I can’t bear listening to myself, so someone else will have to tell me how big a fool I made of myself on the podcast interview.
(You usual suspects don’t even need to bother to listen to it to tell me how big a fool I am—just go ahead and get it out of your system.)
Mooney gets written up in the Las Vegas Sun. Here’s what I get in the same article:
Friday’s panel included a Minnesota biology professor…
Yeah, that’s it.
Someday, I will be famous enough to warrant actually mentioning my name! They’ll misspell it, but still…
We left Las Vegas on a 12:30am flight to Des Moines, IA, had an hour and a half layover, got into Minneapolis sometime around 7:30, made the 3 hour drive from there to Morris, and now I sit here a little shell-shocked and worn out. Give me a little time to bounce back and Pharyngula will be chugging along with fresh material again.
Now…coffee, or nap?
My geekishness has a limit, I’ve discovered. We have a long afternoon and evening to kill in Las Vegas before our plane leaves, and we visited the Hilton, which has a huge Star Trek themed room and exhibit, and Mary even offered to treat me to the Star Trek Experience for Father’s Day.
I’m sorry, but it was too, too geeky for me.
Usually, I can wallow in any SFnal environment just fine; I can hang out in comic book stores with the kids, no problem; I’ll even seek out fringe SF and devour it as my guilty pleasure. But a place with nothing but ST memorabilia, bins of tribbles, a blue guy dressed as an Andorian, televisions everywhere replaying old episodes, and clerks in Star Fleet uniforms? I shudder. No, no…too much. I had to turn down my Father’s Day gift.
Please don’t take away my membership in the community of nerds.
I’ve been off at the big meeting, and it’s been a long and tiring weekend in Las Vegas. It’s been strange, too: we’re surrounded by slot machines and show girls, and our crowd hardly notices them; I took a moment to step outside, and I had to tell my wife, “the sunshine…it hurts…” and we went back in. We were intense, nerdly aliens in a neon world.
It was a good weekend, though. I’ll dump a few of my impressions below the fold.
As you watch the time fade away, sit back and enjoy it and start mentally rewriting your talk. I had it pared down to “I’ll post it on the web later, bye!”
I’m here in sunny Las Vegas, hanging out in the lobby with the free wireless and watching all the funny blogger nerds with the orange badges walking by. Heh. Oh, hang on…I’m wearing an orange badge and blogging in a corner. Yeah, I’m such a nerd.
I don’t know how much time I’ll have for actually posting things here this weekend, but I’ve queued up a series of reruns to appear automagically at various times, so the site won’t be totally drying up. Half the liberal blogosphere seems to be here, so I’ve got to do something to keep a void from appearing.
Well, sorta. I arrived back home around midnight last night, and to be honest, I feel like I need another six hours of sleep right now. I also feel like I need to reply to some of the comments on that last godless post. And I also know I need to go take care of my fish for a while. I’ll be back in full ranty action in a little while, but meanwhile, contemplate this work of art, “Bob decided it was time to put his degree in philosophy to work.”
We cripples have to watch ourselves, so while I’d originally planned to spend my last day in NY at the big ol’ Bronx Zoo, we’ve scaled back a lot: I’m going to be at the Central Park zoo around noon. Short walks, no strain, that’s my policy right now.
Last night I did get to accomplish at least part of the actual purpose of my mission here: I got to meet some of the Seed Corporate Overlords. It was very disillusioning, though, and I’m going to have to come up with a better name for them—they lack the corporate dronishness and aren’t very overlordy. They’re a bunch of science nerds! It’s like the high school A/V club, the student newspaper, the chess club, and the model rocketry club all made an unholy alliance and discovered that they could make money and change the world. OK, and also get a nicer wardrobe and good grooming habits, but still…dweebish hearts are beating in the offices of Seed Media.
We were supposed to arrive in NYC at 2, this afternoon.
The plane was diverted because La Guardia was socked in with storms. We spent the afternoon sitting on a runway in Allentown, Pennsylvania. An hour passed. Another, and another, and another. We got vague promises over the intercom, always saying our departure was sometime in the near future. We stopped believing the captain in the early evening.
We had just killed the fat one, the one whose glasses we used to start the bonfire in first class, the one we called “Piggy,” when the captain came on again and told us to fasten our seat belts and be sure our carry-ons were stowed. Woo-heee, were we ever abashed.
We put our shirts and pants back on and finally landed in the Big City around about 8.
