I’m a husband and father of two. I’ve written fan fiction and published fanzines. I’ve assumed the role of custodian for my friends who created a fanzine called Contact. I founded a convention called Farpoint, which has run for almost three decades. I’ve been a comic book writer and a comic reviewer. I ran Prometheus Radio Theatre, and used to put out a (mostly) weekly podcast. I’m publisher for Firebringer Press. Finally, I’m a recovering librarian, a retired IT Director, a part-time politician and a full-time IT contractor. And yes, I do all this because I’m allergic to work. I figure as long as I look busy, I won’t have to perform actual labor. It’s worked for more than half a century so far…
Ten Rules for Building an Automated Phone Menu
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This is just a bit of silliness that came to me while attempting to refill a prescription this week. I’ve reached the age where I pretty much always have a prescription waiting for me, so I interact with that particular phone menu a lot.
Back during my previous work-life, my boss came to me and said, “I’m thinking of installing an automated phone system on our main number.” I cheerfully responded, “In God’s name why?” I think I also suggested that, if he nurtured a pathological hatred for our public, he should seek therapy. The answer, of course, was that the admin staff fought over whose turn it was to answer the phones and each jealously tracked the number of hours they had to do so up against the number of minutes their co-workers did.
Now, I was fairly senior in leadership, but I believed in pitching in. I offered to answer the phones, if someone would train me on the intimidating, button-studded sidecar that attached to the designated hardware and on the Byzantine maze that was the set of flip cards for finding extensions and outside numbers. I was never trained. Maybe it had something to do with that fact that I consider, “In God’s name why?” a cheerful response.
Continue readingMaryland’s 90-Percent Fail
This week, these nine members of Congress from Maryland voted along party lines in favor of a government shutdown. While their staffs flooded constituents with emails about how much they’re doing for the already-displaced federal workers, they voted to stop the pay and the public service of over six million more.
From the House, freshmen members John Olszewski Jr., April McClain-Delaney and Sarah Elfreth joined 44-year veteran Steny Hoyer, as well as Glenn Ivey, Kweisi Mfume, and Jamie Raskin were among the almost-unanimous Democratic Party rejection of an eleventh-hour attempt to prevent shutdown.
In the Senate, Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks ignored Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s appeal to reason and also voted for shutdown.
Old news? Not really. The federal government is only funded through September, which means, in six months, this piece of political theater will be revived, probably to even more dismal critical response. Is this an effort to stay in the news as the Executive Branch grabs all the headlines? If so, it’s ironic that our elected “representatives” can only be relevant by not doing their jobs.
Continue readingThe Only Thing We Have to Fear
“…the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
It’s unusual that I quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Overall, I’m not a fan, but the man knew how to make an emotional impact on his listeners. He spoke the words above during his first inauguration to the U.S. Presidency, March 4, 1933.
America was in the middle of the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in our history as a nation. People were angry, tired, desperate… and scared. F.D.R.’s proposed, with his New Deal programs, to calm that fear and address the very real suffering of the population. Current wisdom says The New Deal did not end the Great Depression, (more here) but he did take positive steps to end suffering.
And he was right about fear. There’s no emotion more paralyzing, nor more counter-productive. Even avarice and blind lust drive us to do something. Fear stops us in our tracks, unless it becomes panic. Then it does make us do something, usually something very stupid.
Continue readingThe Economic Blackout – What is the Message?
I’m posting a bit early this week, because I wanted a little lead time. There’s an event scheduled to begin Thursday. I want people to think carefully about that event.
A lot of my family and dear friends–very nice people–have been sharing a flier calling for an “Economic Blackout” to begin at midnight on February 27th and last throughout February 28th. The flier is headlined, “As our first initial act, we turn it off. For one day we show them who really holds the power.” It then instructs us to not make purchases, that if we must spend, we should do it only at small local businesses, and we should not use credit or debit cards.
“If we disrupt the economy for just ONE day, it sends a powerful message,” it says, then closes with the vaguely sinister statement, “This is our first action.”
If you firmly support this effort, I’m can’t change your mind. You have to obey your own conscience. But I ask you to join me in considering a few questions.
Continue readingI Blame Norman Lear
I do.
Well, not for everything that’s wrong, but for one specific American obsession that’s causing us no end of trouble at this moment. That obsession is our unbridled romance with “The Tell-Off.”
Let me back up. I am a huge fan of Norman Lear, and the above statement is mostly tongue-in-cheek. The late, great Mr. Lear brought us, beginning with All in the Family, entertainment that challenged our deepest-held beliefs and forced us to consider the topics that nice people just didn’t talk about. He gave us the Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and Good Times, changing as he did the way the majority of America saw an important minority group– onewhose history was just as “American” as that of countless families of White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. He gave us Maude and One Day At a Time, making us take a hard look at the roles of women in America. He founded People for the American Way to stand up to the Moral Majority, and he shared with me a great love for the Declaration of Independence.
But, if you watch enough of his shows, you see something happen again and again: The Tell-off. Many, if not most, of the episodes climaxed with one of the main characters, dripping with moral outrage, wreaking verbal havoc on the episode’s “big bad,” making their opponent look small. It was immensely satisfying. Some of those beats were brilliant: Edith finally telling Archie to “Stifle!” is the standout, but I also loved George Jefferson’s response to a boorish client who told him that, because he stood up for his maid Florence, he could kiss their proposed contract goodbye. “I ain’t gonna tell you what you can kiss,” quoth George.
Classic 70s put-down.
Continue readingTesting the Limits of the Welcome Mat
Many of my readers (and a lot more readers than I often have!) congratulated me on last week’s post, the text of my Friday night speech at Farpoint. A lot of members of the audience congratulated me too. That was very kind of all of you, and it’s nice to know my words hit home. A writer is a performer, and all performers live for audience feedback.
Unfortunately, last Saturday evening, the parameters I had laid out, for who is and should be welcome at our convention, were tested. That test has caused me a lot of soul-searching.
Here are the facts:
One of our regular attendees approached me late Saturday night to complain that another of our regular (so I was told) attendees was wearing a MAGA hat. The complainant wanted the other woman to remove her hat for the duration of the weekend and suggested that at least the hat and possibly the woman did not belong there. [There was a D.J. playing music.]
Continue readingDoes That Make You Less My Friend?
This weekend is Farpoint, my annual Star Trek and science fiction convention, which is why the blog is two days late. The last-minute planning for a three-day event tends to eat up all the days in the week before. Especially when you just closed a show the weekend going into that week. If you missed it, I just performed The Seagull with the Rude Mechanicals. So I’m the emcee for Farpoint’s opening ceremonies. I don’t always give an actual speech, but, given the tenor of the times, I wanted to say a few things to my local S.F. community. I had actually planned to use them as the basis of this week’s blog, and that decision was reinforced when more than one audience member asked me to do just that. So here is my opening address to Farpoint 2025.
I started this con when I was 27.
I didn’t start it alone, but I was the one that year who jumped up and said, “Hey kids, let’s put on a con!
People thought I was too young and reckless and feral to run a con, but, here it is and here we are, and This year I turn 60.
It’s been a long and eventful journey for me, for Farpoint, and for Baltimore fandom. We’ve gained new friends and we’ve lost dear old ones. We’ve seen new incarnations of the thing that brought us together originally, which was the three-season 1966 series Star Trek.
Continue readingRobert A. Heinlein’s Friday – Them and Us
So I’m reading — for the seventh or eighth time–Robert Heinlein’s Friday. I’ve reviewed it before, 13 years gone. This time, I’m struck by some of the events portrayed against the background of a pseudo-dystopian future. They’re all too… familiar to a reader in 2025 America.
Heinlein was a very perceptive social critic. He could see past the conventional wisdom of the times he was living in and caught some trends and developments most people didn’t. That vision made him fairly prophetic. In Friday, he predicted multinational corporations taking ownership of whole countries and becoming nations themselves. Surely as American billionaires have re-launched the space race, once the province of nation states only, we can see that next step as plausible.
Continue readingOedipus and Antigone – Basically Propaganda
So last week I told a wildly slanted version of the story of Oedipus, the man who had a complex named for him long before we started naming complexes for banks and telecomms.
As you’ve guessed if you’ve read my blistering attack on the tale of the man who killed his father and married his mother, I don’t go looking for reasons to talk about Oedipus. I try not to think about him, because, “Eew.” But I recently read a book called The Wisdom of the Myths by a philosopher named Luc Ferry. Mr. Ferry’s goal was nothing less than to bring us better living through mythology. He dug into the philosophical underpinnings of the stories that, to the rest of us, are fodder for Disney movies and Ray Harryhausen films; and he came up with some advice for living.
His main point was that the ancient Greeks accepted man’s mortality in a way no cultures did. They didn’t really believe in an afterlife. People just died. Oh, yeah, their shades (ghosts) went to the Underworld, ruled by Hades. But as soon as Charon the ferryman rowed them across the River Styx, they drank from the River Lethe and they forgot who they were. And then they just sort of… milled about down there. Like the opening chapter of The Wizard of Oz, everything was just gray. (I in no way mean to imply that Kansas is Hell. Superman comes from Kansas, and I refuse to insult Superman.)
A few special souls got to live in the Elysian Fields. Sort of the upper floors of Hades, where you have to have a room key to make the elevators go there. Presumably these souls remember their lives, and thus achieve immortality. But they are special. The world of the Greek myths was elitist above all. There were also other special souls who remembered very well who they were: Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion… The people–kings all–who pissed off the gods and were tortured for eternity.
Oh, and one or two mortals got made into gods. And a few got plastered into the heavens as constellations. The stories never weighed in on whether, as constellations, they were self-aware and had memories. I sense not.
Mostly, though, the ancient Greeks believed you got one life, you died, and that was that. No mystical path to immortality. Mr. Ferry finds in this advice for us all: stop trying to bribe the gods into letting you have more life. Accept that one life is what you get, and make the most of it.
Continue readingI Am Mister Oed
Oedipus did nothing wrong. This must be distinctly understood, or else the wondrous snark I shall direct at this story may never be appreciated. (The Dickens you say.)
It all starts with Oedipus’s birth father, Laius, eventually King of Thebes. Laius’s father, a grandson of Thebes’s founder, Cadmus, died while Laius was a child. The throne was seized by usurpers, and little Laius was unfortunately smuggled out of the city before he could be executed by the new administration. I say “unfortunately,” because no good came from Laius. Literally everyone he touched died tragically.
Laius grew up in Pisa, the ward of King Pelops. Pelops no doubt had sympathy for a child who had escaped execution because, well, Pelops hadn’t. Pelops had been murdered and butchered into stew meat as a child, by his own father, who wanted to impress some important dinner guests. (Okay, they were the gods of Olympus.) His guests were not impressed. They restored little Pelops to life so he could become Poseidon the sea god’s lover (you can’t make this shit up, even though someone probably did). Pelops led a charmed life which culminated in his becoming a king. Then he welcomed The Omen into his house.
Continue reading