Visit the kelpforest....

No pics for this one but a couple of other things I almost forgot...

• I was surprised to come across Peter S. Beagle in a booth in the (absolutely huge, so big we only it made it down two aisles) Vendor's room, selling books; I guess a new edition of The Last Unicorn is coming out soon and they were taking pre-orders for it. He looked dead tired and kind of out of it. I did tell his assistant (who was doing most of the talking) that I'd loved his writing since my high-school English teacher gave me a copy of the aforementioned book. A Fine and Private Place was a joy too, although I haven't read either in a long time. Both men seemed a little surprised when I chose The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Neitchze, a book of short stories, instead of TLU, which everyone else was signing up for. He signed it for me, and I thanked him for all the happy reads. I hope he's doing better now; I remember reading awhile ago he had a lot of financial difficulties because he got ripped off as far as any movie profits (bad contract). Looks like he sells most of his books through his website now.



• I didn't discover that the Artist's Alley was at the opposite end of the Vendor's room until 15 minutes before it closed. Damn - because the art is another favorite part.



• We missed seeing the new Trigun movie, because I thought they were just showing episodes. Duh, why would so many people have been lined up to get in? There's a trailer here, if anyone's interested.



• Not long after we got there, we thought maybe lunch was in order - I'd brought lots of snacks in my backpack, but something more substantial was in order. The food court at the convention Center wanted $9 for a burger; oh, no way. So we walked out and west on on Olympic Blvd, looking for something less pricy. After about a half a mile, we finally happened upon Pollo Camparo, which seems to be a Latin American KFC. I wasn't familiar with them (there are a bunch in L.A. but not so much Orange County), but we were getting hot and tired of walking. The place was jammed with families, and suddenly I wished I'd taken Spanish in high school instead of German. One does pick up a smidgen just living here in CA, and I was hoping I'd recognize when they called my number- one lady was calling a single digit at time, which I could have handled, but the other lady must have called "trescientos cuarenta y cinco" and I didn't recognize it. Then she looked at me and said, "Is this yours?" John would've grabbed it, but he'd stayed home. Anyhow, it was really good. And while we were sitting there, I saw a couple of people walk down the other side of the street in costumes, so I didn't feel quite so out of place. ;p
  
  When we got back to the convention center, we were walking down one of hallways, and I looked out the window in the opposite direction we'd gone. And there was an entire vacant lot full of mobile eateries - I'd call them taco trucks, but LA has gotten a reputation lately for all kinds of really good ethnic food vendors. Have to keep those in mind for next time we're up there - although Angus was probably happiest with chicken fingers anyway.



• We did watch a few episodes of Casshern Sins (looks very dark and futuristic, animation a bit retro-looking, but pretty) and an entire sub-titled live action movie, Happily Ever After, which I'm shocked and proud all three kids sat through in its entirety. Not only that they sat still and weren't bored for that long, but were able to follow the subtitles enough to know what was going on.
  
  The movie itself, based on a manga and apparently a big hit in Japan, was a bit strange; it seemed to start out as a comedy of a long-suffering woman whose guy overturns the dinner table every time she does the slightest thing that upsets or offends him. He doesn't work, takes all of her money and spends the day in bars and panchinko parlors, where he swipes his friend's winnings too. She goes off to her job in a noodle restaurant where the owner is in love with her and keeps giving her extra money and offers her a place to stay should she ever get kicked out (he's so desperate it's a bit creepy, too), and her father is just recently got out of jail for bank robbery and wants to leech off her as well. Then it turns into almost soap opera drama, when an accident triggers a flashback of her school days where she was one of the the poorest girls in her class, and her best friend nearly kills her for wanting to hang out with the more popular kids (although they finally make up). She leaves school and spends a stint as prostitute,where she meets the boyfriend, who after some rather stalkerish following her around, rescues her from a suicide attempt and quits the yakuza in order to be with her. He treats her quite nicely in the beginning, making me wonder what happened. The whole thing really made me shake my head, not only about why the main character put up with so much crap from the men in her life, but also about how women are viewed in Japanese society.

While looking for more info on the the July-write-everyday thing, I noticed someone's comment that very few LJ users post quiz results here at LJ anymore; everyone posts them at FaceBook now. While a lot of people hated them, I kind of liked them, especially if people said something why/why not they agreed with the results. I'm a lot more wary of posting them at FB than here because of privacy issues; I had one quiz send its results to everyone (including emails, which it must have scraped) on my list there, which was not really appreciated by some.

Anyhoo - have not seen a quiz on my FL for a very long time. I got the above for this entry and a couple of other everyday entries. I'm not familiar with him but maybe I should go pick up something. Looks very interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

My single piece of fiction got Stephen King, and this got William Gibson. Not that I really believe a computer-generated analysis equates to me having anywhere near their skill (I certainly could never come up with a novel - I can't seem to come up with fictional story ideas to save my life), but it's nice to imagine.

Well, we hadn't been to Anime Expo since it was in Long Beach, and they did have a BOGO for kids tickets. So, remembering how well going to listen to Green Day worked out, we parked in Long Beach and took the train up to the Convention Center. Some day I will actually get to some panels, but we always seem to do mostly people watching, and boy there is a lot of it! I will get some pictures posted, but wanted to get this posted for the the 3rd, since we only got back about an hour and a half ago.

Looked at my cruise entries and realized they posted out of order - I didn't think I sent them that way, but that's how they showed up. As soon as I get my pics organized, I'll add them to those entries if you'd like to backtrack.

In the meantime, this is my roommate Elizabeth's log for her students, posted day-by-day as we were out there - she's a participant in the Teacher-at-Sea Program so she's waay more detailed than I was. I feel a little ashamed of myself. Plus she's got some fantastic pictures - I really had camera envy (my pics = see? see that little tiny black dot?! That's a dolphin's DORSAL FIN!! AN ALBATROSS! A SHIP, EVEN!). Ahem. The link:

http://teacheratsea.noaa.gov/2007/eubanks/index.html

Also, just found the chief scientists blog at the TOPP (Tagging of Pacific Predators) website:

http://www.topp.org/blog/suzannekohin

Looks like she only did the first leg, and then her boss took over:

http://topp.org/blog/russvetter?page=1

Nifty! I didn't know they were keeping blogs, too! (Edit - Suzy emailed us later saying that the webmaster had changed all of her entries, so she doesn't really consider it her blog.

Scientist/Author Carl Safina (Eye of the Albatross, Song for a Blue Ocean) was along for the first leg (I was on the third). I wish my writing could be half as poetic as his prose. His blog of the cruise can be found here:

http://carlsafina.wordpress.com/2007/07/05/welcome-to-the-hotel-californshark/

(This page is his first entry on the cruise - link to the next can be found at the bottom right of the entry)

I found Neil Gaiman's entry today, about his daughter Maddy, quite touching. Because that is exactly why I started this journal.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/12/replacing-something-that-doesnt-exist.html

"... in a few years Maddy will forget that she had ever existed in a flurry of self-referential notes, and I will forget as well. And sometimes this Blog is just a diary, or a reminder. You forget the things you were certain you would always remember, especially the tiny things, and all too often they're the things that matter."

(edit: ...and I'm tickled that I beat Will Wheaton to the punch in quoting this. XD )

The Last Unicorn remains one of my best-loved books, since a favorite English teacher in high school gave me a copy. By turns, touching, tragic and humorous (how could it not be, with a clumsy wizard named Schmendrick), I loved the language and all the little cultural references for the time it was written the author tossed in - which I wonder if younger readers today even catch. I don't think I've seen the movie since it was in the theaters; it stuck to the book's plot pretty well. However, I had a different picture in my head for the characters, it took itself far more seriously than the book, and the animation of the unicorn's movement seemed awkward (I remember thinking, hadn't the animators gone and watched some horses, deer, or goats, even?), so I wasn't quite satisfied with it. I wasn't quite as forgiving of differences between movie and book then as I am now.

I'm on a mailing list for Brobdingnagian Bards, a Celtic music group that plays primarily in Texas. Never actually seen/heard them in person, but they give out free bumper stickers that say Real Men Wear Kilts and mp3s of their work with their newsletters, so I'm on their list. I swear I will actually by some of their CDs at some point, I promise. However, I was kind of surprised to see something about one of my favorite authors in their newsletter.

( About Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn... )

I'm starting to think it's a curse if Neil Gaiman mentions your site. I've been trying to check out the teapot site he linked a couple of days ago and it's still crashed for exceeding bandwidth. Poor guy.

Hmm, PH at work has been reading Collapse by Jared Diamond and says it's very good. This lecture is actually free; usually they're $5 even for members.

http://www.aquariumofpacific.org/NEWS_EVENTS/05_05/collapse.html

So Neil Gaiman posts some pictures of himself and the fans respond:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/officialgaiman/190852.html?thread=2633348#t2633348

I love the comments here...hee! D'ya think he even realizes or did he do it on purpose? I can't say that struck me when I read Neverwhere, but I don't think my copy had a photo.

(edit: 10/23/05 - The entry is gone now, but had to do with someone reading the character description of the main character and then turning and looking at Neil's photo on the back of the book. [photos referred to are here] He looks exactly like the description. ;) )

( From another photo shoot for a previous book )

If you're a member of Pharyngula, you can just scroll on past this entry.

For those who aren't, this is an absolutely lovely bit of science writing, on par with Rachel Carson or the Carls (Sagan or Safina), in my humble opinion.

Oh, and an ode to sea hares. I love sea hares. Look, they're in my interest list No, they're not - nudibranchs, but not opisthobranchs....how'd I miss that?