From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Balticon
Date: Wed,  1 Jun 2011 22:15:21 -0400 (EDT)
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

I went to Balticon the same way I've done for the past decade:  I
took Metrorail to Greenbelt, took the B30 Metrobus to BWI, then rode
Baltimore's light rail.  The B30 cost twice what it did last year,
and the Metrorail fares are also up.  The trip took four hours, which
is about average.

This was the longest I've gone between cons since the '80s -- one full
year, as I hadn't been to any cons since the previous Balticon.

The is the sixth year in a row Balticon has been at the Hunt Valley
Inn, a sprawling low-rise hotel in an industrial park that's otherwise
pretty much empty over the holiday weekend.  The layout is always
exactly the same.  It's always even the same vendors at the same
tables.

As usual in recent years, I stayed up the whole weekend rather than
paying for shared crash space.  On rasff, someone recently posted that
she gets highly amused when someone younger than her tells her that
they're too old to understand computers.  I get amused when someone
half my age says they used to stay up all night, but have gotten too
old for that.

There's a pool with a shower room.  If I use it shortly after it opens
at the unfannish hour of 7 am, I can take a long hot shower, and even
shave in the shower, without delaying anyone else.

The hotel also has a 24-hour "business center" with two Windows
machines on the Internet.

People who drove from the DC area on Friday afternoon and evening
were severely delayed by a police funeral which blocked several major
highways for several hours.  The arrogance of our masters knows no
bounds.  How anyone can still think they are our servants rather than
our masters is utterly baffling to me.  Far more so than how anyone
could have believe Harold Camping's rapture prediction, which was
another major topic of conversation.

I saw plenty of WSFA people, plenty of PRSFS people, and plenty of
Nookery people.  It's interesting how I instantly categorize people
into categories such as these.  I often recognize someone as one of
whichever group before I recognize them as an individual.  Does anyone
else have that experience?

I don't think I'm alone in this, as people kept asking me what was
new in WSFA even though I dropped out of that club six years ago.  In
preparation for this, which I expected, I had checked WSFA's website,
but it seems to be almost abandoned.  I wasn't able to find any meeting
minutes from this year.

Several people asked me about Bill Wells.  I was able to give them
his contact information.

As usual, I went to few program items.  I prefer events at which I'm
an equal participant to ones where I'm just an audience member.  I did
go to _Not Your Father's Gravitation_, but it was a disappointment,
since it *was* my father's gravitation, i.e. there was nothing
new there.  I had a better time at a talk by Andrew Love on how
centrifugal force is no more fictitious than gravitation, perhaps
because that's also one of my hot-button physics issues.  After his
presentation, I discussed Niven's ridiculous "One Face" with him.

I spent most of my time in random conversations, or gaming.  Games
included Jungle Speed, Are You a Werewolf, Zendo, and Scrabble.  The
one Scrabble game was a three-way with Hank Smith and a woman whose
name I don't remember.  Her score was nearly twice that of Hank and I
put together, largely because of a bingo that hit *two* triple-word
scores, which was possible because she got both blanks.

Another game consisted of people attempting to guess what person,
place, object, concept, etc. had been assigned to them by another
player.  I asked if it was the same game as was played in the movie
_Inglourious Basterds_, and was told it was.  I then said I hoped it
wouldn't end the way the game in the movie ended, and joined the game.

Some of the other players were remarkably ignorant.  One never guessed
Martin Luther King Jr. no matter how many hints he was given.  Another
was incorrectly told that she was a country, in Australia, a single
island, that declared independence about 20 years ago.  The correct
answer was New Zealand.

There was an official trivia contest, run, as usual, by Brick
Barrientos.  I did pretty well, despite the emphasis on fantasy,
TV shows, comic books, and video games.  Perhaps this was because
Martin Morse Wooster wasn't there.  He usually wins those things.

There were open room parties every night.  They included a chocolate
party hosted two nights by Chris Zach, Philcon, a book launch party,
and Worldcon bid parties by Texas in 2013 and Spokane in 2015.

Chris Zach is perhaps best known for running a computer game room at
past Balticons.  There haven't been any computer game rooms there for
the past few years.

The con suite and the game room were open 24 hours.  The game room
was always comfortably warm.  The con suite was okay in the daytime,
but bitter cold late at night.  It was so cold that some people who
weren't even me were complaining.

The weather was nice all weekend, except for one thunderstorm on
Friday night.  People who got too cold in the con suite moved outside.

In the con suite, one person corrected someone who said that the
Disclave with the flood was the last Disclave.  He said Disclave
'98 was held in DC in mid-May, and named the hotel.  He was quite
insistent, even when I said I had been to every WSFA meeting and every
WSFA-hosted con and event in those days, and that I was later WSFA's
secretary, journal editor, and archivist.  I offered to bet him any
amount of money that he was mistaken.  He insisted he was correct,
and promised to send me a copy of the con's souvenir book.  I said I
looked forward to that, as I've long wished to establish contact with
a parallel world in which history was different.

Just then, Sam Lubell walked by, and I informed him that the guy I was
talking with insisted he had attended Disclave '98.  Sam said there
was no Disclave '98, then the guy immediately said, "Oh, I must be
mistaken, then."  Sheesh!

On another occasion, I noticed that three of the four people --
including me -- sitting on a bench in the con suite had L.A.con III
bags.  I jokingly chastised the fourth of having the wrong kind
of bag.

One person in the con suite insisted that cold fusion had been
confirmed.  I insisted that when controversial claims are capable
of confirmation, they are soon confirmed or discredited; they don't
remain in limbo for years.

A woman I knew only as a fellow player of Are You a Werewolf
spontaneously told me that she left the film program because of the
depiction of gay attraction being acceptable.  I of course asked her
why she thought it wasn't acceptable.  She wasn't religious, as I
would have guessed.  Instead she used an evolutionary argument that
gay sex is a disease.  I agreed with her claim that the reason it was
removed from the DSM list of mental disorders was because of political
pressure rather than research, but said that the same was true of
its inclusion there in the first place.  I tried to involve her in
a discussion of what constitutes a disease rather than a variation.
For instance is my bald spot a disease?  But she didn't want to
discuss it.

I was half-hoping she'd accuse me of being gay, in which case I would
have half-seriously suggested we retire to her room to investigate the
question more closely.  She is kind of cute.

The guest of honor was Ben Bova.  Before leaving for the con, I
checked my shelves and saw I had seven paperbacks by him, so I brought
them to be signed.  The signing, oddly, was held in a sleeping room
distant from everything else.  As I neared the front of the line,
someone said that his favorite short story was Card's "Enders Game,"
and asked which issue it was in.  Ben Bova didn't know, so I answered
the question, August 1977.

Last year, a friend asked me to do a small amount of paid IT
bioinformatics work for him.  He was going to email me some files.
Later, he decided the files were too large for email, or even a
website, so he was going to snail-mail them to me on a CD-ROM.  Later,
he decided he'd give me a whole Linux computer, with the files already
on it.  After several months, he did so.  He then decided I needed
more files, and would snail-mail me a DVD-ROM.  Weeks went by.  A week
ago, I emailed him and said that he was obviously waiting to see if
the apocalypse would happen, and now that it hadn't, there was no need
to waste postage, since he could hand me the disc at Balticon.

And indeed he did.  But it wasn't a disc, but a disk.  A heavy and
fragile hard disk, with a large wall-wart and several cables.  Sigh.

I spent a fair amount of time hanging out at Nancy Lebovitz's table,
chatting with her and her two paid assistants, Sue Cochran and Seain
Gutridge, and with passers-by.  I also helped her with setup and
teardown.  She let me stash the hard disk, my Ben Bova books, and
other stuff I wouldn't need for the remainder of the con behind her
table, so I wouldn't have to haul them everywhere.

We got to talking about someone with a very penetrating voice, who
easily got very angry, and who was so upset by Disclave's weapons
policy that he threatened to pepper spray anyone who tried to stop him
from carrying a weapon at that con.  Ironically, he worked at the time
for airline security, making sure that passengers were unarmed.  He
was also vehemently in favor of the space program, and considered
any cuts to any proposed space missions, no matter how expensive or
purposeless, to be inexcusable treason to mankind.  Anyhow, none of us
could remember his name, though we were all sure we were thinking of
the same person.

Less than an hour later, I ran into him, though I hadn't seen him in
perhaps ten years or more.  As might be expected, I recognized him
first by his voice, which carries like no other.  I could tell it was
him and that he was very angry, though I couldn't make out a single
word.  I chatted with him, and got his name.  (I won't give it here,
to see if anyone else knows who I mean.)

In addition to the usual fannish organization tables, there were
tables for a secular humanist organization and for a skeptics
organization.  I picked up literature and free magazines from both.
The secular humanist stuff consisted mostly of left-wing politics.
The skeptical stuff was mostly skeptical of junk that nobody would
believe anyway, such as claims of psychic or magical abilities.

As always, Filthy Pierre was there.  I don't think I've ever been to
a con he wasn't at.  He spent a lot of time at a grand piano in an
out-of-the-way corner, taking requests, and playing them competently.

There were about a dozen program tracks, so it would be possible to
have several Balticon reports with nothing in common.

I was disappointed that there was no memorial event for the Ghost of
Honor, Mark Owings, one of the founders of Balticon's parent club,
BSFS.  His widow, Jul, was there, and she had two books of photos for
me to leaf through.  There was an obituary by Martin Morse Wooster in
the souvenir book.  There was also an obituary of Richard Butler by
Colette Fozard.

As always, I helped with teardown.  There was a tremendous amount of
stuff that had to be collected, disassembled, packed, and placed into
a truck.  Pipes and pegboards for the art show, heavy iron plates
that anchor those pipes, lights for the art show, lights for the
masquerade, easels for holding signs all over the con, toys for
the childens' program, towers for holding up the lights for the
masquerade, scaffolding for assembling and disassembling the stage
lights, gels for the stage lights, portable air conditioners for the
game room, microwave ovens, computers, carts, whiteboards, games,
wheelchairs, shelving, food, soft drinks, coolers for soft drinks,
steel grids for holding messages, stairs for the stage, tool boxes,
ladders, power tools, cables of all kinds, and countless cardboard
boxes and plastic bins full of who knows what.

At one point, four of us were gathered around an over-stuffed
cardboard box, trying to use an automatic bander to band it shut, and
someone likened us to the Three Stooges.  I pointed out that there
were four of us.  I then asked if anyone knew which Columbia short
had four stooges, Moe, Larry, Curly, and Shemp.  Several people
immediately gave the correct answer ("Hold That Lion").

There's a freight elevator to the loading dock, but it's mostly
monopolized by the hotel staff, so everything that doesn't absolutely
require it is hand-carried around the outside of the hotel.  The dock
itself smells very bad, as there's an immense trash compactor there.
It's also very noisy, as there are powerful fans blowing, presumably
to attempt to reduce the odor and the flies.  A new unpleasantness
was that the concrete floor and the metal plate which bridges the
gap between the dock and the bed of the truck were all greasy and
slippery.  On request, the hotel staff gave us something to cut the
grease.  It seemed to work quite vigorously on the plate.  I looked at
the grease-cutter container and saw that it was sodium hydroxide.  The
plate was aluminum.  Oops!  So we hurriedly hosed it down before the
plate completely dissolved.  It continued to be slippery.

Most of the people loading the truck were obviously very
uncomfortable, as it was unusually warm.  I got several odd looks
from people who noticed I wasn't sweating at all even though I was
obviously working as hard as anyone.  If not for everyone sweating,
I probably wouldn't have noticed that it was unusually warm.  Except
that even when I was right next to the powerful fans, I didn't feel
the least bit chilled, unlike in past years, even though I had removed
my sweater jacket.  Sometimes it's nice having a weird metabolism.

I later learned that it reached 98 F (37 C) at BWI that day.

While I was helping with teardown, Seain was driving Nancy back to
Philadelphia and helping her unpack there.  He then turned around and
drove back to the con hotel to pick me up.  The hotel is directly on
the way from Philadelphia to his home in Virginia, not far from mine.
He picked me up at 11:30 pm Monday, a half hour after the dead dog
party ended and the con suite was finally locked up.  There were still
two other people up, and I was chatting with them when he arrived, so
that was pretty good timing.

I preregistered for next year's Balticon, and I look forward to doing
it all again.  I don't currently anticipate attending any other cons
before then, though I will be at plenty of other fannish events.