The Drink Tank 138 (2007).pdf

The Drink Tank 138

I had to do one more...

real big deal was that my cell phone was stolen

too. That led to some great comedy.

You see the jackass who stoled my wal-

let and phone must have given his number to

his girlfriend. That was a dumb idea because

less than 10 hours after it was stolen I had a

new phone and that phone wouldn’t be working

any more. Be he’d already given out the num-

ber and hadn’t told his girlfriend that the phone

wasn’t working.

And so it began with a phone call at 10

or so on Saturday.

“Hi hunny, it’s Beth. I’m just sitting

around thinking about you. Call me. Love you.”

That was the voice mail. It was from a

209 number which is in the Central Valley of

California.

She called again around Noon on Sun-

day.

“Hi, it’s Beth. Ijust wanted to talk to

you. Call me.”

And then around 2.

“Call me, baby.”

And then the texts started.

Hey babe- just wantd to talk to ya. Call

me back so i can C U.

And then

Why havnt you called?

And then a bit later

You need to stop chillin with Steve and

call me so U can com over and B wit me. K?

I igured that I could report the number

and have them track my phone down, but more

important was petty revenge.

I sent a text.

Sorry Baby. I’ll pick U up in 20 minutes

I then did nothing. he called and left a

message.

I’m in trafic. B there in an hour

I didn’t call again until very late when I

left a text

Sorry. I’ll come tomorrow .

She sent some very angry messages and

inally, shortly before I got to BASFA, I got a

voice mail.

She was mad.

“How could you do that? I’ve been

waiting here and waiting and you brush me off!

Fuck you! I don’t wanna be with you anymore,

asshole!” she couldn’t be more than maybe

eighteen. She sounded young and sassy and

mad.

So, here’s the funny part. I broke the

two of them up without the guy who stole my

phone even knowing that she was mad at him.

Now you can’t say that a guy who stole a cell

phone and gave the number out was a dick

move. If he had simply fenced it, I’d have had

no problem with that, but his technique was

shitful and therefull he deserves what he got.

Does that make me a bad person?

This should be the Cocktail Issue, or

even This Were WorldCons. I’ve been working

on both and they’ll be out soon, I promise, but

I had to do one extra because I had much to say

and I had one of those experiences that just has

to be written about.

I had my wallet stolen. A lot of you who

read my LJ will have heard that part, but the

The lovely and talented Linda joins the ranks

of my writing staff (if you can call my cadre of

folks a staff) with what will likely be a regular

thing about her two cats Pedro (who was called

Saba before I redubbed her Pedro) and The

Other Cat (referred to as the O.C.). And now...

The Fabuloso Adventures of

Pedro and The O.C.

by Linda Wenzelburger!

So Chris brought over a copy of Guido-

lon for me.

Pedro and The O.C. were entranced by

the chicken image on the disc, so they stared at

me and did their Jedi mind trick thing so that I

would place the disc into the player and turn the

monitor on for them.

Given that they are cats after all and

don’t have opposable thumbs, the only part of

the AV system that they can have any hope of

operating is the remote control, so they do re-

quire assistance with the whole ‘setup to watch’

thing.

Pedro was already ensconced on the

couch. She deigned to raise her head up from

full nap position to get a better angle on the

screen. The O.C. was pacing the room anxious-

ly waiting for the ilm to start.

As soon as it did, he sat down smack in

front of the TV and gazed up as the story began

to unfold. It was very much like ‘His Master’s

Voice’ only Chris isn’t exactly what you’d call

his master, so much as a rival. But that’s an-

other story.

About 5 minutes in, something, I’m

not sure what, made The O.C. nervous and

he glanced back at me then jumped up on the

couch and spent the rest of the ilm glued to my

side. But he stuck it out, even though he was a

little distressed. Might have been the volume.

heh heh.

Pedro, inding nothing of interest to

interact with on the screen, put her head down

and pretended to sleep. She’s more a ilm noir

snob, so this really wasn’t her cup of tea despite

her initial interst in the avian subject. I’ll let her

watch ‘Asphalt Jungle’ again this week to

make up for it.

Letter Graded Mail

sent to garcia@computerhistory.org

by my gentle readers

Monday 13 August 2007

Dear Chris (for TAFF),

This is just a LOC ette, really; since I’d

inally decided that I should pull my inger out

and send you a piece for your cocktail issue, I

igured I could make the extra effort to respond

to your most recent issues as well. A little

sooner than October, even. In fact, now that

you’ve gone and got yourself a life there’s a

possibility I might be able to keep up…

And I’m so glad you did! I was wondering if

I’d have any European representation in the

Cocktail issue.

Anyway, I was impressed both by

James Bacon’s article about many things

bookshoppish in the UK and by your homage to

James’s lexible use of language that led to you

crediting his article to ‘Jame’. I can obviously

ask James this myself, but I’m curious about

how many books he’s reading at the moment if

he’s buying about twelve a week.

There was a time I was buy ifteen of twenty

books a week and reading 1 every three to four

weeks. I was a FOOL! I did put many of them

up for auctions.

As James mentioned, Foyles is

something of an institution in the London

bookselling world. It used to have a reputation

for idiosyncratic practices; books were shelved

predominantly by publisher and even if you

found something you wanted to buy you had to

go to at least two different desks in order to do

The Man Himself, Kevin Roche as Vanda-

monde and Radar as Agatha Heterodyne from

Studio Folio’s Girl Genius comics. You should

go and buy stuff at studiofolio.com. You really,

really should.

Photo from Costume College by Linda!

so. Much of

the bookshop’s

character was

established

by Christina

Foyle, the

daughter

of two

booksellers

(her father

William

founded

Foyles); she

died in 1999.

Since then it’s

become more

of a bookshop

than an experience, and may well survive.

Many bookstores are experiences, like the

used shop in Downtown San Jose that is

gone now. It was amazing! You had to climb

over things and there was an added loft that

required pay-offs to the Fire Marshall. What’s

funny is that they also put things by publisher

too!

As Alison Scott mentioned in her letter

in #137, London-based fan Julie Rigby used to

manage the children’s section at Foyles. Julie

was also responsible for putting on at least one

exhibition of SF art in the shop, getting some

lovely pieces from big names including Jim

Burns and Anne Sudworth and displaying them

very well.

Anne Sudworth is my current favourite artist.

She’s on my desktop at work!

Despite increasing news and personal

experiences of Waterstone’s behaving less

and less like a shop that wants to sell books to

people who actually want to read them, I must

admit to a fondness for Huge Waterstone’s

as the Simpson’s, Piccadilly branch is known

in our household. This is despite what

happens whenever I go in there (usually in

mid-November, in the hope of knocking

some Christmas shopping on the head before

everyone else gets the same idea) which makes

me wonder whether they’ve decided to attempt

to emulate Foyles and develop idiosyncrasies of

their own.

You have to seriously plan your

idiosyncracies. I’ve always said that.

Thus I ind the appropriate department,

look for the book I want, and then realise

that they have invented a particularly bizarre

shelving policy for that department alone. After

a bit of fruitless twirling about, I approach the

nearest counter and ask them to check for me.

Half the time, despite the size of the shop, they

haven’t got the book I want. On most other

occasions they tell me they have several copies

in different departments, at least one of which

is in their own. I ask them where it is; they

tell me it’s where I’ve just been looking, and I

explain that it isn’t. They go off to search for

it themselves. Often they come back looking

equally bafled and send me somewhere else.

Eventually, having repeated this performance

on another loor, someone offers to order it

for me. I give up, decide to buy the book from

Amazon, and move on to the next item on my

list. In practice, much of the value of going

to Huge Waterstone’s – and the reason I still

love real bookshops despite the convenience of

Amazon – lies in the off-list books that I ind

whilst looking for something else.

My theory is that computers, wishing to

inlict damage in revenge for what we’ve

done to them, make you search like that. No,

they wouldn’t dare strike by making medical

computers stop working, but a foul up at a

bookstore is much more annoying.

It still seems to be the case that a

determined and knowledgeable department

head in a branch of Waterstone’s can make a

real difference; James mentioned the displays of

books nominated for SF awards in the Croydon

store, where the key has been the employment

of a former Forbidden Planet man to run the

SF section, leading in addition to a marked

improvement in stock.

Lloyd Penney mentioned in his letter in

#136 that he thought a fanzine lounge should

have ‘some quiet times, and some party times,

too’, with which I agree. In the UK there’s a

long-standing problem with the idea of either

a fan lounge or a fanzine lounge; however

well-planned and well-run they are, if they’re

called either of those things then lots of people

won’t go into them, fearing either a stereotyped

huddle of elitist BNFs glaring at anyone they

don’t know who dares set foot in the place or a

room empty of anything except tables groaning

with fanzines that someone else apparently

doesn’t want. The fact that if most people don’t

go in then this is a self-fulilling prophecy, and

also that it’s no fun whatsoever for the people

who would like to have the space there and

working well, means that we usually have to

concede defeat and either not have a fan or

fanzine lounge or just call it something else.

I need to call my lounges just Lounges. That

might be weird. There were quiet times, but

they were during the day. And at night. Late at

night. VERY late at night...

For the recent Year of the Teledu

convention in the UK, there was general

agreement that it would be good to have a

lounge space within the con area where people

could hang out, chat, relax, play games, use

computers, and hold small informal programme

items; having described it, there was further

agreement that it seemed to need to contain

all of the sorts of furniture, equipment and

other items that might be found in an average

(if rather larger than average) fannish living-

room, and that’s what it was therefore called.

It was a great place to hang out after breakfast,

before the programme got going, and have a

inal morning cup of coffee; it was an excellent

meeting place (next to the con bar) during the

day; and it was full of lively conversations and

strange games late at night as an alternative to

or continuation of the evening programme. And

some of the programme items it hosted – like

the ‘Stitch and Bitch’ circle – probably would

have itted in well at Robert Hole’s alternative

Westercon, as John Purcell suggests in his letter

in #137…

The concept of the Con Bar is strange to me.

I’m so used to a party loor. The simple little

soft lounging space is a good idea. It was nice

to have Mike McInerney stop by before work

two mornings as an example.

It was, of course, a fan room – even

though many of the people involved in the

decision to create it are among those who react

negatively to the idea of a fan room that’s

called that – except that it didn’t have fanzines

available for sale or giveaway; that would have

been a step too far into fuddy-

duddy fannishness for most

of the attendees, I think. We

had a couple of League of Fan

Funds tables, though, and ran

a paper auction and a tombola

which helped to raise a healthy

wodge of cash for TAFF and

GUFF.

We had little for giveaway,

but we had a lot for reading.

Good to hear that TAFF

fundraising is going on.

All us Chris For TAFFs

(and Linda’s for TAFF) all

appreciate the effort!

Your exchange

with Lloyd about Chris’s

Little Thing, as Leigh Ann

Hildebrand put it – and your

hand gesture; is it like giving

someone egoboo? – inevitably

reminds me of Dick Smith’s

fanzine Uncle Dick’s Little Thing , which I

enjoyed although I came to it after the event;

indeed, the fanhistorical aspect of reading

contemporary accounts of events I’d heard

about subsequently was part of the appeal.

Whatever will people make of Chris’s Little

Thing and the events described in 10 or 20

years’ time…?

Best wishes,

Claire

Well, that EgoBoo signal would be a little too

much like the Chris, Here’s What I Think of

You! gesture that many folks like to give me.

To properly do it, set your hand palm down

parallel to the ground, ingers slightly apart.

Then, bend your ring inger

down at the irst joint, jiggle

it downword. That’s the way

it’s done!

Thanks Claire!

And now, John Purcell!

Yes, cute people are

oh, so very important. They

make the world go ‘round.

Damn right! And I’m sur-

rounded by them!

Hey! It is good to see

Alison Scott getting into the

loccing habit. Maybe she’ll

respond likewise to my zine

once I get some hard copies

off in the mail in a couple

weeks. It looks like I will be

getting a decent-sized pay-

check starting this fall - now

a full-time faculty member

at Blinn College; no more

adjunct teaching (knock on

wood; bring your head closer, Chris) - so I

might be able to realize my goal of making all

covers for my Dead Tree Roster recipients in

full color. That would be lovely.

I would say you could pass me over, but I

need them for the Lounge.

Now I know how you feel about that

Who Wants to be a Superhero? show. I freely

admit that it is a big bunch of hokum, but if

taken at a really low level of expectations - and

also a low volume level - it is a mindless bit

of luff, perfect background noise while grad-

ing papers or reading fanzines, which are much

more important than stupid television shows.

I refuse to discuss that dreck!

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