Hey there Little Red Riding Hood, you sure are looking good

[austin_dern]

And now, finally, I can get to reporting on Morphicon! Our trip started on Thursday, because happily they moved the convention to what's a long weekend for bunny_hugger, and we could start out at a reasonable hour around noon to drive to her parents' place. This let us drop off our pet rabbit, who'd stay with them. It also let us see just how their pet dogs are declining; they are legitimately getting into worse shape. We had lunch, and talked about what we expected the con to be, and then were on our way to pass Ann Arbor and head to Ohio.

Morphicon's hotel, a Holiday Inn that's properly in Worthington rather than Columbus, had something new when we arrived. They handed a Code of Conduct that we were to read and sign, and the people at check-in assured us that Mr Wright (?) had approved it. The code specified against things like excessively loud parties or harassing non-con-goers at the hotel. We had no idea there'd been any harassment of non-con-goers. Part of the fun of the convention is that it doesn't fill the hotel so we always have some meeting-of-alternate-worlds with people who have no idea why there's all these people in mascot outfits at their hotel room. We never would get an explanation of what the code was about, either. It just ... prohibited stuff.

Among the banned things were ``the kinds of behavior called 'horseplay','' or something to that effect. It wasn't just a banning of horseplay, nor of ``horseplay'' in scare quotes, but of behavior called ``horseplay''. It all suggests some kind of incident and we couldn't think of what might have happened last year. bunny_hugger had the recollection that last year some particularly uptight social group shared the convention --- she remembered some stern glares given to mystee's dancing last year --- and perhaps that group complained a lot. We'd share the hotel with a different group this year.

But the important thing to do was eat, which we decided to do when we found out registration wasn't open yet. We went back to the burrito place we visited last year. We'd thought it was a shaky new burrito spot last year and learned it had actually been open nearly a whole year. It just had that chaotic air about it suggesting a state of perpetual emergency and maybe short life. But it's still there, and it was much calmer and more orderly this time around. The burritos are good, though, very customizable and with sauces hot enough that even I can't quite take them. Also I realized I could look at just a few seconds of whatever sitcom was on Nick at Nite with the TV volumes turned way down and want to slug everybody in the show. bunny_hugger believes the show was Full House. I didn't recognize it.

Trivia: In his 1873 patent application Thomas Edison named his telegraph duplexer a ``diplex''. An undated diagram from his 1873 notebooks also lists a ``Fourplex, No. 14'' and the note ``Why not?'' Source: Edison: A Biography, Matthew Josephson.

Currently Reading: The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum.