COPIOUS FREE TIME: It came as little surprise that my hours at AllianceBernstein would be temporarily reduced: once the quarter-end crush petered out, the pace of incoming work slowed down to the point where I was idle four or five hours of some days. For June, then, I'm coming in only on Thursdays and Fridays unless something extraordinary comes along that necessitates more of my presence; then I'll go back to full-time hours for July as we gear up for the onslaught of second-quarter commentaries and servicings. This means four idle Monday-through-Wednesday stretches in June, and correspondingly reduced paychecks (but still big enough to disqualify me from unemployment benefits *grumpf*). I've contacted the freelance agencies to see if they can find me anything to fill in those gaps. If most of those days remain ungainful, however, well, there are things that need doing both in and out of the house, Donna has a few medical appointments to be driven to, and I could stand to catch up on a little sleep. With the assurance of full employment again in July, I'll get by.

     One thing I'm starting to do in the extra free time is go through the 25 years' worth of accumulated Stuff in the basement with an eye to selling or otherwise getting rid of some of it. I don't expect to do more than make a small dent in it, but anything will be an improvement. Does anyone reading this have any use for about 200 eight-hour VHS tapes full of Vin Scelsa's "Idiot's Delight" radio shows from the late 1990s?

     We made it to Balticon in spite of Daisy's front right wheel trying to come off (and thanks to Brooks-Huff, the Goodyear tire shop down York Road, for making speedy repairs on short notice on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend). The con featured a memorial filk in honor of Greg Baker, but before that could transpire, we got even more sad news: Lisa Rogers had died of complications following knee-replacement surgery in a hospital in Newark. (Kind of made my sore throat seem less traumatic.) Roberta Rogow and I, with assistance from Deb Wunder back in Brooklyn, got the word out. May Lisa rest in peace, and may Ward be comforted.

     The Kid's name has now been immortalized in the Congressional Record of 6 March 2012, thanks to Rep. Edolphus (Ed) Towns (D—Brooklyn), who spoke in honor of the Peace Corps on the 51st anniversary of its founding, and took the opportunity to mention the names of four current volunteers from his district. Rep. Towns's office sent a nice letter and a copy of the remarks to him in Cameroon. Just in time, too; he'll be outta there in about two months. I read about it in his blog at <cameroon [dot] betacantrips [dot] com>, which he continues to update sporadically.

Comments on APA-NYU, Volume 10, #5 (e-APA-NYU #97)

APA-NEWS:

Dick Clark's middle name was Wagstaff? I didn't think there was anyone with that name outside the Marx brothers movies, but it turns out Wikipedia lists 13 real people with the surname Wagstaff, and a few more named Wagstaffe. No Hackenbushes or Driftwoods, though.

LIFE* WITH LESS (Ariel Cinii):

Congratulations on ridding yourself of the phantom roommates. Enjoy the additional space in good health. (And happy 21st anniversary to your vagina.) /*/ "He tends to live in the sedimentary style common to fannish folks." Not to be confused with the sedentary style. In the sedimentary style, your old fanzines, program books, T-shirts, and so on are eventually compressed into diamonds, but you end up trapped in a tar pit. /*/ "If you're ever locked in an unwinnable struggle, wait. Sooner or later the other side will give up, go away, forget or die." Or maybe you will. Who's better at playing the waiting game may depend on who suffers greater consequences (loss of income, storage space, personal freedom, etc.) from the waiting itself. /*/ While I agree that the "classic Western Electric ringer" is the proper sound for a landline phone to make when a call comes in, I don't feel that way about mobile phones. Now that I have a phone which allows me to assign any MP3 as a ringtone, I change off periodically, usually selecting long instrumental breaks or intros from classic rock ("Question," "Embryonic Journey," "Ticket to Ride," "Summer in the City," "What Is Life") or excerpts from my favorite Mike Oldfield albums. I keep waiting for people to be impressed with my taste in ringtones; I guess I'll have to keep waiting. /*/ It is good that you've gotten your living area rearranged more the way you want it. I've done a couple of bits of that in my room by moving several hundred LPs down to the basement; however, a similar quantity still remain to be moved. I'm hoping to make progress, during the anticipated idle time in June, at removing some reel-to-reel and VHS tapes from the place permanently. Maybe even some books. I am both eagerly awaiting and dreading the death of the 25-inch cathode-ray TV in my room and its replacement with a flat-screen model. On the one hand, I'll be able to plug the output of my laptop into the new set and use it both as a secondary (and larger) monitor and to play downloaded video; on the other hand, since it will doubtless be at least a 32-inch model, I'll need to find the room to put the thing. Fortunately or not, the CRT set shows no signs of impending death after something more than a decade's use. /*/ As I type this, we've managed one NYUSFS meeting in the park so far in May. I'm hoping for more as the spring and summer progress.

ICONOCLAST (Joel Nelson):

I see that How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog by Chad Orzel, which you review here, has a prequel, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I'll have to take a look at it and see if it will work for a cat as well. /*/ (¢me) "'Sixth Avenue in the 50s' Sounds nostalgic." Or anticipatory; only 40 years to go. /*/ "Our only hope to avoid UBC [Upset by Change] becoming more and more prevalent, and thereby causing the future to be a Very Bad Place to Live, is to somehow train people to increase their toleration of change and to slow its rate of decrease caused by aging. That is, to teach people how to adapt to change." My question: have younger people—say those born in the 1980s and later—grown up more resistant to UBC because they've been immersed in faster change all along, or will even they find themselves UBC as change accelerates exponentially?

JAMISON, TAKE e-LETTER (Mark L. Blackman):

Hi, Marx! /*/ I wasn't terrifically impressed either with the used-book selection at The Thing; I think I would have been if I were more of a history buff. I've been more impressed with the restaurants in Greenpernt, which still supports a variety of places that do ethnic home cooking. Pity we could only eat a meal or two there in one Shikar. /*/ (¢Nelson) "Between his tithes & his contributions to that Mormon anti-gay PAC, Romney pays more per year to his church than to the IRS." I'm not worried about how much he pays to his church—that's his business—but I may be worried about how little he pays to the IRS. /*/ (¢me) "Didn't you pick up financial jargon at Manny Hanny-Chemical-Chase?" Perhaps I should have said "investment jargon"; the jargon of commercial-loan officers and funds-transfer operators, and that of mutual-fund managers, overlap but do not coincide. /*/ "I think it would be scary if doctors are mad." Mad (or at least perpetually annoyed) doctors seem to make for popular television programming, though.

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