Marscon report
Marscon in Minneapolis, Minnesota was more of a media-oriented SF con than I'm used to, and also much more of a party con than we have here in Michigan. But I appreciated the space technology track. I envy the space science room, which was full of models and computers running simulations. The Dementia concerts were especially good, and I enjoyed hearing wormquartet, who was by far my favorite music artist among them.
One usually doesn't see many people dressed as Star Trek characters in Michigan, but there were a lot of Klingons at Marscon. I spent most of the evenings in the Klingon room, where they were showing Trekkies 1 & 2, which I must rent because I couldn't make out the words over the room's shouts of "tlhIngan maH!" The Klingons taught me how to play a Klingon version of chess, and I showed them the Shogi set I built and played it with some of them. It was quite popular with the Klingons, as I knew it would be since it expresses the martial spirit of bushido.
I sought out someone from the Klingon Language Institute because I wanted to talk about ways in which they might further their connection with Lojban. (Notice on KLI's website where it says, "This site hosted by The Logical Language Group, e'osai ko sarji la lojban. ji'a" That's us, giving them webspace.)
They only had one lady there who used to speak Klingon. She forgot most of it when she fell down a flight of stairs and got a concussion. That was also when she was contacted by space aliens from the Plieades constellation. "The Mayan calendar ends in 2012," she gravely informed me, and waited for my reaction to this fact. Since she had listened with such interest to my descriptions of the bits and pieces of Hopi Indian evidential tags, Russian event contours, Mandarin pronouns and computer language connectives incorporated into Lojban* I felt duty-bound to listen to her schpiel in return. Oh, who am I kidding; you know I can't resist. "We have all the knowledge in the universe in our genetic code," she continued, and described the books she had been reading about it. "To tap into that knowledge, we release our love to be a conduit between our DNA and the Plieades. If the whole species does this by 2012 it would usher in a thousand years of peace." She feels great joy and peace, and no fear. But she forgot 500 words of Klingon vocabulary, dammit!
Now then... I must try out a Star Trek costume. A Klingon will not do. It's just not me. So... where to obtain gold contact lenses and silver face paint...
*You've seen the T-shirt that reads, "English doesn't borrow from other languages, English follows other languages into dark alleys, knocks them down and goes through their pockets for loose grammar"? This has got nothing on Lojban.
One usually doesn't see many people dressed as Star Trek characters in Michigan, but there were a lot of Klingons at Marscon. I spent most of the evenings in the Klingon room, where they were showing Trekkies 1 & 2, which I must rent because I couldn't make out the words over the room's shouts of "tlhIngan maH!" The Klingons taught me how to play a Klingon version of chess, and I showed them the Shogi set I built and played it with some of them. It was quite popular with the Klingons, as I knew it would be since it expresses the martial spirit of bushido.
I sought out someone from the Klingon Language Institute because I wanted to talk about ways in which they might further their connection with Lojban. (Notice on KLI's website where it says, "This site hosted by The Logical Language Group, e'osai ko sarji la lojban. ji'a" That's us, giving them webspace.)
They only had one lady there who used to speak Klingon. She forgot most of it when she fell down a flight of stairs and got a concussion. That was also when she was contacted by space aliens from the Plieades constellation. "The Mayan calendar ends in 2012," she gravely informed me, and waited for my reaction to this fact. Since she had listened with such interest to my descriptions of the bits and pieces of Hopi Indian evidential tags, Russian event contours, Mandarin pronouns and computer language connectives incorporated into Lojban* I felt duty-bound to listen to her schpiel in return. Oh, who am I kidding; you know I can't resist. "We have all the knowledge in the universe in our genetic code," she continued, and described the books she had been reading about it. "To tap into that knowledge, we release our love to be a conduit between our DNA and the Plieades. If the whole species does this by 2012 it would usher in a thousand years of peace." She feels great joy and peace, and no fear. But she forgot 500 words of Klingon vocabulary, dammit!
Now then... I must try out a Star Trek costume. A Klingon will not do. It's just not me. So... where to obtain gold contact lenses and silver face paint...
*You've seen the T-shirt that reads, "English doesn't borrow from other languages, English follows other languages into dark alleys, knocks them down and goes through their pockets for loose grammar"? This has got nothing on Lojban.