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(I have represented white pieces with capital letters, following the ordinary convention instead of the convention I used in the past.)
Sumana: it's originally Doppelgänger. My old New Cassell's claims it comes from parts meaning "double-goer".
You get similar transliteration problems in names like Schroeder, Schaefer, and Schoen. (Did you know that Pat Schroeder and Bruce Lehman were both there in the room when Jack Valenti gave his "Boston strangler" testimony?)
Leonard, were you thinking
You always play the madman poets
(He stood upon the bridge alone)vinyl vision grungy bands
(and Fire and Shadow both defied;)you never know who's still awake
(his staff was broken on the stone,)you never know who un...der...stands.
(in Khazad-dûm his wis...dom...died!)
or maybe
So tonight I turned your station on
(He stood upon the bridge alone)just so I'd be understood
(and Fire and Shadow both defied;)instead another voice said I was
(his staff was broken on the stone,)just too late and just no good.
(in Khazad-dûm his wis...dom...died!)
I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond to get a new beard trimmer, because I managed to burn out my old trimmer by leaving it on while it was plugged in. I use a cheap Conair trimmer, which seems to work well. (I took a full-calendar-year vacation from cutting my facial hair at all, and there is no co-incidence in the fact that my first Vitanuova diary entry reported on my getting my beard cut.) On my way there, I stopped for the lunch buffet at India Garden. It still seems to me that lunch buffets are a better deal for me than for other people, because I eat so much.
With the beard trimmer having been obtained, and ablative absolutes aplenty having been employed, I took a bus or two to Borderlands Books on Valencia, where Rudy Rucker was reading. Rucker is best-known to me as the author of Infinity and the Mind, and is a well-beloved and well-respected fiction and non-fiction writer in the geek world. I often get his oeuvre (I should say his opera) mixed up with that of Clifford Pickover; I forgot, for instance, which of them wrote Time: A Traveler's Guide (it was Pickover).
I didn't actually hear Rucker reading, but I did hear him answer questions from his fans. He seemed very respectful of them and of their questions.
At the reading, I ran into Lisa Rein and Cory, and also Kragen. Kragen and I talked for a while, and then we went by to see the new pirate store at 826 Valencia. (Eye patches, pirate hats, whittled canes, ornate spyglasses, a sextant which turns out to be a quadrant rather than a sextant, Jolly Roger flags, maps, lemons and limes, etc.)
In the evening, I walked over to the Castro to hear a series of readings which included Cory (with his new book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which I read the night before) and surly media nerd (and Aeneid fan) Annalee Newitz, who was actually curious why I called her the Cumaean Sybil just under a year ago. (I owe her a good answer.)
Annalee got up on stage to read from her Techsploitation columns and suggested that she could use a "geek cheer".
There was a famous software patent protest chant from around 1991 which included counting in hex, but I can't find it at the moment. (Or maybe it was a "Free Dmitry" chant -- all I remember is that it came from Boston and involved counting on beyond 9. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about?)
So I suggest -- for future reference --
Oh,
2, 4, 6, 8, A, C, E,
Eight hex cheers for Annalee!
Several of us had dinner at the Bagdad Cafe, and then Ren had a housewarming party at his place in the Lower Haight.
Contact: Seth David Schoen
