Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 224

Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 114

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Like cattle to the gods are we -- placid, balky, and blissfully unaware of our purpose.  Save for the time traveler Amanda Nelson.  She broke through, into the superchronic plane where our owners dwell.

"Why, Bossie! What are you doing on this side of the fence?"

You can tell this is nearing its final form by the care I take with my handwriting.

"What is the Nature of the Catastrophe?"

The Unilever Series: TH 2058

by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

The Tate Modern, 10/14/08 - 4/13/09

"It rains incessantly in London," the artist writes in the show's explanatory notes -- "not a day, not an hour without rain, a deluge that has lasted for years and changed the way people travel, their clothes, leisure activities, imagination, and devices.  They dream about infinitely dry deserts."  An impeccably science fictional opening to an installation whose inspiration was SF.  The Tate Modern, in London, is a 

The opening to a review of an art installation I saw in London.  It was later published in the New York Review of Science Fiction .
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Alas, Dirigibylon!

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So close!  It looked like Marianne and I were finally going to ride the Eureka this afternoon.  Unfortunately, all flights were canceled and for an extremely unhappy reason.  A blimp burned and crashed in Germany yesterday, killing its pilot.  Because the airship communit is so small, everybody pretty much knows everybody else.  So airship pilots worldwide are in mourning.

Mike Nerandzic, an airship pilot with over twenty years experience, died a hero.  He managed to save his three passengers, though at the cost of his own life.

Before a sacrifice such as that, one can only stand silent.


Above:  The Eureka, attached to a mooring truck.  My snapshot, taken from the field.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 113

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This is just a note that was left to us by a friend when we were staying with her in London, just before Marianne and I took the train to Edinburgh.  That would have been early in 2009, just after Marianne retired from the Bureau of Laboratories.  We went to London, Edinburgh, and York in a kind of victory lap.

This particular notebook didn't go with us, though.  The note somehow made its way back to America with us, and so I pasted into the most convenient notebook.  As a kind of diary substitute.  For some reason I seem to be congenitally incapable of keeping a diary.

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