Happy birthday to me (and this weblog, too)

So a couple of days ago I hit the big four-two, and like most recent birthdays it was met with a mixture of dread and self-loathing, but there was cake involved, so it wasn't so bad. Having long since passed the milestone birthdays that actually mean something (the last one being at 35, after which you can become president), we're now full swing into the birthdays where you are basically counting down rather than counting up. 42 of course has special meaning for any self-respecting Hitchhiker's fan, so maybe this year will reveal the meaning of Life, the Universe and... what's the other one? Everything! Oh, yes.

Beth engineered a surprise birthday gift by bestowing upon my person my very own copy of Iron Man #1. I'd happened to see it up on the rack behind the counter at Jack's several weeks ago, and while it wasn't perfect, perfect has become too expensive as far as that comic is concerned, and he was calling it Fine and asking $110, which is about what the guide says it's worth. It was definitely on the plus side of Fine, though, although my cursory examination lasted about three seconds before I handed it back to Jack. I mentioned it to Beth and the kids at dinner that night, as the original Iron Man #1 (not his first appearance, but his first solo book) has always been a holy grail of my comic collecting. I've seen many copies over the years but somewhere between when I stopped collecting after college and started up again 10 years ago, the priced had gone up about 1000% for a pristine copy. One of my "one that got away" stories is that at a show I went to during my college years I held a mint copy in my hands that a guy was asking $45 for, but the guide said it was worth $40 so I passed it up.

Recent conventions have shown that it is no longer a reasonable goal to acquire all the '70's Marvels in mint condition, because they are getting increasingly harder to find, and increasingly expensive. So I've had to lower my standards somewhat in the interest of completeness over quality, since now that these books are 30+ years old they're collectible in any condition. Iron Man #1 is actually from May 1968, pre-dating my current collecting area of interest, but I'd be willing to make an exception, although even at $110 it would be substantially more than I've ever spent on a single comic. So in that respect it was the ideal gift, in that it's something I really wanted that I never would have bought for myself (leaving aside for the moment that I technically did buy it myself since Beth is buying me gifts with my money).

Also celebrating a birthday this month is this weblog, which hit two years old a few weeks ago to no fanfare or ceremony. While I haven't kept it updated as often as I would like, I'm still plugging away, and after this year's Boskone have a new resolve to write more, and more often, and after all this site was originally intended to be a means to that end, regardless of the fact that, 160+ posts later, the only person that seems to check in regularly is Phil. Anyone else out there who's actually reading this crap, drop me a line or leave a comment yea or nay, it's always nice to get mail that doesn't start with "Mark, Refinancing opportunities now!"

mataglap redux

A recent e-mail from an uncontrollable nihilist breaks two-plus years of silence in order to provide a linguistics lesson on the name of this website:

mata = eye(s)
gelap = dark

The spelling in Indonesia would normally be "mata gelap", two words,
but it is possible that they render it "mataglap" in slang (or in Malaysia).
Yes, it means "dark eyes". I didn't know the "crazed" meaning; I would have
just taken it to mean dark retinae, same as English. But google seems to be
with you.

"Mata hari" (eye of the sun) is a diff structure, hari being a noun
(you'd be tempted to think it "sunny eye" otherwise). It can also be rendered
"hari matanya".

And yet "darkness of the eye[s]" would be "mata gelapnya". Malay/Indonesian has confusing rules about word order; "-nya" often flips things around (often, but not always).

buku Mark = Mark's book[s]
buku Marknya = Mark's book[s]
Mark bukunya = Mark's book[s]
Mark buku = ???? (invalid form)

guru sekolah - the school's/schools' teacher[s]
guru sekolahnya - the teacher's/teachers' school[s]
sekolah guru - the teacher's/teachers' school[s]
sekolah gurunya - the school's/schools' teacher[s]

That gotnya?

That's more thorough than what I got from my sister-in-law's brother a long time ago:

I asked an Indonesian girl I work with about mataglap. She had not heard your usage but said:

"mata: meaning eye
gelap: meaning dark.

but i've never heard of mataglap. u sure it's indo and not phillipino? cause mata means eye in both indo and phillo. unless it's some provincial dialect that i don't know. "

I also heard last summer from the owner of mataglap.com, asking if I'd like the e-mail address mark@mataglap.com or something, but I declined. I just like the word, what it means is relatively superfluous. Let's not worry so much about dark eyes or dilated eyes and focus instead on man-eating nanotech.

Boskone 42 report

Happy President's Day!

Spent the weekend at what by my count is my twelfth Boskone, the local sf convention that was very handy when it was in Framingham and now marginally less so now that it has relocated to downtown Boston. What I discovered during the Worldcon last fall was that I don't really need to drive into the city every day, and the money saved by not having to pay $20+ to park can be better spent on books. So, even though it's a bit colder than it was during the Worldcon, I schlepped from the green line every day, and that seemed to work just fine. It's not like you go back to your car in the parking garage during the day anyway.

This year's guest of honor was Orson Scott Card, whom I've only seen on a panel or two at one of the recent Worldcons (Philly, I think). He's a good guest of honor in that he's got plenty of opinions about everything, but unlike other pontificating sf authors like Bear or Brin, I get the impression his opinions center more around deconstruction than saying anything positive. In fact, he's downright controversial as apparently he's published a few screeds against homosexuality over the years (being a card-carrying Mormon) that seem to have caused some fans and pros alike to boycott the convention. Some of it can be attributed to post-Worldcon fatigue, too, I suppose, but more than the average share of pros were awol given that there were no weather problems this year.

In spite of that, most of the panels I attended managed to do quite well with who was available. I skipped Card's goh speech to hear George RR Martin do a reading, as did plenty of other people. GRRM continues to give Boston a slot in his calendar every year, so I got to hear him reading another excerpt from possibly the most anticipated sf book since The Last Dangerous Visions, the next volume in his "Song of Ice and Fire", now three years late and counting (and hopefully not to suffer the same fate as TLDV). The reading was short enough that he could field a number of questions afterwards, and he admitted to having trouble with this book because of a combination of the pressure involved (given the level of anticipation he's created) along with some retrenchment as he's writing due to finding more to say about certain events than he thought he would. When the book ever comes out, it will be enormous, and enough time has elapsed since I read the first trilogy that I'd have to go back and read at least the last one again.

The science guest of honor was Alastair Reynolds, which was a real thrill as I've read literally all his books (just finishing up Absolution Gap as we speak) and I don't think he's been to an American convention before. This saved me the trouble of having to haul one of his "mammal-crushers" all the way to Glasgow. He did a couple of slide shows as well as a reading and participated in a few panels, and I caught most of those and he was very engaging and seemed like a nice guy, even keeping his cool when a rabid filker started shrieking at the end of Reynolds' slide show because he was running overtime and eating into the next event in the room. That was one of the nice things about the layout when Boskone was still in Framingham that they could segregate the filkers from the rest of the humanity.

Boskone has adopted kind of a minimalist approach the last couple of years, I'm not sure how much of it is by design. I know they did away with the "green room" concept for pros, thinking they'll hang out in the con suite more, which doesn't seem to be the case. They also seem this year to have done away with notifying panelists when their time is almost up, causing panels to go right up to the hour, and then the next panel starting 5 or 10 minutes after the hour. The dealers room was a bit of a letdown, also, no British books, no Glen Cook, the book dealers that were there did primarily new stuff and collectible stuff, and they seemed to have less space, but tbere wasn't necessarily more of anything else, just less space in general. I figured I would find at least a couple of BSFA nominees there but didn't see any, so I barely bought anything. Reminded me of the one Lunacon that I went to way back when.

As I said, the panels I sat in on were mostly worth hearing, I think there's some tiredness to some of the topics, but maybe I just need to make different selections. I tend to avoid the writing-oriented "how-to" panels as they tend to offer either obvious or conflicting information, and seem to be geared towards people who shouldn't be writing in the first place. Although not really a how-to panel, the one with GRRM and Wen Spencer and a couple of others about the nature of trilogies as a standard of fantasy did tend to stray into that topic occasionally, with Martin saying people shouldn't write novels first, they should make their name with short stories (with Spencer as someone who started with novels) and Spencer saying that one chapter does not equal one scene (with Martin saying that in his books, one chapter does tend to equal one scene). The fallback history of sf panels are only as good as their panelists, and unless you have somebody who was there like Hartwell or Silverberg or Pohl, you end up with people regurgitating stuff second hand that may or may not be completely accurate.

Still, well worth the tired rear-end and looking forward to Readercon after a year off last year. Still hoping to do Glasgow in August, but right now plane tickets are $800, so unless they drop by about 50%, we'll be finding something else to do at that end of the summer.

Pats win! Pats win!

All this talk of dynasty takes away from the week-in, week-out effort that this team has demonstrated during the course of the season to get to this point, such that the outcome of the big game this year was a foregone conclusion, and otherwise ambivalent Superbowl watchers were rooting for the Eagles just to cheer for the little guy and spread it around a bit.

In central Illinois, the Cardinals and Bears were the nearest teams but neither of them were doing much of anything during the '70's, so us kids would just jump on the bandwagon of whatever team was winning at the time. I was variously a Dolphins fan, Redskins fan, Steelers fan, and had the coats and belt buckles to prove it. And somewhere right now in some backwater part of the country there's a bunch of kids who are Patriots fans just because they're the hot team right now. Not the most glamorous bunch, but still a bunch of clutch players who can't help getting in the hall of fame eventually with this kind of consistent behavior.

After seeing the Red Sox break the curse, nothing the Pats can do will measure up to that, but they set the stage three years ago with their first win and I think helped people here think that if the Pats could do it, so could the Red Sox. Maybe this year I'll remember to bring the camera to the parade.