Hmm, been a while. Lots has happened since mid-August, so let's see what I remember…
BiCon (end August) was fun despite being appallingly organised. 'As if they'd had two months rather than two years' remains my comment.
If next year's repeats the same mistakes (crap publicity = low numbers, poor programme in much more than one sense, etc etc etc) please point me at this and go 'ha!' 'cos I've volunteered to help Paul do BiCon 2002.
But as I said, it was fun. Thanks to everyone responsible for that.
Coventry City vs Notts Forest. The evening after BiCon, L (from Nottingham) and I (from somewhere within sight of Coventry) saw the football match between the two teams… Well, from a Coventry perspective, it couldn't possibly be worse when we see the rematch in December. Forest had first one, then another player sent off, but Coventry proved less able to score than a certain Kevin. 'We've only got nine men' sang the Forest supporters.
After 'losing 0-0', Coventry's manager — who'd become famous for shouting and getting all emotional — left the club not long afterwards, to be replaced by a quiet Swede who's managed to get the team winning. Hmm, where have we heard that before?
11th September. The main surprise to me was how shocked the Americans were. Like their habit of having $100 bills exactly the same size and 'color' as $1 bills, security on internal US flights has long been a disaster waiting to happen.
It should go without saying that of course murdering a thousand people is Wrong, but I can understand why there are people prepared to do it: a combination of religious lunacy (see Richard Dawkin's spot-on comments) and American foreign policy.
As it turned out, the Anglican Archbishop of Wales was in New York that day, His reported thought was that, while shocking, this must be what life is like in Bagdad and the Gaza Strip every day.
This is what I posted on cix the following day:
The President's Statement in full
Am I safe yet? Oh, is the mic on?
Fellow Americans, I pledge to bravely stand tall against international terrorism, several hundred feet underground in a sealed nuclear bunker.
The American government would never murder innocent civilians. Well, not in the United States anyway. Unless they were on Death Row in Texas and I refused to grant them clemency. Hardly any of them were innocent, so that doesn't count.
Neither will the United States stand for state-sponsored terrorism abroad. Unless it's by Israel. Gee, do you think that was one of the reasons we were attacked?
Anyway, I pledge action. I pledge revenge. I pledge we'll kill more people than they did. Hopefully, we'll include the people responsible, but even if we don't, it'll send a clear message to the world about what sort of people we are.
But first of all we will be attacking the people who trained the terrorists. Watch out Bill Gates! There's no way any Arabs could have learnt to fly a real plane — they must have used Flight Sim.
The next day, the Daily Mail (the most evil paper in Britain) had a story asking if the terrorists used Flight Sim and suggesting it should be banned. Sigh. Maybe I should have included the paragraph that said since they hadn't flown into the Empire State Building, every skyscraper should have its own giant ape to bat away approaching planes.
Last week was crap, what with failing my driving test (grrr), a broken pipe in the flat above flooding my bathroom (and destroying a large amount of computer manuals and software, a long story). a very strange break-in (they smashed the front window and used a crowbar to force the deadlock, but only took one old – albeit highly collectable – home computer).
Oh well, at least upstairs is insured. Which is good, because the replacement cost of the stuff that got pulped turns out, to my amazement, to be Rather A Lot.
The weekend was spent in Cambridge, helping a friend do some long overdue decoration of his flat.
What I should be doing: moving things around the house in preparation for baby (two weeks and counting…)