled -- there's "The Mind Control Lasers Lied to Me" here, and "Luncheon ex Machina" over there, and the old reliable newsgroup discussion, and of course my Guestbook.

Feel free to post to any of them!

Beer Log, March 2005

Lawrence — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 05:58:00 +0000

New beers tried this month:

Dead Guy Ale, from Rogue Breweries -- see here.

Dead Guy Ale is a bock, but if I hadn't looked it up I wouldn't know that; it just tastes like a good hoppy ale, nothing tremendously special, but nice. Bought a bottle on a whim in Palm Springs, mostly because I liked the label; the name comes from it having been invented as a seasonal beer specifically for the Day of the Dead.

Hellas Pils, from Hellenic Breweries of Atalanti, SA.

Got this with dinner at a Greek restaurant the other night; light, clean taste, more like a good Mexican beer than anything else European* I've ever tried. Or maybe a bit reminiscent of Kirin, the Japanese beer. In any case, clearly intended for a warm climate. Went well with chicken shish kebab. Online reviews indicate it doesn't age well at all, though, so do check the "sell by" date on the label.

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*I've tried Italian and Spanish beer; this isn't like them at all.