Four Bags Full

Contemplative and bookish men must of necessitie be more quarrelsome than others, because they contend not about matter of fact, nor can determine their controversies by any certain witnesses, nor judges.
-- John Donne

Tuesday, August 29, 2000
One year ago: Impressionists
Two years ago: INFJAG

Since Pete was giving me a ride to work this morning, I was able to bring groceries with me! This two-fer is the way he usually works it: if he drives me home one day, he offers to pick me up the next morning. So last night I'd walked down to Safeway, to grab stuff to have for lunch at work. Somehow the food expanded enough to fill four bags! A lot of frozen stuff, a bag of "Spring Mix" salad, and some cereal.

Normally on Tuesdays, we have a conference-call meeting with Arthur in London chiming in. But he's on vacation this week, and Chip was very busy, so we skipped it. When we are all in the same room, we pretty much know what each one of us is doing in any case.

Two guys who are interested in partnering with us came by for a meeting. I love their name: the Funky Monks! But they don't have anything to do with The Red Hot Chili Peppers, nor the home of retro street fashion. Instead they are working on some technology that might be useful on our site. I'm not sure how our business model will mesh with theirs, though. They didn't come to Seattle specifically to see us; they were doing a bunch of meetings out here.

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I'm reading Bujold's Memory, and enjoying it a lot. I seem to be going through the Vorkosigan novels backwards, though I did start with an early one a few months back. Of course, now I wish that I'd been reading her before Orycon 20, where Bujold was the guest of honor (My Orycon 20 conrep). She does a good job portraying her characters at different stages of their lives. Good suspense, too!

Currently the Memoryhole list (devoted to fanzine collecting, supposedly) is refighting the Breendoggle. The Breendoggle was a nasty scandal that divided fandom in the early sixties. Some people never became friends again! Evidently the incident was so powerful that there are only a few webpages that mention it. The basic story was that a convention committee decided to ban one fan from attending the con, putatively because of bad acts on his part involving minors. Some folks get all het up because this action wasn't taken against other fans who had similar reps. Therefore the committee must have really done this because of other gripes against this particular fan. A sad, ugly story. It's the second time this year that all this has been dragged up, around and over the list. So I immediately posted (though I mostly lurk) to expound on the benefits of mail filtering and deleting, and put this into practice. Sadly, a group on the list didn't take the hint, and persisted in chewing on each other's legs.