Is yesterday the first day that I’ve missed since I started this?
Wow. Before we left north Georgia, we made a very brief trip through
Amicalola Falls Park, just enough to convince us that we should come
back some other time when we can do it justice. We power drove from
Dawsonville home and I suited up in my Mexican wrestler outfit. I was
trying to make it to the convention by 2:30 to see Diana Obscura. I
got there about 3:00 and she wasn’t playing, I guess she had
cancelled. Such is life at Dragon*Con.
I refreshed all the flyers, and made another circuit through the
place. I went to a panel on eBooks on which the only panelist was John Ringo (why wasn’t I on that one if there was only a single panelist?
Sheesh!) although Ed Howdershelt from Abintra Press also came up and
joined him by the middle. Ringo is one of those guys that I hate to
have on the same side of an argument as me. He was kind of a blowhard and didn’t have much logical consistency to anything he was saying, mostly a series of forceful assertions.
I drove home and took my wife to dinner, and then suited back up and returned for more. I went to an 8:30 panel on the “Hacker Work Ethic” which compared it to the “Protestant Work Ethic” and
described/defined it. This is a subject I care about, and yet the
presenter was so boring that I walked out. 30 minutes was all I could
take. I met up with the usual suspects for Dragon*Cons – area
writers Rob Sommers, Steve Antczak, Gary Kim Hayes and Jim “Hawk”
Bassett. We sat in the hotel bar for a while, a few of us went
upstairs to the guest VIP room (free drinks) where at one point Phil
Morris (Jackie Childs on Seinfeld), Lou Ferrigno (Incredible Hulk) and
Dave Prowse (Darth Vader) were all up there. That may be the best part of being a guest at Dragon*Con, drinking with the media guests. The
guy mixed rum and cokes so strong that I could barely drink them. You
couldn’t take drinks out of the suite (this must be new because I used
to) so I found myself trying to pound this cocktail and I couldn’t. I
went to the soda table and kept putting more Diet Coke into it in an
effort to make it drinkable. By the time I put it down and left, I was
on my way to being half-lit.
I went back to the prime table at the hotel bar – it was the best view
on the milling crowds in the whole place – where I sat with the guys
for a little while, and then went to see Jefferson Starship play. It
was a pretty good show, but I felt slightly cheated that Paul Kanter
wasn’t there. I was pretty sure all the promo stuff stressed that both
Kantner and Marty Balin were involved and that this wasn’t one of
those “single founder hires new band but uses old name” type nostalgia shows, which in fact it was. It was OK nonetheless. They played “Miracles”, my favorite of all the Airplane/Starship songs. They had a female vocalist in the Grace Slick role who looked to be in her 20’s, younger than Grace Slick was when she joined the band. That’s got to be a tough set of shoes to step into. She did really belt it out for
“White Rabbit.” It ended with some odd schtick of cops onstage cuffing
the guitar player and leading him off – I never quite got that. I
milled around for a little while past that and then dragged my tired
self to bed.
