Scott’s Scribblings

While watching an old rerun of How I Met Your Mother:

Lily (on TV): …My fiance stabbed me with a broadsword!

Scott and Deb (simultaneously): It was a rapier.

“Boo! looks like a head just lying on the bed the way he’s under the covers,” said Deb.

“Like the horse in The Godfather.”

“Yes, but that was bloody, this is funny.”

“I thought it was funny when the dude started wigging out.”

“That’s because you’re weird.”

“What? He had it coming.”

“Yes, but the horse didn’t.”

“They never developed the character of the horse, so it’s ok. Kind of like Mimi in La Bohème.”

“Mimi isn’t the character, her tuberculosis is.”

“That’s a good point. It was sad how the tuberculosis died in La Bohème.”

A recent post at my friend Marie’s blog made me think about travelling abroad, which of course brought to mind fond memories. Funny how most travel memories involve food, at least for me.

I never got around to writing the all-encompassing narrative that was our trip to Japan. Such a task would be a lot of work to do properly. Perhaps random anecdotes are a better route to go.

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Wow, it’s been a while since my last entry. A lot has changed since then.

In the meantime, Deb and I have relocated to Jersey City. I’m now consulting for Infusion Development. One of the may neat things about working at Infusion is the opportunity to develop for Microsoft’s Surface computer. My first task at Infusion was to work on a Business Intelligence demonstration for Microsoft utilizing the Surface. They’ve posted a video of that demonstration on YouTube. I wrote the controls she uses to view the data.

Via Sillybean, comes this wonderful link. (For programmers only.)

Baseball has been slowing growing a following in Europe of the past couple decades. You might have heard the International Olympic Committee voted to remove Baseball from the Olympics. Normally, I wouldn’t care about what the Olympics did, but the baseball programs of some European countries, like Ireland, get much of their funding from their national Olympic Committees.

In an effort to get the IOC to reconsider, the World Baseball Classic in 2009 will be held at various venues across Europe (rather than in Cuba as originally planned). Furthermore, a European wide professional league would expose the sport to more Europeans than the small leagues that currently exist in many of the countries.

An excellent introduction to European baseball can be found in the documentary The Emerald Diamond.

Just in case you were looking for ideas.

Probably. Although, spectrographic analysis would be conclusive.

A Buddhist couple in Arizona has been within 15 feet of each other every minute for the last ten years. These reporters tried it for 24 hours. Part of me is curious to try this. Deb would be pretty bored at my work, but then I could say, “Did you see/hear that? That is what I’m talking about it at night.”

I want to get a t-shirt or something to commerate my presence and participation in the best sf convention panel ever. I’m speaking, of course, about the Build a World panel at Wiscon 32. A full write up can be found here. Ted does an excellent job of recapturing the spirit of the thing.

I claim credit for the following:

• Cat Vacuumers
• Chlorine excreting elephants (I think it was Ben Rosenbaum who made them Cthuloid)
• Al cooking his face to begin the story

Deb came up with the Chocolate Mint.

I laughed so hard at this panel, my eyes started to water.

(Incidentally, I’ve also attended the nadir of con programming, a panel on advice to new writers at (IIRC) Torcon 3 with Robert Silverberg and a wannabe who shall remain nameless. Ask me about that one in private.)