Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Oooops, forgot (you'd think after I double-posted, I could shut up,
but nooooooo)
Pamela--the lemon-scented bat story can be found in....I think the
first incarnation of this topic.  It is quite amusng.  If you have
nothing else to do with the next year or so, you can read the
exceptionally silly backlog of topics we have accrued.  Soon we will
need our own wing of the library.  Thank God for L-space!  And Goddess
help the Librarian(s)!

Ook.  M.
  

    
I just finished a book about Unions and strikes and murders and feuds
in East Tennessee; the next book I picked up to read happened to be
about... Unions and strikes and murders and feuds in W. Virginia. In
both cases, hard-working people getting screwed by Big Business. Pretty
sychronous, what with ConCat getting canceled at, essentially,
corporate level of the hotel. Was the universe trying to tell me
something here, like that pre-MadCon dream I had?

Oh, and Michelle, when I flew into O'Hare, to go to MadCon, I picked
up the rental car and spent fifteen minutes of
what-the-F-is-wrong-with-this-car getting out of the parking lot before
I realized that I wasn't clutching, I was braking.

Lemon scented... no, I *still* do not need that visual.
  

    
Mary Roane~Hugs needed, and received.
  

    
Dan and Mary and all:  Yes indeedy, Kenneth is to play Gilderoy
Lockhart, the self-obsessed Defense Against The Dark Arts teacher.  I
agree that Rickman kind of is perfect for Sirius Black but he is
rocking as Snape.  I could see...hmmm...Ralph Feinnes as Sirius.  That
family makes me weak in the knees.  It has to be someone dark and
brooding.  OK, I'm going to stop Pottering around now.  

JaNell, sucks about ConCat.  sorry.  
  

    
Indeed it does. And what she said.

Miss Mousey (Good Mistress Mousey Accost, I keep hearing it as),

- Steve Brust is very fun to talk to and is not to be trusted.

Y'know, that is an excellent summation of Steve's perverse charm.

I can no longer remember whether, back when he was doing a reading at a
convention I was wearing a programming co-chair hat for, we actually did
laminate the pages of his story and have him do his reading in the hot tub
surrounded by gorgeous babes, or whether at some point we all merely drank
sufficient amounts of various libations that it seems to have happened,
but either way, it was a Very Steve Kind Of Thing.

Get him to do the Steve Brust Good Parts Version of the movie Tombstone
sometime, if you really wanna have some fun. When Mr. Ford and I were in
Las Vegas the time before last, he and Steve and Emma (Bull) and I were
all at the table together, and there was much badinage regarding research
into various aspects of the events of 1881, et cetera.

Ooh. That reminds me. Gotta do a zine. About the old west stuff, and the
research and all that, basically. But first, more metal-bending art. And
then sleep, probably.  But a zine, ere long, must come to pass, if only to
use the title: "Backlit". Made Emma giggle, so it's gotta be OK.  It's
from Mr. Ford's line, back when he was teasing me because I have a crush
on Doc Holliday:

"Wyatt, why is everything we do in the Old West backlit?"
  

    
Kelly - If you can scrape the funds together, it's often a worthwhile
journey to see other thingies en masse.

JaNell - Well, the cemetary photos are from my own personal library of
them, so thank you for the offer, but I'm just going to have to take
them myself. And it's good to know I'm not the only one who forgets how
to work those autos. 

Mary - Thank you. I figure I might as well bombard the topic while I
still can. Normally if I'm awake enough, I'm working on sewing projects
these days. But just now, I trust myself much more on a keyboard than
with a rotary cutter (ouch! <-- she says speaking from experience). And
I don't know if I'll be alive to post after the Friday madness sucks
the life out of me that this past weekend just put in me.

<lioness> - The comment was actually sparked by discussion of the
slave auction at Exoticon. Someone asked whether I would participate. I
explained that I was too broke to buy anyone and too wary to offer
myself as a slave. Steve said something like "You can trust me", and
let's just say I don't hear Neil laugh that hard very often. Still,
note to self re: Tombstone. And zines are always fun. :)

squeaks, who thinks it might be late enough to go to bed now.
  

    
>>so, i don't know if you all remember, but i work at Warner Brothers,
>>progenitors of the Harry Potter phenomenon.

     Adriana, I don't think "progenitors" can be the word you wanted
there.  AOL Time Warner Turner Uncle Tom Cobleigh And All (a division
of the Acme Corporation) is several things to the phenomenon, but they
came afterward.  "Promulgators," maybe?  That's at least a
nonjudgemental word.
  

    
Kelly, Michelle is right. And Thingees are added insurance for "God
I'm sooo bored let's get drunk and rent bad porn" Saturday nights at
Cons, and I have MadCon pics from same to prove it! Maure and
NightWalker are clearly visible...

Dang, if I'd've known that this would happen to ConCat, I'd've found a
way to go to Exoticon...
New Orleans rocks.
  

    
JaNell,   I'm very sorry about ConCat. I know how excited you were
about it. On a lighter note, it wasn't just porn, it was Nothing But
Sex. Walker and Grover stayed to watch the entire thing. Megan fell
asleep like a rock near the end. When we checked out, we had to pay for
the "movie," and the girl behind the counter kind of had that secret
half smirk, so we told her Jeremy from DreamHaven rented it in our
room. I would say he started scowling when we told him, but he was
scowling before. 

I am very happy today. Sometimes I really love my job. This is the
last day of work this week for me, and it's Pajama Day. The entire
elementary school gets to wear pajamas for the day. And then a five day
weekend! I'll have so much time, I won't know what to do with it all! 
  

    
>>I just finished a book about Unions and strikes and murders and
feuds in East Tennessee;<<

*blinks* Reading this the first time thru, I thought it said "a book
about unicorns, strikes and murders and feuds"... and needless to say,
I was confused.  :-) And I'm sorry about the con, JaNell - that really
sucks.

Squeaks - I would have gone to Exoticon, had I known it was last
weekend before the weekend was up. I happened to see RT from Seattle to
New Orleans for $200, and easily could have afforded that,... alas and
oh well.

Lionness - an old west zine would be incredible! And, and, Doc
Holliday? *drools* My dad is big into the old west, and used to take me
off hunting ghost towns, a passion I've kept as an adult. When we
lived in Reno, we'd take off almost every weekend to go see what we
could find,... amazing stuff out there. (I've even been to the tourist
trap known as Tombstone, which was still fun in its own touristy
way,...) I think my favourite ghost town is in middle of nowhere
Nevada, next to the almost ghost town of Ione. It's a park, because
they discovered icthyosaurs (sp) there - a whole huge bed of their
bones, almost an elephant (well, icthyosaur) graveyard type of fossil
bed. There were so many that they didn't pull all of them out, just
resined them over and a building on top, so you can experiance a real
life dino dig,...  plus a nicely preserved ghost town on top of that. I
should scan in ghost town pictures, some time,...

Adriana - how very cool for getting the extra day off; some friends
are glad they could help you out there. (I plan on contributing to the
films take late late late tomorrow night. Or, I suppose, tonight, since
it's the next day, even if I can't sleep,...)
-Kelly, going to try to sleep again,...
  

    
Maure~I don't know about excited, exhausted is more like it! A very
few of us worked very hard all year, with the most bizarre setbacks -
Neil helped us with one of them, actually - and then... *whimper* 
Hush up with your five day weekend.

Nothing But Sex~I could have done w/o the metal nail decals in that
one scene, Ouch! And it's amazing what you learn about people, watching
porn with them...

Jeremy was a hoot, and if it's his Con in Minneapolis that Michelle is
talking about, it sure looks to be worth going to.

Grover, now, who would have thought that someone working for the CBLDF
would have to have so much explained to him?

(By the way, y'all, Maure and her sister are gorgeous.)

Kelly~ "unicorns, strikes and murders and feuds"
OK, who here reads *too much* fantasy?
(grin)
  

    
Kelly~Totally mised the dino dig bit. I want to go out there so
badly... 
One of the things my husband and I have in common is a love of digging
up stuff, and poking it, and such. There's a prehistoric animal dig,
preserved much the way you describe, not far up the road from Cam's
Townsend dig (http://chad-c.dyndns.org/). Which they haven't thrown him
out of yet, thankfully, although he's just doing paperwork at this
point. The end date for the dig follow-up is the end of the year, and
this time they mean it. Maybe.
  

    
JaNell -- I like King's writings.  They're a different sort of thing
than, say, Pynchon, but it flows and it entertains and, in the case of
most of the stuff he's written since the accident, it moves me.  Is
Potter really on that level?  If so, I may enjoy it after all.
     Sorry to hear about ConCat; there's no way to raise $3.2k?
  

    
Dan Guy~Harry Potter is enjoyable; so much so that I mainlined all of
'em over Labor Day weekend.

As for raising the money...
We're all tapped out, and even draining the remainder of my accident
settlement wouldn't have been enough. Maybe if even half of the people
planning to come had pre-registered... *sigh*.
Calls were made. It was just not doable, on such short notice. We're
unfunded, Not-For-Profit status; even us Board Members pay to get in.

We're planning on regrouping, though. Ziggy & I will be going to more
cons, networking; KASFA (Knoxville Area Science Fiction Association)
will be working on other projects, as well as revamping ConCat; and
we'll be working with some of the other groups in town, like the local
Goth crowd (http://easttngothic.proboards.com/index.cgi) to bring some
life back into Knoxville. People forget that there's more here than
football.
  

    
JaNell: sorry to hear your con folded. 

I'm guessing this year is going to be tough for a lot of the smaller
and mid-sized fan run conventions (as opposed to, say, Cretin cons),
what with folks losing their jobs left right and centre, and also being
wary of travelling. I'm hoping it evens out by MediaWest (huge fanzine
con in Michigan every Memorial Day Week-end), but even if only half of
M*WC shows up, that's still over 500 participants...

Me, I have no fear of travelling. I do, however, have fear of not
making rent. Hence skipping Windycon and Capricon this year, tho I'm
gonna try for World Horror Con, since last time it was in Chicago area
(I think it was actually out in "Where the hell is the city? Oh wait,
isn't there an IKEA near here?" otherwise known as The [ DA DA DA DUUUU
M] Dreaded Suburbs) I couldn't afford it then either, and just went to
visit with friends on Sunday.

I actually need to scope out local media cons, to see if I can net
some interviews to snag some extra income this winter.... Pray for me!
  

    
WHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA...."AOL Time Warner Turner Uncle Tom Cobleigh And
All (a division of the Acme Corporation)" Mr. Ford, you are so right. 
I stand deeply corrected.  working for The Man has turned my head to
goo. 
  

    
Tara~Yes, people would rather pay $85 for a shot at seeing one of
dozens of guests through the maddening crowds at one of the bigger Cons
than pay $35 to be able to meet and talk with only a few...
<shrug>
Back to how you want to spend your day, I guess.
One of our panels this year was "The Future of Small Cons, and Do They
Have One?"

Re: The writing; have you tried the looking through want ads in
Inscriptions (http://www.inscriptionsmagazine.com)? I'm not sure what
all kinds of writing you do, but they're a pretty good source and well
worth the money.
One of the trips a group of us is planning is to go to World Horror,
so I might meet you there.

Dern that slippery Adriana!
  

    
Squeaks: Which con did you mean, regarding the gathering of Thingie?. 
I'm hoping to try to go a-stalkin' next year, if there's somewhere
with a large gathering of Thingies.  

JaNell:  I agree with Tara regarding the trouble all sorts of small
venues are probably having this year.  I'm so sorry.  Can I be totally
lazy and ask you where/when World Horror is going to be?

Mary: Thanks much for the heads-up on the location of the lemon bats
story, but there's no way I'm going to have time to go back and read
that topic.  Things is nuts.

Anybody want to take pity on me?

Also: Humanities fest people--did Neil's beard make it to Chicago or
not?  Pictures?
  

    
>Thingie?. 

No s.  Double punctuation.  Missing bits and leftover pieces.

Is it dementia or just giddy carelessness?
  

    
>the gathering of Thingie

Are we becoming a group mind, maybe?
  

    
>> Kelly~ "unicorns, strikes and murders and feuds"
OK, who here reads *too much* fantasy?<<


*chuckle* I believe the last fantasy I read, of that genre, was many
years ago - Eddings, maybe? I'm so high brow elite nowdays *rolls
eyes*,... (my current reading list: Guns, Germs and Steel - a bit at a
time, since it's written in an annoying fashion -, a book on
advertising and consumerism, a book/textbook for poetry writing, and
The History of Food).

And yes, the ichthyosaur dig is really neat, even tho they don't
actually let you dig. Mars wants to go to Montana some time, out to the
Badlands,... that should be fun.  :-) (Well, he'd really like to go to
Patagonia, but I don't see that in our near future.)

-Kelly
  

    
Yeeks. Kelli, I read that as "I'm so high brow elite nowdays *trolls eyes*"

Ack!

Today's bookstore score was a volume entitled ATLANTIS IN WISCONSIN by Frank
Joseph. [Galde Press, Inc.  ISBN: 1-880090-12-0]  It's amusing. However,
if everything in it is as... questionable as his geology and glacial
geography, then it really ought to be shelved under Possibly Inadvertent
Fiction.  An example will suffice.

Here's the actual true info about Devil's Lake, in Wisconsin.  It's a
spring-fed lake in what used to be a short section of the bed of an old
river.  When the Wisconsin Glacier came along about fifteen thousand
years ago, it didn't cover the entire area, but instead two lobes of the
glacier stretched out like pincers, pushing their dust-ruffle of
kicked-up rocks in front of them, and the two pincer lobes almost closed
on the spot that is now the lake. Almost, but not quite. Then, when the
glacier retreated and melted, the dust-ruffle of boulders and stuff
stayed at the furthest points of advance. (Those mounds of rocks and
debris, which are also kind of like the foamy stuff pushed along by an
advancing wave on the shore, are called glacial moraines -- sorry if I
sound like a Little Golden Book of Glacial Geography, here, but I love
this stuff, and I don't assume everybody knows it, so if you do already
know it, please forgive this long explanation.) So since the pincers
didn't quite close, and since they were coming together from above and
below and following the river valley, which was walled in quartzite
ridges, the space between them where they didn't quite close is now a
lake, with quartzite bluff walls on two opposing sides, and with huge
rockpiles (those moraines) at each end. 

The rockpiles are amazing. (I think I rhapsodized about them
someplace on the WELL a while back. Standing at their feet and looking up
at this huge pile of talus, which is poised at the very angle of repose,
which for sharp quartzite boulders the sze of desks and cars is pretty
angular indeed, I had a deep shiver of awe hit me when I realized that
this huge pile was the merest fringe on the hem of what had been
thousands of feet of ice above where I was standing....)






More basic info:
http://www.saukcounty.com/devils.htm


Cool techie glacial geology/geography info:
http://www.uwmc.uwc.edu/geography/baraboo/baraboo.htm

Hiking trail and park map here:
http://www.devilslakewisconsin.com/Print_trail_map.htm
and the park map shows the layout of the lake and the bluffs and the
talus piles, although I couldn't find a really good map anyplace. But the
trail descriptions and ratings will give some idea of how fierce some of
the bluffs and rockpiles are. When the Potholes trail, for example, says
"distance .3 miles, hiking time 2 hours," they ain't kidding.

And nearby Parfrey's Glen really is a magical site, as they say.
Definitely elf turf. Very cool indeed.  So is all of the Driftless Area,
which as the site says "remained, almost inexplicably, unglaciated
throughout the Ice Age, even as surrounding areas were overrun by ice
several times in the past 2 million years."  (Well, of course it did. Fae
have ways of keeping importunate glaciers from trompling stuff, if they
wish. [Gleeful cackle from the Lioness, as she contemplates various other
notes for the 1881 project....])

Oh, I was going to tell you what ATLANTIS IN WISCONSIN said about the
lake.  Here:

"[The lake] radiates beauty of a very unusual kind. Although only three
miles across, it is almost completely surrounded by high cliffs of purple
quartzite, honeycombed with caves and adorned with the abstractly
fashioned sculpture of eons.  High trails wind through pine woods
encircling the water and wander off into additional hundreds of acres of
untouched forest.  Some of the views, particularly toward the north, are
so spectacular, they are more characteristic of Colorado than
Wisconsin.  Dusk suffuses the site with a singular enchantment, as the
purple quartzite cliffs glow in the direct rays of the setting
sun.  Although the lake appears to have been created by a colossal
meteorite impact, volcanic forces, or some such violent geologic action,
scholars believe it is the remnant of a vast sea that covered the entire
state seven million years ago."
                -- AIW, page 113

Uh, not quite. There are cliffs, yes, but it's two ridges of bluffs and
two rockpiles....  And actually, I think the glacial history explanation
is more interesting than the lukewarm leftovers of the
seven-million-year-old lake in that placid sentence. Not to mention the
fact that, well, glaciers *are* violent geologic action.  Yes, they're in
slow motion -- but slow power is still power, and whether the destructing
and building takes place in an hour or an eon, it's still powerful
change.

[Um, I suppose it's obvious that I get passionately involved in the
geological background of some of my research and writing
projects....  I'll go sit quietly on a moraine now and ponder things some
more. But I do encourage people to see Devil's Lake if they get the
chance, and definitely consider hiking some of the trails if you can.]
  

    
On the way to Chattanooga from Knoxville, there's The Lost Sea
(http://www.monroecounty.com/lost.html).
  

    
Whoa!!  That is intense.

I like this page.  It'd make good wallpaper....

http://www.thelostsea.com/
  

    

Whoa, Lioness!!  Fabulous images.  Now I want to see that!  Is purple
quartzite anything like amethyst?

And, if I could have a pseud in this conference, I'd surely choose
"dust-ruffle of kicked-up rocks."