Wednesday, August 24, 2011

comment, publication, egocheck

1. You won't find me among those Pacific coasters chuckling at the East's reaction to its 5.8 earthquake. Even around here, a 5.8 is at least enough to make you sit up and take notice, and I've seen Californians run around like headless chickens after a 6.2 forty miles away. If I were along a sinking mudlogged coast, as the DC-area seaboard is,* and more importantly one without California-level building codes - because it's not the quake that usually kills you, it's the falling buildings - I'd be plenty concerned about a 5.8 too.

2. Usually SFCV takes its reviewers' concert picks for the upcoming months and blends them into one continuous set of listings, but mine for this fall got published as a separate article. (The introductory paragraph is editorial.) You will notice that I'm more about the repertoire than the performers. I'm not going to get to all of these myself; in fact the two on Oct. 23 are both out because I have tickets to something yet else that day.

3. Looking up on the web something about a filk CD we picked up at Worldcon, I was amused to discover that a throwaway filk parody I wrote in 1983 and had nearly forgotten about, titled "Filkers Dining Together", has become a classic in filk lore. The article says it was "written by the bleary-eyed survivors who managed to keep filking till 6 a.m. Sunday morning at ConChord I in 1983," but however much it may have mutated since then, the original words were all mine. That was the con where I had no hotel room and no way to get one, for distressful reasons I'll omit here. I spent the first of the two nights sleeping under a table in the function room, hidden by the long table skirt. The second night, however, about a dozen people, including Leslie Fish, stayed up filking all night, and I, forsooth, was among them. About 5:30 a.m. someone suggested we take a break and repair to the hotel coffee shop when it opened at 6. By the time it was my next turn 15 minutes later, I had written a set of comic verses, including a couple of bad puns, about filkers seeking breakfast in the coffee shop, to the tune of the serious neopagan song "Sisters Dancing Together" which Leslie had sung earlier. Everyone thought it very funny, because we were so sleep-deprived. And then we did go and have breakfast, less adventurously than the song describes. A few days after the con I got a note from Leslie asking for a copy of the words, which I sent her, and that's the last I ever heard of it until now. The incident was the one bright spot of a painful weekend, and writing that song was my final act as a regular filker.

*Take a look at a map of the Chesapeake Bay. That is a drowned river valley if there ever was one.

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