SoylentNews

So, I've been sitting here watching the Spam moderations page and the mod-bombs page post-election thinking someone's gonna get butthurt and abuse moderation. It has yet to happen. Kudos to everyone for managing to restrain themselves. You guys make me fucking proud, so I'll leave you with this little bit of humor on an otherwise tense day:

Britain: Brexit is the most shocking thing a country will do this year.

America: Hold my beer...

“Say, Ed! How was your trip? Lager?”

        “Hi, John. Yeah, I’ll have a lager. The whole trip was lousy, a journey through hell all the way.”

        “Didn't you fly Green-Osbourne?”

        “Well, yeah.”

        The bartender swore; he was a wealthy man who owned the bar he was tending and quite a bit of Green-Osbourne Transportation Company stock as well. “What went wrong on the trip?”

        “Those stupid talking robots. God but I hate those things.”

        The bartender laughed. “Everybody does.”

        “Why do you have them talking, then?”

        “Advertising and engineering want to point out our superior technology, including AI.”

        “Well, it's too much A and not much I at all. Those things are really stupid.”

        John snickered. He hated talking robots, too, but had been voted down at board meetings. The tendbot he used when it got too busy for a single bartender to easily handle he’d special ordered, with no voice, only screen printouts and beeps. Most people thought talking robots were creepy.

        “Well, look, Ed, they can’t really think. Programmers just use humans’ built-in anthropomorphism and animism. It's a parlor trick, one of our engineers explained it to me once. So what did the stupid thing do?”

        “It was dinner time, the first night of the trip. I'd bought a business class ticket and somehow wound up on a first class flight... Say, did you have something to do with that?”

        John just smiled. “Go on, Ed, what did the stupid robot do?”

        Ed gave John a funny look and continued. “Well, I'd never had pork before. I thought it must be extra tasty, considering how ridiculously expensive it is.”

        “Well, it's environmental regulations.”

        “Huh?”

        “Sure, it's why Earth buys all its ores from space miners. Mining is pretty much illegal on Earth, because poisonous pollution from mining, farming, industry, and transportation nearly ruined the Earth's ability to sustain life a couple of centuries ago. It... Oh wow. Want to get rich, Ed?”

        “Not particularly, why?”

        “Someone will. We should build hog domes and farm pigs in them, and sell the pork to Earthians. I’d do it but I’m way too busy, what with Green-Osbourne, the bar, the brewery, and the farm I grow beer ingredients in.”

        “Well, I'll talk to a few folks. It would help Mars’ economy. Fill me up, John,” he said, sliding his glass across the bar. “Uh, what were we talking about?”

        “Pork and robots.”

        “Huh?”

        “Your trip.”

        “Oh, yeah, pork. Why is it so expensive?”

        “Like I said, environmental regulations. They almost made Earth unlivable a couple hundred years ago. Pigs are just too nasty to ranch more than a dozen or so in any one place there.”

        “Well, Earth was damned filthy, that’s for sure. Almost as dirty as it was heavy. Anyway, pork’s way too expensive for me. I wouldn’t even be able to afford pork on Earth, let alone on Mars, so since I had a first class ticket and meals were covered, I wanted to try pork. So I told the servebot I wanted ham and beans.

        “The stupid thing said there was no ‘Hammond bean’ listed in its database. So I said ‘No, you stupid junk pile, ham, and, beans.’ It said ‘The word hamand is not in my database.’ stupid thing.”

        John grinned. “So what did you do?”

        “What could I do? I ordered a barbecued pork steak. It was really good! But the damned robots annoyed me like that the whole trip. The very next morning I felt like a turkey cheese omelette so I ordered one. The stupid robot said ‘There are no Turkish cheeses listed in the database.’ So I said ‘A turkey omelette with cheese.’ So it says ‘there are no Turkish omelette dishes listed in the database.’ Stupid computer.

        “So I said ‘I want a cheese omelette with turkey meat. A turkey omelette has nothing to do with the country called Turkey...’ What’s so damned funny, John?”

        John was laughing uproariously. “Exactly the same thing happened to Destiny when we first came here, only the computer was printing it out instead of talking. Let me guess, it said ‘Parse error, please rephrase’.”

        “Yep, exactly. So I said I wanted an omelette with turkey meat, and it goes ‘There is no meat that has come from that country listed in the database.’ dumb machine! So I says ‘Turkey the bird, damn it!’ it said...”

        “It said ‘Parse error, please rephrase,’ didn’t it?” John interrupted.
        “Sure did. So I asked what meats were available for omelettes. It said pork, chicken, duck, turkey, and beef. So I said ‘A cheese omelette with turkey meat.’ the idiotic thing repeated ‘There is no meat from that country.’ I’ll tell you, John, that damned thing was really making me mad by then. I finally said ‘Damn it, computer, I want a cheese omelette with bird meat.’ it said ‘Please name the bird.’ I told it turkey and finally got my breakfast.”

        “There’s a trick to it,” John said. “Tell it you want a cheese and turkey omelette and it won’t give you any trouble. If you would have asked for navy beans and ham you would have gotten your ham and beans. Like I said, they don’t really think.”

        “No kidding. That must the dumbest computer I ever saw. Well, the tendbot in the commons may have been even more stupid. It didn’t know what a Cardinal was.”

        John groaned. “Ed, that’s strictly the Martian name for that drink. Everybody else calls them Bloody Marys.”

        “Oh. Why do they call them that?”

        “Because that’s what they were called for hundreds of years before anybody ever came here, before they had space travel, even. Before your ancestors ever left earth.”

        “So why do we call then Cardinals then?”

        “Frank Harris was responsible for the name. He was a farmer who came here from Earth and started growing tomatoes, under the ‘Cardinal’ brand.”

        “But why cardinal?”

        “There’s a bright red Earthian bird called a cardinal, so he named the bright red tomatoes after the bird. Bartenders here had never had a Bloody Mary before, because nobody here had tomatoes before Hardy brought them. So when they thought they had invented a tomato drink, they named it after the brand of tomatoes.”

        “How do you know all this stuff?”

        “My wife’s a history buff. She’s been getting me interested in it, too. So what happened after you got to Earth?”

        “Oh, man, it was pure hell, painful torture and terror. You know I've only been off Mars a few times in my life, mostly to Ceres or an asteroid dome out in the belt. But Earth... oh man. It was nothing like I'd ever experienced before. Or even imagined, it was horrible!”

        “First was the weight! That was part of what was wrong with the trip, when the robot was arguing about the turkey cheese omelette it was already getting really heavy. By the time we reached Earth I couldn’t walk at all and had to use an electric chair to get around. How do those people live like that?”

        “Ed, you should have been working out for months before going to Earth, especially since you’ve never had more than Mars gravity.”

        “Well, I did walk.”

        “Walking’s not nearly enough.”

        “No kidding, I couldn’t even stand up there. Had to have a robot help me in and out of bed. It was torture!

        “Why didn't you use a walker?”

        “You have to have gravity close to Earth's to learn how to use one.”

        “Bill Holiday uses one, and he's from Ceres. All the asterites grew up in less gravity than you did and he goes to Earth all the time, it's part of his job.”

        “He would have had to train to use it, those things weigh over a hundred kilos counting the power, and training takes longer than I was going to be on Earth.

        “The horrible weight was bad enough, but it was horribly scary there as well.”

        John grinned. He was an immigrant, who was born in St. Louis and had settled on Mars in late middle age. He hadn't thought of how it must be for a native-born Martian or Asterite on Earth. “Pretty scary, huh? I mean, not having a protective dome.”

        “Well, I've been outside the dome plenty of times, but being outside without an environment suit...” He shivered visibly. “Give me a shot of Scotch.

        “It was night when we got there, and they used what seemed like they use here on Mars to connect the ship to the terminal. On Mars it's so passengers don't have to wear environment suits, but I don't know why they do it on Earth. Probably so us spacers would feel at home.”

        “Well, not really,” John said. “It gets hot and cold there, and it rains. It's so passengers don't have to have coats and umbrellas. They were doing it like that before the first spacer dome was built.”

        “Yeah, I found out about rain and cold the night I got there, and heat the next day. In the entrance way to the terminal there was a flash in a window and a loud boom a second or two later. I thought there had been an explosion.”

        “Thunder.”

        “Yeah, and it was really loud! I almost jumped out of my skin. Anyway, we rented a car and I told it to take us to our hotel for check-in, and the first lightning flash scared the hell out of me. It looked like a crack in the sky and made me feel like all the air would escape, and then the thunder. I've never heard anything so loud!”

        “You should hear a chemical rocket with a heavy load taking off!”

        “I have, down here on Mars, and it's nowhere near as loud as thunder.”

        John laughed. “Ed, there's hardly any air outside the dome. Haven't you noticed how much quieter it is outside the dome?”

        “There's nothing out there to make noise.”

        “Well, if there was it wouldn't be loud.”

        “I guess. Anyway, parking at the hotel was outside, but the car dropped us off under an awning before it parked itself. Lightning flashed again, and it really gave me the willies. Then it thundered, even louder than it had before. It was so loud you could feel the sound. It was really scary!” He finished his beer and slid his glass to the other side of the bar. “Fill 'er up, John!”

        John poured another beer for Ed as Ed continued his traveling horror story. “Man, all that water pouring out of the sky. It was really strange, and even the water was scary and I don’t know why. And it was cold. Must have been under twenty.”

        “It gets well below zero some places.”

        “How do they live like that?” he repeated. “I was all right as long as I was inside, except that first night when it stormed. I hated that storm! I sure am glad we don’t have anything like that on Mars!

        “There was a bar in the hotel, thankfully, so I didn’t have to go out until the next morning. But the storm scared the hell out of me.”

        “So how did your meeting go?”

        “Well, I had to take the car there, meaning I had to be outside. It was fine in the dark, like a room with no lights turned on, but walking outside without an environment suit when you could see the sky really freaked me out. I finally told myself it was just a big blue dome.”

        “Did it work?”

        “Not really. It was really hard rolling around out there in my electric chair, and it was really hot outside! I never sweated before, and I hate it.

        “But worse than that was bugs. Some of them bite. Some of the bugs they called ‘butterflies’ the Earthians thought were pretty. I thought they were creepy and scary.

        “And barking dogs. I never saw a dog before, and John, those things are scary as hell, just downright terrifying. And there are a whole lot of them there.”

        “Okay, how did the meeting go?”

        “Lousy. Between the weight and the storm I didn’t sleep well. And the weight, the bugs, the dogs, the outside, the heat, the storm, all of it had me so rattled I couldn’t think straight, and we didn’t get the contract, DA2 did. At least it was a friend’s dome.

        “Give me another shot, John. Man, but I’m glad to be back home here on Mars. Earth sucks. Now I know what people mean by ‘hell on Earth’. Earth is hell!”

        John grinned again. “So... I take it you’re not going back?”

The entire universe was turned inside out and upside down and completely backwards today, and I must have been the only one to see it. It all started with an innocent looking email.

        I get a lot of emails like this one, except that the note’s subject line looked like a headline from the National Enquirer, or maybe The Onion. It read “Archaeologists Find Twenty Five Million Year Old iPhone.” Misaddressed, maybe? But it was a press release for an art exhibit.

        A few minutes after I set the mail aside is when it hit me; the fellow who sent the email had mentioned that he’d seen my work before and knew I’d written about art and wanted me to see his exhibit. I had written a story, one story, ten years earlier, and the paper hadn’t published it.

        I printed it out and went to see Frank, my boss.

        “What’s up, Stan?” he asked.

        “I just got the strangest email” I said, handing him the printout. He read it.

        “So what’s so weird, Stan? You must get these every day!”

        “What’s weird is that yeah, I’m working on that story about the city museum, but I haven’t even finished researching it and barely have an outline, and I only wrote one other art thing, and it was never published!”

        “Huh, that is weird. Why don’t you go down and check the place out?”

        “You know, Frank, I think I will. Maybe I’ll get a fun story out of it.”

        It was here in town, 568 Broadway, up in the eleventh floor. It was only about a fifteen minutes ride on the subway, and I rode the elevator up.

        It looked like an Apple store, only it was as weird as the email. For instance, it had strange iPhone accessories, like a case with a built-in hourglass. It was like an Apple store in some twisted alternate dimension.

        I had expected to see Evan Yee, the artist behind the installation, but nobody was there at all. Also weird. I took a few photos and left, disappointed that I had gotten no story out of it.

        I went to the elevator, and there was no elevator. Instead, there was a door leading outside, at street level. I wondered if I was going crazy, and remembered the time my mother said she had a “senior moment”. Maybe I was just getting old, but I was only forty five.

        I reached for my phone as I walked outside, thinking that maybe I’d get some sort of inspiration from the pictures, but it was gone. Damn, that phone cost six hundred dollars! I was glad I’d noticed so soon, and turned around to go in – and it was an Apple store. Between losing my phone and my disorientation when I left the exhibit, I hadn’t noticed that there hadn’t been anyone outside.

        By now I was sure I was going crazy. I went in anyway, and there was my phone, laying on one of the counters. I picked it up, looked around, and the place looked nothing like it had before I’d left, although it still looked like a weird, twisted, dystopian Apple store.

        I left again, and the street and sidewalk were bright green. I just stood there a minute, kind of dazed, I guess. By then I was pretty sure I’d gone stark raving mad. Maybe I was having a stroke? I reached in my pocket to call for an ambulance, and my phone was gone. I could have sworn I’d stuck it in my pocket.

        I went back in, and it wasn’t an Apple store any more, just an empty room with my phone laying on the floor. I picked it up and tried to call 911, but there was no signal. I went outside again to get a signal; lots of buildings suck for phones, and it was now night; it had been morning when I’d gone in.

        And there were two moons. Everything else was normal, but there were two moons in the sky and there were no people.

        And my phone was missing again! Next phone I buy is going to be a cheap one. I went back inside, and it was an Apple store again, this time like any other Apple store. Again there was no one there, and again my phone was on the counter. And again, I could get no signal. I firmly gripped it in my fist and walked outside...

        And confronted a monster! A giant animal, really huge, bigger than an elephant with huge teeth and claws and feathers. I screamed and ran back inside... a cave.

        And I’d dropped my phone outside in my fright. Not that it seemed to work any more, anyway. Or that it mattered, since I had clearly gone insane.

        But I couldn’t just sit in the cave. I waited a long time to make sure the monster was gone, then peeked outside. No monsters, and no phone. I went back in, I don’t know why, and there was my phone laying on a large rock. I put it in my pocket, and noticed the cave had changed. It was huge before, now little more than an indentation in the rock face.

        I went back out, and it looked like New York in the early twentieth century, except there were no people. I hadn’t seen a soul since I’d started this ordeal, except for the monster.

        And my phone was gone again. I turned around, and the Apple store’s sign read “Bell Telephone”. I went inside and there was a bank of antique switchboards, all unmanned. My phone was laying on one.

        I put it back in my pocket and walked back out. I don’t think I’ve ever been as worried and scared in my life, especially when I’d seen the huge, weird looking animal. This time the streets and signs of civilization were gone, and a group of wigwams was there where New York City had been before.

        I was shaking. I sat down on a log, put my face in my hands and cried like a baby. I felt like one, lost like no lost child had ever been lost before.

        Cried out, I sat and tried to think of a way out of the mess I’d somehow gotten myself into. The only thing I could think of was going back into the wigwam.

        There was a room filled with some very strange looking machinery, machinery I’d never seen before and had an idea that no one else had either. And there were people there this time! Two women, a blonde and a brunette, both wearing extremely strange looking clothing, intently poring over a complex-looking gizmo that looked like it was from some science fiction movie, and didn’t notice my entry. I stood there speechless.

        “We almost had him!” one of the women exclaimed. “In the right dimension and we almost had him in the right time. It would have taken only one more minute. If he’d just sat still a little longer!”

        “I can’t find when he is now. This thing is being extra finicky today,” the other woman remarked.

        “Excuse me,” I said, “But would someone please call 911? I think I’ve had a stroke or something.”

        They both whirled around at the same time. The blonde said “Oh, no, he’s now!”

        The brunette said “It will be all right, sir. Please, take your phone and wait in the hallway until it rings. There’s a comfortable chair out there.”

        “What’s going on?” I asked.

        The blonde said “I’m sorry, we can’t say anything more without fouling things up even worse than they already are. Please, your world will be normal in a few minutes, just listen for your phone.”

        “Uh, okay, I guess,” I said, and took my phone outside and sat down.

        Maybe fifteen minutes later I heard my ring tone, and it was coming from inside the office. I looked in my pocket and my phone was gone again.

        I wondered if someone at work could have spiked my coffee with some hallucinogen, but no... nobody at the office would have done such a thing. I sighed, wondering what strangeness I was going to see next, and went in.

        I was back at the art exhibit, and again, no one was there. I picked up the phone to answer it, but all that came out of it were some strange noises. I hung up, and I was getting a signal again! I called my boss.

        “Where have you been?” Frank asked.

        “I got lost. I may have had a stroke or something, I’m going to the doctor to get checked out. I’ll call when I’m done to let you know.”

        “Well, I hope you’re all right. I’ll talk to you later.”

        “Bye.”

        I walked hesitantly out into the hallway, and the chair and door to the outside the building were gone, with the elevators taking its place. I pushed the button, and when the car came I stepped in gingerly wondering what would happen when I got outside.

        Outside the building everything seemed normal again, with the throngs of people and noise of vehicular traffic. I hailed a cab and took the taxi to the hospital, where they took my vitals and did a brain scan and some psychological tests. The doctor said everything looked normal, but my blood pressure was a little high and I should make an appointment with my regular doctor.

        I took the subway back to the office. As I waited for the elevator, Doris, an editor, walked up—and she had red hair. Oh, no, I thought. “Your hair!” I said, scared again.

        “Like it?” she said. “I was tired of being a blonde so I dyed it last night.”

        I could have hugged her. We took the elevator up and I went to see Frank.

        “Frank, do you mind having someone else check out that exhibit? I don’t think I could give them a fair revue.”

        Frank said I looked really pale and should go home, so I went home early. I couldn’t get this weird day out of my mind, so I just wrote it down.

        Of course, I’m not putting this in the paper. Maybe I’ll send it to a science fiction magazine under an assumed name, because there’s no way anyone could believe it wasn’t fiction.

        But I’m getting a new phone tomorrow.

By request, these are our top resident wiseasses, clowns, and wit smiths:

By count: Nick Funny Mods %Funny wonkey_monkey60635% aristarchus59625% c0lo58522% Ethanol-fueled43113% VLM3809% bob_super35624% maxwell demon35520% Tork29720% frojack2574% Bot25337%

By percent: Nick Funny Mods %Funny Anne Nonymous16960% Buck Feta19755% Bot25337% DECbot12137% skullz10137% Gaaark21536% wonkey_monkey60635% JeanCroix9232% jimshatt9530% davester66624129%

A tip of the hat to @wonkey_monkey: and @Bot: for being the only ones to make both lists. Their asses are indeed wise.

Looks like I'm going to have to up my game if I want to make the list next time.

Here we go again. AC is excluded of course because he cheats by having tens of thousands of people do his posting for him.

By count: Nick Trolls %Troll Ethanol-fueled56517% Runaway19563097% jmorris23712% The Mighty Buzzard21910% aristarchus2179% frojack1503% Hairyfeet1499% zugedneb9025% khallow876% VLM802% By percent: Nick Trolls %Troll zugedneb9025% Ethanol-fueled56517% Khyber2015% jmorris23712% The Mighty Buzzard21910% jasassin3010% aristarchus2179% Hairyfeet1499% TLA148% Runaway19563097%

A tip of the hat to the returning champions and a hearty welcome aboard to the newcomers.

(Version with photos is at My web log)
        I had more fun this weekend than I have in years! Patty and I attended this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City.
        Patty had said that she would be at my mom’s house in Belleville around one, and I got there a little before.
        She got caught in construction work traffic in Indiana, and we didn’t get on the road until three. Traffic was terrible, not just through St Louis but all the way there. We decided to go straight to the convention; we could check in to the hotel later.
        We got parked (finally), and went in through the light rain, which would be a hard rain later, and cold wind. There inside the building sat Dr. Who’s Tardis! There was a door handle, and Patty decided to see if it would open. She walked up to it, and it moved away!
        That was the first really cool thing we saw, but not the coolest by far.
        We got to the place to get our badges, and oops: I forgot the magic numbers: the membership and PIN numbers. All I could do was hope we could get in, anyway -- I had the emails from worldcon on my phone.
        It turned in not to be a problem, as they had us in their computer systems. Patty’s name tag said “Patty McGrew”, mine said simply “mcgrew”. A helpful lady in a scooter gave us the lowdown on everything. I asked where the nearest drinking fountain was, and she said that bottled water, soda, and snacks were free in the exhibit hall.
        I got a bottle of water and Patty got a soda. We wandered around and came across a life sized cardboard cutout of an astronaut, and someone said a real astronaut was there. There was a fellow in a business suit, the first business suit I’d seen and asked him if he were the astronaut.
        “No, she is,” he said, gesturing towards a trim, fit, attractive black woman in a green dress.
        I’ve never been one to be starstruck. I’d met dozens, probably hundreds of celebrities while pumping gas for Disney World between 1980 and 1985 – major league baseball, basketball, and football players; professional golfers, more than one who became irate because I didn’t recognize them, despite the fact that I’ve hated that sport since my first job at age sixteen, working as a groundskeeper (“If anybody has to work that damned hard for me to play a silly game, I’m done with golf”); Rock and pop stars (one of whom, Cris Cross, was a complete and total jerk, but most were pleasant enough)...
        And Movie stars. My favorite movie star was Buddy Hackett, a really nice guy. Knowing he had done Disney movies, I told him if he were an employee I could give him a discount. He said he had before and may be again. “Yes,” I said, “I recognized you” and told him my favorite movie was Mad Mad World. He grimaced.
        “I hated that movie,” he said. “It was hot, half the actors were not very nice and Mickey Rooney was an asshole and Jim Backus...” (the actor who played the rich guy in Gilligan’s Island) “...was always flubbing his lines because he was always drunk.
        “My favorite movie was The Love bug,” he said. “we had SO much fun making that movie!” He had quite a few tales about that movie.
        He said he was there to talk to the brass about an upcoming movie, which he didn’t name but was The Little Mermaid, where he played... I’ve forgotten, I took my kids when they were little.
        It was a very pleasant conversation. He gave me his credit card, I ran it through the machine, the old-fashioned kind with carbon paper, returned his card, thanked him, and he drove off. I mentioned to my co-workers, who all were star-struck, who I had just served. They didn’t believe me, so I showed them the card receipt and they all went ape-shit.
        John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd stopped by and the star-struck dummies I worked with kept pestering them and they kept repeating that they’d never heard of those guys. “Guys, if they say they’re not John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd
  they’re not!”
        As they were leaving, one of them winked and thanked me. The morons I worked with seemed not to realize that the only difference between them and us was that they had better jobs.
        And then I met NASA engineer and astronaut Jeanette J. Epps at Worldcon, and for the first time in my life I WAS star-struck. This woman had been in outer space (or rather, will be in 2018)! I had a very pleasant conversation with her. She asked if I wrote science fiction, and I told her “yeah, but I read more of it than I write.” It seems she was as impressed by meeting a science fiction writer as I was by meeting an astronaut! At her questioning I told her Sputnik launched when I was six, I watched Armstrong land on the moon, and while living in Florida I saw every shuttle launch before the Challenger accident... and the look on her face told me no astronaut likes to think of that.
        She said she was envious, to see all that history with my own eyes. I told her I was envious of folks Patty’s age. “Now, only a select, elite few ever make it to space but by the time Patty is my age, space will be open to everyone.”
        By then, the word “astronaut” would be as disused as the word “Aviator” is now, as everyone would be able to visit space. After all, there was no such thing as an airplane when my grandmother was born, the first airplane flight being six months later, and she flew on several planes and saw men in space land on the moon. Yuri Gagarin flew into space twenty sic years before Patty was born.
        We talked of America’s inability to send people to space (I got the idea that she didn’t like Russian rockets) and I countered that at least we could launch cargo, and would soon have our own capsule. “Three of them,” she said. I took Patty’s picture with her and shook her hand. She indicated she wanted to see us again the next day (today; the awards are presented tonight; I’m typing a draft in the hotel and will finish when we get home) and I assured her we’d be back. I intend to give her a copy of Nobots if I see her today.
        As Patty and I walked off, I realized that for the first time in my life I was star-struck. This woman was not only an engineer (all the astronauts are, if I’m not mistaken, scientists and engineers) but an astronaut! “That alone was worth the price of admission,” I told Patty with a huge smile on my face, and she was as impressed as I was.
        Dr. Epps was one of the few black people I saw there. There were more Chinese alone, and Japanese, than black people. I saw more blacks in my hotel than in the teeming masses at the convention. I met one black fellow later, an overweight gentleman who said he was an actor from New York. For all I know, he was in Hamilton.
        S/N ran a piece last week about “racism in SF” and I can tell you that there are few black SF writers because black SF fans are almost nonexistent.
        The crowd was almost as Caucasian as a Donald Trump rally.
        Most of the night was that good. I took Patty’s picture as she sat on the throne from Game of Thrones, she took my picture with some alien Japanese monster. However, the weather got to me – it got cold outside, and with the huge building’s air conditioning it was cold inside and my arthritis started aching terribly. But the pain didn’t stop me from having a great time.
        There was a very short man in a Jedi robe, a woman with a robotic baby dragon, and lots of booths put up by cities hoping to host a worldcon. Dublin wants it in 2019, and God if it’s there I want to go! Ireland’s on my bucket list, anyway.
        They were raffling stuff off, some of it really expensive stuff, so we each got a ticket.
        We didn’t win anything.
        After the raffle we drove to the hotel, checked in, and went to our rooms.

Day Two:
        I’d gotten to bed about two, and since I can’t seem to sleep when it’s light I got up about seven. There was a strange small coffeemaker, two packets that said they were coffee, but no basket.
        So I took the elevator down to the lobby, hoping to find coffee. Coffeeless, I pushed the wrong button on the elevator and it stopped on the second floor, and there were two computers for guests. I decided to write when I was awake enough; the previous night I had regretted bringing a computer.
        Not only was there coffee, there was breakfast. I got a cup of coffee and went back up to my room to read and watch the news. Back down for more coffee and a thumb drive, and on the way back up I stopped on the second floor to write.
        No such luck, there were two young teens at the two computers. So I went back up to read some more. Patty was sleeping and wouldn’t wake up. It was her rental car, and I considered taking a cab to the convention center, but didn’t.
        While reading, I heard strange sounds outside the window, three stories down. Looking out through the screen, I saw the Kids on skateboards. Good, I could write!
        My coffee was empty after writing for a half hour or so, so I went back downstairs to fill my cup, and back to my room, again considering a cab. It was eight-thirty, so I called Patty’s phone again. This time she answered, and I informed her that she had twenty minutes to get breakfast.
        She came back up after breakfast and said she needed to lay down a little while and would be half an hour or so. She said she wasn’t feeling well, which was understandable since she’d driven from Cincinnati to Kansas City the day before, and we’d been at the convention until after midnight.
        Oddly, despite only sleeping five hours the night before, I was fine, wide awake.
        We got to the convention about eleven-thirty or so, too late to meet Dr. Epps again. But we discovered that the daytime was a lot more busy and had a lot more to see – and buy. I bought three tee shirts, and so many books I won’t be at the library for months. One was Star Prince Charlie, co-written by Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson, signed by its editor. At least, I think it’s the editor’s signature. There was all sorts of cool stuff, like the bridge of the Enterprise and a huge sculpture of the part of the Death Star that Luke Skywalker blew up, made from Legos and including Luke’s and another pilot’s craft.
        The illustration here is from one of the tee shirts I bought. The title of the book the robot is reading is “Tomorrow is Now”, which makes me wonder if the artist has read Yesterday’s Tomorrows. If so, I’m flattered.
        Then I met David Gerrold, who has been writing and selling science fiction since he was twelve, which is an interesting story in itself. He had written a screenplay called The Trouble with Tribbles and sent it, unsolicited, to Paramount. Paramount, like all film studios, return unsolicited manuscripts unopened.
        However, they had no script for the next Star Trek episode and were becoming panicked. They read, then after several rewrites, filmed the script. He’s been making a living at it ever since. The September issue of S&SF is dedicated to him, and he signed a copy of it and I bought it from him.
        There were more nerds than I’d ever seen at once, far more. And every one of them was smiling. I had pleasant conversations with several people, including a gentleman from the Kansas City library.
        Carrying around what felt like fifty pounds of books and short on sleep, I decided to get the car keys from Patty and put the swag in the trunk.
        I must have walked around for miles carrying that load trying to find the car. Hot and tired I was stumbling like a drunk, and when I fell down I decided it was time to surrender, and staggered back to the convention center, still hauling my load.
        I ran across the librarian, who grinned and said, as has been written in so many science fiction stories and comic books, “So – We meet again!”
        I stumbled back in and got a bottle of water and sat on a couch towards the back of the hall; my back was killing me. I tried to call Patty, but she wasn’t answering. I was starting to worry, as my phone battery was getting low, and she had my battery charging battery in her purse. Ten minutes later, my water empty, I decided to get a beer. I tried calling again – no luck. I sat back down on the couch again as my phone rang; it was Patty. I told her where I was and she couldn’t find me.
        “Do you know where that big screen is?” she asked. I answered “Yes, I can see it from here.”
        “Stand under it!” I did, and she found me. We sat at a table by the screen and I plugged my phone into the charging battery. There was a heavy black man in a polo shirt, one of the incredibly few black people there. There was an engineering company logo on his shirt.
        “So,” I asked, “Are you an engineer?”
        “No, but I play one on television.”
        Patty had gone for snacks and I had a pleasant conversation with the actor, about SF in general and the convention in general.
        Patty came back with some veggies; raw broccoli and cherry tomatoes and cheese. We ate it and walked around some more.
        There were a couple dozen people in various science fiction costumes. One was a very short man in a Jedi outfit that I mentioned earlier. I could swear I’ve seen the guy on-screen somewhere.
        We decided we’d seen everything there was to see there by three, so went back to the tables by the screen. It had been beaming some sort of thing that was going on in the auditorium the night before, but only a static photo now. We had a conversation with a couple of folks who looked about my age, two men and a woman. The woman and one man and I talked about science fiction and art, the other man, who was with the woman, was largely silent. Patty had gone to the restroom.
        I decided to get a slice of pizza and a beer at the Papa Johns booth, which looked like a permanent part of the place. A very small four piece pizza was eight bucks, and a pint can of Budweiser was six, twice what a Guinness was in any bar at home. But I was having too much fun to worry about my bank balance or credit card bills.
        I ate one slice, and nobody else wanted any. The three left, and a while later we made our way to the auditorium to watch the Hugos be presented. “Too bad we got here too late to see Dr. Epps again,” I said.
        “I saw her when you were looking for the car,” she said, “but she was with people looking busy so I didn’t bother her.”
        We got pretty good seats toward the front, but it was still forty five minutes before the ceremonies started. I used the rest room and got another beer, this time a Corona; beer choices were pretty limited.
        Finally it started. The Master of Ceremonies was Pat Cadigan, a woman who had won a hugo decades ago, and she would have made a pretty good stand-up comedian.
        She came on stage holding a bull whip and after telling everyone to silence their phones, admonished us “Don’t make me use this!” Her whip was the center of many jokes by many people on stage.
        I’d been disappointed since 2012 when I read The Martian that it hadn’t gotten the Hugo it deserved, and apparently I wasn’t alone, because Andy Wier got two of them this year. One was “best new writer”, probably since it was years too late to award it for the book, and one for Best Long Version Photoplay for the movie version, that even beat Star Wars!
        Mr. Wier wasn’t there. An astronaut in his astronaut uniform accepted the award in his place for “best new writer”.
        When “ Best Long Version Photoplay” came around, another astronaut in uniform accepted it for him: None other than Dr. Epps! I gave her a standing ovation, but no one else did.
        I haven’t had that much fun in years! I spent a fortune, but it was worth every penny.

Mayor Waldo was eating his salad as he waited for the main course when he was summoned to Dome Hall for an emergency. His secretary insisted that he couldn't talk about it in public or on the phone.
        He paid for the meal, told the serverbot to keep his food warm when it was finished cooking, and returned to Dome Hall, muttering under his breath. He asked Willie Clark, his secretary, what was going on that was so important it would interrupt his lunch hour.
        “A body was found outside the dome, sir. We suspect murder.”
        Murder? There had been a lot of death in Mars’ hundred years of colonization, but until now there hadn’t been a single murder, at least that anyone had known about. There were no homicides on the planet’s surface, at least; in space the pirates would kill you the first chance they got. In space, only the Green-Osbourne Transportation Company’s security fleet kept things relatively calm.
        “Why do you suspect murder? There’s never been a murder on Mars.”
        “Until now. The body was found outside the dome and wasn’t wearing a suit.”
        “Maybe he was drunk and stumbled through the wrong door. I should talk to council members about assigning guards to the airlocks.”
        “No, sir. Impossible. The body was found a half kilometer from the nearest lock. If he’d simply walked through the airlock...”
        “Hmm, yes. He’d have died before he went two steps and probably would have died inside the lock. Who do you have investigating?”
        “Nobody yet, sir. The police chief called us right before we called you, looking for guidance. The coroner is examining the body and we expect her report in a week or two. The corpse had been out there a couple of days at least. Of course there was no decay, but the body was completely desiccated, freeze-dried, as would be expected.”
        “Do we know the cause of death? Was a dead body taken outside, or a live one out there to die?”
        “The coroner is still doing the examination, sir. We’ll let you know as soon as we know.”
        “Thanks, Willie. Have the police start an investigation, and have them get in touch with an Earthian police detective who has experience in solving homicides, and have our people get advice from him or her.”
        “Should we keep this secret? At least until we know more? The Chief thinks so.”
        “No, you’re not working for Wilcox any more, and I’m not anything like Wilcox was. That’s why we won in a landslide, people hated his secrecy. Set up a press conference for tomorrow morning.”
        “Yes, sir.”
        He went back and finished his lunch.

        Albert Morton was the electrician who had discovered the body. It had been the most horrible thing he had ever seen in his life, and it ate at him that there had been nothing about it on the news. Who had done this, and why? He decided to contact a newspaper the next morning. Tonight he was going to get drunk; he’d never seen anything so gruesome, and couldn’t get the awful scene out of his head.

        “Say, Ed, how’s being Mayor treating you? Lager?”
        “Hi, John. Yeah, and a shot, I don’t care what. Scotch, I guess. My job’s sure not very fun today, we’re almost certain that we have a murder on our hands.”
        “Murder? On Mars? Really?”
        “We can’t see how it could be anything else. He was found half a kilometer from the airlock without an environment suit.”
        “What killed him?”
        “We won’t know until the coroner’s report comes in. But it has to be murder, nothing else makes sense. How’s business?”
        “I just got mail from Dewey this morning. We captured five pirate vessels last week and got a nice big finder’s fee from the boats’ rightful owners. He and Charles are looking at some new propulsion systems that might be a lot more efficient than the ion engines we’re using now. That will both lower the shipper’s cost and increase our profits, maybe even more than when we went from fission generators to fusions. And there’s a lot more shipping since they found all those rare earths on Ceres.”
        “Your bar doesn’t seem to be doing all that good.”
        John snorted. “You know this is just a hobby, but still, it is turning a small profit. It doesn’t usually get too busy until later at night. My brewery is doing almost too good. It’s hard to grow enough ingredients to brew enough of it to supply the demand. I may have to buy another building to grow more hops and barley and other ingredients.”
        A man walked in. “Hi, Al,” the bartender said. “The usual?”
        “Not today, John. Really bad day, I’ll have nightmares tonight. A lager and a shot of that white lightning you make. God damn, I ran across a dead body at work today outside the dome, and it was someone I’d met a few times. The poor guy didn’t have a suit on. Not just no suit, he wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing.”
        “Yeah, Ed here was telling me about it.”
        The mayor said “I hadn’t heard that. They only said he had no suit.”
        The electrician asked “Ed, why isn’t this in the news?”
        “Beats me, but I’m holding a press conference about it tomorrow. Wilcox would have tried to keep it secret, but that’s why he lost the election. Was it gruesome?”
        Al downed his shot, took a sip of beer, and said “You wouldn’t have wanted to be there. John, another shot, please. Make it a double.

        Sam Woodside was a reporter for the Martian Times, one of several dozen such newspapers in Mars’ many domes. Al Morton called him the next morning, a day after the discovery, with news of the dead body that he had found. The reporter asked the electrician “Who was he and how did he die?”
        “I don’t know, His first name was Bob, but I don’t know what his last name was. He was an electrician, too, but he usually worked the other side of the dome from me and I didn’t know him very well, I only met him a few times. His shop was short staffed so they assigned me on that side temporarily. You’ll have to ask the cops his full name and how he died. I talked to the mayor last night at Hooker’s, and they don’t know much yet.”
        “Hookers?”
        “Hooker’s Tavern, named after a musician who lived in the nineteen hundreds. John Knolls is a good friend of mine and owns the place.”
        They spoke for another fifteen minutes without Sam learning much.
        As he was beginning to dial the mayor’s office to get more information, another call came in. It was from his boss, who assigned him to a press conference the mayor had scheduled for the morning.
        Typical. He really wanted to write about the murder and here he had to attend a meaningless press conference. He wondered what it was about. “Probably something nobody would want to read about,” he thought.
        The news conference lasted a long time, even though little was yet known about the murder. The only clue had been the corpse itself, and it hadn’t yet yielded any answers. They would have to wait for the coroner, who had possession of the case’s only clue that had turned up so far.
        The mayor issued an executive order that all airlocks be guarded, and that no one would be allowed outside the dome alone. Martians had to be extra cautious about everything, since the environment outside the domes was so deadly. Safety was drilled into native-born Martians from birth.
        The mayor had of course been in contact with Dome Council members, all of whom were going to present a bill making the guards and the “nobody goes out alone” rule law. All had urged him to make the executive order, which would last until the council next met.
        Sam wrote the story, which was on the front page with an extra large headline: “GRUESOME MURDER OUTSIDE THE DOME” and in smaller type, “Police Have Few Clues, No Suspects”. Sam took what little information he had about the murder and skillfully stretched it to two full columns, most of which was the accounts of the electrician’s grieving friends and family, and some of it slightly redundant.
        The dome’s police contacted a homicide investigator on Earth, who chided the Martian for doing so little investigating. “Come on, man, get a warrant and search the victim’s home and workplace. It may have been for robbery, but there are a lot of things that cause murder. Find out who he associated with, if he was having any love affairs, who saw him last. Don’t wait for the coroner! What did the crime scene look like?”
        “Like there was a dust storm between when he was killed and when the body was found. If there were any footprints or wheel tracks or any other such evidence they were gone.”
        It seemed the newspaper had done more investigating than the police. The Martian took the Earthian policeman’s advice, but still came up with little, at least at first.

        “Hi, George, I was wondering if you were sick or something and didn’t go to work today, you always drop by for a beer on your way home.” John poured an ale for him.
        “I ran really late tonight, somebody stole my tools. At first I thought somebody might have grabbed my tool box by mistake, but I’m pretty sure they were stolen. Anyway, I had to fill out a ton of paperwork for the insurance.”
        “Sorry to hear that, the tools must be expensive.”
        “Yeah, they are. Brand new tools, state of the art stuff. I was working on two panels around a corner from each other, and I had my tool chest by one panel when I was working on the other one. I closed that panel up and went to finish the side where my tools were, and they were gone.
        “Like I was saying, at first I thought someone must have picked the tools up by mistake, but I noticed boot prints going away from the dome from where my tools had been. So when I got back in the dome and out of my suit I called the cops. I didn’t think anyone picked them up by mistake after seeing footprints leading away from the dome. The cops said it was possible that were taken by mistake, but I don’t think so. Talking to the cops took another hour.”
        A man in a policeman’s uniform came in, sat down, and ordered a shot of Bourbon and a wheat beer. “Rough week,” he told the bartender. “Murder a few days ago, probable theft today.”
        “Yeah, I heard.”
        The policeman looked at George. “Say, you’re the fellow whose tools are missing, aren’t you?”
        George answered in the affirmative and ordered another beer. Obviously a little distraught, he had drank the first one far faster than usual.
        The officer said “those boot prints you saw led to wheel tracks. We followed them for ten kilometers, and it looked like a space craft had landed and taken off. We think pirates have your tools.”
        George shook his head sadly. “Damned pirates, the tools are insured but it’ll take three weeks to get them replaced, and I won’t be able to work.”
        “That sucks, George. Need to run a tab until your new tools come?” the bartender asked.
        “Thanks, John, but I have enough cash and credit to make it until I can get new tools delivered.”
        The police officer finished his beer and shot and walked home, just as Mayor Waldo came in. “Hi, John. We had a theft today, give me the usual.”
        “Hi, Ed. Yeah, I heard,” he said, pouring the mayor a beer and the thirsty electrician a third beer.
        Ed sighed. “News travels fast.”
        John laughed. “Where would you go if your tools were stolen and you couldn’t work for weeks? You know George, don’t you?”
        “Yeah, hi George. Those were your tools?”
        “Yeah, it really sucks.”
        “Anything I can do? Or the dome can do?”
        George laughed. “Yeah, get a better football team, the Australians and Europeans always kick our asses!”
        Talk drifted off to sports for a while, and a thought came to John. “Ed,” he said, “Could the pirates have committed that murder?”
        “No, they would have taken him to their ship so they wouldn’t harm the suit. Everyone knows how valuable a suit is. They would have just dumped the body in space.”
        “You ought to dump those footballers in space,” George said dourly.
        The mayor and bartender laughed, and talk went back to sports as more people started trickling in.

        The next day the Chief of Police called the mayor with news of clues: the dead man’s tools and environment suit were missing. Did someone murder him for his suit and tools? It looked like that was the motive, although police were still investigating the victim’s associates. If they found that suit and those tools, they would likely find the murderer.
        Things seemed to be looking up. He usually only stopped by John’s bar when he’d had a bad day or a seemingly insoluble problem, but he decided to make an exception this time since his old friend Charlie Onehorse would be there. Charlie was the mayor of Dome Australia Two, about twenty kilometers from his dome. Old Charlie had been visiting on a trade mission.
        When he got off work, John’s bar was already filling up. “Ed!” came a voice from the gloom, as his eyes hadn’t yet adjusted, but he knew that voice.
        “Hey, Charlie! How did your deal go?”
        “Ace, even though those blokes aren’t drongos, but the deals always go well. Almost all of them, anyway. I heard your dome had a homicide?”
        “Yeah, it sure looks like the poor guy was murdered. Had some thefts, too, but one of them looks like pirates.”
        “Maybe it was pirates that killed that bloke,” Charlie said.
        “That’s what John said, but like I told him, they would have just carried him and his suit away and dumped the body in space.”
        “Yeah, you’re right, they would have. Damned pirates, I hope they leave my dome alone. Hey, John, get a grog for Ed, would you?” Just then a robot rolled up with Mayor Waldo’s beer.
        At the other end of the bar, John was talking to Al. Al had been telling him of the nightmarishly horrible discovery and how it was affecting him for the last few days, which he had mostly spent in the bar getting very drunk. “Al, I want you to meet a friend of mine,” John said as an attractive woman walked up. “Al, meet Tammy Winters.”
        “Hello, Ms. Winters.”
        “It’s doctor, but call me Tammy. John tells me you’re having some problems.”
        Al glared at John angrily. Tammy said “Look, Al, your reaction to what you’ve gone through is normal. Look, I have a friend who needs some new patients, could you help him out?” and handed him her colleague’s business card.
        “Well, I don’t know,” Al said, looking at the card. “What will it cost?”
        “Nothing, the government pays for it.”
        “Thanks, I will!”
        Tammy replied “John, are you going to pour me a beer or what?”

        Several days later the coroner's report came back, right before the mayor was due to go home, and Mayor Waldo was puzzled. The report said the victim had a stroke; a blood vessel in his brain had burst and he’d died instantly. But why was he out there naked?
        He decided to talk to John. John always had an answer when things got crazy.

        “Holy crap,” Sam said when he got the news. “Damn, the most sensational news in my career and it wasn’t. How can I spin this? The boss wants more papers sold!”
        He decided to focus on the mystery of the naked corpse.

        “And your cops can’t figure it out, either?” John asked.
        “No,” said Ed. “It’s still a mystery.”
        “Christ, Ed, it’s as plain as the nose on your face! Look, only a few days later George’s tools were stolen, and the police say it was pirates. It’s simple, Ed. They were waiting for a chance to steal the poor guy’s expensive tools and he collapsed. So they not only stole his tools, but his environment suit and clothing as well. Why didn’t you guys see that?”
        Ed scratched his head. “I don’t know, but it makes sense. I’ll talk to the police chief about it tomorrow.” Just then George entered.
        “John!” he yelled. “Drinks for everybody! WOO HOO!”
        “What happened?” Ed asked.
        “John’s army!”
        “John’s army?”
        “It isn’t my army,” John said. “More Dewey’s than anyone’s, I only hold maybe fifteen percent of Green-Osbourne.”
        George said “I can’t thank you enough, John.”
        “George, I didn’t do anything, there wasn’t anything I could do,” John replied. “We capture pirates all the time. It earns us a lot of cash and makes shipping easier for everybody, including our competition. You just got lucky.”
        “I don’t care, I’m still grateful. They said I’d have my tools back the day after tomorrow.
        “Oh, and Ed—they found Bob’s suit and tools when they found my tools.”
        John grinned. “See?”

        After the Mayor’s press conference the next morning, Sam cursed. How could he spin this one without looking like a damned fool?

It was some time last year that someone on Facebook posted a graphic that said "Beer: because no good story ever started with someone eating a salad." There are a lot of them to be found in Google Images.

So I decided to write a good story that starts with someone eating a salad, although parts of the story do take place in a bar. How good is it?

Magazines like F&SF get a thousand submissions a month, and each bi-monthly issue only has half a dozen stories. Only the very best get printed, and almost all rejection slips are form letters that all say pretty much the same thing, no matter what magazine.

Out of over a hundred rejections, I've only gotten two that were not form letters. The first was actually the first story I ever submitted, "Voyage to Earth". A junior editor (or perhaps slush reader) wrote back saying that it was a good story and well written, but the beginning didn't grab her.

The story I'm posting tomorrow, "The Naked Truth" garnered a personalized rejection from Charles Finlay, F&SF's Editor in Chief! He wrote a very encouraging letter saying that the idea of a murder mystery on Mars intrigued him and it was well written, but he didn't like the ending.

It was very nearly in F&SF. That means it isn't just a good story that starts with someone eating a salad, but a VERY good story.

I'm putting magazine submissions on hiatus until I finish "Voyage to Earth and Other Stories". I want to publish it next year, some magazines hang on to stories for a really long time ("Dewey's War" was in Analog's slush pile for six months, Tor has had "The Exhibit" since December) and if they publish one, I won't be able to publish it for a couple of years.

I have five finished stories you haven't read, three of which nobody has. I'll probably post one every couple of weeks until I run out of them. I've been working on one story, "The Pirate" (which I may rename) for a couple of months. Writing's been hard since I smoked my last cigarette last New Year's Eve.

I didn't know how much storage my "new" tablet has (hadn't looked, it's eight gigs) but reading the manual that I had to google to find (It's second-hand) I saw that it would take a 30 gig SD card, what they're calling single inline memory modules (SIMMs) these days. I decided to get one at Walgreens when I got beer.

It was a 32 GB SIMM (MicroSD, whatever) so I made sure to keep the receipt in case it wouldn't work in the tablet, but installing it was easy.

I can't say the same about getting it out of the retail packaging! It took half an hour and I was afraid of breaking the chip getting it out.

When I booted the tablet, it reported that it had installed it and reported 32 GB. That's two gigs more than the size of the part of my music collection I actually listen to. So I connected to my network drive with the same file manager II use on the phone, copied the folder holding the music, and pasted into the SD card. It took several hours.

When it was done, it informed me that third party apps didn't have permission to write to the SD card! WHAT THE HELL IS THIS BULLSHIT?? So I googled, and it said that Android 4 was the reason -- except my phone is running 4 and it had no problem writing to the simm.

The tablet has a built-in file manager that will access the SD, but can't access the network drive. I started copying a few at a time... and had a thought. I wondered if that 32 gig SD would work in the phone?

It does. So right now my phone's copying music from the network so I gan get it in the tablet. Good thing the physical chip is so easy to install and remove. I have a 12 gig chip in the phone, I think I'll get another 32 gig for the phone. Maybe bigger, I'll have to google to see what it can hold. I'll give the phone chip away.

But why would they have had a restriction like that?? Anyone have a clue for me?

The idea “Hey, what if I line up powers of 20, multiply them by sort of coefficients, and add them….?” –i s a huge intellectual leap. So far as I can determine, it only happened twice. It never happened in Europe.

http://fredoneverything.org/the-maya-who-woulda-thunk-it/