Egyptian artifact

Originally uploaded by slushgod.

On Friday, I met up with friends David Barr Kirtley and Amy Tibbetts in Manhattan for a little museum action.  We met up outside Penn Station, then trekked over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art via subway.  In the subway, we had a little adventure, as Dave and I tried to figure out our subway maps; a moment of indecision kept us from boarding the train we should have taken immediately (the C train), so we needlessly changed trains a few times, but in the end, we arrived where we’d originally intended.  The stop left us off near the entrance of Central Park, and the museum is on the other side of the park, so we took a leisurely stroll through the park to get there. 

The museum was pretty awesome.  I didn’t realize all of what was at the Met, or else I might have gone there earlier.  For some reason, I thought it was just paintings.  In fact, there’s so much other than paintings, we didn’t even get around to really seeing any.  Well, except for when Dave speed-walked us through a wing of paintings on our way to another exhibit, so we didn’t really get a chance to stop and look at them.  Though Dave seemed intent on doing a lot of speed-walking; for a smart guy, he displayed surprisingly little tolerance for a museum pace which would actually, you know, allow you to appreciate the artifacts and perhaps learn something.  I suppose we’re just lucky that no one has listened to his idea of making a museum in which you can rollerblade or jog through it.  Well, that might be kind of cool, actually; it’s got to be more interesting than rollerblading or jogging around the block.

One instance of our speed-walking was right at the very start as we went through the Egyptian exhibit, though we at least had a good reason: we were looking for the bathrooms.  However, our pace did not deter me from snapping some pictures along the way (click on the above picture to see the complete photoset).  You’re not allowed to use a flash in the museum, because the light can damage the artifacts apparently, but I got some great pictures anyway.  Sadly, I didn’t check my camera’s batteries, and I quickly ran out of power, and the stupid gift shop doesn’t sell batteries (no doubt because they want you to buy their crappy disposable cameras).  Later, I was thinking that I should have asked other museum-goers with cameras if they had any batteries to spare, but I didn’t, so these few pics are all the evidence I have of my trip.

What I really would have liked to photograph was some of the cool armor and weapons we got to see.  (And if I was thinking, I would have tried to photograph the informational plaques beside each of the objects I took pictures of.)  Oh, well; next time.  Truth be told, there’s so much to see at the Met that you can’t see it all in one day anyway, so it’s just another excuse to go back. 

After the museum, we headed out to dinner with Andrea Kail (who just made her first fiction sale, to Fantasy Magazine), Dave’s Odyssey classmate Rob Bland, and Carol Pinchefsky and her husband, Peter.

Things learned on Friday: (1a) tattoos located on the lower back are known as “tramp stamps”; (1b) when a woman’s g-string is visible above the top of her pants, that is called a “whale tail”; (2) the way to impress Hollywood moguls is to drop by their studios with your optionable stories in hand, making a grand entrance on top of a papier mache dragon; (3) museum gift shops are evil.

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First: yes, I’m still going.

Why am I selling my membership then? Because I just scored a press pass via SCIFI.com.

I bought my membership a while ago, for, I think $150. So I’d be happy to sell it for that amount, just to get my money back. Seems like a good deal since memberships are now $200. If you’re interested, please email me privately at johnjosephadams@gmailNOSPAM.com rather than responding in the comments (be sure to delete the NOSPAM part).

My preferred method of payment would be paypal. Hugo voting rights have already been used up (obviously, since the deadline has passed), but whatever else it entitles you to is probably still active (site selection, and I don’t know what else).

UPDATE: Membership sold!

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Sybil’s Garage, a zine put out occasionally by publisher/editor Matthew Kressel is once again open for submissions:

Sybil’s Garage will be opening for submissions for our 4th issue on September 4th, 2006.   What we’re looking for hasn’t changed all that much.  We accept all works of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, etc.), but we have a tendency to prefer the strange. Interpret that as you will, or seek out our previous issues to see what we mean. But we’re a friendly bunch; if you’re not sure, please send it our way anyway.

Stories should be no greater than 5000 words. We will also look at non-fiction, book & film reviews, and poetry.

Also, our submission process has changed.  We now have an online submission form.  A link to that form will be made available on September 4th.

Full guidelines available here.

We look forward to reading your submissions!

It’s a small zine, but it’s published some quality stuff, and has a nice, quirky sensibility about it.  Submit something, why don’tcha?

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So, I received the first submission to the Shimmer special pirate issue today. And only 115 days early! Haven’t read it yet, and I don’t know who it’s from since the Shimmery folk at Shimmer have a Submissions Wrangler who strips all manuscripts of identifying material. I’m looking forward to checking it out, but don’t let that encourage you all to submit now (instead of, you know, during the submission period).

Also arriving today, and bringing considerable glee, were two review books I’ve eagerly been anticipating: Wings to the Kingdom by Cherie Priest, and The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi. Gah, too much good stuff to read! (I know, I know–what a terrible problem to have.)

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On Tuesday night, I attended an event called “An Evening With Harry, Carrie & Garp” at Radio City Music Hall, which was a benefit reading by J.K. Rowling (Harry), Stephen King (Carrie), and John Irving (Garp).  The event was put on to benefit The Haven Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. 

I was up in the cheap seats; in fact, I was just about as far away from the stage as you can be and still be inside Radio City (there was one row behind me).  Stephen King read his story “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan” (which is itself part of the story “The Body,” which was filmed as Stand By Me).  If you saw the movie, you might remember it: it’s the story about the fat kid at the pie eating contest.  It’s a great story to read live, because of all the groans (because it’s gross) and laughs (because gross can be funny) it provokes from the audience.

J.K. Rowling read a bit from the latest Potter book; the section she read had Harry going back in time to witness Tom Riddle’s acceptance into Hogwarts.  John Irving read part of his novel A Prayer for Owen Meany.  Rowling did a great job with her reading; she was very natural and confident, and the portion she read worked fine for me, even though I haven’t read the books, so it was a good selection.  Irving’s reading was good as well, though it was a bit awkward hearing him do a falsetto voice for Owen Meaney; it was really necessary considering Owen’s character, but Irving didn’t quite pull it off — it was a bit too hammy for my liking.  The excerpt he read was entertaining, but slight; I know the book’s much more profound than the bit he read, but I guess he wanted to go with something more light and amusing. 

Whoopi Goldberg did the primary introduction to the event, and a bunch of other “surprise guest” presenters introduced the authors themselves.  Whoopi was pretty lame; it was clear she hadn’t even read the script before getting up to the podium.  She was reading it off the teleprompter, but kept stumbling over her lines, and even mocked the script at one point after reading something clunky (and immediately afterward, she proceeded to skip ahead a bit).  Whoopi claimed to have read every one of the authors’ books, so I guess that’s why she was there.

Kathy Bates was there to introduce Stephen King, appropriate since she’s his “#1 Fan.”  Andre Braugher introduced John Irving; why, I don’t know.  I guess they couldn’t get someone from one of his movies?  Jon Stewart introduced J.K. Rowling, which also didn’t make much sense, but he was funny and charming, even if he did recycle a joke about Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant from the previous night’s The Daily Show.

After the readings were done, there was a brief Q&A period, MCed by Soledad O’Brian.  Rowling got some good questions by detail-obsessed fans, but King’s and Irving’s questions were all pretty stock.  King’s in particular were lame.  He got “What scares you?” and “How do you write those crazy stories (without being demented yourself)?”  Yeah, like Stephen King has never heard *those* questions before.  Soledad claimed that they had received over 1000 questions for the panel (asked in advance, via email by ticketholders); if those were the best they got, I’d hate to see what the other ones were like. 

My only real complaint about the event though was the sound; maybe it was just because I was sitting so freaking far away, but I had a hard time hearing some of the authors and presenters at times.  There wasn’t much amplification going on, it seemed.  Oh, and I wished that the authors had read something new or unpublished–something from a forthcoming work, rather than stuff already in print. 

But, overall, a fun event, for a worthy cause.  And as Stephen King pointed out: it’s pretty cool to have filled Radio City Music Hall not with the promise of guitars, but with the promise of words.

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David Louis Edelman’s recent blog post about speed limits reminded me to blog about my own recent experience with speed limits which was not at all happy-making.

Some time in May, I was driving my grandfather’s car because mine was in the shop. I get pulled over for speeding: 45 in a 25. But the best part was, my grandfather’s registration somehow expired, so I got a ticket for that too, plus the cop towed the car. He was a real ball-buster, this guy. For instance, if he had written me up for 19 mph over the limit, my ticket would have been $95 less. But because he wrote it for 20, the ticket is $200. Cops like this guy are why even law-abiding citizens hate cops sometimes.

Luckily, it didn’t cause a major transportation issue–I was actually working at the time, going to the post office to pick up the mail. So Gordon just came and picked me up, then gave me a ride home later, and I picked up my own car from the shop.

I didn’t even realize that stretch of road had a 25 mph limit; I didn’t even realize I was speeding. Here’s where Edelman’s a national database of speed limit information would have come in handy.

So far, all of this sucked pretty majorly, but there’s more. In the end, this turned out to be like a eight hundred dollar ticket. It was $200 for speeding, $54 for the expired registration. And I didn’t realize that they towing company was charging $35 per day for “storage,” so the car was sitting there a couple days. By the time I pick it up, it cost me $310 to get it out. And then I had to have them tow it all the way from Union City to Perth Amboy (home, 27 miles, another $175) because I couldn’t get the registration sorted out right away, and I figured by the time I waded through the red tape, it would be cheaper just to have them tow it here, rather than leave it there at $35 a day. (See, because you can’t just drive it out of the lot unless you get the registration fixed; it’s illegal for them to release it to you without a valid registration, and you can’t park an unregistered car on the street either, so I couldn’t get them to tow it to a parking space.)

And then there’s tow truck place itself. It was like a scene out of a horror novel. The bathroom was broken, and it REEKED of piss and god knows what. The driver was this giantic behemoth who looked like he didn’t even need a tow truck–he could just pull the cars with his bare hands. Kind of a scary dude. Plus he starts jabbering away in some strange language. It was Russian or some Eastern European language, I guess. His last name was something -vich. His demeanor was softened somewhat by the fact that his five-year-old kid was wandering around the office. If it wasn’t for the kid, there would have been no witnesses, and the guy could have just murdered me and took my cash and no one would have known. See, he only takes cash, and he knew I had to bring him like $500. Would have been an easy set up for a mugging.

But anyway, first, I talked to the guy on the phone, told him I’d be there in an hour. I’m there right on time, and he’s not there. No one is there. I call him; he’s out on a job. Says I should have called before I came over. I said I did call. So I have to wait like a half hour for him to come down there and take all my money. Then, he couldn’t tow it right then. He said he’d do it later that night, or the next day. So he didn’t do it that night, so I had to rearrange my work schedule so that I could be home when the tow arrived. And it took all day for them to get it over here.

So, a pretty wretched adventure all around, wouldn’t you say?

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And speaking of Camera Obscura… I got my first piece of reviewer fan mail the other day. Well, not so much fan mail, as mail to point out a misconception on my part. You can read it (and other letters) at IGMS’s Letters to the Editor column. Do feel free to drop them a line to say how wonderful I am.

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On her blog, Deanna Hoak was talking about a plug-in she can use to cross-post between her blog and her LJ. Now that sounds pretty handy. Does anyone know of a plug-in I could get for Movable Type that does something like that for a MySpace blog? I really never update my MySpace blog; I’d like it to be active, but I’m just too lazy to update both places.

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For those of you who missed the premiere of the new SCI FI show, Eureka, you can watch the entire two-hour pilot episode online at SCIFI.com’s new SCI FI Pulse component.

And while you’re there, be sure to check out another pilot SCI FI is offering online: The Amazing Screw-On Head, which is based on the comic by Hellboy-creator Mike Mignola. As much as I liked Eureka, I think this one’s even better and more fun, and probably has more potential. But the thing is, Screw-On Head doesn’t premiere on SCI FI until July 27, so this SCI FI Pulse availablity is kind of a test run for the show. Go watch it, then take the brief survey afterward, letting SCI FI know what you think. The survey results will be used to help determine whether or not to greenlight the show as a series.

But even if you don’t have any interest in watching it, I say go there and vote for the show positively, because even if it’s not your thing, letting SCI FI know that you want intelligent, well-written shows like this one (rather than rehashes of Mansquito) is a good thing. If we keep telling them that, maybe they’ll start listening. It seems that they’re already on the right track as of late, first with Battlestar Galactica, and now with Eureka and Screw-On Head (not to mention that the forthcoming Dresden Files looks promising as well), so let’s do what we can to convince them that there is an audience for a more sophisticated SF show on their network.

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Apparently, there’s a new spoof film of SNAKES ON A PLANE called CATS ON A PLANE, which is set to debut on MySpace at 10PM tonight (Tuesday). F&SF author Jim Young has been spreading the word, as the filmmakers are friends of his out in La-La land.

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