Why?!! Why must the little things die?

Dammit! I hate it when people I respect kick the bucket and I don't find out about it for weeks.

I just found out singer Laura Branigan died back in late August. And once again, I had to learn of the death from reading about it at The Lipstick Librarian's blog--the same blog where I first saw Rick James died. What kind of news junkie am I, anyway? A shitty one, evidently.

Oh, I could tell you who's just been cast in the Dukes of Hazzard movie, or what high-pitched singing cartoon rodent trio are next up to get the live action treatment, Garfield style, but when it comes to scanning the obits I'm not hitting the mark.

This actually is nothing new for me. For seven years straight, from mid-highschool through college, I used to attend a three week summer camp where we were so busy and had so little access to media that we were practically in a news blackout. (Sounds like a cult, I know, but I assure you we were just really busy writing and producing a three act musical comedy. Also, if you have a camp full of forty-plus hormone-raged teenagers and don't keep them as busy as possible at all times, their minds start to wander to things you don't want them doing.) Invariably, some huge celebrity would die or something big would happen in the world during those three weeks and none of us would know about it until December when we'd see it in Year in Review retrospectives.

Of course, I also labored under the mistaken belief that Howard Cossell had died a couple years before he actually did due to my college yearbook having listed him among the deceased for that year. At the time, I assumed he must have died during camp, as I'd not heard of it before. Then, when the man actually died, a full two years later, it came as a shock yet again. (I think that yearbook staff is now working for CBS news.)

As to Laura Branigan, I have a fondness for her and her music that runs pretty deep. Her song Self Control came out around the same time I really started to become aware of popular music and how lyrics actually meant something. Not that I understood what hers meant entirely, but there was something about her living among the creatures of the night and not being able to control herself as a result that I knew was probably not something that I should like, but somehow did. (Once again, you gotta keep kids busy or their minds start to wander.) There was just something about that song that pressed dark little buttons inside me. I probably only saw the video once or twice, but I was definitely a fan of hers from then on.

I have now gone and put on my cassette copy of the Self Control album in honor of the late Ms. Branigan.

Computer Illiterates of the Serengeti Plains

I've written about computer illiterates at the "liberry" before. It's a subject that frankly never gets old for me because human ignorance is an amazing and varied field of study the depths of which will never be fully mapped.

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand that there are people in the world who either don't know how to use computers, don't want to know how to use computers, or may be coming in to the library to try them out for the first time. That's cool. I grok it. And the library is not a bad environment for such a learning venture, particularly if the computer-illiterate patron calls ahead and takes advantage of the FREE computer tutorials one of our savvy library friends offers. However, as a 32 year old guy who has been around computers of one sort or another since age 6 and who was actively using the internet a full five years before Al Gore's invention became popular with the rest of the country, it's still a little disconcerting to me when someone walks in cold and asks "Do you have the inta-net here?"

A prime example of this sort of thing can be found in one of our inactive Rogues, Mr. Little Stupid. Like his near namesake, Mr. Big Stupid, Mr. Little Stupid was only interested in coming in the library to use our computers. Unlike his near-namesake, however, Mr. Little Stupid had no idea how to do so.

Three years back, in he walked, a small, balding, skinny, bespectacled guy wearing overalls and carrying a Girl Scouts of America binder. He asked to use a computer, signed the clip-board and let me log him onto one just like any other patron might. I didn't even realize this man was completely without clue until later when I logged someone else on and noticed that he was still staring blankly at the Windows Desktop, exactly as he had been when I'd logged him on 20 minutes before.

"Uh, do you need some help?" I asked him.

Turns out, Mr. Little Stupid was trying to find some poetry, specifically some poetry written either by or for one of the teenage victims of the Columbine shootings in Colorado, (he wasn't sure which). I assumed by his binder that he was working on some sort of project for a Girl Scout troop and further assumed that his wife must have sent him to the library to research it for her troop. I was wrong.

Okay, so he didn't know how to get on the internet. Fine. That's fine. You can't know what to do if you've never done it before, even if the program you're seeking to use is helpfully named INTERNET EXPLORER and not, say, ASSHAT EXPLORER.

So I brought up Internet Explorer for him then asked for the name of the poet/subject he wanted. I then brought up Google and did a search for the poet, Rachel Joy Scott, which immediately brought up her page. I showed Mr. Little Stupid how to click on the link and bring it up. I then even wrote down the address of the page for him and showed him the blank in which to type it should he want to bring it up in the future. After a few questions about page navigation, he seemed pretty comfortable with everything, so I left him to it.

The following day, Mr. Little Stupid was back. He signed the clip-board, I logged him on and twenty minutes later he was still sitting there staring at the Windows desktop. It was like someone had rebooted his brain and lost all my programming from the day before. He'd completely Mementoed and had NO idea what to do. Most folks faced with that scenario would have come up to ask for help. Not Mr. Little Stupid. He just sat there staring at the screen until I discovered his predicament. Still, I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt that he wasn't really a complete moron.

Once again, I had to show him everything that I had shown him the previous day.  The only shortcut I had was that he still had the website address written down, so I was able to forego the Google search. Still, from his reaction, it was like I was showing him something completely new.  He reacted to the page's appearance like he'd never seen it before. I had to question whether or not this was even the same guy, but the Girl Scout binder and my hand-writing in it gave him away.

Day three: Mr. Little Stupid returned and it was an exact repeat of day two, except this time I knew he had probably rebooted again so I skipped the inevitable 20 minute desktop-staring-session in favor of just loading the Rachel Scott page for him when I logged him on. This time I also showed him how to print the poems he found there, in case he wanted to take them home and enjoy them at his leisure. I was now pretty sure that my assumption about his wife's Girl Scout troop was erroneous as the man had no wedding band and his Girl Scouts binder smacked of thrift-store purchase rather than officially licensed use. I now imagined that he'd heard about Rachel Scott's website from some radio show or saw it on the news and decided he wanted to check it out. Great. Whatever. Just pay some damn attention and learn how to use the equipment so I don't have to keep doing it for you! Never before had I more wanted to enforce our posted internet policy that patrons should have at least a passing knowledge of how to use a computer before attempting to do so.

Day 4: Two months actually passed between Day 3 and Day 4. During that time, we saw nothing of Mr. Little Stupid. When he returned, though, he was still the same skinny little man in the same overalls with the same Girl Scout binder tucked beneath an arm. He was also on the same mission. I imagined now that this strange alien had gone back in his pod to bake for a couple months, as he wasn't quite done on the first try. Of course, by then he'd lost the website I'd written for him and I'd forgotten the name of the poet he wanted so I had to repeat Day 1's lessons and look it all up for him. How could this guy continue to reboot like this, yet still remember that he wanted to come in and search for poetry? Was he really a moron?

Turns out, he was.

Literally.

Mrs. C eventually alerted me to the fact that not only was this guy computer illiterate, he was functionally illiterate as well. In fact, he'd been a part of the library's literacy program some years back but kept failing to show up for his lessons (or just kept rebooting, more likely) and eventually gave up.

Naturally, I felt embarrassed at having ridiculed the man, but I was still no closer to answering the question of just what the hell he was trying to accomplish? Not being able to read certainly explained why he couldn't get to the site he wanted, but what precisely was he planning on doing once he got there? It was nothing but POETRY--more words that he couldn't read! WHY????!!!!

I don't think he's been in since.

Hi, these are just a little overdue

The librarian from the Community College, Mr. Rob, stopped by to drop off a few of our books that a patron had entrusted to his care. They weren't interlibrary loans, as you might expect, but were just books this patron had checked out directly from us that were so embarrassingly overdue that the patron was too scared to check return them to us herself. Mr. Rob said she had even pleaded with him to return them to us on Friday when she knew we didn't charge fines. Mr. Rob must not have liked her much, though, cause he turned them in on a Wednesday.

And just how embarrassingly overdue were these books? Something to the tune of 16 months.

The ironic thing is, even as overdue as they were, we still wouldn't have charged her any fines on any day because they were all checked out on our old VTLS circulation system, the records from which we no longer have access to, so we wouldn't have even known what to charge her unless we wanted to do the math based on the date due slip. Even then we have a fine ceiling cutoff of $4 per book, so she still wouldn't have been out more than $16 total.

She may have been afraid we'd charge her for the one book among her four that she had evidently gotten wet, for the cover was all ink-blurred and wrinkly from a soaking, no doubt over a year ago. This being the case, we used our new handy-dandy Millennium circulation system, on which she had managed to secure a new card at some point in the past month, to block her from checking out anything at any library in our network until she pays us $9 for the damaged book. Frankly, she's getting off easy.

More D-Con Reportage

Just in case ya'll haven't had enough about me yammering on about Dragon Con, writer Peter David has a much briefer con report over at his site.

I didn't attend any of Peter's panels this year, which is odd cause I'm a big fan and usually try to do all of his panels. I chalk it up to scheduling conflicts, but it's just as likely lack of planning on my part.

You can start here...

Peter David's Dragon Con Report for Day 1 & Day 2

Mr. B-Missing?

Kind of an odd Sunday shift in that it was utterly free of Mr. B-Natural. He's usually the first patron of the day and is almost always waiting at the door when I drive up. Not so today. I'm guessing he's still pissed about his dog being banned from the library and so he's staying away in protest.

Normally, my response to such a protest would be, "And this is a bad thing, how?" But I do feel a bit sorry for him in this case. As my wife pointed out, while Mr. B-Natural is indeed the grumpiest old man in all the world, he's also a fairly lonely guy. Not surprising, what with his being so grumpy. However, he'd mellowed so much over the past few months due entirely to the presence of Bubba the Dog. See, Bubba is Mr. B's ambassador to the world. Everyone loves Bubba (especially fleas, mind you, but people too), who is a genuinely sweet and happy dog that attracts positive attention which gets vicariously shared by Mr. B-Natural. With Bubba around, people actually smile at Mr. B-Natural and are happy to have him around. Without Bubba, he's just a cranky old man that no one will have much to do with.

So, he's probably off sulking somewhere.

Without Mr. B-Natural in today, I had to make do with two, count `em two, separate visits from Parka plus an appearance by Matilde the Cranky Wiccan. She gave me a bit of trouble too.

When Matilde came in to sign up for a computer, I told her it would be a couple of minutes because the computers were full. I was just coming around the desk to go boot one of the patron's whose time had run out when Matilde stepped in front of me and started back to the computers herself. I thought: What part of "It's gonna be a couple of minutes" didn't you understand, lady? She went right to the computer hall, then saw they were full and turned around to come back, nearly colliding with me in the process. When the computer was finally clear, I went and told her and pointed back to the hall. She went. Then, about 4:50, I went back to get garbage bags from the bathroom and to tell her that she only had 10 minutes left until we closed. This news elicited not even the usual annoyed grunt from her, though. At 5 p.m. sharp, I went back and told her "It's about that time." Again, not a word. She just kept right on typing on the e-mail she had open. I kept myself busy for half a minute, putting a new liner in the garbage can by the bathroom, then started shutting off computers in an effort to reinforce my point that we were closing. I didn't want to have to repeat myself to her, but it looked like I might need to.

"Oh, am I out of time?" she asked, after I shut off the computer beside hers.

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"What?"

"Yes, ma'am!" I repeated, nodding. Only then did I realize that Matilde the Cranky Wiccan is hard of hearing. It certainly explains why she was so quiet the whole time. I only felt a little bad for heaping such silent ire in her direction.

As to the fleas, they seem to have been eradicated. I wore shorts and got nary a bite.

Poor Bubba

I went to work at 1 today and Mrs. C told me to go read the sign on the front door. The sign said the library would be closing at 5.

Whoo hoo! I get to go home early! This is good, as the wife is coming home from Clarksburg for the weekend and I had been a bit concerned as to how quickly I would have to come up with dinner after getting off at 7.

As to WHY we were closing early, Mrs. C enlightened me...

It seems we have fleas.

That's right, fleas.

Mrs. J found several of the little buggers attempting to bite her while she was shelving today. Suddenly, almost everyone was finding little bumps on their ankles that they had been at a loss to explain until that moment. So the plan was for us to close early and bug bomb the snot out of them. (Why exactly we needed to close early in order to bug bomb them, I'm not sure. Seems just as simple to bug bomb them after 7 as it would be after 5, but I certainly kept my mouth shut on this point.)

Mrs. A, still on vacation this week, but doing so at home, phoned in to give us some new policy regarding the fleas. To keep fleas from coming back after they've been bombed, we are now outlawing all animals other than service animals in the library. We've been very dog friendly in the past, allowing them to run free in the library. However, during most weeks, the dog population pretty much amounts to Mr. B-Natural's pooch Bubba. It will be sad to have a library with no Bubba, but what are ya gonna do? We can't have fleas infesting the joint either.

Mrs. C was the one to break the news to Mr. B-Natural when he and Bubba came in for their mid-morning computer crossword puzzle.

"What?" Mr. B-Natual said. He's supposedly hard of hearing, but I'm pretty sure it's a selective condition.

"I said, you can't bring Bubba in any more," she said. "We're having trouble with fleas."

"He shouldn't have any fleas. I gave him the flea treatment and washed him. No, Bubba doesn't have any fleas," Mr. B said. Of course, while he was saying this, Bubba was sitting on the floor beside him violently scratching at a flea.

"We're not saying Bubba brought the fleas in," Mrs. C told him. (Who is she kidding? That's exactly what we're saying.) "We're just saying that we have fleas and we don't want any more and you don't want them getting on Bubba either."

After Mrs. C related the above story, I said, "You do realize, of course, that Bubba will now become the new smuggled coffee cup for him, right? He'll start trying to sneak that dog in in his coat, just like he did his coffee."

Hours later in the day, the phone rang and a gruff voice asked to speak to Mrs. A.

"I'm sorry, but she's on vacation this week," I said.  "Can I take a message?"

Mr. B-Natual's familiar grumbling commenced for a few seconds before it resolved into the phrase, "When will she be back?" I told Mr. B-Natural she'd be in on Monday. Apparently, he's none too happy about his dog being banned. I'm not really sure why, other than it's an opportunity for him to be all grumpy about something. No other library in the county allows him to bring Bubba in, so I don't see what the big deal is now that we won't. Of course, it's not like he hasn't tried other places.

Mrs. H, who also works at the library branch in Town-D, said Mr. B-Natural tried to bring Bubba in her library one day until the head librarian saw the dog and said, "Nope. Out. He can't come in."

Mr. B-Natural paused in the door and shouted, "Hateful old woman!" then he took Bubba back to his car and left.

Now that's the old Mr. B-Natural we all knew and loathed.

Wal-Mart Jesus Vs. The Internet

Things were going along swimmingly for once; not too much patron traffic, not too much work for me. Then Wal-Mart Jesus came in and the patron floodgates opened up. Wal-Mart Jesus wasn't even the trouble. He just set his bag and cudgel down, then disappeared into the reference hall without a word. It was everyone else in the room that were suddenly desperate for my attention! I felt like the main brain buffet for Night of the Living Dead. Still, I blame him as the chaos didn't begin until he arrived.

All at once, somebody wanted to interlibrary loan some Finnish language tapes, another wanted a computer, two others wanted to check out, one wanted a library card and a late middle-age white lady with a slightly manic look about her wanted Ulysses by James Joyce.

Where the hell was Mrs. C when I needed extra hands? Oh, that's right! She'd disappeared upstairs fifteen minutes before and hadn't been seen since.

I tried to deal with the patrons in order, but our computers were all full so the computer patron would have to wait. Then I couldn't look up the Finnish tapes on ILL because our brand new Dell circulation computer--which is allegedly superior to our old one, yet still somehow manages to run just as slowly and freeze up just as much--no longer had access to our statewide catalog and no one in our smaller 20 county library system owned any Finnish tapes.

"Oh, and do you have Kitty Kelly's new book?" the manic Ulysses requester asked. "I think it's called The Bush Dynasty."

"Uh, no. Not that I'm aware of, ma'am. I couldn't even say if we've ordered it."

She looked appalled that we could call ourselves a library and not have the full Kitty Kelly catalog on display by the front desk.

"We do have Ulysses," I offered, seeing that it was available in our computer. "Looks like it's upstairs."

"Oh good. Could you go get it for me?" Mrs. Manic said.

I wanted to tell her to gnaw on a loin, but opted to just go get the book for her upstairs. It would give me a chance to hunt down Mrs. C, who it turned out was indeed upstairs having a chat with Mrs. B.

"The desk is swamped," I said, dashing over to the 823's in search of Joyce.

Mrs. B made for the stairs while I grilled Mrs. C about Kitty Kelly orders, our computer catalog access and Finnish tapes. Came up zero on all three and then Ulysses too, as it was missing from the shelf.

We went back downstairs. On the way, I spied an open computer I could plug our computer-wanting patron into, so I went to tell them but was accosted by Mrs. Manic first.

"I'm sorry. We don't seem to have Ulysses on the shelf," I said. "And our librarian hasn't done a book order in a couple of weeks, so Kitty Kelly's book isn't here yet and hasn't been ordered. I'm not even sure if we're planning to order it, but if we did it wouldn't be until next week cause our librarian's still on vacation."

Again, Mrs. Manic looked aghast. "It's a huge, huge book. Kitty Kelly... Very big," she said, practically shaking her finger at me. "Could you put me on hold for it?"

"No, I'm sorry, but we can only put people on hold for books that are currently in our system and, like I said, I'm not even sure we're going to order it." Again with the look. "I can put you on for Ulysses, though."

She seemed delighted at this, so I went around the desk where Mrs. B was helping the patron who wanted a library card. I was about to sigh and take a break since I couldn't get at the circ computer for holds anyway when I remembered our waiting computer patron. Well, remembered isn't really accurate as I only recalled her when she walked up to my side of the desk and looked hopeful at me.

"Oh, yeah. I've got one ready for you," I told her. We both went to the computer hall where I found Wal-Mart Jesus had commandeered the empty computer. I wasn't exactly sure if he was there legitimately or if he'd just plopped down for a surf without signing in first. Turned out he hadn't signed in, so I asked him to let me put my patron on since she had signed in first and told him I'd get him on the first available one. Another user was just leaving, so I suddenly had one open for him. Screw the sign-in, I thought. Who's really gonna complain that the guy who looks like Jesus and carries a cudgel didn't sign in?

Back up front, I was finally able to get to the circ desk to put Mrs. Manic on hold. Then, the question I should have asked her in the first place hit me.

"Um, do you have a library card with us?"

Mrs. Manic blinked at me for a while, then admitted that she didn't think so. ARGH!!!

I couldn't put her on hold without a card, so I directed her toward the applications. A sort of worried look came across her face at that point. She didn't seem to want to take the time to fill one out. Fortunately for her, the man who had just received a new library card from Mrs. B was her husband, and he agreed to let her put Ulysses on hold on his card. (I tell ya, I'm really getting sick of patrons and their card-issues.)

About that time, Wal-Mart Jesus reappeared wanting help with the internet. I moseyed on back with him. Seems he was looking to expand his usual quest for obscure Judaic philosophical texts that no one owns to the internet. He even had a site written down that someone had told him about, but he didn't exactly know how to go about getting to it. Admirably, he had brought up Internet Explorer, but he had somehow managed to delete the address field, all of the toolbars and indeed the pull down menu bar, plus he'd moved the task bar to the top of the screen in such a way that I couldn't move it back. He'd also managed to change the appearance of the program itself, causing the IE window to appear far more colorful and shaded than it normally does. I just don't understand how people who are such internet neophytes can cause such havoc with our systems, yet can't seem to type a damn address into the one field clearly labeled "ADDRESS."

Since I couldn't seem to undo his damage, I just rebooted the system so it would reset everything. Then I Googled the Jewish studies university library he was looking for. He explained that he heard they had a really wonderful database on CD Rom and was hoping to access many obscure Jewish texts this way. I hated to tell him, but usually when people have databases on CD Rom, it's because they want you to buy them. This turned out to be exactly the case, though I didn't know for sure right away as the entire site was in Hebrew. Fortunately, being a devout Chasidic Jew, Wal-Mart Jesus can read Hebrew so he was able to translate and guide me where to click. After nearly five minutes of doing the clicking for him, I decided that it wasn't doing him any good for me to navigate for him and it would be much better on us in the future if he had some skills for searching on his own. He took over the mouse and I stood by to answer any questions. I didn't actually have many answers, as most of his questions were geared for someone with more familiarity with the site and I, as I kept explaining to him, had never been to it before and couldn't read it now that I was there. Still, I did at least have internet intuition on my side and steered him away from obvious pay services and back toward the on-line database it listed, which he kept avoiding because it had far too much information to take in at a glance.

That's the thing about searching for information... you're gonna have to wade through a lot you don't want to get to something you do.

Once he was headed in the right direction, I left him to his search, coming back only to remind him that his bus would soon be leaving 20 minutes later.

Of course, by that time my lungs were aching for air.

It's like someone turned on the stench-electro-magnet today. We were beset by stinky patron after stinky patron.

Well, all right, so there were only two of them, but they were foul enough for ten.

I'm almost certain that the first guy is the same stinky man who darkened our door and soiled our souls with his stench around three years ago, during Stinky Patron Day 2001. He had been using the little computer by the stairs just prior to my arrival at work. No one likes to use the little computer by the stairs provided the other two comfyer computers are free. I'm guessing that they were therefore not free when he was logged onto the little one, but they had long since been abandoned by the time he got up and left.

On his way out, Mr. Stinky walked past me, wearing a too-tight, filthy gray t-shirt with deep-set stains and a veritable cloud of nose-permeating evil. My theory is that this shirt is actually the too-tight red t-shirt he had worn on his previous visit, leeched of its color by his olfactory aura. Before he had even left the building, Mrs. H had busted out both the Airwick and the woefully underpowered automatic air-freshener, which had been secreted within a potted plant on the windowsill next to Mr. Stinky. The lingering stench ate both of them.

Barely an hour had passed when the Sweatiest Woman in All the Land came in. We knew she was on her way because she'd sent her daughter ahead to herald her coming and check to see if there were any computers free. (Her daughter's pretty stinky too, but only because of contact-stench from mom.) I'm starting to believe that the eye-watering breeze of the Sweatiest Woman in All the Land is not entirely sweat-spawned. My fellow employees are of the opinion that it is not so much a sweaty sort of odor as a uriney sort of odor. I didn't buy into this at first, but now I've come to think that my nose may have simply been overwhelmed by her wake of funk and automatically defaulted to the most palatable explanation for what it smelled like. I mean really, which would you rather have come into your library, a patron soaked in dried sweat or one steeping in her own urine? And being as how she's a really nice lady, beyond the impoliteness of her vapors, we think she must have some sort of bladder control issue rather than just having a penchant for peeing her pants on purpose. Again, that's the most palatable explanation.

So anyway, the Uriniest Woman in All the Land finally came in for a computer too. That's all she ever wants, hence why we have so many air-freshening products hidden in the computer hall. Unfortunately for those of us who'd have to share the front room with her while she waited, all three of our computers were full. We'd just signed on two people a few minutes earlier and the only one our timers said was out of time belonged to Mr. B-Natural, who was back with his dog, Bubba, playing solitaire. I went back and told him that his time was up.

"I ain't been on that long!" he angrily grumped. "I had to wait around upstairs for a while. My time's not up."

I sighed. If only he knew the favor I was trying to do him by allowing him and Bubba the chance to escape before the stench-fest descended on his head.

"Well, the timer says you're done," I told him. "But maybe it was still set for the patron before you. I'll go check."

As I was about to go check, the patron using the computer by the stairs stood up and said she was finished. Mr. B cracked a smug grin at this, thinking himself safe to continue his game. If only he knew what I was about to unleash into the computer hall. I smiled with this knowledge, rebooted the free computer and then went to tell the Uriniest Woman in All the World it was ready for her to use.

Poor Bubba. They say dog noses are a million times more sensitive than human noses.

Actual Telephone Conversations Heard in Actual Libraries #7

ME: Tri-Metro County Public Library.

CALLER: Yes, I'd like to renew some books over the phone. Can I do that?

ME: Sure thing. What's your last name?

CALLER: Donovan. D-O-N-O-V-A-N.

ME: (TYPES IN "N/DONOVAN") Okay, and the first name?

CALLER: Dave.

ME: (TYPES IN "DAVE." NO DAVE DONOVAN COMES UP AT ALL. NOR IS THERE A DAVID DONOVAN LISTED.) You said, Dave, right?

CALLER: (MUMBLES SOMETHING THAT SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE "Yes.")

ME: Um, I don't have a Dave Donovan listed here. There's no David either.

CALLER: (SUDDENLY FURIOUS) It's Stephen!! I said it was STEPHEN!!!

ME: Stephen Donovan?

CALLER: Yes!!

ME: Uh... Oh. Well, sorry. I could have sworn you just said it was Dave.  Twice.

CALLER: No! It's Stephen!

I still have no explanation for this call. As far as I'm concerned the man said his damn name was Dave twice and confirmed it the first time I asked. I base this on the fact that the names Dave and Stephen sound nothing alike no matter your accent. However, as we don't have a Dave Donovan listed and we did have a Stephen Donovan who had checked out the book The Da Vinci Code I can only assume I was in either in error or he was crazy.

I was unable to renew his book for him, as we still have an assload of people on hold for that book, so Dave was SOL.

D-Con Report

D-MINUS: 0

Arrived at the Hyatt Regency around 1 p.m. and went straight to registration. No sign of my pals, who allegedly were to leave Starkville, MS, around the same time I left my in-laws in North Carolina, putting them there same time as me.

Checking the schedule of panels, I see Peter Davison (the 5th Doctor Who) is scheduled to be giving a panel at 1:30. If my pals were at the con that's where they'd be so that's where I head. Peter Davison isn't actually there when I arrive at the panel, nor are my friends. Instead, comic scribe Warren Ellis (Planetary, Transmetropolitan) is on the stage, along with Annoying Brit Track Boy. (ABTB is one of the D-Con folks in charge of programming involving British themes--the British Track. I've seen ABTB around in years past, but never thought of him as especially annoying until this year. More on him later.) Turns out this panel is a general Brit-panel with the two major British guests, one of whom, Davison, is running late. So I get to hear Warren Ellis talk about things he has in the works and answer questions for a bit, which is great cause he's one of the guests I was already looking forward to seeing. (I also see my first Pern Person of the year, pictured here.)
Peter Davison eventually shows and the panel proceeds. It's a pretty good panel, though it's a little odd to have two completely unrelated guests, beyond the fact that they both live in England, answering questions from the audience on similarly disparate topics. ABTB, always the glory hog, is seated at the panel table along side the guests. At the end, they give away prizes via trivia questions and I win one. (Nerd!) They asked on which cartoon did Jon Pertwee, the third Doctor, do one of the voices. I answered "Danger Mouse" since that's the only British cartoon anyone ever gives a rat's ass about and it turns out I was right. I won a Doctor Who book signed by the actors who played the Brigadier and Benton during the 3rd Doctor's run in the 70's.

Still no sign of pals after the panel, so I hit the dealer's room where I immediately found a booth with probably twenty five long-boxes full of graphic novels and trade paperbacks bargain priced at 50 percent off. And they're in great shape! I buy up the first two volumes of The Ultimates and spy several other potential purchases before I can escape.

The guys show up at 3:30 and we go up to our room. It's fantastic! Exactly what we had hoped for, which is good cause it took an act of congress to get it.

My friend Glen made reservations for a room several months ago, but when he called Hyatt up in early August to confirm the reservation they said, "Glen who?" Turns out the asshat Hyatt clerk who had taken the reservation had inserted the wrong hotel code, so our reservation was made for a room in the Hyatt in Marietta, Georgia and not Atlanta. Things looked grim at first, for the hotel claimed they had no other rooms available and that we were shit out of luck. Glen, however, is no stranger to showing his ass when the need presents itself and after doing so for a while the clerk he was dealing with gave in and transferred him to a customer care rep who arranged for a small suite for us at half price. It cost more money than any of us really wanted to pay, but was considerably cheaper than we should have been paying for what we were getting so we gladly accepted it. Granted it was on the 11th floor, so hoofing it up by stairs was not really a feasible thing for a bunch of out of shape nerds. Fortunately, the bellboy let us in on a secret that the staff generally doesn't raise a fuss if guests use the freight elevators, so that saved us quite a bit of time.

The guys, Glen, Joe, John and Marc, had made a wager during their trip over as to which variety of costume-clad con-goer they would see first. Would it be the Klingon, the Stormtrooper, the G.I. Joe character, the Pern Person or the perennial Fat-Chick in Chain Mail? Pern Person won out, yet again.
We also did a strafing run on the Walk of Fame to see who was there. Not all of the guests were present, but a few choice ones were. Erin Gray, TV's Colonel Wilma Dearing from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was there. I had a huge crush on her when I was a young lad and she still looks really really good today. (Sorry, I'm lame and didn't take a picture.) Like a dumbass, though, when I spoke to her I said, "I really enjoyed your work when I was a little kid." Great! Now I made her feel old!

We walked on and came to Peter Davison's signing table, at which point the only thing any of us could utter was, "That's fuckin' Doctor Who!" We thought it was probably best not to approach him until we could get a better choke hold on our vocabulary.

While we were in the Dealer's Room area, I slipped away on a reconnaissance mission to get snapshots at the Speculum & Leather Sales booth. Found it right away. In addition to medical instruments sold for non-medical purposes, there was the standard assortment of whips, chains and clamps. The proof...

Dinner was at the Hard Rock Cafe, where we didn't even need to use our reservation as there were plenty of open tables. Just to get my influx of carbs started, I ordered the Twisted Mac & Cheese, which was excellent and sat in my tummy like a Fat Chick in Chain Mail for hours to come.
We retired to our room where the closed circuit Dragon Con channel was playing the pilot episode of the Joss "Buffy" Whedon penned, quickly cancelled by Fox, sci-fi TV series Firefly. Only one of our crew had ever seen Firefly before and he told us to shut up and watch, cause it was a great show. We shut up. We watched. When the episode was finished, we were to a man born-again Firefly converts. Suddenly we were excited that some of the cast members were present at the con! They were going to have a big panel, even! We were also a tingle that not only were the episodes available on DVD but a Firefly movie has been filmed and is scheduled for release next summer! And, another episode was coming on next! Unfortunately, whoever was showing the next episode had not intended to do so, for they shut it off after ten minutes and played Spaceballs instead. Bastard!

Our first panel of the day was Peter Woodward. For those who don't know him, Peter Woodward is the son of Edward Woodward, of TV's The Equalizer fame. Both were members of London's Royal Shakespeare Company and Peter served as the fight master for them for a while. Peter played Galen on the short-lived Babylon 5 spin-off, Crusade, and hosted and produced the Discovery Channel series Combat. He's a favorite of ours. His panel this time was all about combat and fighting techniques using different weapons. He even had our row get up on stage with him to serve as a visual aid for a point he was making. Fun stuff, even though Peter didn't hump anyone this year.

After that there was a Cartoon Network Adult Swim panel in the same room. Lots of the staff and voice talent for Adult Swim programs like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Sealab were present as well as Billy West, the voice of much of the Futurama cast and the original voice of Stimpy on Ren & Stimpy. Mostly they showed clips, acted crazy and did voices for us. Billy West has been hired to do Popeye in a new computer animated Popeye project and he demonstrated his impressive vocal process for doing that character. The Adult Swm team also showed clips from upcoming shows and told us about a few choice bits of news in that vein. I knew they had more Family Guy in production, which is good. They also have a whole new series from FG creator Seth McFarlane as well as a series by FG co-star Seth "Scott Evil" Green. Their truly big news is that in late Summer 2005 they will be airing a cartoon based on Aaron Macgruder's comic strip The Boondocks and said this is going to be an envelope pushing show as far as edgy humor goes.

Afterwards, we met up with Beta Squadron, a second group of friends from Mississippi who were staying elsewhere in the area. My friend Mark "Hey, there's a Gerbil in that Cleavage" Chow was among them. (Hi, Mark!) We all went to lunch, then hit the dealer's room and walk of fame again. I was able to find a pristine copy of the Sin City graphic novel Hell & Back at the half-off booth. It's a good thing it was half off, cause it's a $28 book cover price.

In the Walk of Fame I also nearly collided with actress Dee Wallace Stone, who was standing in front of her signing table. She's about my height, but looking into her face all I could think of was "Wow, it's Mom!" Name any given 80's movie and chances are Dee Wallace Stone played the mom in it. She's terribly good at playing the Mom and she still looks every bit like a mom should. I just wanted to give her a big hug and tell her that I was sorry I hadn't called or sent any mother's day cards in a while. I refrained, but I did tell her that I really enjoyed her work. She gave me a big warm mom grin that made me feel all loved and stuff.

While the rest of my crew went off on their own missions to find specific nerd swag, I went to the 4 p.m. Warren Ellis panel back at the Hyatt. Ellis was very Ellis in manner, which is to say he was insightful, vulgar and terribly funny. Asked what he thought of the current political climate, as his book Transmet is an extremely political book which some see as a response to the current administration, he turned the tables on the question and asked us how we felt knowing we were about to have four more years of Bush. Naturally, there were boos, but Warren rounded on it and made the extremely valid point that if the Democrats were actually serious about winning the White House they would have run someone other than a corpse with a badger nailed to its head. He also pointed out that most of Transmetropolitan was written in response to Tony Blair and not Bush, but that there were lessons to be learned all around.

Ellis also told the story of how he had inherited a literary agent who insisted he write a novel. He didn't want to write one, so he turned in 100,000 words of the most insane and offensive material he could think of--we're talking Godzilla bukake and Ostriches zonked out on ruffies insane--figuring no one in their right mind would ever publish it. Naturally, Harper Collins bought it for quite a bit of money, so now he's forced to finish it up. He also touched on the subject of Harlan Ellison after someone asked him if he'd ever had any discussions on the subject of the internet with Ellison, being as how Ellison hates the web and Ellis loves it. Ellis said he had not, but would probably find out as they were scheduled to breakfast together the following morning. He described seeing Ellison in the guest's lounge, jumping up and down with glee saying "I've just been verbally abusing people!" This certainly bade well for the future Marc Stewart/Harlan Ellison rematch I'd been hoping to see.

I also was able to talk to Denny O'Neil, writer of the classic 90's series The Question. I asked him to sign my copy of issue #30 and issue #1. I explained issue #30 was the first of the series I'd ever read, given to me for my birthday by Rob Snell, one of the guys who owned the late lamented comic shop, Gun Dog Comics, back home. Rob's gesture was only generous on the surface, though. Much like a crack dealer, he knew that giving me a first hit of a series as good as The Question would only lead to more sales. Once I read issue #30, I ordered all the back issues from Rob and the shop wound up making a tidy sum off me. Worth every penny. O'Neil seemed like a nice guy.

We adjourned to Champions Sports Bar, in the Marriott, where we ate excessively expensive and not particularly tasty fried food and watched the Mississippi State game. Afterwards, some of us went to the room to chill while others of us ventured out to freak watch and attend the Buffy The Vampire Slayer prom, which was even more of a freak-fest.


First panel of the day was the Babylon 5 reunion. The only B5 cast members present were Peter Jurrasik (Londo Mollari), Jason Carter (Marcus Cole) and a guy who played one of the generic aliens on the show. As usual, though, it was still a good panel.

The three spent around ten minutes paying tribute to actor Richard Biggs, who played Dr. Stephen Franklin on the show and who passed away from a brain aneurysm a few months back. It was a nice tribute but would have been better had Dragon Con staff provided a screen and video projector present so they could show the tribute video that had been made. Before the panel started, I overheard the guy who made the tribute film complaining to someone that one of the decision makers within the Dragon Con upper echelon does not like nor gets B5 and goes out of his way to shit on all B5 programming at the con. Granted, this is one man's perspective on this and perhaps the video projector was being used by another panel at the same time and wasn't available. But I've seen evidence of such B5 program downplaying in the past too. On many occasions, the B5 programming has been crammed into tiny rooms in the sub-levels of the Hyatt with standing room only crowds. Sure, the show's been off the air for several years now, but Trek panels don't get treated with such disrespect and that show's been gone for 30. Regardless, this particular panel was in one of the bigger rooms and had the crowd to justify it so I'm happy on that front.

At one point during the panel, Peter Woodward burst through the door, interrupting Peter Jurrasik mid-story, and staged a coup on the stage. Woodward screamed he was taking over because he'd not been invited to participate in the panel since he was only on a B5 spin-off. He claimed he had dirt on the personal lives of all of the panelists and would be revealing that down at his signing table. He then ran through the audience passing out flyers for the cruise he's hosting next year and then fled the room. Jurrasik just smiled and resumed his story, to much applause.

The next panel of the morning was the Harlan Ellison panel we'd been looking forward to. Harlan was late getting there and when he finally did show up he was wearing a t-shirt and sweat pants and looked a bit disheveled. He explained he'd been asleep 20 minutes ago and had just spent ten minutes trying to get downstairs via the perpetually crowded and slow elevator system. He claimed he had become so frustrated with the idiots on the elevator with him, who were getting in DOWN directed elevators in order to wait for them to go back UP, thus crowding the elevators unnecessarily, that he began verbally assaulting them and finally physically hurled several of them from the elevator onto random floors. A man in the audience testified that this was indeed true.

The Ellison panel was called "The Secret Crimes of Harlan Ellison" and was supposed to be a forum for Ellison to take questions from the audience regarding tales of his bad behavior in the past and then give his side of the story. Sounds fun, no? The trouble is, as my friend Marc pointed out, Ellison seemed to have been possessed by the spirit of Grandpa Simpson for the duration and spent 45 rambling and digression-filled minutes on a single tale about a near-miss fist fight with Frank Sinatra in the 60's. He kept stopping to try and remember tiny and irrelevant details and then chastised the audience brutally for not being able to fill in the blanks for him. As nasty as this might seem, it was tame compared to the last panel my friends attended, during which Harlan took the microphone and walked into the audience laying verbal waste to one and all. We suspect he may have mellowed down.

After the panel, Harlan returned to his signing table where a line of fans formed to get him to sign their books. My friend Marc, recipient of Harlan's destructive tongue during his last attempt to get Harlan to sign something three years ago, went to join the queue. This time, Marc didn't exhibit the hubris that brought about the wrath of the Crassness God last time. Instead, Marc plied Harlan with such an eloquent commentary of his own nature as a fan that when Marc finished all Harlan could do was gesture toward the rest of the penitent in line and say, "I went through all these idiots to get to you." So while it wasn't a fiery rematch, the levels of irony were sufficiently satisfying.
Following lunch, Peter Davison had another panel all of his own which we attended. Present on stage with Peter was Annoying Brit-Track Boy. Now in the past, I've seen ABTB participate in panels as a moderator, asking questions of the subject of the panel and directing audience questions. That seems to be a valid role to take should the guest require it. However, Peter Davison does not need a moderator and is fully capable of running a q&a panel on his own. To make matters worse, ABTB wasn't even acting as a moderator for the panel at all. He was just sitting there by Davison adding unneeded commentary to the man's answers and even daring to answer questions on his own that weren't posed to ABTB in the first place. Add to that ABTB's high-pitched hyena-like laughter which he insisted on braying directly into the microphone whenever anything was remotely funny and you get an idea of how utterly enraged the entire audience was with him by the end. At one point, he said something about possibly leaving and there was a smattering of applause at the notion.

Another example: Peter Davison, upon being asked by an audience member how he went about preparing for any given role, answered, "Well, not as much as I probably should." Seems cool, no? However, Annoying Brit Track Boy seemed to feel that the question had somehow been asked to him as well, so he also answered, saying, "Speaking as a drama-minor, not much." Who the fudge cares, punk? Annoying Brit-Track Boy also dis-endeared himself by not shutting off his cell phone during the panel. We know this because it rang and he actually took the call, ON STAGE, in the middle of Peter Davison's panel. Peter Davison, ever the gentleman, exhibited a Herculean amount of patience with ABTB. I don't know how he managed it, but I'm guessing potential headlines of "Doctor Who Throttles Fishnet-Clad Dipshit at Nerd Con, Audience Rushes Stage to Help!" probably had a lot to do with his mercy.

Most of us wanted to stick around for the Firefly panel in the big room that afternoon, but I was on a mission to secure Warren Ellis's signature on a few books. So me and a new friend from Beta Squadron, named Malloy, went to wait in line. Afterwards, we strolled the Dealer's Room a bit more then went back for the last 15 minutes of the Firefly panel. Seeing what I did there made me wish I'd gone for the whole thing. The two guests were just awesome and I now want a Firefly DVD set even more than before. Even Malloy, who said he wanted nothing to do with Firefly, had to admit it was cool.

Back in the Walk of Fame, I saw that Soupy Sales was there in person. I'd heard he would be there, but had forgotten about it until then. My dad was a huge Soupy Sales fan back when he was a younger man. I even have an appreciation for him from an early 80s comedy series he hosted on CBS. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I enjoyed Soupy's early 80s series until the Halloween episode, where someone knocked on the door of his set "house" and when he opened it there were just two evil looking eyes against a field of blackness, meant to represent a vampire. The image scared the hell out of me and I screamed and cried for quite some time. I think dad avoided Soupy Sale's show after that to prevent any trauma to me, and it was subsequently cancelled. I thought this would make a cute story to tell Soupy Sales himself as a way of showing how big a fan Dad was. However, I was only part way into a short version of the story when I realized that no communication seemed to be getting through to Mr. Sales. He was just staring through me blankly. A lady I later learned was his wife was seated beside him and I kind of gave her a brief glance, then decided that I really didn't want to embarrass Mr. Sales or the lady by letting on that I'd noticed anything wrong, so I just wrapped up my story as quickly as possible and said it was nice to meet him. At that point, he seemed to come back to life and smiled and nodded. I don't know if he'd had a stroke or Alzheimer's or was just hard of hearing.

We feasted that night at a steakhouse across the street from the Hyatt where we were accosted by a street person who begged us to vote Republican in the next elections and who accused the one staunch Republican among us of being a Democrat.

Afterwards, we freak-watched in the lobby for a while, looking at the various costumes of the participants of the Costume Contest. I saw a great Starman and talked to him about how he made his staff, as I had made a similar one when I did that costume a few years back. I don't know that his staff was better than mine, but it was certainly a lot lighter as his staff head was made of foam and mine was made of transparent yellow plastic resin that weighed a ton. He still had the advantage on me, though, in that he actually looked like the character and I was just a poser.

We all woke very late on Day 4. Too late to get packed up and still have time to hit the first panel of the day. We didn't even bother looking at the schedule to see what we were about to miss, cause it would just ruin our day. As it stood, it looked like we would miss the second panel too, cause we were scheduled to meet Beta Squadron at Hooters for lunch at 11:30.

Showers were had and shite was packed up.

Joe had managed to win the chance to buy a Heroclix Galactus, a truly huge chunk of plastic, so he was having to drag that out. You probably won't know what any of that means unless you're a gaming or comic nerd, but you won't catch me explaining it for the masses.

Most of my purchases fit nicely within my backpack and duffel bag, but I had lots of other stuff to carry too. Before leaving for the con, I'd stopped by the grocery store and purchased a shitload of food to keep in the room. We're talking bags of chips, two packs of Oreos, pretzels to supply a good sized bar for a week and granola granola granola. I'd also brought a full case of Old Vienna, which Mrs. A's boyfriend had imported for me from Canada and which I was hoping to dispose of at the Con so I wouldn't be tempted to tuck into it while low-carbing it upon my return home. We'd only actually brought half the case up to the room on Friday night, (thank Jebus!) but out of the five of us, plus the five of Beta Squadron, only I had drank any of it and I only drank two. So much for getting our drunk on at the Con. Thusly, I had ten bottles of beer left and the maids had thrown out the original box, so I had to wrap the bottles up in my clothing and carry them out in my duffel and backpack. This added weight made those bags extremely heavy. The food as well had to be carried back down. Almost none of it had been touched by any of us, so back it had to go. (I guess I'll donate it to the "liberry" for use in their end-of-the-month patron appreciation open house gigs.) Originally, I was going to make two trips to take my stuff to the car, but decided that even though I knew it would nearly break me, I could manage it in one. Backpack on back, duffel in hand, three bags of uneaten junk food in other hand, pillow beneath arm, I slowly trudged with my pals to the freight elevator for one last unauthorized use of it.

The rest of Alpha Squadron had parked in a different garage than I had, so we separated there while I and my added seventy pounds of baggage took the walking tubes from the Hyatt to the food court next door to the Marriot and finally to my parking garage in back of the Sun Trust building. I wasn't ready to drop by the time I got there, but was certainly feeling the burn.

Not having anything better to do for twenty minutes until the Hooters rendezvous, I just walked around absorbing the general atmosphere of melancholy. Day four is always sad at the con. It's palpable. Beyond just my own bummer at the thought that this year's con flew by so fast and that I would soon have to drive eight hours to get home and not see my pals for a while, the bummers of just about everyone else at the con were plainly apparent. You can feel it in the air. All these people, particularly the ones who stay in costume the whole time, are clearly unhappy at having to return to the real world. You can just drink it in, and so I did.

I was first to arrive at Hooters so it fell to me to secure us a table for 10. I'd never actually been to a Hooters before, but found the experience mostly enjoyable. A waitress in the usual super tight wife-beater shirt and shorts so short Daisy Duke would blush, came to help set up tables. I must say, super-tight wife-beater or not, she was not exactly overly blessed in the Hooters department herself, at least not as much as one would tend to expect from such an establishment. In fact, only one of the waitresses there really qualified as Hooteriffic and she was so generously equipped that her too-tight wife-beater seemed in peril of exploding at any moment. She could not have been comfortable in that corset of a shirt, and I found myself wishing that management would give her something a little more suitable to wear, as it hurt to look at her. I did get a bit of a thrill, though, when the wind from tropical storm Frances blew over the Hooters sandwich board sign out front, causing two of the girls to have to go out, bend over and pick it up, aimed quite satisfactorily in my direction. I know, it's a juvenile comment to make, but we've long since accepted that Dragon Con reverts even the best of us into 12 year old boys. If it didn't, then we would have a real hard time explaining all those people we spit at from the balcony.

After a bit, Beta Squadron showed up. They'd been betting that Alpha wouldn't actually be there at 11:30 and were also wagering that we would be at least 15 minutes late. Well, I blew that away, but indeed the rest of Alpha did not arrive until after 11:45. It seems John misplaced his own car, so they had to reenact the Seinfeld episode of wandering up and down levels of a parking garage in search of their ride.

Lunch was irritatingly expensive, but tasty all the same. We ate our fill then paid and went to stand on the sidewalk out front, the formerly gale-force winds of Frances whipping through our hair. This is always the saddest part, when we have to say goodbye. Fortunately, this time around it's only for a couple of months, as most of us will be meeting up again at Glen's wedding in October and then will see each other another couple months later at Christmas.

The drive home was long and boring, punctuated by angry talk radio and my P.G. Wodehouse book on tape.

(OKAY, I LIED, THERE'S ACTUALLY ONE MORE D-CON REPORT...)

D-CON: Kills Nerds Dead

In case you haven't guessed by now, let me just spell it out: I'm an enormous nerd.

That's right. Gasp in shock and horror at the darn near 32 year old male who collects comic books, plays Magic: The Gathering, watches cartoons regularly and is an avid role playing gamer (or at least he used to be back when he had nerdy friends to play with).

Nerd, nerd, nerd. Huge nerd.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

With this established, it should come as no huge surprise that in a mere 4 days, I'll be off to Hotlanta, GA, where I will be meeting a goodly number of my college Nerd Herd pals for our semi-annual sojourn to Dragon Con.

For those unschooled in the ways of nerddom, Dragon Con is a science fiction/fantasy/comic book convention that's held annually in Atlanta around Labor Day. It's an excuse for lots of nerds, closet nerds, freaks, geeks, subsidiary Buffites, Pern-People (Oh, God, the Pern people!), Trekkers, Trekkies, Tolkien Scholars, Poser Tolkien Scholars and a few otherwise normal folk to congregate and meet some of their genre heroes (actors, writers, artists, sundry creators, washed up b-movie has-beens, former porn actresses, and, as always, Boomer from Battlestar Galactica) who are responsible for large chunks of their nerdy entertainment pleasure.

Many of the attendees even dress up for the event, sporting some of the best and the worst home-spun costumes ever conceived. (Check out Dragon Con's picture pages for the good the bad and the ugly from years past.) Now most cons have dressup as a factor, but Dragon Con is especially well-known for being something of a freak show. Sure, you've got a huge representation of Storm Troopers, Elves, G.I. Joe troops, miscellaneous Cobra soldiers, Klingons, Hobbits, Ghostbusters, residents of the Matrix and comic and sci-fi characters, but there are plenty of people dressed up for completely non-innocent reasons as well.

To put this in perspective, Dragon Con has more leather present than do most herds of cattle.

In fact, the dealer's room, while chock full of nerdy goodness, is also home to booths that sell a wide assortment of leather gear. Some of this is couched as Ren-Fest supplies, but others are openly geared toward the S&M crowd.

Need whips, chains, hand-cuffs (both padded and not), leather lingere, riding crops or harnesses of any sort? Hit the dealer's room. They'll have what you want.

Need a speculum? Ho boy, do they have speculums. And ladies, these are not those comfy warm plastic speculums most thoughtful gynecologists use these days; we're talking nice cold gunmetal speculums that'll ratchet you open to 11. Two words: Dealer's room.

Need a testicle vice? Well, I haven't seen one of those in the Dealer's room, but I wasn't exactly looking for one either. It's probably there.

So as you can see, Dragon Con is nearly as much fun to attend just to watch the strange, disturbing, sometimes titilating but more often than not just plain unsettling scenery as it is for all the nerd stuff. And as weird as some of it gets and as much as I'm glad some of the people there are not among my close personal friends, it's a very open and welcoming atmosphere. Where else are you going to find two entire metropolitan high-rise hotels chock full of people just being themselves and not feeling out of place because of it. From the tiniest goth chick to the most whale-like comic book nerd, all are welcome to the party. It is a sight to behold.

Plus there's always the chance you'll get to ride in an elevator with Chekov from Star Trek, see a former member of the Royal Shakespere Company dry hump a fat guy or get to buy an overpriced autographed 8x10 of Lou Ferigno in the Walk of Fame hall where the celebrities hang out.


I confess that I get a bit star struck when I visit the Walk of Fame hall at Dragon Con. I usually just walk around and see the famous folks there without actually bothering them about anything. When I do talk to the celebrities, it's mostly to tell those I admire and respect that I admire and respect them, then I get the hell away. Not that there should be a problem with chatting to such folks at the con, it's just not usually my bag. I did chat for a while with Brad "Wormtongue" Douriff, but only because I found out he's from West Virginia and wanted to know which part. Turns out he has relatives in the Tri-Metro area and spent a lot of time around here as a kid.

Another drooling fanboy moment is pictured at right. This was my nerd's dream come true photograph taken with actors Andreas "G'Kar" Katsulas and Peter "Londo" Jurrasik, of TV's Babylon 5 fame. Peter wasn't even scheduled to be at the con that year. Imagine my surprise to walk into he hall of fame and see the both of them, my two favorite characters from the B5 series, seated side by side. I nearly screamed like a girl. My friend Joe had to ask them if they'd consent to a group photo and they graciously did. I'm such a damned nerd.

So you can see that there are celebs that make me too starstruck to say anything at all. I'm not sure why this is, as I'm a former broadcasting professional who has interviewed and otherwise met quite a few semi and actual famous people through the course of my job without once losing the ability to speak to them. Perhaps, though, it's because I never gave a rat's ass about most of the famous folks I met in the course of my radio career. Not so at Dragon Con.

For instance, while standing in a nerd traffic jam in the dealer's room, I happened to glance over at a woman standing to my immediate left, who was equally stuck, and noted that she was actress Claudia "Ivonova" Christian, also from B5.

Wow, I thought. She looks exactly like Claudia Christian!

And that's pretty much the extent of what was running through my head. Not: "Oh, excuse me, I just wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your work on B5. You played one of my favorite characters on the show." Or better yet: "Why the %&#! didn't you come back for Season 5? What the hell were you thinking, woman?!" Nope. Just: She looks exactly like Claudia Christian! And in my starstruck beffudlement, I failed to notice that Ms. Christian had a gerbil peeking out of her cleavage. That's right, a live gerbil. In her cleavage. It should also be noted that one of my nerd companions, who I won't name so as not to embarrass him, (Mark Chow), first locked eyes on the gerbil in the cleavage and then was too distracted to notice whose cleavage it was peeking out of until we told him later. I don't know which of us you should feel more sorry for on that one.

Chatting with the celebrities can also be a dangerous thing to do unless you're armed with beaucoup small-talk skills and common sense. Otherwise it can quickly degenerate into something uncomfortable for all involved. For instance, there was the time we accompanied our above cleavage-fixated friend to meet Biff from Back to the Future:

MARK CHOW: "Oh, hey. I, uh... I just wanted to tell you that I liked you in Back to the Future."

ACTOR THAT PLAYED BIFF: "Oh, thank you very much. It was fun."

MARK CHOW: "Yeah. That movie was... that was great."

ACTOR THAT PLAYED BIFF: "Mm."

(Time passes)

MARK CHOW: "Oh, and you were good in the sequels too... playing all those other Biffs."

ACTOR THAT PLAYED BIFF: "Sure. Thanks."

(More seconds of awkward silence pass as we all stand there looking at Biff and his expensive autographed Biff merchandise we're not about to shell out good money for. None of the rest of us have any idea what else to say to Biff either since the only thing he's ever done that we've seen is play Biff, so we just leave Mark hanging out there like a moron.)

MARK CHOW: "Well... um. It was, uh... good to meet you."

ACTOR THAT PLAYED BIFF: "Sure."

(We slink away)

That's how these things go sometimes, though.

Another far more personal failure at smalltalk came when I met comic book artist Adam Hughes. When I first heard he was going to be at the con, I was bound and determined to get him to sign one of his issues of Justice League America for me and tell him how much I've enjoyed his art. He draws very clean and very well composed comic pages with a great deal of skill and I wanted to tell him I appreciated it. What I did NOT want to do was be the slack-jawed stereotypical nerd fanboy who just likes Hughes art cause he draws fantastically well-stacked women. So here I go, marching up to Hughes's table with my JLA issue in my hand and all that came out of my mouth was something akin to "Yew draw womens purdeee!" That's not an exact quote, but I assure you the real quote was startlingly similar. I was mortified even as I said it, for it was precisely what I was trying to avoid saying. I'm an intelligent human capable of discussing the finer points of comic art, but enormous well-composed cans were all I could think of when it came down to the wire. Hughes sort of smiled/sort of looked sad for me and then signed my book, mentally putting another check mark under the Horny Mouth-Breathing Dipshit column in his fanboy tally tables.

Sometimes, though, meeting celebrities can present more actual danger, such as the time a couple of friends of mine inadvertantly picked a fight with author Harlan Ellison...


For anyone who's ever seen author Harlan Ellison on TV, (yeah, I know, it's probably been a while, but Tom Snyder's show couldn't last forever), you are probably aware of the sort of volatility his personality holds. He's an extraordinarily intelligent man who doesn't suffer fools lightly and seems to view at least 95 percent of the populace as fools. He's also had like 8 heart attacks, so he doesn't have a lot of time to mince words, hates political correctness with obvious passion and is capable of very precise verbal surgery when confronting a suspected fool. With science fiction conventions being simply rife with fools, you can imagine how fun and curse-filled his panels can become. Being connoisseurs of political incorrectness and crassness in general ourselves, Ellison's panels are just the sort of thing my friends and I love to witness.

A few years back, after one such Ellison panel, during which he lambasted a girl in a wheelchair for taking up valuable aisle space, my friends Marc Stewart and Joe Evans decided to approach Ellison at his autograph table to congratulate him on his extraordinary skills as a master crassman.

Marc, ever the crassness ambassador, was the one to actually speak. He told Ellison they enjoyed his work and were glad he was a consultant on Babylon 5. Then, completely as a compliment and with good cheer in his voice, Marc added, "Mr. Ellison, we just wanted to let you know we think you're the king of crassness." Now either Ellison didn't take this as the intended compliment it was or he simply decided to prove the point, because he lit into my friend with a series of blinding curses and insults that completely cut Marc's legs out from under him. Joe described Marc as being pinned like a frog on a dissecting table as Ellison verbally carved him several new assholes in front of God and everybody. The onslaught continued for nearly a minute before Joe was able to reach in and grab Marc's arm and physically pull him out of Ellison's Dead Lights. They fled toward the nearest exit, while Ellison's screaming continued as a soundtrack to their escape.

Harlan Ellison is scheduled to be at the con this year, as are Marc and Joe. I'm looking forward to the rematch.

My own personal favorite celebrity moment at Dragon Con, though, was when I attended the Mystery Science Theater 3000 panel, featuring Mike "Mike" Nelson and Kevin "Tom Servo" Murphy, two years back. About mid way through the panel, they opened the floor for Q&A's and I stood up to be the first to speak. I had no question for them. I merely wanted to tell them thank you for their little TV series and tell them just how much of an influence their creation has had on shaping the collective sense of humor of not only me and my friends but pretty much everyone in the room that day and kindred spirits across the earth. It was a heart-felt speech that I extemporaneously summoned up and delivered with the skill that would befit a man of my broadcasting background. I'm proud to say that the entire population of the hall backed me up with cheers and applause for Mike & Kev and they seemed to take the compliment well. It was a moment that could have come across as Scary Emotional Nerd Guy at the Mic, but I believe worked out for the best. It was something that had to be said.

This will be my 4th year attending Dragon Con and I am looking forward to it. Quite a few heroes of mine will be in attendance this year, such as Warren Ellis (writer of Planetary, The Authority, Orbiter, Red), Denny O'Neill (writer of The Question, lots of Batman, and the classic Green Arrow/Green Lantern series from the 1970s), and Dr. Demento. Plus one of our Con favorites Peter Woodward (of Combat and B5: Crusade fame) will be on hand. We always try to attend as many panels as he's a part of cause he's just one of the most entertaining and intelligent guys around beyond his ties to nerddom. (For those keeping score, Peter's the former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company who humped a fat guy on stage. Twice, in fact. He did it once while actually humping the fat guy during a martial arts demonstration two years ago, and then again last year when the fat guy returned with pictures of the humping and Peter then had to reinact it for the audience, using the same fat guy, in order to tell the story. Nothing like a proper English gent humping stuff to tickle the funny bone.)

Beyond all the nerd stuff, I mostly go to Dragon Con to hang out with my friends. I don't get to see them often enough these days--almost exclusively at weddings and major holidays and Dragon Con. And I only usually get to see a fraction of them at the Con anyway, but we've got a good crew this year. I liken this to the typical "Annual Hunting Lodge Gathering" that lots of men engage in with their buddies on an annual basis. (As imortalized in Da Upers song "Second Week of Deer Camp" which I heard thanks to Dr. Demento.) Frankly, if my pals weren't there I probably wouldn't bother going to the Con at all. There is very little in this world these days that can coax me from my house beyond work, comics, friendship and love.

D-MINUS: 2

The Book Sale (a.k.a. Make the Bad Books Go Away, Mommy! Make them Go Away!)

Today's book sale went much better than might be expected. In fact, it was very little trouble at all, apart from the whole matter of having to haul around all those boxes of books. I'd guess we had around 350 boxes worth of books to unload from the U-Haul onto the long portable tables we'd spread out on the community college lawn. They were arranged into rows of Fiction Hardback, Fiction Paperback, Children's and General Non-Fiction of both the paper and hard back varieties. We started doing this at 7 in the morning and were finished with the unpacking and setting up by 8:30 or so, just in time for the early bird crowd.

The early birds were the major headache we were anticipating, but they weren't nearly as annoying this year. We only had to tell them four times that we were not yet open and they therefore were not allowed to begin bum rushing the tables. Naturally, they weren't too happy about this.

"We can't even look at the books?" one lady asked.

"No, ma'am. We have to be fair to all the customers," I told her. It's no good letting them shop early, even if they aren't physically taking the books from the tables. They're still marking them in their minds for future removal, getting a head start on everyone else. Granted, this is nothing I wasn't doing as I unpacked the books, but I work there and am doing all the heavy lifting so I figure I can mentally earmark a few books.

After being warned off, most of the early birders slunk away to what they hoped we would consider a safe non-shopping distance (i.e. only four feet from the tables). There they continued to scan the books, studiously not shopping yet still moving along the table rows at a very methodical pace. Their de facto leader in all this was Mr. Smiley, second grumpiest old man in the world. He stepped in three feet from the tables as he very conspicuously scanned them, daring us to tell him otherwise. Whatever. We let him go, cause there's just no pleasing him with the book sale anyway. He firmly believes, and has in the past loudly stated to all within earshot, that Mrs. A hoards all the good books for herself. This isn't true, but even if it was true she would only be hoarding them for the library's collection, which is why the bloody things were donated to us in the first place.  He's also complained in the past that Mrs. A's dog was making too much noise, presumably disturbing his illicit early bird shopping.

The reason we are watchful of the early bird crowd is because last year a group of them gave us lots of trouble. The group in question was a family of used book dealers from another state who flock to weekend book sales to help restock their storehouse. They had arrived well before 7 a.m. last year spent the two hours before we opened the sale trying every trick they knew to get a look at the books early. Now, I can understand their need to seek cheap stock, but they're going to have to abide by the rules if they're going to do it at our book sale. We had to tell them to stay away from the tables several times and practically needed a whip to enforce the policy. Then, as soon as we opened, they descended on the books like ravenous birds of prey. They would swoop in and scoop up whole sections, which they carted back to their little nest of operations, where they could sort through them away from the prying eyes of other shoppers. They picked out what they wanted and returned only the detritus. When we caught on to their scheme, Mrs. A told them to cut it out immediately and do their shopping at the tables themselves. They continued to swoop in and take books, but not in the same quantities as before. They managed to amass several teetering piles of books that they still had not paid for by 2:45 in the afternoon. That's when we realized what their real game was.

See at our sale we charge $3 for hardbacks and $2 for paperbacks until 3 p.m., at which time we shut things down for half an hour to arrange the tables and shift books before reopening and charging only $3 per bag of books. These early-bird dickweeds had been planning to hold all their piles of books until after 3:30 and then buy them at $3 per bag. After all, why pay $3 for a hardback book when you could get a whole bag of them for the same price? They could have escaped with their entire hoard for under $25.

Once we realized this, Mrs. A told them that they weren't allowed to do that and that they had to either purchase the books they had gathered before 3 p.m. or put them all back on the tables and take their chances that they would still be there when we reopened at 3:30. The family figured it was a safe enough bet, so just before we shut down at 3, they put all the books back on specific tables where they could find them again quickly at 3:30. This was a mistake on their part, but their REAL mistake was in leaving the area for the half hour we were in siesta. We'd been watching them as they put their books back and so, as soon as they went to get some coffee, we dashed right to their "secret" tables, took all their desired books and seeded them throughout all the other tables. And some of the more noticeably valuable books we took and hid in the U-Haul, just for spite. They were not happy campers when they returned to their "secret" tables and found their chosen books missing. I'm sure they relocated quite a few of them, but they had to work for it. Then, as soon as they checked out, we put the hidden books back out for mass consumption at $3 a bag.

I know, we're bastards, but at least we're only bastards to bastards.

This very family of book dealers did come to the sale this year, but they behaved themselves. They sent their daughter in to case the joint before 3. She bought a few books at regular price. Then, after 3:30, the whole family came back and bought 8 bulging bags of books. They played fair, we played fair.


Other than the minor trouble the early birders gave us, the rest of the book sale went pretty smoothly and was a rousing success.

I found that my book radar was pretty strong throughout the day. At my request Mrs. C recently ordered a favorite childhood series, the Tripods Trilogy, by John Christopher, for the library's juvenile collection. Trouble is, the book supplier didn't have a copy of The White Mountains, the first book in the series, so they sent books 2, 3 and the prequel book (of which I was previously unaware). Just as the sale started, I happened to walk by the children's section and got a ping on my book radar. There, nestled among some juvenile paperbacks was a pristine copy of The White Mountains. In fact, it was the only one of the series to be found there. Providence.

Another ping came when I was doing some shopping on my own. I'd gone into the sale wanting to pick up some of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow series and found the first book right away, pinging at me from the paperback fiction.

I used my ping to help find books for several customers. It's kind of like playing a big game of Memory, finding the books we've seen earlier like shape cards turned face down.

Other books I picked up included Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, which I wanted to read just to see if it is as bad in print as it was as a movie. I found a few of Brad Meltzers novels. He's been doing a damn fine job writing comics these days, so I wanted to see how his novels were. (Check out his run on Green Arrow from a couple years ago, available in trade paperback, as well as his current gig as the writer of the Identity Crisis limited series from DC. Good stuff.) And speaking of comics, I managed to find the trade paperback of Dean Motter's The Prisoner mini-series from the late 1980s as well as a Marvel Masterpiece collection of The Essential Dr. Strange. I don't even like Dr. Strange, but it was in great shape so I picked it up. The only other comic to be found was the Batman Forever movie adaptation, which I have no use for on several different levels, so I didn't buy it.

By 5 p.m., we'd sold eight tables worth of books out of probably 16 or 17 tables total and we sold another table's worth by closing time at 6 p.m. We let late stragglers come and have their pick of the leftovers as we packed them all back up in boxes to haul away. We didn't have nearly as many leftover books this year as we have in the past, but they still amounted to around 130 boxes worth in the end.

Now those of you who had near cardiac infarctions when I last spoke of us chucking all the leftover books into the garbage truck, take your nitro and calm down. This year we did things a little differently.

Sure, I've been trying to convince Mrs. A that we'd sell a lot more books if we'd just back a garbage truck up to the book sale around 4:30, with the usual accompanying BEEP BEEP BEEP sound. If customers really knew that the garbage was the actual fate of the books, I'm betting they'd buy quite a few more $3 bags worth and we'd have that many less to throw out. However, Mrs. A fears the uproar this would cause so she looked into other avenues.

Turns out, a lady who lives in the closest bigger city to us wanted to attend the book sale but was unable to make it on the day it was held. She wrote to Mrs. A and requested a private session to go through the books herself. Mrs. A refused this on the grounds that it was even more blatant an early bird move than most of the early birders attempt. The lady then said that she would like to be able to go through the leftover books. Again, Mrs. A refused as what the lady was requesting meant a tremendous amount of unnecessary work for us. In that scenario, we the staff would have to pack up all the books from the sale, haul them back to our storage location instead of to the garbage truck, unload them, wait a couple of days for the lady to drive over, then we'd have to go back, unpack them all, let her go through them, pack up what she didn't want and load all those boxes on the truck to haul to the garbage and unload again. Work work work. Mrs. A told the lady that if she wanted any books, she had to take them ALL off our hands as well as do all the loading work herself (or bring her own help to do it). We absolutely were not going to haul any more boxes of books until next year. Surprisingly, the lady went for it and offered to pay us $1 per box. At 130 boxes, that nets us another $130 bucks to add to the $3890 we made in the sale itself, pushing us over $4000 total. Plus, it's no more work for us and we don't have to throw any books away. Sweet.

May all future book sales go so smoothly.

D-MINUS: 5

Bladders Running on Empty

Learned some very encouraging news, yesterday.

Sometime on Sunday afternoon, Mrs. C heard on the police band scanner that an officer was in pursuit of a green Jeep with its top down. The officer had run the plates on the Jeep and discovered that its owner had around 6 outstanding tickets and a suspended drivers license. Before the officer even said the man's name, Mrs. C knew who the owner of the vehicle was going to be... The Amazing Bladderboy!

That's right, the Amazing Bladderboy, the cohort/lover/hater of Jimmy the Anonymous Snitch and the prime suspect in the theft of our library's laptop computer last January. He's also the only one of the two who remains at large, being as how Jimmy got packed off to prison for embezzling from a former employer. Also, Bladderboy's Jeep license plate number was originally provided to the police by none other than the staff of our "liberry" back when we were trying to play clubhouse detectives in the latptop theft case.

As Mrs. C described it to me, she listened intently to the play by play of the chase over the scanner for several minutes until it petered out. Bladders was able to lose his pursuers fairly quickly. For a while the police coordinated efforts to find him again, but beyond one possible sighting of the Jeep near police headquarters itself (where there were no available officers to give chase) Bladderboy was not to be found.

Still, we are overjoyed at this turn of events for Bladderboy will now have warrants issued for his ass, possibly an APB, and will most likely see the inside of a jail for his crimes. And, if he shows his face around the library itself, we now have carte blanche to call the cops on him.

Ain't life grand?

D-MINUS: 8

The Manglehoffen Bluff

One of our semi-frequent patrons, Mrs. Manglehoffen (not her real name) came in yesterday. She dropped her books on the circulation desk and went to browse some while I checked them in. One by one, the books checked in bringing up her name on my screen as they did.

Presently, Mrs. Manglehoffen wanted to search for some interlibrary loans and asked if I could look them up for her. Sure thing. I helped her out, found the books at other libraries and put ILL requests in for them. Meanwhile, Mrs. Manglehoffen had picked out a few new books and walked up to the desk to check them out.

"Do you have your card?" I asked.

"My card? Oh, no. I don't. But I'm in there," she said, pointing to my screen. "It's Stella Manglehoffen."

"I'm sorry, but we do require an actual card to check out books now."

Mrs. Manglehoffen stared at me for a second, making some careful calculations. "I don't have a card," she repeated.

"Yes, ma'am. I realize you don't have your card, but we do require that you have it to check out books."

"But I'm in there," she said.

"Yes, ma'am. But we do need a card. If you like, we can hold your books here at the desk and you can look for it."

"Oh, no. That won't do," she said. "I don't have time to come back to town tonight."

I was fully prepared for Mrs. Manglehoffen to do the typical Old White Lady Stands There Staring at You, Waiting for you to Accede to her Wishes bit, but she didn't even try it on for size. She just stacked her books neatly on top of one another and slid them to one side of the desk and left the building. She wasn't even angry about it, which I thought was mighty nice of her. I felt a little bit bad for her, but we've really been cracking down on actual physical card presence recently.

A couple of weeks ago, Mrs. A allowed a patron to check out books without a card due to the fact that Mrs. A had forgotten to close out the patron's record and it was already on the screen. That patron rewarded her generosity by going around to other area libraries and telling them that we'd let her check out without a card, so why were they getting so snotty about requiring one? The libraries then, in turn, got snotty with us about it, so we've been card Nazis ever since.

A few minutes later Mrs. Manglehoffen reappeared at the desk. She had her purse out and had evidently been searching through it, as she was clutching several stray pieces of paper that she likely found during the search.

"I've looked. I don't have one," she said.

I started to explain to her once again that I understood that she didn't have it with her, but that she couldn't check out without it when she stopped me and threw a new wrinkle into the mix.

"No, I mean don't have one at all," Mrs. Manglehoffen said. "I was never given a card."

Did my ears deceive me? Was she really trying this? Was this really the hand she was attempting to bluff her way through with?

"Uh, yes, ma'am, you were," I said.

"No. No. I never got a card."

"Ma'am, when I checked your books in, your name came up on my screen. That means you DO have a card with us."

"No, I never got one," Mrs. Manglehoffen said again. "She wouldn't give me one that day because I didn't have my drivers license."

By "she" Mrs. Manglehoffen likely meant Mrs. A, who wasn't there to defend herself. Didn't matter, because I've witnessed Mrs. A issue plenty of cards to people who forgot their drivers licenses, telling them to phone the number in later. We're not in the business of entering patrons into the database and then not giving them their cards. Occasionally, we've had patrons walk off and forget their cards, at which point we save them in a little card box at the desk, but Mrs. Manglehoffen was not one of them. I checked.

I tried to explain all this to Mrs. Manglehoffen, but she didn't care. She just wanted a new card.

Fine! But I wasn't giving it away for free. We're already getting plenty of people who "forget" to bring their cards and suddenly claim that they've "lost" the card in order to get a new one and check out books. So we've decided to charge them $1 for the first replacement card and $5 for each additional. I explained this to Mrs. Manglehoffen and she forked out a dollar for her new card, no arguments at all.

After Mrs. Manglehoffen had left, Mrs. C stepped over from her desk, where she'd kept herself deeply involved in a telephone conversation while all this had gone on. She suggested a very real possibility for why Mrs. Manglehoffen didn't have her card. It seems earlier in the week, our very own Mrs. J was attempting to check out books and was lamenting that she had already managed to lose her own card. She'd looked everywhere for it, searched her purse inside and out, trashed her house trying to find it and came up blank.

Mrs. B had just smiled as Mrs. J told her story, then said, "It's on your keys."

Sure enough, Mrs. J had one of our key-card models instead of the full-size wallet card. I'm willing to bet Mrs. Manglehoffen does too.

D-MINUS: 9

Brent, Brice, Busted

Our print-stealing New Devil Twins, Brent & Brice, came back the other day intent on using a computer. The last time they tried this, Mrs. C busted them--not for stealing prints the last time they'd been in to use a computer, but for not having a permission slip on file allowing them to use a computer at all. She gave them one to take home and have their mom fill out and it was this completed form that they were armed with upon their return.

"Thank you very much," I said, taking their permission form. Then I added, "You still can't use the computer."

"How come?"

"Because the last time you guys came in and used it, you walked off with a stack of prints that you didn't pay for." I held up my fingers, approximating a 5th of a ream of paper. "We've told you not to do that twice already, so before you can use a computer again you're going to have to talk to our librarian and see what she wants to do about this."

I wasn't angry with them and said all this very matter-of-factly. To their credit, the boys didn't seem scared or angry either. They waited at the desk while I went upstairs to tell Mrs. A who I'd just caught in my web. She came down and talked to them, explaining that the amount of prints they had made would be worth far more than $1, but that this is what she was going to charge them before they could use the computers again. They agreed, and left.

About an hour later, Brent returned on his own. I thought he was going to fork over a dollar and sign up for a computer, but he'd only returned to tell us that his mom had decided that he would need to pay for this out of his allowance and he wouldn't get that for another week, so that's when he could pay us.

Maybe they'll learn a lesson out of this after all.

D-MINUS: 10