Your result for The they're there their test....

Grammarphile

You scored 100% grammarphile.

Take The they're there their test. at OkCupid

I just finished helping my parents move my entire guest bedroom set, both sets of planetarium seats, and the bookcases on either side of my TV to Hartselle, to make room for moving in Jennifer's stuff in the near future. I'm tarred!

What would English look like with only Germanic words, and none of the Latin words that came with the Norman French? Science fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote an essay called "Uncleftish Beholding" ("Atomic Theory"), where he lays out the basics of chemistry using only German-derived English words. It kinda makes my brain hurt, but it's pretty cool. It starts to make sense after a while.

Who knew a water binding was made of two waterstuff unclefts and a sourstuff uncleft?

(binding == molecule, waterstuff == hydrogen, uncleft == atom, and sourstuff == oxygen)

I got this link from Gautam Mukunda, who I know from the David Brin email list.

Farmer's daughter disarms terrorist and shoots him dead with AK47

Apparently around the India/Pakistan border, militants are constantly demanding food and lodging from the nearby villages. They tried to demand it from one family, and the father said no. They thrashed him with sticks while his family watched. 21-year-old Rukhsana Kausar ran out of hiding toward her father's attacker, struck the terrorist with an axe, grabbed his AK-47. She shot him dead, and wounded another one as he tried to escape.

Just stuff I had open, mostly from the Larry Niven email list...

Jedi religion founder accuses Tesco [grocery store] of discrimination over rules on hoods Amazingly and amusingly, the store didn't immediately whip out the lawyers, but instead used examples from the Star Wars movies to show Jedi not wearing hoods.

Philip K. Dick letter praising "Blade Runner", which was adapted from his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

The Empirical Evidence Against Big Government was a YouTube video that uses actual statistics to back up its point.

A couple of plots showing trends in science fiction/fantasy TV.

Read Any Good Records Lately? An old Time article about a man who could recognize certain classical pieces from the grooves on their phonograph records.

An article about a British linguist who knew 44 languages.

I'm back from Con†Stellation, not that I went far, and I had a blast! Granted, I was a little bummed that it was on the same weekend as Anime Weekend Atlanta, but Con†Stellation gets my first loyalty. This year, I served as assistant guest liaison, helping take pressure off of Sue as she handled both guest liaison and dealer liaison duties.

Friday morning, as part of my guest liaising duties, I took Jack McDevitt and his wife Maureen, and David Weber and his wife Sharon, to the Space and Rocket Center. (I really like them, BTW, even though I've never gotten around to reading a David Weber book.) I then drove them to lunch at Grille 29, where Baen Books publisher Toni Weisskopf bought all of us lunch. (Toni is originally from here in Huntsville, BTW, and spent much of her teenage years going to Con†Stellation.) I spent lunchtime hobnobbing with most of the pros in town for Con†Stellation. I even talked some of the time.

I got to spend Friday evening of the con with Jennifer, which was good. Saturday, she had a ridiculous number of music gigs piled on top of her, so she couldn't come that day.

I got a grand total of about 8 hours of sleep Friday and Saturday nights, because I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning hanging around with the usual suspects from the dance (in no particular order, Marie, Manda, Jeff, Tim, Ben, and Sean) and laughing my ass off. I stayed for the whole dance each night, helped put the room back the way we found it, and hung out in Mike, Marie, Jeff, and Manda's hotel suite for a while.

Because Saturday was Talk Like a Pirate day, I recycled the shirt, boots, and pants from my groomsman costume at Mike and Esther's wedding into a semi-decent pirate outfit, and wore it most of the day. I helped out with the Masquerade this year, so I was in costume in view of everyone as Tim and I helped people on and off stage.

After Masquerade, I went to a panel local SF author Travis Taylor and his coauthor Bob Boan were recording for YouTube, describing some of the contents of their Planetary Defense textbook. Like the rest of the audience, I actually had to sign a release form for them to possibly use my likeness in the final video.

About 10:30 Saturday night, Sue called me up, asking me if I'd drive Lou Anders (Pyr Books editorial director) and John Picacio (award-winning illustrator, and our artist guest of honor) somewhere. They wanted to meet illustrator Stephan Martiniere's daughter. She was in Huntsville from Atlanta, to attend a big meet-up of Makers Local 256. I'd only ever vaguely heard of it, but apparently, there's a growing movement of mostly young people who get together in a shared space, with shared equipment, and build gadgets and technological art projects they think up, sometimes in the middle of the night if the inspiration strikes. A lot of the raw materials are donated by various companies. Huntsville's group has a small warehouse downtown, and I headed the three of us down there. It was fascinating. In a way, it's like seeing a little bit of the future being born. We found her, and she took us on a tour. While we were talking, Sara from VBAS walked by, and I said hi to her. I'd heard she's joined the "Makers", so I wondered if I'd see her, once I finally figured out that what Lou and John were describing was the same thing she said she'd joined.

After I got us back safely, I briefly went back to the room parties, but since I rarely drink, there wasn't much to interest me, so I headed for the dance, and helped them set up.

During con take-down, I usually help take down the art show panels, and take their component parts out to the truck, along with tables and other stuff. This year, I also helped pack up art show items for return to the artists, which was actually pretty fun. Later that afternoon, I attended the Dead Dog Party, a tradition where the con feeds its helpers. After It wound down, I headed for home.

Another thing was unusual abut this year's con. Con†Stellationis known for its great con suite, but I've never eaten better at a con than at this year's Con†Stellation, with more hot meals served. The credit goes to Judy and her staff. They did an excellent job this year.

Con†Stellation attendance was up this year. Apparently, they will be making a little money this year. That's good news, because they've lost a little money in each of the last seven conventions.

I know a lot of my friends list will be at AWA this weekend, but in case you aren't, I'm inviting you to the local science fiction convention this weekend. This year's constellation is the fox. I'm looking forward to it.

( T-shirt art )

As a promotion, Barnes and Noble is running a book fair thingy. (Why yes, that is the technical term.) Basically, if you buy stuff at the Bridge Street Barnes & Noble using the bar code behind the next LJ cut, they will contribute money to the convention.

( Book fair voucher )

Wow, it figures that the one time I manage to get to HAAS in about a month, it's not actually happening. Oh well, back to the house...

While on the subject of enormous artificial worlds, here's an excellent visualization of Larry Niven's Ringworld. This is something I really wanted to do back before I got too busy. I got as far as making model sketches on graph paper before I konked out.

( Ringworld movie )

Since there's nobody flying the Lying Bastard in the close-ups, I can only imagine that Speaker to Animals has taken a quick trip to the litterbox, and he'll be right back... ;-)

Oh, and I think I just found my groom's cake...

( Ringworld cake! )

( Here's someone's short film inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous With Rama, about exploring a large alien spacecraft from outside the solar system. )

( Here's someone else's project, showing a good view of the interior. )

I thought about creating a model like that once upon a time, to help me visualize it, but I never got around to it.

Believe it or not, well-known science fiction author Ray Bradbury was in a cheesily futuristic prune commercial in 1968. It actually has better production values than some of the original Star Trek... ;-)

I haven't done a great job posting more than links lately, so here's a quick little post about this weekend.

Friday night, Jennifer and I pretty much just hung out and watched a couple of episodes of the '90s X-Men cartoon on DVD.

Saturday, we visited my parents, and my little sister Corie was visiting as well. We went out to eat at Fulin's Asian Cuisine in Decatur, and that was good. I had my favorite Chinese dish, General Tso's chicken.

Today at church, we were both there early for practice -- even earlier than our usual practices. I ran the lyrics/service slides on the projectors, and Jennifer sang and played violin. She was lead singer on one song, and did a really good job. After lunch (Cazadores, where else?) we went to look at a house my parents found for her, that might have made a good business property for her music lessons and other teaching. Her dad came out to look with us, and he was a big help. Unfortunately, the place had major foundation problems, and the yard had a known history of flooding. Also, renovating it would have been a huge effort. (In other words, improving it would be polishing a turd.) On the plus side, we also looked at a small office she could rent in an ideal location, although the rent seems pretty steep.

This is funny and scary, and also explains a whole lot about the "Wild, Wild West" movie: Kevin Smith explains what happened to his Superman movie

In honor of Independence Day, but a day late, here's Muppet Stars and Stripes Forever...

Friday night after Jennifer got done with band practice, we watched "Labyrinth". It had been ages since I saw that one.

Yesterday afternoon, I took Jennifer to see the Wolverine Origins movie. It was pretty good for most of the movie, as long as you ignore a few of the liberties they took with comic book continuity. The childhood stuff was relatively close to what I remember from the Wolverine Origins comic series. There was the occasional stupid stuff in the movie. Jennifer and I were both annoyed by the BS claim that killing the bad guy would make a good guy character just as bad. No, actually, unless you did things that I don't know about, that were much worse than killing this guy, you can't possibly be as bad. Save human- and mutant-kind a lot of misery and execute the bastard.

After the movie, I stayed at my house to finish filling out something I needed to do for work, and that took a while. I finally finished and got to HAAS around 8:45. I was glad I got a chance to see drmindfunk for the first time in weeks. After the meeting let out, I went to dinner at Mellow Mushroom for the first time. The meatball appetizer was very good, and the slice of pizza Basil gave me was really good, even though it was covered with veggies and I'm a veggiephobe.

After church today, I had lunch at Jennifer's parents' house with them, Jennifer, and my Mom and Dad. Excellent food and company. We got some more wedding stuff figured out. We've figured out a date for the wedding (November 7), but I realized that I'd forgotten to tell Mom and Dad. Wow, I suck! Must be distracted... Today, Jennifer and I both learned that the wedding time is also set. It will be held at 3 PM, so that the musicians Jennifer picked out can get done in time for a concert they'll be playing later that night. The musicians are significant because they were Jennifer and Amy's violin and cello teachers.

As for location, we're currently planning to hold the wedding at Covenant Presbyterian on Drake. Jennifer and I will go over there Tuesday afternoon to check it out, and make sure it will work. The other job I've been assigned is finalizing a count for the groom's side of the wedding guests.

Friday 5/1/09 through Sunday 5/3/09

Last weekend, I was a groomsman in silphion and tomanywolves' wedding at the Georgia Renaissance Festival. It was a great experience. It was great hanging out with folks, I liked my costume, and it was awesome seeing the Faire with Jennifer, Amy, and Brent. It was a good-sized dose of the sense of belonging I crave. tomanywolves has some pictures in her post. I'm in the next-to-last picture. You can also read more about it in a post by chocogaz, and another by gaiamyles. If you're on Facebook, you can see where I've posted my own pictures. One of these days, I want to write my own real post about the weekend, and get my own pictures up where people outside Facebook can see them.

Th 5/7/09

At the Bailey Cove SF Book Club, we discussed A Spell for Chameleon, the first Xanth novel by Piers Anthony. It was a fun book to read, but unfortunately, there wasn't much meat to discuss.

( One-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eaters and programming language parts of speech. Yes, it's that geeky. )

Friday 5/8/09

Friday night, I took Jennifer to see the new Star Trek movie. We both thoroughly enjoyed it. When I get more time, I'll probably write a review.

Saturday 5/9/09

During the day Saturday, I helped Jennifer put on a recital for her music students. The little ones were consistently cute, and many of the kids of all ages were just incredibly talented. Jennifer's parents helped put on a reception for the participants and families, then we all helped clean the church where it was held, and put it back the way we found it. I was exhausted, and I didn't even do nearly as much as Jennifer and her parents. I'm glad I could be there to help.

When we were all done, I felt like spending the rest of the evening with Jennifer. We both had a hankering to see the original Star Trek, thanks to the new movie. She suggested that we watch the movies with the original cast. So, we put in the Star Trek: The Motion Picture DVD. We were reminded of why it's one of the least popular of the Star Trek movies. It was still worth watching, and I had fun rattling off the trivia I remembered about the movie.

Sunday 5/10/09

Sunday morning, I ran the Pro Presenter presentation during the church service. After that, I took Jennifer to Hartselle with me for lunch with my Mom and Dad, my little sister Corie, and her new husband Pat. The food was excellent, and Jennifer got to hear my Dad's story of dealing with the 1960 hurricane in the Florida Keys. After we got back into town this evening, we talked a lot about what to do with our stuff, and what we'll need to have done to my house before Jennifer and I are married, some time in late October or early November. This is not an easy problem, because we're both major packrats, and I'm even worse. We have a pretty good idea about which furniture we're keeping, and which we're getting rid of. In the next few months, I'll need to put a lot of effort into getting rid of stuff, and deciding what to keep. We have decided we'll need plenty of bookshelves, because Jennifer doesn't want to box books up into storage any more than I do.