Saturday
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.
