Christopher McKitterick's Blog, page 20

James Gunn News

Sad news from James Gunn about his wife, Jane:

Jane died last night at Brandon Woods. She had several hospitalizations in the last month or so, for dehydration, since she wasn't eating or drinking much, and went into hospice care a couple of weeks ago. She had been nonresponsive for the past few days, but they kept her comfortable, and we had a CD player beside her bed playing Frank Sinatra and [their son] Kevin's music. At her request, she is being cremated and will be inurned, in a small private occasion later, in Lawrence's Pioneer Cemetery, where many KU faculty and family are inurned. Jim

Here is her obituary.

My first memory of Jane was meeting her in 1993 at Jim's retirement party, in a stone castle in Lawrence, KS. She was vivacious - probably aided by champagne - and lovely, with creamy, unlined skin. I saw her often through the years since, when I visited their home. It will be strange to see Jim there, knowing that Jane will no longer answer the door.

Best,
Chris

"Flowers for Algernon" and Me

An LJ friend's post about forgetting to take his meds prompted this disclosure and discussion:

Over the last few days, I've forgotten to refill the pill-box on my desk so I can take my afternoon Adderal before class. I tell you what, I won't be doing that anymore. I've been feeling like Charlie Gordon from Flowers for Algernon .

I haven't talked about this here before, because I felt uncomfortable doing so in public. For a long time, I'd been suspecting I might have ADD - not the hyperactive part, but the fragmented-attention part, so I was uncertain and avoidant. But I certainly suffered many of the symptoms, the worst of which was having great trouble focusing on one task (especially when I had many things to do, as I always do!), difficulty concentrating on things, and serious impairment in listening to one person talking in a noisy room, and so on. What I didn't realize that many of my anxiety issues also stemmed from the ADD, and overcoming this is perhaps my favorite result of the new meds: Even though I'm a light sleeper now, I used to startle awake at the slightest sound; I used to experience near-panic-attack levels of stress when I had too many things on my plate - and I've always been exceptionally good at putting too many things there. Brilliant. Imagine how emotionally straining it was for me when I was working full-time for both Microsoft and KU, plus trying to maintain my writing career, plus trying to stay in relationships. Since childhood, I've always been prepped for attacks whenever walking past people.

Are these things normal? I think not. They certainly weren't doing me any good. Of course, most of these symptoms - by nature of only existing inside my head - no one knew about, but they constantly plagued me.

Yet I felt that an ADD diagnosis would be problematic, a dirty label. Even now, I'm going back and forth whether to post this publicly or friends-only. How will the professional world, my co-workers, view me if they knew? I didn't want to be "one of those people," and I certainly didn't want to see myself like [insert names of people who are barely functional]. I despised having to admit that I have even more problems. As my suspicions rose, I asked myself, Why shouldn't I just be able to overcome this on my own? I actively avoided reading about ADHD. I mean, I lived through childhood. I've been successful in adult life. I'm smart, quick, capable of dealing with lots of crap all at once. Except I wasn't. Sure, I've always managed to deal with things. Except not very well, and it took a serious toll on me, my life, my writing, my career, my relationships... you get the idea.

So these broken-in-half little blue dextroamphetamine-amphetamine pills have transformed my life. I can now pay attention to a single conversation at parties. I can work on single projects until I'm done or reach a stopping-point. My stress level has dropped at least 90%. In class, I stay on track so well - even if a student's question redirects the discussion for several minutes - that I can return to what I was saying before. I'm WAY better at tracking time in a linear fashion. I'm more patient and less prone to frustration. When I have a dozen things to do and only time to deal with half of them, I can now tactically or strategically determine which needs to be dealt with first without the Beast Anxiety rearing up and trampling my ability to decide. And so on.

Strange that forgetting to take my pill - even at such a minimal dose - causes me so much trouble now, when I didn't even start taking them until last winter. How did I ever teach so many classes or get anything done before I started the stuff? How did I ever finish writing projects as long as novels? Most of all, how did I ever live with such stress before?

Thank you, modern medicine. Thank you for your patience, everyone who had to put up with me before. And thank you, everyone who not only supported me in pursuing a solution but also didn't think less of me when I acquired a new label.

I don't feel more broken now, bearing new scarlet letters. I feel more human. In fact, I feel superhuman at times, in control of a newly freed mind, able to focus while still retaining the hypervigilance that once wore me out. Simply taking these meds, I feel much more capable of taking control of this oft-quarrelsome mind. I mean, who doesn't have some kind of issues, right? Plus, ADD and ADHD no longer bear quite the stigma they used to. Though I'm still troubled by children getting the diagnosis, I waited too long before addressing this.

This much is certain: I won't be forgetting to refill my office pillbox anymore.

Chris

New Adventures in the Life of Chris

Here's what I've been up to over the past week or two:

Visited Free State ComicCon This is always a blast. Picked up a pile of graphic novels (and an awesome T-shirt of John Brown, Superhero).

On a related note: Later that week was the "Weird Edition" of Super Nerd Night at the Jackpot.

Chased off a Home Invader At 4:10am on Saturday night (or Sunday morning, whichever you prefer), the doorbell went off. Being a light sleeper, I woke instantly, if not clear-headedly, heart pounding within my ribcage, wondering, "WTF?!" A few seconds later, it rang again. Worried that a friend was in trouble, I set about searching for pants (found some stretchy shorts in the dark), glasses (no luck), and dagger (beneath the pillow, natch), and then headed downstairs. This is when the doorbell began ringing in eanest, as the visitor pressed it repeatedly for at least a dozen times. Now my concern turned to irritation and a bit of worry, because my friends wouldn't do that, would they?

Downstairs, I found my phone. No missed calls, so not a friend. Unfortunately, the front-door motion-detector light was turned off, making it tough to see outside very well (no Moon, either), so I inched the front curtain open. The doorbell-ringer had left. Whew.

Just then, I heard the back sliding-screen door open. Here's when I went all HOLY CRAP INTRUDER! The ensuing adrenaline cleared out any remaining sleepiness. The back-yard motion-detector light on the garage was unplugged, I learned later (probably my own fault from turning it off with a long stick), and the back-door light is switch-only (and off at the time), so no light back there, either. I peeked around the corner in the kitchen as the man - a little taller than me, I judged, and wearing bulky clothing - tried to open the sliding-glass door. Because of last year's adventure with locking myself out (this involved a drill, lock-puller, chisels, hammers, Sawzall, and such), the back door doesn't have a lock but is instead blocked; ironically, this is much more secure than a simple lock, so the door only slid an inch or so before hitting the rod in its runner. He put his hand INSIDE THE HOUSE, searching for a chain or something, I suspect, then pushed the door again.

Pissed off now, I turned on the overhead kitchen light. The intruder-dude CONTINUED TRYING TO GET INSIDE. Unfortunately, the sliding-glass door is virtually impossible to see through when it's dark outside and the overhead is on inside, so all I could see was a hand. CREEPY. At this point, it was time to go upstairs and fetch something more menacing than a dagger.

In the back bedroom where I store said menacing stuff, I discovered that, naturally, chernobylred had slept through all this. I turned on the light, informed her what was going on, found what I was looking for, and went back downstairs. En route, I also found my glasses.

When I reached the kitchen, he had left.

chernobylred , being more level-headed than I, asked, "Shouldn't we call the police?" Uh, yeah, good idea. Ahem.

They arrived within minutes. A cruiser rolled past on the street out front, lights off like a land shark, while another pulled into the alley with lights everywhere. Two police walked the alley with flashlights as bright as the sun, and another walked through my yard. The intruder was gone.

I gave them my report and discovered that they had found a suspicious man nearby on a bicycle. Of course I couldn't give any description, but if that was him, perhaps he'll be more cautious in the future. As in, NOT TRYING TO BREAK INTO HOUSES.

My theory? The doorbell-ringing was to find out if anyone was home. If someone meek had answered, he might well have busted inside for nefarious purposes, but I bet he'd have run away. I think he wanted to find an unoccupied house, break in, and steal stuff. I wish I'd gotten a good look and we could finally catch this serial burglar - assuming it's the same guy that's been robbing neighborhood houses.

I'm double-locking the doors now and sleeping with more-substantial equipment within reach. Oh, and now all the motion-detector lights work.

Wrote a New, Um, Thing, Plus Jack and Stella At last Thursday's Write Group, I finished a new piece of writing. My first sub-1000-word work in a long time! Now some polishing and off it goes.

Oh, and The Galactic Adventures of Jack and Stella is coming along nicely. Over the past week or two I've written another couple thousand words. Best of all, I worked out parts of the plot-arc that were shaped more like nebulae than a bridge. Also wrote a scene for the next book in the trilogy (I think it'll be three...).
The Galactic Adventures of Jack and Stella progress:

Went to the Kansas City Renaissance Festival Since the KC RenFest opened three weekends ago, I've gone three times! Different goals each time, with next time being a group trip to the Barbarian Battles region, where I intend to pummel my friends with foam swords. This last weekend, I caught a whole bunch of shows and finally rode the bungee-trampoline. HOLY COW was that fun! I aimed for the sky, and reached a good 30 feet or more toward it. The combination of trampoline below + gnarl of bungees attached to each side of a climbing harness = HUGE AIR. I leaped so high that the bungees were actually pulling me down from the top of the arc, above the telephone-pole uprights, and after shooting back down and hitting the trampoline, I sank in knees-bent several feet before it launched me back up again. Did this for many minutes in a row, and my ankles were shaky afterward. My gnarly old pirate assistant stopped me after my first backflip: "No more flips for you," he said. Followed by, "You made me tired just watching you."

A MUST-DO BLAST FOR ALL!

This was a day when I intentionally wore jeans, not the kilt, for this very purpose. Ahem.

Saved a Baby Snake I was working in the garage today and discovered that one of the sticky traps I put down in there to capture horrid things like Brown Recluse spiders had captured what looks like a baby Brown Snake. It was still alive, but barely moving. Only about eight inches long, thin as a pencil at its thickest, with a teeny pointed tail and wee face with long, black, nervously flicking tongue. It was stuck upside-down on the glue trap, face first, looking like it was trying to eat the cricket stuck there, only its cream-colored belly showing.


Click the image to see the Great Plains Nature Center's website.

I felt so bad! I looked up how to humanely free a critter from the trap, and it seems that vegetable oil does the trick. So I trimmed the glue trap down to near the snake, then drizzled olive oil (the only oil I could find in the house) along both sides of its body. I set it down in the shade in the grass upside-down so that the snake would be upright, then soaked the back (paper) of the trap, too, thinking it would loosen the glue faster.

Went back out after an hour, and he'd freed his head. An hour later, and the snake is gone. Hooray! Go free, little Brown Snake, and eat bugs and snails!

Conclusion Sorry I haven't posted much in the past week. I've been busy with teaching, writing, and so forth. Hope you're well!

Best,
Chris

Hey, I was on MPR! Related: What are your predictions for 2037?

Just realized I posted a couple of other places but not here - sorry! I was on NPR this morning, talking about how accurately science fiction predicts the future (and how that's not really what SF tries to do) in a piece entitled, "What did science fiction writers predict for 2012?" In 1987, L. Ron Hubbard challenged his fellow science fiction writers to forecast what the world would be like in 25 years. Then they put together a "time capsule" of letters to us, now, that was just opened.

Here are those predictions, and here's the Salon article about them, written by AlterNet's futurist editor, Sara Robinson.

The show was live this morning from 11:20am - noon on Minnesota Public Radio's Daily Circuit, and is now available for streaming on their website.

Didn't get a chance to call in during this morning's show? Share your thoughts on what the world will look like in 25 years on the Daily Circuit blog.

At the end of the conversation, the show's host, Kerri Miller, asked us to send our predictions for 2040. Here I go. My prediction for 2040:

The Singularity.

[image error] A few years after the time-capsule predictions we discussed today, in 1993, mathematician and SF author Vernor Vinge wrote the seminal essay, "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era." He stated that, "Within thirty years [by 2023], we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

This is arguably the single most-important concept that SF authors have had to address ever since the concept became widely known. All near-future SF written today must take the Singularity into account, whether the author believes it will happen or if she explains how the combination of rapidly accelerating advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence will change civilization on Earth, the Earth itself, and what it means to be human. In other words, will we reach the Singularity? If not, what devastating events brought our ever-accelerating technological advances to a halt? If we do, how will the human species remain relevant? What will it mean to be human in a world of superhuman intelligences, ubiquitous information and information-processing (both within and around us, via biotech and nanotech) that work like magic? Will humans resist this change - which might feel like marginalization - so hard that we destroy our civilization and, perhaps, become extinct without ever having invented Terminator-like AI killing machines?

This is what much of today's SF explores, because we will face these things by the year 2040, no matter how much some people want to stop progress or change. How SF most affects the future is not in its prediction or even that it encourages positive outcomes, but rather in the negative outcomes it helps prevent:
The environmental movement was fertilized by SF stories set on a ruined Earth.
Nevil Shute’s SF novel and film On the Beach and the TV movie The Day After probably helped us avoid nuclear war.
Orwell's 1984 might have helped us avoid tyranny of that sort, and we can only hope that Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale helps us avoid that one.
So we ask, What are people's greatest concerns today? We might answer, "Climate change, disease, energy and water depletion, economic collapse" and so on. All these are important challenges we must overcome, so these are what today's SF authors explore in their work, just as the authors from the time capsule reflected what was on the minds of people in 1987. But the most-fundamental issue at hand in the next 25 years is this:

What will it mean to be human in a post-Singularity world? How will we survive - free, happy, and fulfilled?

Best,
Chris

Hey, I was on NPR! Related: What are your predictions for 2037?

Just realized I posted a couple of other places but not here - sorry! I was on NPR this morning, talking about how accurately science fiction predicts the future (and how that's not really what SF tries to do) in a piece entitled, "What did science fiction writers predict for 2012?" In 1987, L. Ron Hubbard challenged his fellow science fiction writers to forecast what the world would be like in 25 years. Then they put together a "time capsule" of letters to us, now, that was just opened.

Here are those predictions, and here's the Salon article about them, written by AlterNet's futurist editor, Sara Robinson.

The show was live this morning from 11:20am - noon on Minnesota Public Radio's Daily Circuit, and is now available for streaming on their website.

Didn't get a chance to call in during this morning's show? Share your thoughts on what the world will look like in 25 years on the Daily Circuit blog.

At the end of the conversation, the show's host, Kerri Miller, asked us to send our predictions for 2040. Here I go. My prediction for 2040:

The Singularity.

[image error] A few years after the time-capsule predictions we discussed today, in 1993, mathematician and SF author Vernor Vinge wrote the seminal essay, "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era." He stated that, "Within thirty years [by 2023], we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

This is arguably the single most-important concept that SF authors have had to address ever since the concept became widely known. All near-future SF written today must take the Singularity into account, whether the author believes it will happen or if she explains how the combination of rapidly accelerating advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence will change civilization on Earth, the Earth itself, and what it means to be human. In other words, will we reach the Singularity? If not, what devastating events brought our ever-accelerating technological advances to a halt? If we do, how will the human species remain relevant? What will it mean to be human in a world of superhuman intelligences, ubiquitous information and information-processing (both within and around us, via biotech and nanotech) that work like magic? Will humans resist this change - which might feel like marginalization - so hard that we destroy our civilization and, perhaps, become extinct without ever having invented Terminator-like AI killing machines?

This is what much of today's SF explores, because we will face these things by the year 2040, no matter how much some people want to stop progress or change. How SF most affects the future is not in its prediction or even that it encourages positive outcomes, but rather in the negative outcomes it helps prevent:
The environmental movement was fertilized by SF stories set on a ruined Earth.
Nevil Shute’s SF novel and film On the Beach and the TV movie The Day After probably helped us avoid nuclear war.
Orwell's 1984 might have helped us avoid tyranny of that sort, and we can only hope that Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale helps us avoid that one.
So we ask, What are people's greatest concerns today? We might answer, "Climate change, disease, energy and water depletion, economic collapse" and so on. All these are important challenges we must overcome, so these are what today's SF authors explore in their work, just as the authors from the time capsule reflected what was on the minds of people in 1987. But the most-fundamental issue at hand in the next 25 years is this:

What will it mean to be human in a post-Singularity world? How will we survive - free, happy, and fulfilled?

Best,
Chris

Astro-Porn of the Day: When a Solar Dragon Erupts.

Remember the magnetic filament creeping across the surface of the Sun from one of my Astro-Porn posts last month? Here it is, the massive cloudlike feature on the left side of the Sun in this image:


Click the image to see that LJ post.

Well, here's what happens when they go KAPLOOEY and erupt! Beauty from destruction:

[image error]
Click the image to see NASA Solar Dynamics Library page - with a video!

The filament stretched and arched upward until it broke and blasted off into space. Some of the plasma from this eruption hit Earth with a glancing blow on September 3, generating some beautiful aurora:


Click the image to see a Daily Mail news article about the event.

Chris

The Vespa rides again!

In July, my charming Vespa S150 - also my primary form of transportation in Lawrence - went kaplooey and stopped running. Not only would it not start, it wouldn't turn over at all, and even the dash lights wouldn't come on with the key.

I've researched and messed around and tested stuff, but finally decided I WOULD NOT STOP TROUBLESHOOTING UNTIL IT WORKED. After working through a full Friday afternoon and into a good part of the evening, I discovered:

Not the starter relay - like new inside.
Not the ignition switch - turning the key drops battery voltage.
Not the starter - like new inside after taking it apart and reassembling.
Not any of the fuses - took apart the front end and the underseat area, and the fuses are all good.
Not the kill switch - switching it changes voltage.
Not the wiring - nothing frayed, disconnected, or damaged.
Not the coil or spark-plug wire - they're intact and firmly connected.
Not the computer - each input and output work as advertised.
Battery holds 12.8 volts, above the 12.6-volt minimum...



WTF?! WHY WON'T YOU RUN?

So I didn't think it was the battery, but upon reflection, I realized that the voltage was almost completely going away when I switched on the bike. Odd. wapped in my 1978 BMW R100S's battery, and the bastard fired right up.

AARGH! I could have been riding it for MONTHS if I'd just tried that before! Damn you, voltmeter, for lulling me into accepting your reading.

Nonetheless, it runs now! I ordered a new Shorai lithium battery for the Vespa, a small, light unit like the one I put in the BMW, only even smaller. Should arrive later this week. This place has the best prices on these batteries by far, and it's not that much more expensive than a lead-acid battery ($80 vs. $126) - especially when considering it claims to have a much longer life and deals with sitting around unused far better, too. Oh, and it weighs less than two pounds, versus the 10 or so of the stock battery.

In the mean time, I can technically ride my Vespa again, though the BMW's battery is a couple of inches larger, so it sorta jacks up the seat. But soon! Soon, it'll have its own, new battery of awesomeness, and I will be fully mobile again.

Woohoo!
Chris

Astro-Porn of the Day: Galaxies among galaxies, perspective, life....

The reason I bought my first multimedia-capable computer, in 1997 or so, was to be able to see the amazing and wonderful images that NASA was sharing across the internet. Since then, not only has NASA continued to do this, but so have many other places - like The University of Arizona's Mt. Lemmon Sky Center, responsible for the photo below. Since then, they've only been getting better at it, building easy-to-use galleries, posting quick-view images that you can click to open massive original-size images, and writing lovely descriptions of what you're looking at.

The photo below is one of the reasons I go on living in this crazy world. I mean, seriously, take a moment to bathe in the quiet alien beauty of this spiral galaxy, NGC 5033. In May of this year, astronomer Adam Block took this shot through a 32-inch telescope using a CCD camera, they toyed with the image using Photoshop and another astrophoto program. This kind of photograph is now within reach of small instruments (nowadays, some individuals even own 'scopes that size!), and digital imaging and processing further democratizes the once-esoteric field of astrophotography, which used to require vast knowledge of chemicals, supercooling tech for film, processing tricks, glass plates, and so forth - and some of these exposures took all night. Mess up the emulsion or developing time? Your night is lost. Not any more. Now we get astrophotos like this on a regular basis:


Click the image to see a very large, full-size image courtesy of the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter.

That should blow your mind! For reference, here is what the pre-digital age of astronomy looked like - and this is one of the era's best-known photos of one of the nearest galaxies, taken through the world's largest telescope at Mt. Palomar:


Click the image to see the Wiki page about the Andromeda Galaxy.

I mean, just compare the two. Check out how the vintage Andromeda photo is devoid of clear division between the spiral arms; notice how playing with color filters helps you identify the different types of stars in the newer photo; and so forth. But perhaps most impressively, check out the giant, 2MB version of NGC 5033, and you will be astounded by how many of the "stars" surrounding the galaxy are, in fact, more galaxies.

It makes sense, of course, because the universe holds more galaxies than our galaxy holds stars, and galaxies are larger than stars - they have to be really far away to appear smaller than a star. But WOW. LOOK AT ALL THOSE GALAXIES. That photo contains literally hundreds more identifiable galaxies! Perhaps THOUSANDS to an expert eye. WHOAH.

Now, for just a moment while you are floating in space, hunting for galaxies millions or billions of light-years away, turn around. Look for the Milky Way Galaxy among the stars. There, far out in the Orion Arm of our spiral galaxy, that's our Sun. Can you see it? Maybe, if you know where to look, and if you're using a big telescope and a high-resolution digital camera and using excellent software. Our star is a mundane one, smallish compared to the giants easily visible among the swirling multidudes.

But on a little rocky planet not far from the Sun's flares, bathing in its warmth at a temperature high enough to melt water ice - but not so hot as to boil it - dwells an intelligent species that not only ponders the meaning of life in a vast universe, but only looks upon the pinpoints of light in the sky and asks what they are, and is currently taking tiny steps in their direction. Every thought that every intelligent creature on that little planet has ever held, every hope and dream and fear and frustration, every feeling of love or hate toward another, every drama and birth and death: All that every human being who has ever lived has thought or done is contained within a narrow orbit around that little star, within a handful of miles of the surface of a planet invisible from this distance. Yet some of those beings still consider themselves to be masters of the universe.

It is charming, really.

This perspective... this is one reason I sky the skies (and the internets) for such discoveries. It's also why I love science fiction. This is where I derive my love of astronomy, and sharing it through photos and words is where I derive most of the pleasure.

Enjoy!
Chris

Astro-Porn of the Day: Jupiter Goes BOOM.

Yesterday, Jupiter took one for the team:


Click the image to see the i09 article. I love their "Jupiter saved us!" angle.

Amateur astronomers witnessed the event, and George Hall of Dallas, Texas, even filmed it (the above gif-enated shot is a still from his recording). The light from the explosion lasted between two and four seconds; Dan Petersen described it as "a bright white, two-second-long explosion just inside Jupiter's eastern limb... about 100 miles in diameter."

What smashed into ol' Jove was probably a small asteroid or a comet, similar to previously observed impacts. The best-known Jupiter impacts were when fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter in 1994 and then 2009, leaving behind multiple atmospheric scars visible for weeks to anyone with a medium-sized telescope. Here's a mark from the July 2009 impact:


Click the image to see the NASA site.

Will this impact produce such lingering scars? Time will tell. If you have a telescope, get out there and look! Jupiter is the mega-bright object that dominates the post-midnight sky, standing nearly overhead in the wee hours of the morning.

Chris

Labor Day weekend!

I did not end up going to WorldCon this year, despite initially having planned to do so; the educational track didn't come together as hoped, so I saved my pennies and simplified the start of the semester by not heading to Chicago for the weekend. Which is too bad, because on Sunday night new KU creative-writing prof Kij Johnson won the Hugo Award for best novella for "The Man Who Bridged the Mist"! This is the same story that also recently won the Nebula Award. That's what I call starting one's teaching career with a bang.

Instead, I had a real vacation weekend. This included writing, of course (further progress on The Adventures of Jack and Stella ), tinkering with the vehicles, reading (right now it's the first book of the Harry Potter series and something called, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos ), hanging out with friends, and two more events.

The first, on Saturday, was this year's Greaserama. For the first time at this punk-car-culture event (and its second car-show ever), I drove the hot-rod Newport. Friends Matt and AJ drove over with me. Here we are at the show:



Lots of photos from the show on my website (let me know if you have issues with the gallery - experimenting). At nightfall, we watched a double feature at the Boulevard Drive-in theater where the event is held: "Boulevard Nights" followed by "The Warriors," both circa 1979. Just as the first movie was about to start, everyone fired up their rods' engines and made as much noise as possible. It's not just parental pride when I say the Newport was the loudest bastard out there on Saturday. How do I know? Because not only did Matt and AJ have to back away while I revved the hell out of it, but the roar was actually painful enough that it forced me to cover my ears, and afterward I could hear nothing but a muffled hum for a while: 747s on takeoff have nothing on this beast! I felt really part of the event when one of the car-club members who runs the event, "Weirdo Harold," fell in love with it and invited us to park in their row.

A beautiful (after the rain broke) day out with good friends, awesome cars and bikes, turkey legs and corn dogs, delicious tequila at a double feature in an old-school drive-in... happy-making.

On Sunday, after getting a bunch of work done, I got together with a bunch of friends to celebrate a birthday. Said friends then headed over to the Kansas City Renaissance Festival on Monday, where we practiced archery (only Matt hit the bullseye in 7 shots):



And tested our Mjolnir skills (I rang the bell!):



Then we went to everyone's favorite event at Faire: The Royal Smoker, where ten bucks gets you two drinks, a cigar (or soda), finger-food, and entertainment ranging from baudy humor and music to belly-dance (courtesy chernobylred ). Super-fun weekend!

Yesterday saw another cluster of meetings at work plus class, and same for today. This weekend? I'm going to get SO MUCH WRITING DONE on The Adventures of Jack and Stella , I tell you what!

What'd you do on Labor Day weekend?

Chris