Basking in Reflected Glory

Emerald City is Science Fiction Weekly's Site of the Week.

The Notorious Al-Gebra Movement

[A Google search shows that this thing must have been around for a while, but I had never seen it, so there. Forwarded to me by my former director at my job.]

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said he believes the man is a member of the notorious al-gebra movement. The FBI is charging him with carrying weapons of math instruction.

Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Gonzalez said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, 'there are 3 sides to every triangle'."

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes".

Testing the Best Editor Spilt

Now that the Hugo Award nominations are closed, cherylmorgan (with some help from me) is running over at Emerald City a test of the Best Editor Split Hugo Award. If you haven't been following these things, you may not have heard that last year, a proposal to split Best Editor into two categories (Short Fiction/Long Fiction) passed the Business Meeting. If ratified this year, it will become part of the WSFS Constitution and the 2007 Worldcon would start awarding two Editor Hugo Awards.

As Cheryl explains in her blog, right now is a good opportunity to run a test of the proposed split categories. She has put up the two new categories and is soliciting recommendations for them as if they were on this year's ballot. The results may be useful for the ratification debate at L.A.con IV this August. I'm not taking a position on the proposal, as I chair the Business Meeting, but running a test like this seems like a good idea to me, especially as we can't use the Special Committee Category as a live test.

Woo-hoo! Hugo Nominations!

I'm sure they'll be posted officially tomorrow morning, but John Lorentz (the Hugo Administrator) sent out the Hugo Award nominations announcement this evening. Two of Interaction's major events got Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) nominations: Lucas Back in Anger (Phil Raines and Ian Sorensen's Star Wars parody performed on Friday night of Interaction) and Prix Victor Hugo (Opening speech and framing sequence of 2005 Hugo Awards Ceremony, written and performed by Kim Newman & Paul McAuley). I was Events division manager -- in dramatic presentation terms, I think that makes me roughly the executive producer of both these works. (Not that I'm claiming any ownership rights, you understand, not a bit: if either work should somehow manage to win -- which does seem rather unlikely I have to admit, running against three Doctor Who episodes and a Battlestar Galactica episode -- the trophies go to the authors of the respective works.)

I once again merely bask in reflected glory, as I also do with Emerald City's nomination for Best Semiprozine. (As most of you reading this know, I proofread EmCit and am auxiliary moderator for the web site's blog.)

As I said, the official posting will probably be up on the L.A.con IV web site and elsewhere soon, but in my opinion, posting an announcement on SMOFS is IMO as good as anything else. (If I post an announcement on SMOFS, I expect it to be publicized.) If you want to see the nominations right away, here they are at the Emerald City site.