The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: travel

  • Online Obscenity

    —

    by

    mongreldogs
    in ,

    In this online review, Joe Brown of Wired waxes eloquent about the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport, a new ultra-high-end sports convertible.  The Grand Sport costs a cool 2.1 M$ and boosts appropriately over-the-top stats like a top speed of 217 mph and 1001 horsepower from a 16-cylinder engine.  It will come as no suprise…

  • Lunacon 2009 (4): Sunday

    —

    by

    mongreldogs
    in , , ,

    After the hectic pace on Saturday, the con wound down somewhat before concluding on Sunday. I attended a panel on Galileo, another one on world building, and one on World Domination. Then I attended the dead dog filk and went home. Along the way I finally met up with someone I’d been on the lookout…

  • Lunacon 2009 (3): Saturday

    —

    by

    mongreldogs
    in , ,

    Today was the busiest of the convention. I gave blood; saw Mercedes Lackey and others hold forth on building fantasy worlds; participated in a discussion on financial crises in sci fi; participated (sort of) in the Masquerade after all; caught about half of a surprisingly good 1940 adventure film; and caught all of a not-at-all…

  • Lunacon 2009 (1): Friday

    —

    by

    mongreldogs
    in ,

    Well, Lunacon is officially underway. So far I’ve tried out a new card game (Fluxx) and attended one session (“Those Terrible Middle Ages”). I’ve also discovered that I can walk out my room (418), down two corridors, around a bend, and directly onto the 7th floor. It’s no accident they call the Hilton Rye Town…

  • My walking routes

    —

    by

    mongreldogs
    in ,

    Part of my new regimen is exercising, which for me is going to mostly (entirely?) be walking.  Using a cool google maps feature/app called gmap-pedometer, I’ve computed the walking distance for various routes around my home.  All of these are, for the moment, hypothetical, until it gets warmer out.  And I will add others as…

  • Contata (2)

    —

    by

    mongreldogs
    in , ,

    So, on to Contata proper. (See this earlier article for context.) A filk con is different from a regular con (assuming that my limited experience at Lunacon allows me to generalize about a “regular” con) in that the filk con is explicitly organized around the music. In a lot of ways, it was really just…

  • Contata (1)

    —

    by

    mongreldogs
    in , ,

    I spent this weekend at the hotel Hilton Parsippany, attending a sci fi con called “Contata 5“. In a somewhat strange co-branding fashion this was also NEFilk 18 — apparently, NEFilk is sort of an umbrella designation. Filk is an odd branch of music deriving from (originally, literally via typo) folk music — it’s folk…

  • Lunacon 51 (2)

    —

    by

    mongreldogs
    in ,

    Lunacon 51 (2) Some thoughts on my second con (should that be “sec-con”?), jotted down at midnight, though they’ll be posted much later. The first panel I intended to attend was “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”, a documentary on the failed vision of futurists from the 1930s through 1960s. Due to the weird layout and unpredictable spacetime anomalies…

  • Lunacon 51 (1)

    —

    by

    mongreldogs
    in ,

    Well, here I sit in the Hilton Rye Town waiting for Lunacon to get started. If you are paying more attention to this blog than you should be, you’ll recall that I attended Lunacon 50 last year as well. This year I managed to reserve early, so I am staying at the correct hotel and…

  • Alternate History: The Speech that Wasn’t

    —

    by

    mongreldogs
    in , , ,

    In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly…