Tuesday,
March 18, 2008

First off, an announcement

A belated but heartfelt birthday wish for my beloved brother Michael, whose birthday was on Saturday. I remembered, darlin', and I meant to call you, but Lyndon's tooth issues kinda took up all available processing cycles. A card is forthcoming!

My imaginary geek boyfriend is back

Yes, a new episode of The Big Bang Theory was broadcast last night, and Melanie was a very, VERY happy camper. Just seeing this picture on the website had me rolling on the floor.

I'm also increasingly amused by the general conclusion that Sheldon is bat-crap crazy, to quote Leonard. What he is is physically 26-27, intellectially 250, and emotionally 10. And a bratty 10 at that. It's what happens when you spend puberty with your intellectual age cohort rather than your emotional age cohort.

I don't particularly care -- I still think he's cute as a bug in a rug.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, RIP

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, one of the visionaries of science fiction, the conceptual developer of the communications satellite and a hell of a nice man died today in his home in Sri Lanka at the age of 90. While he wasn't one of my early influences (those would be Madeline L'Engle, Robert Heinlein and Kurt Vonnegut -- and you wonder why I'm so obsessed with time travel stories) I truly enjoyed and admired Sir Arthur's work over the years, and reading the final scene of Childhood's End is one of my most iconic memories.

Back when we were living in Montreal and I was working as guest liaison for Con*Cept, we looked into arranging an interview with him via a satellite video linkup to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the communications satellite. As it turned out, he was starting to suffer more strongly from his post-polio complications and didn't really have the energy to participate, but his brother Fred called me to explain and was kind enough to pass along Sir Arthur's best wishes for the con. As a thank you, we created a gigantic get well card and had all the con attendees sign it, then sent it to Sri Lanka -- I found out later that it became part of a museum collection of cards, letters and other communiques he'd received over the years. Wow.

Ad astra, sir, and may you find new realms to explore.

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