Light in your head and dead on your feet

[austin_dern]

One of the great things Morphicon offers is pauses for dinner, when everything shuts down and people are driven to eat. Also, on Friday night, they provide pizza, which makes for a good social event too. We were able to hang around some and get a couple slices of overstuffed-vegetable and then plain-cheese pizza while working out the sad implications of the schedule. We couldn't go to the Furry Text Adventures game, the event we so enjoyed at Motor City Fur Con, because it was set at the same time as the cake-decorating contest. Of the two, cake-decorating won.

The con suite had the evening's schedule posted on a huge sheet of paper, though, and it told us cake-decorating started at 8 pm. So that'd be a good time to go back to the hotel room, rest a bit, catch up on e-mails and other things in case, like, there had been a catastrophe at work I should've been doing something about, and so on. There wasn't.

We got back to the con suite at 8 pm and saw ... the cakes decorated, and everyone cleared out, and some of the cakes even partly eaten. The wall schedule was wrong. The cake-decorating started at 7 pm. The pocket schedule and the con booklet had the correct time; it's just the schedule posted in the con suite that got it wrong, and because of that we missed cake-decorating for the first time ever. We also missed text adventures, which were at 7 pm also. We were soundly deflated by all that.

We would mostly rebuild our spirits by the time the dance started. We put on our kigurumis --- bunny_hugger as Stitch, me as a red penda --- to join in the dance that was, for a wonder, pretty well-attended. Morphicon dances have been tucked off at a less-accessible spot that hasn't got a dance floor, just carpet (it was the same room our pinball talk was in), so they're low-key affairs. This time there were maybe twenty people dancing together, a healthy crowd. Also one that got coupons for purple beads.

When we needed a rest, we went over to what had been Artist's Alley during the day. Karaoke was set up there that night. It had the same eclectic yet overwhelming selection of songs (nothing by Sparks, or Starship, or nearly any S-named performers) and an inflatable screen to project the lyrics on. I found another song I could kind of manage --- the theme to Secret Agent Man --- although I realized it was easier for me to read off the laptop screen than on the projection on the slowly deflating screen. The theme from Secret Agent Man requires more notes, but if you sing forcefully enough, it almost sounds like you know what you're doing. bunny_hugger sang, among other things, her signature karaoke piece of Gerry Rafferty's ``Baker Street''. (It's that late 70s song with the saxophone. Yes, that's the one.) She'd been saving it for Friday night as more people would probably be around to hear her.

I believe we returned to the dance, to see it out, after karaoke finished but am not positive. The karaoke might have run late enough into the night that we just went to bed instead.

Trivia: No actual historic map from medieval times or the Age of Exploration is known to contain the phrase ``Here be dragons''. The Lenox Globe, believed to have been made around 1505 --- origin and maker unknown --- does contain the warning ``Huc Sunt Dracones'' just below the equator and near China. This may be intended to mean ``here are Dagronians'', referencing cannibals of the kingdom of Dagronia reported by Marco Polo. Source: On The Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, Simon Garfield.

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

PS: A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: ansatz, the start of a 26-installment summer special! I explain a mathematics term you may never have known existed before.