This is my front page. All comments here are screened; if you don't have my email address, you can drop me a line here. If I know your email address, I'll reply by email -- if not, I'll reply to your comment, and then rescreen both your comment and my reply.
It's also got every tag I have -- this is because my current LJ style doesn't include a tag index. (At least half of my participation on LJ is on my Treo. I chose this style because it loads quickly and it's still readable on a small screen.)
I'd tell you more about myself, but that's what my profile -- and the rest of my journal -- are for.
You realize, of course, that he's not really dead. We'll be hearing of Michael Jackson sightings for years to come, and he'll be making regular appearances in tabloids. It'll be the new century's Elvis sighting.
"I saw Michael Jackson at an IHOP!"
"I saw Michael Jackson at Graceland!"
"I saw Michael Jackson at a strip mall!"
"I saw Michael Jackson at the San Francisco Zoo!"
"Oh, yeah? Well I saw Michael Jackson at an elementary school!"
Well, the first one went over well, so here's another. Beneath the cut, you'll find lots of tasteful pictures of beautiful women... but there's more to this post than that. Each one of these women is also a damned fine musician. Each picture is a link to a song on YouTube, so that you can hear her for yourself. The Gothic Metal still predominates, since women are far better represented in that subgenre than in any other subgenre of metal.
(I tried to find pictures of Jo Bench (Bolt Thrower) and Leather Leone (Chastain), but gave up after Google Image Search gave me hundreds of pictures of furniture and jackets. I also decided against including Lita Ford, Doro Pesch, or Joan Jett. Maybe in a retro edition...)
Don LaFontaine August 26, 1940 -- September 1, 2008
For those of you who don't know who Don LaFontaine is... you actually do know who he is; you just don't realize it. Have you ever seen a movie trailer with a deep, gravely voiceover, done by what has to be a seven-foot-tall man who's been smoking cigarettes since early childhood? All too often, beginning with the phrase "in a world...?"
Yyyep. Told ya you know who he was. He's done trailers for about five thousand movies. You almost have to have been under a rock your entire life not to have heard him.
Well, he died two days ago. A damned shame, that. In addition to having such a distinctive set of pipes, he had a wonderful sense of humor. And gods help me, I'm about to put one of those stupid GEICO ads in my LJ, just to prove it.
You'll be missed. You made "in a world" such an instant catchphrase that it became a joke, and then you had the grace to laugh with us about it.
I'm sure that if I really looked, I could find good things that Jesse Helms has done. As it is, though, all I really know about him is that he's a morally uptight bottomfeeder whose political legacy includes a whole lot of racism, a whole lot of homophobia, and lots and lots of tobacco subsidies. I'd love to comment on all the ways he improved the world around him, except that I can only think of one way he's improved the world: by leaving it. Well, he's finally done it. And he chose a very good day to do it, too.
Rot In Pieces, shitbag. If there's a Hell, I hope you spend eternity being topped by a hispanic man and a black man, and I hope they're putting out cigarettes on your back. I think that covers all the bases...
Generally, I try to organize my Con-related posts, so that I'm not spamming you guys with shitloads of "OMFG I had so much fun" posts. Sadly, this year I really can't, so I'm wrapping it all up here. Yes, I'm leaving a lot out. It can't be helped.
I had a couple of chats with a couple of friends I know online, but I only end up seeing once a year. In addition to just having a lot of fun chatting, I got some interesting new insights into [Igor]'s habit of stealing small parts from my shop, before we caught him and told him never to come back. (Try to imagine a grown-up and homeless Linus, from the comic strip Peanuts, stealing from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Now picture him as a long-unemployed electronic engineer.) In addition to this, they discovered a terrific pizza joint, and took me there for lunch. Tony & Alba's. I recommend them highly, and these friends liked them enough that they ate there three times over the weekend. Damned good stuff!
For those of you unfamiliar, Regency Dancing is a lot like square dancing, except it looks a lot more elegant, and the music is much better. I'd never done it before because I have this fear of looking silly and/or incompetent, but I decided that this was a stupid thing to fear, so I did a running tackle on it. It turns out that the fear was needless: it's easy to learn, and a lot of fun. And yes, unless you've been at it for a while, you will look silly, but so will a bunch of people around you, so lighten the hell up.
There was a panel on coping with Drama Llamas, which I attended mostly to pick up pointers just in case I ran into [Brad] and [Janet] again. Of course, I never saw them. Please note that I'm not saying that they weren't in attendance -- only that I never saw them. For all I know, they weren't there. Or just as likely, they avoided me. Or just as likely, they were having so much fun they forgot about me completely, and fate just decided that we didn't need to run into each other. I find I'm hoping for that third option. We've had more than enough of each other already -- why reopen old wounds?
Saw some neat stuff in the Art Show. Todd Lockwood was the Artist Guest of Honor, and his work definitely lived up to the title. Still, I got to check out a bunch of other artists. Some of them were amazing. And of couse, some of them were so bad they made me wonder why I put down my color pencils, because I could do ten times better in my sleep. And then I remember that I put down my color pencils some time after I started getting good on guitar. Go many arts, so little time...
I'm not generally fond of pornography (all that web design work killed whatever appreciation for it I might have had), but I do enjoy watching artists put one toenail over the line between Art-with-a-capital-A and pornography. My favorite examples of this were Sarah Clemens' "Patron Saints of Pornography" (NSFW) series, combining well-done nudity with sly, gutter-level humor (though the quadruple-dragon-nipple-piercing was a little too hardcore for my tastes). Well, those, and a couple of Sandra Santara's centerfolds. Her vision of Odin (NSFW) also dances on that Art/Porn line -- he's certainly arty. He's also discreetly, but unmistakably erect. And hot. (What? I'm straight, I'm not blind!)
I also tried to donate blood. (Every year, there's a blood-van in front of the hotel.) To save both my time, and the time of the warm-hearted vampires with the needles, I asked for a list of disqualifications, and found that it hasn't changed -- I'm still, more or less, permanently on the "please don't donate... ever" list. (I've shot up once. I also have male partners. Either of these alone is a permanent disqualification, no matter how careful I am about it.)
Lest we forget... every Monday morning at BayCon, there's a panel celebrating the lives of the people who've died since the previous BayCon. This panel is hosted by an old friend of mine, and a nice guy to whom I used to sell comics on a regular basis. This year was a bad year: Arthur Clarke, Utah Phillips, Robert Asprin, Steve Gerber (Howard the Duck), and Rory Root, among many others. My con experience is as much wall-to-wall fun as I can cram into it, with the exception of this panel. I can't say I have fun at it, per se, but I feel better for having attended it.
Sadly, there are things I didn't get to do. There always are. I missed Rocky Horror because I was low on sleep, and I missed Eye of Argon because I was on the party floor and forgot about it entirely.
There are also people I didn't get to see. Again, sadly, there always are. This year, they include a couple of friends whom I'd apparently successfully cajoled into showing up, but I never get a chance to say hi. There's also a friend I kept an eye out for, and I didn't remember until after the con that she was in Con Ops. There are others, but if you're reading this, you know who you are.
After the Con, I always feel a hint of sadness as I have to return to the real world. This makes me especially grateful for the blast I'd been having the last few days, and I always swear that next year, I'll have at least as much fun. (And next year, I simply won't bother with the elevators. I was on the sixth floor, and half the time I went to and from my hotel room, it was faster to use the damned stairs.)
Anyway, this concludes my batch of posts for BayCon 2008. I now return you to our regular programming.
Sadly true, all too often. But eventually, the Grim Reaper claims us all, and all the money in the world won't stop him. Nor will it do this witch a bit of good where she's going.
"Leona Helmsley, the cutthroat hotel magnate whose title as the “queen of mean” was sealed during a tax evasion case in which she was quoted as snarling “only little people pay taxes,” died Monday at age 87.
Helmsley died of heart failure at her summer home in Greenwich, Conn., said her publicist, Howard Rubenstein."
Heart failure? Personally, I think this is speculation at best, or an outright fabrication. I'm not prepared to believe she actually had a heart. Not that it matters -- until someone sprinkles her body with holy water, cuts off her head, puts a wooden stake through her chest where her heart should be, and stuffs her mouth with garlic, I'm not prepared to believe she'll stay dead.
Yes, yes, I know. "But she gave so much money to charity!"
Tell that to her poor abused employees. Or her daughter-in-law. Or the higher-ups in her companies that got sacked the day she was released. Or all the people with whom she did business who complained of being stiffed.
Abraham Lincoln once said, "nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Leona Helmsley had power, and as a result, we all know her character.
I've seen several tributes to this guy, but I don't follow Wrestling, so I haven't been paying much attention to this story. So, it took a post from neitherday to make me take notice. She's addressed the subject quite well, already, so I'll confine myself to expressing my shock in four words:
I have all but two of her books; one of them, Fledgling, I will have as soon as it's out in paperback, and the other, Survivor, I will have as soon as I can find a copy. Considering that it's out of print, that may take me a while. I'm sure I've mentioned her before; she was an amazing, insightful writer -- thought-provoking to the point of being frightening.
She will be missed.
(I first saw this in the LJ of nightdog_barks, and didn't want to believe it. The thing is, now it's hit enough official sources that I can't reasonably deny it.)
A friend of mine recently lost someone close to him. He seems to be taking it with far more grace than I did when I was in a similar situation a couple of years ago... but to be honest, I haven't seen him, and I'm a bit worried.
I won't say much about it here -- that's not my place. Right now, I'm just trying to figure out whether he needs his FRIENDS or his SPACE more. Since I'm having no luck with that, I'll settle for pestering the shit out of him until he tells me when and where he needs me to be.
I won't name him here (he can out himself in the comments, if he chooses), but he was there for me when I lost a loved one a couple of years back, and he was one of several people who kept me company (and very tactfully made sure that I was eating) shortly after I admitted that I had to stop using meth again. Now, it's my turn to have the easy job: wishing that I had a magic wand.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
sad