Some guy named Brian Penny decided that he needed to have an article about himself in Wikipedia, so he attempted to pump himself up, then create and pad an article about himself. It's been deleted so often that we have "salted" his very name to make such puffery harder to repeat ( Read more... )

William Dunbar. 1465-1520 ( Read more... )

Science fiction is unique in that it is a literary genre almost invariably judged by ignorant people (including critics) unaware of the contents of the actual genre, but instead vaguely and a-historically confusing it with a hodgepodge of hazy memories of comic strips, cartoons, films and TV shows (many of them defunct and disdained within the ( Read more... )

Remembering Jim Dandy Lowrey, 1922-1963. Younger son who picked cotton in the summer and dropped out of high school, left home after an inconvenient accident, banged around the country and ended up out West, did a stint in the C.C.C., joined the Army and then went A.W.O.L., ended up working in a defense plant (under the name of "Lucky Brocius ( Read more... )

Any system that claims that no protection is the same as equal protection is really a system for protecting the privileged. - Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Well-meaning, smugly self-congratulatory college-educated upper-middle-class intellectuals at a WisCon? Gee, that NEVER happens....

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/londoners-diary/rachel-johnson-in-the-grip-of-wikipedias-orange-mike-8613948.html>Or so reports the Evening London Standard of this evening.

I've just gotten word that an interview with parkingprincessmy beloved and I was broadcast on the BBC World Service programme Outlook last night. Due to the State's filter, I can't listen to it (streaming media blocked); but here's the URL http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p017cq6l

I wake up late and bleary a little before 10:00 a.m. local time (9:00 a.m. my body's time); but discover there's no programming until 11:00; and nothing I want to attend until 1:00 p.m. I type and post the first installment of this series, and head for the con suite. The Krispy Kreme donuts are all gone, but I grab some cereal and milk, and a few ( Read more... )

(For those of you who don't know the story: I was membership #3 at the first Chattacon, which was attended by less than 100 people; so when I moved from Nashville to Milwaukee, I vowed not to break my streak. For probably a decade now, I'm the only person left who has attended every single one. parkingprincess (Cicatrice) understands, and has occasionally come ( Read more... )