Memnison Journal

Set of covers from APA-69 # 79, drawn by Giovanna Fregni. Gorgeous stuff of dinos getting together in a PG-13 manner, with one catch in the fourth section cover…

I’m scanning up all of the APA-69 covers that I have around - 99% of the APAs were shredded a while back in my effort to clean things out, with the exception of the covers and my own contributions. No, I’m not posting them all; most have no real interest (aside of prurient) to y’all, but these are lovely.

Only very very mildly NSFW. apa_69_covers_79 (PDF, 1.4 M)

From Lynn Calvin: What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. And for a extra touch, ** star the ones you caught in a simpler format (Classics Illustrated Comics, movie, etc)

Jonathan Blaque on the piloting deficiencies of John Sidney McCain III.  Me, I worry more about his deficiencies as a fiscal steward in the same irresponsible levels as all of those bond rating outfits that lived off the fees from the people they rated and gave the impression to people that bulls**t mortgage derivatives were gold-plated sure things.

Of course, if I say that I don’t make any money, but my wife is a gazillionaire who loans me planes to ride in for my political efforts - and I pass out my tax returns, but hers have to remain private for the sake of the kids’ privacy…say what?

Mutual funds are another story. Cindy McCain—or someone advising her—is trying to make a lot of money through active mutual-fund trading. She has between $600,000 and $1.25 million invested in three mutual funds run by the American Funds Group, which is anything but conservative. They are investing for high growth and paying high loads (sales charges) to do it—an expensive strategy that seems to have won the couple some money in the past but does not look promising so far this year.

No doubt, because mutual funds are starting to tank.  The disaster presided over by Bush called the US economy is going to hell in a handbasket, and McCain’s right beside him with an everything is fine response for the base’s happy-happy place.

You may not agree on which Democrat should take him on, but I’m convinced that the man is a total disaster.

The BBC is reporting that of the 53 girls between 14 and 17 picked up from the polygamist compound in Texas earlier this month, over half are mother or pregnant or both. 

AP and the BBC are both reporting that the Vietnamese government just decided to cut off adoptions of Vietnamese orphans to American citizens, closing down contacts with 42 US adoption agencies.  The US Government just put out a report that there was widespread baby-stealing and baby-selling going in in Vietnam for the ‘U.S. market’, so to speak, at around $10,000 a kid.  The Vietnamese government, rather than look into the matter, exploded and cut off the arrangements for the US on all adoptions.

I feel horrible for the US families who were in the line to adopt and are left with nothing after all of their hope, but more horrible for any Vietnamese families who did get forced into handing over kids to brokers for ’sale’.

As you can surmise, I was working like a demon on the basement this weekend; I basically went down there the whole time and only popped up for food breaks or when I was done for the night.  I got a lot done, but it’s hard to see all of it unless you know things as well as I do.

My office in particular was a real snarl, and a lot of time has been put into straightening it all out.  I cleared out a lot of loose paper, and consolidated the remainder.  Soon, my mom’s secretary desk will be usable again - both as a source for office supplies and as an information source.  The thing was loaded up with old ‘important paper’ that was just moldering away and largely worthless.  It will be the place we go to look up equipment manuals, for one thing, or to get envelopes, cards and so on.

The amount of medium to low-priority stuff to scan is still huge, and I still have a lot of sorting to do.  A ton of the stuff in my files, as well, can be taken out and (if still useful) scanned and the paper disposed of.  When I’m done, the files will be used for things you don’t want to toss (like my maps), but not for tons of information I can’t search through or easily dig out.

The last of the books that needed to come down from the upstairs bookcase area that I tunred over to Susan and Meredith got down via Susan today - and all of the paperbacks are now shelved.  It’s not the neatest or best job, but it frees up the boxes to take the hardbacks and prozines out of here.

I started with the American history, and started gutting things.  Out went a lot of Civil War specialty stuff, and a lot of recent US political history.  Most of it was stuff I’d never look at again.  Next is probably the European historical stuff…

I’ve posted on a couple of big lists I belong to about the prozines.  While I’d rather donate them to a charitable outfit and get a tax boost that way, I just have to get them out of here.  Some people asked for listings of the stuff (so they could pick and choose, doubtless) but I’m not bothering with an inventory.  If someone wants to volunteer to come over to my house and do it, lovely.  But I simply don’t have the time or inclination to do it.  If I don’t get a good response on the things, I *will* start approaching local libraries on the donation end very soon.  Like within the month of May, no kidding. Having four of five people dig through the damn things and take only a handful of copies and leave me with a seething pile of scattered ANALOGs and whatnot isn’t going to fly.

This, BTW, has everything to do with decluttering and zero to do with my medical stuff.  Except that my foot situation precludes me from lifting and shoving heavy boxes around.  I know that the chances of me ever digging through these are nil, and there’s no point in having them gather dust.

Susan and Mere set up the Topsy-Turvy today with squash and beans, and the rest of the plants await further action.  Mere was also away Saturday night on a scouting overnight to ‘camp out’ - her first - and she had a glorious time.  She’s been eating like mad, so she’s probably getting ready to sprout again…

My great hero in freshman year at my high school was Tim Langley; a great actor, well-spoken, intelligent, kind, a fighter for the underdog, and just in general an admirable guy. He was well-chosen in my freshman (and his senior) year to play Cyrano De Bergerac…and he was also the news editor on the paper. He wrote the item on a modern-day Jesus just before Christmas, 1971, and I’ve always liked it. (He’s now a Federal Public Defender in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and my mother in law dealt with him many times in court over kids she was looking in on for the school district.)

The next two items deal with the changing times - making teachers go to other schools as a part of school integration, and the reaction of he students and staff to the idea, and then the whole issue of letting girls into boys-oriented classes, teams and so on. Meredith saw the movie Gracie with me not long ago, about a teenage girl’s efforts to get onto the school’s soccer team, and she just can’t get her head around the idea of a world where being of a particular gender or race is a disqualification for anything. Totally alien to her, thank God.

jar_wwpilot_122370 (PDF, 1.3 M)

At this point (fall of 1973), I’m the editorial editor for the high school paper, and my, I was a lot more conservative in those days in a lot of ways.  This paper brings up two items that were controversial in the day, and aren’t uncommon anymore…

First, the reaction to the Board of Education mandating that we have a security guard stationed at the school.  There was a good deal of thrash in the 1970s in Dayton over busing of students across the city for purposes of racial desegregation; most black Daytonians lived in the western quarter of the city, and I lived in the eastern one, where most of the locals met the idea of having their kids bused to cruddier schools on the ‘bad side of town’ with a great deal of resistance.  As a kid, I was petrified to think of possibly being sent to a tougher school; blacks didn’t scare me, but I’d regularly gotten the crap beaten out of me by tough *white* kids, and I didn’t need to be sent to a new school that had more and different tough kids to beat me up further.  No, no thank you.

Part of the reason the security guards were sent in was because of a fear of increased violence.  The lawsuit that started in 1972 to force busing worked its way through the courts, and people and kids on all sides got more and more worked up over the case.  Voters put a majority of anti-busing members onto the school board, and they fought at great trouble and expense all the way up to the US Supreme Court, which finally ruled that a previously-set-up court-orders busing plan must take effect.  That was 1977, and I was out of college that year, so it didn’t affect me at all.   Busing for integration finally ended in 2002, but by that time, the school system was a shell, broke and in very sad shape.

I wrote the editorial items in this clipping on the security guard and the draft; I registered for the draft on my 18th birthday, while I was in college, but the draft ended in 1973, before my number could come up.  Thank God.

The final bit is about a effort that was made in my senior year to create a series of ‘minicourses’ for English students; I took one on Science Fiction Literature, and was appalled to find out that nobody but me was actually reading the stories, for all intents and purposes.  I’d been in English honors classes up until then, and wasn’t fond of being in a situation where I was bored out of my mind while the teacher struggled to push the other kids into Doing Their Class Work One Page At A Time *grunt*push*.  So I found the classes a neat idea that was short on being all that stimulating.

jar_wwpilot_100573 (PDF, 2.1M)

Another clip from my high school paper (December 1972) on the development of beards and mustaches and the like at the school when it was still very very much frowned on by the adults in the area as ‘hippie crap’.  I had longish bushy curly hair my freshman year and finally grew sideburns in my senior year.  I didn’t grow my trademark beard until 1977, after my beard-hating father died and I could quit tearing up my face and neck with a razor.  (I’ve got very sensitive skin that Does Not take well to a razor.)

jar_wwpilot_120172 (PDF, .4M)

Piece from my high school newspaper about a Black Panther who was brought in by a civics teacher to talk to the class.  Quite a shocker to the kids; it may read like something in the Onion to the younger folks here, but - well, this was 1971, and a poll in the same issue asked students what they thought about My Lai and Lieutenant Calley, and the students were strongly for letting him off.  Long ago and all that.

jar_wwpilot_050371 (PDF, .4M)

Article from the local Chicago papers in mid-1986 quoting from interviews with me, my ex, Gretchen Roper, Neil Rest and others about fannish activities, with mentions of Thursdays, the old floating weekly party.

jar_lernerpapers_081486 (PDF, .7M)

Written originally for Roger Reynolds’ FUTURE FOCUS around 1979, it’s a piece I did on FTL travel, and of course, is probably wildly out of date or inaccurate.  Enjoy.

jar_tachy_time_travel_1979 (PDF, 1.6M)

For several years in the 1990s, Susan and I had a graphic design and web design business we called Marmot Graphics (the Marmot in question being a nickname for Susan, who was born on Groundhog Day, etc.) - and it was a reasonably profitable side business. It paid for our various computer upgrades over the years, and our clients got quality stuff for reasonable prices.

The business really got off the ground after Susan and I were furloughed during the US Federal Government shutdown in late 1995. The U.S. EPA’s managers strongly suggested we Find Other Employment, and freely handed out written permission to moonlight (which you had to have) from the Regional Administrator. We hooked up with Adam D’Auria, a techie friend of ours who had a good computer consulting business in the Chicago area, and he threw some of his customers at us for web work.

The end of the business bascially came to to three things - the crash of the dot-com boom, our customers getting a desire for more website than their budgets could afford, and adopting Meredith. The first two closed down the old business, and the last choked off our time for getting in new business.   We basically let the little business we had die out, and turned our attention to raising The Kid.

Below is a copy of my old business card from the company.  (The marmotgraphics.com website is all that remains of the business - as soon as I can integrate the last of my stuff from there into memnison.com, I’m closing it down and ‘ending the era’, so to speak.)  The various contact information on it is wildly out of date, except for the phone number.

CONGENIAL, the con I started up in the late 1980s, has tried to maintain a standard of uniqueness over the years.  Here’s a few of the badges from our collection from the earlier years….

Another item from my past - from a late 1962 or early 1963 issue of FATE Magazine, a letter from my mother (an avid subscriber) to the editor about early baby-tooth loss. Mine. Including my encounter with a ghostly lion.

I don’t remember the encounter exactly so, but I do remember being in a criblike bed and seeing some sort of lion in there with me - I thought at the time that I had just come out of sleep and semi-awake, saw this lion! Your Mileage May vary… the letter is after the cut. (Click on the graphic if you need to see it larger.)