Worldcon in the Meeting Press

My thanks to Bob Daverin and Ben Yalow on the SMOFS list, who were able to locate the current locations of two articles originally published in Meeting News giving Worldcon good coverage:

The Science of Unconventional Planning

Born Into a Love of Science Fiction (a sidebar to the above article)

And one article about the woes of the Seattle in 2002 Worldcon bid that we have to hope hotels and convention centers won't read when we come calling on them with proposals:

Sci-Fi Saga In Starwood-Swollen Seattle

CWSFA Awards Conrunning Scholarship

Westercon 58's parent non-profit has issued a conrunning scholarship.

( Here's the official announcement, issued earlier this week. )

Ring-a-Ling, Ding-a-Ling

It is a lovely day today, and I was really looking forward to my post-lunch walk. As I left the building through the side stairs, I remembered some letters I meant to post, and turned to go back inside and get them. I had to let myself in with a key -- the side stairs are not controlled by electronic card. As I opened the door with my left hand, I felt my wedding ring slip off and heard it *ping* once on the concrete landing as my momentum carried me through the doorway. I was unable to look back quickly enough to spot the ring as it fell , but I quickly turned around and went back outside, assuming that the ring would be on the landing.

No such luck. I began to search around, with no success. The ring is titanium, otherwise unadorned, and very lightweight. It may have landed edge-on and bounced over the concrete curb into the low ground cover; however, it's not heavy cover, and I would have expected it to show up easily. I searched for about 20 minutes, moving outward to check less-likely places (including inside the doorway). I found nothing, and I'm very annoyed. I'll look again later this afternoon when the cars parked at the foot of the stairs have left, in the hope that maybe the ring rolled down under one of them and I couldn't see it when I looked under them.

There is a spare ring up in Oregon, and it's slightly smaller and thus less likely to fall off (this is not the first time the ring has slipped off my hand), but still, I'd rather not have lost it.

Update, 16:40: Found it! I made up a couple of signs saying "LOST WEDDING RING" and giving the particulars and contact information, and as I was taping one of them to the door, a woman from the company downstairs came through. I explained the situation, and she made sympathetic sounds and looked around. Then she said, "Wait, I think I see it!" and reached down and plucked it off a small bush about two or three meters from where it fell off my hand. The ring must have fallen off my hand, hit the opening door, rebounded off the concrete over a railing and onto the branch. You could not have done it on purpose if you'd tried. What a relief!

Match Game: A Step Forward

While doing the last bits of box-shifting in preparation for doing to Yuba City this weekend and putting a bunch of stuff into storage, I found the bag of Match Game props, including the questions, the tapes with the theme song and continuous loop of "think" music, and the questions. (The "think" music isn't the actual incidental music from the show, which has a bit of variety in it, but is instead the first couple of bars of the theme music recorded in a continuous loop for 30 minutes. The sound FX person starts and stops the tape while the panel thinks about answers.

I'm glad I found this stuff; it would be a real pain to have to recreate it all again. The props are pretty low-tech -- tent cards with solid and empty circles and triangles, which the panelist put in front of them and turn "on" and "off" depending on whether they matched, and a set of seven "score" tents numbered 0 to 6 for each contestant. There is probably a high-tech approach that puts monitors and computer control at each of the eight required stations, but why do that when you have a low-tech system that works and sets up more quickly and doesn't break easily?