Poll cats

Spoilsport suggests that the media learn elementary statistics.

Thanx to smofbabe

Written English is my mother tongue

Geek conversational behavior, a reprise of the classic discussion of fannish conversational behavior, and a geekish discussion of the issue

All thanx to andrewducker

The cool party

You are not missing the cool party.

Thanx to rm

Fan

Frederik Pohl, who was banned from a Worldcon before I was born (and I'm old) has a blog in which among other things he discusses those days with the style and grace that made him a beloved author for, lo, these many years. Jo Walton points out that this makes him an excellent candidate for the Fan Writer Hugo. Some people quibble. I'm with Jo.

Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010)

As Gore Vidal said,

Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices, and their clubs. Yet such is the vastness of our society and the remoteness of academics and book chatters from actual power that those who should be most in this writer’s debt have no idea what a useful service he renders us by revealing and, in some ways, by betraying his class. Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.

He wrote a lot, and I didn't like all of it, but I loved much of it. He was essentially a short-story writer, and his best work (The Rector of Justin, The House of Five Talents, Portrait in Brownstone) was fix-ups. (Offhand, I can't think of another mimetic writer of whom that can be said.) He was a lawyer in mundane life and if, as I imagine, he constructed wills and trusts with the same intricate skill, there are many rich people indebted to him. Link

I will probably not be the first to say this

maxiPad