Worldcon Membership Statistics

I promised I would look this up, so I did.

Most Worldcons in recent times grant voting rights only to supporting and full attending members. (This is required by the WSFS Constitution.) They rarely grant voting rights to single-day attendees. (They may do so if they choose.) I went back and looked up the numbers of at-door attending memberships relative to the total number of WSFS members (those eligible to vote), and got the following:

Year - City - WSFS Members - At Door Attending
2005 - Glasgow - Insufficient Data
2004 - Boston - 5984 - 284 (5%)
2003 - Toronto - No Data
2002 - San Jose - 4856 - 404 (8%)
2001 - Philadelphia - 5347 - 349 (7%)
2000 - Chicago - 5608 - 376 (7%)

Working off the assumption that relatively few people buy advance attending memberships between the Hugo Voting cut-off and the close of pre-registration, these figures represent the number of WSFS members who buy memberships but have no opportunity to vote for the Hugo Award in that year. (They do get nomination rights for the subsequent year, like all other WSFS members from a given Worldcon.)

Going back farther into the past, the at-door-attending percentage is about the same, although it was 10% in San Antonio in 1997 and 16% in The Hague in 1990.

And before you get all excited about the "disenfranchisement" of single-day members: The total at-door membership (full + single-day) for recent Worldcons represents between 10% and 20% of the total membership (plus a spike of 25% in 1993 in San Francisco).

The details behind this are available on the SMOFInfo site, in the file "Details of membership numbers and sizes for a several Worldcons."

Off My Meds

One thing traveling does is put you off your routine. I got home late Tuesday night. Friday morning, while doing my morning routine, I realized, "I haven't taken my blood pressure medication for two days!" I take a couple of medications every morning, plus another (Niaspan, to raise my too-low cholesterol levels) at night. I did not miss any doses while traveling, even on the days when it was into the hotel for only one night at the beginning and end of the trip, but for some reason, when I got home, I simply forgot about them. No wonder my BP (which I do check each morning) was up about 10/5.

Anyway, I'm back on the routine. This weekend -- the first since 1988 that I haven't been on the road over Labor Day Weekend -- is for rest, unpacking, and getting to the piled up jobs that accumulated during Worldcon, including reviewing the Minutes of the Business Meeting so we can get them published relatively quickly.

Hit and Run

The night before I left for Worldcon, I had the aggravation of realizing that my front license plate had almost come off, was hanging from only one bolt, and was all bent up. So on top of all the packing I had to do, I also needed to spend time unbending the plate and reattaching it. At the time, I figured that the plate had just worked itself loose from the frame.

Today, coming out to my van from buying groceries, I realized that there was actually a minor dent in the front bumper. Upon closer examination, I found a large scrape on one end of the bumper where some of the molding was worn away. I have no idea how all of this happened, but it looks to me like possibly the afternoon before I left for Worldcon, someone had a minor collision with my front bumper, inflicting all of the damage above, but that I was too distracted by trip plans to notice anything except the front license plate.

This is annoying, and it's probably not worth trying to have it repaired, but I guess I should be grateful that it wasn't a full-blown collision that would have totaled my van just before we headed off to Anaheim.

Edit, 9/4 9:50: Corrected typo noted in comments.