Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 82

Nebula Awards Weekend

The Nebula weekend was a wild social whirl, but we didn't take advantage of the lovely Cocoa Beach location. Brought bicycles but they stayed in the room; brought bathing suits but never put them on. (You're not supposed to swim in the nude, but hey, after 3 a.m. who cares . . . )

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America maintained a well-stocked hospitality suite all through the four-day affair. Gay and I spent a lot of time there and in the hotel restaurants and bars, which were...

Bach to Bach

[Bob on sff.net notes that he has played guitar pieces by Bach, but when he sees other musicians doing it, they appear to have been written by some other, more talented composer . . . :]

Bob, you know Bach had seven children by his first wife and then thirteen by his second. For some reason there was no third. But the history of Thuringia is Bach to Bach to Bach. Fifty of them musicians, composers, what-not. So those songs you don't recognize might well have been by Barbara Bach. Or Burt B...

(gamma ray) blast from the past

Going through a pile of old stuff, I came across this badly printed photograph from when I was hospitalized in Vietnam, from bullet and shrapnel wounds. That's the South China Sea behind me, and what I think was a Korean machinegun emplacement.

I wasn't sure why I sent it to Gay, except that it was the first roll printed from a camera I'd just gotten at the hospital PX.

Then I turned it over, and found the explanation I'd written on the back. So I was a sci-fi guy even then, forty-two years a...

cashtronomy

Ooh, like I already didn't have enough reasons to go out and rob a bank. An outfit called Night Vision Astronomy is marketing a gadget called the Binocular Photon Machine, which it initializes as BIPH. (I suppose because BPM is in the news everywhere as British Prime Minister.)

The BIPH runs on two AA batteries and contains a light-amplification unit that increases the light-gathering power of your telescope by a factor of three. So my little 3.5" Questar will show things as dim as the ones...

The Ikea Syndrome

I just sacrificed most of an hour to what should be called the Ikea Syndrome. I ordered a "hobby lamp" from Cheap Joe's Art Supplies, a compact floor lamp that gives the spectral equivalent of sunlight. I won't actually be doing much art with it; maybe sketches from television. It's for reading in the recliner, which otherwise has lousy light.

So I opened the box to find seven little boxes, all sealed up with layers of tape. And a 13-step assembly instruction list, missing a couple of inst...

old folk and new

Now for Eine Kleine Volkenmusik . . . last night Gay and I went out to Melrose to hear Grant Peeples, a Florida singer/songwriter. He has a lot of talent and bad-boy good looks, hawk-sharp features and hard prison muscles (which he probably got at Gainesville Health & Fitness, like me).

He had several striking songs, none better than "It's Later Than You Think," which is also the title of his latest album. It starts out like this --


It's later than it seems / Shadows long and dark

The party'...

the engineer's song

(In sff.net, we got to talking about MIT things like smoots and the Engineers' Song -- "We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the engineers," etc.)

Not only are there still smoots, Susan, they were preserved when the bridge was rejuvenated a few years back. I believe they cut the sidewalk up in sections with the painted numbers intact, and replaced them.

The smoot is a unit of measurement that goes back to 1958, named after an Oliver Smoot, an inebriated undergraduate who allowed himself to b...

the answer to everything

This is from Marsh Whitfield, by way of Sherry Gottlieb --

It is a slow day in the small Minnesota town of International Falls, and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit.
 
A rich tourist visiting the area drives into town, stops at a motel, lays a $100 bill on the desk and says he wants to inspect the rooms before selecting one for the night.
 
As soon as he walks out with a few keys, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door t...

mountings

One large mechanical triumph last night. I installed the part the manufacturer had sent for the new Ioptron telescope mount, and hooked my old 7" Maksutov up to it (the adaptor for the 9.25" hasn't come yet), and it worked splendidly! A $105 gizmo that they sent for free, for customer relations. (I had written them saying I was going to give it a try, and they said hold on and they would send one.)

Even with the heavy-duty modifications, you can pick the mount and tripod up with one hand. ...

water, water everywhere

An old pal of ours, Humberto Campins, just discovered water and organic compounds on the asteroid Themis, a pretty big rock between Mars and Jupiter. Humberto used to be an astronomer here at UF, but he moved to the University of South Florida a while back. Offered him a bigger telescope or something.

Of course everyone in this little club knows how important this discovery is. We can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that once we've completely raped and pillaged this planet, we still haven...