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Categories
Meta
Rainbow Over Grey Fox
By the time we got the instruments under cover the sun had come back out.
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Postcard From the Hill
This has been a postcard from the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in Oak Hill NY.
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Stabbed By An Antique
“I’ve been told that several times today,” she said with a bright smile. “It’s an antique.” And she went back to reading her tourist map.
Why I Don’t Have An iPhone, Reason #1
I still found that calls regularly broke up on some major streets. In New York City, riding in a taxi along the Hudson, one important call was dropped three times on the new iPhone. Finally, I borrowed a cheap Verizon phone and got perfect reception.
— Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal today.
There are so many other reasons, but above all, it’s a phone! I’m no fan of Verizon but I have never had calls dropped like that in the middle of New York City. Well, not since I was an AT&T customer years ago, when you couldn’t make calls anywhere near Penn Station….
Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008
I was very sad to read that Thomas M. Disch apparently committed suicide last week. The obituary says he’d just had a sequence of awful disasters, health problems, and so on. It’s really sad.
I was introduced to his work thanks to a well-intentioned tongue-lashing by Baird Searles at the Science Fiction Shop on Eighth Avenue when I was a teenager (“You love New York and science fiction and you’ve never read 334????”). Even as I drifted away from the field, I would always snap up a book of his. He was one of the best writers in the field, and one of the few so-called new wave writers whose work remained consistently good as he got older.
He wasn’t the friendliest guy, but when I met him at an SF convention at Columbia University sometime in the early 80s, he did sign my dealer-table paperback* copies of 334 and Camp Concentration with a smile and a friendly remark around his cigar.
*Baird Searles was the kind of bookseller who would talk enthusiastically about a book even to someone who obviously wouldn’t be able to buy it (for instance, a kid who’d just had to put one book back, having done the sales-tax arithmetic wrong and therefore not having enough money to buy them all). I miss the Science Fiction Shop.
FOR RENT 3 ROOms
I was completely charmed by this sign in the window of a former cell-phone store on Flatbush Avenue. (So nice for once to see one of those go away, rather than the good local bar and independent video store that have left or are soon to leave the same block.) The elaborate lettering, the wildly creative spelling, and the fact that he did the whole thing in black and red EXCEPT for the contact information, written in red only, and now faded almost to illegibility.