Then the tide rushes in and washes my castles away

[austin_dern]

After arriving at the Port Authority my father and I set out for 30 Rockefeller Center, since while I was given ticket reservations I wasn't given actual tickets and who could tell when the tickets would run out? For that matter who could tell when the line for actual admission had formed, and when it would have the magic 210 people that fill the studio in it? We set off looking for the sunny side of the street since the weather was below freezing and extremely windy and discovered that the sunny side wasn't actually warmer by any appreciable measure. At Rockefeller Center after some looking around for the elevator where people used to line up for Late Night back in the 1990s we found NBC pages who told us, very distinctly, that the line would form about 3 pm in the mezzanine level and there we'd be given tickets and wristbands to attend the show and we should not come back before then.

Considering the people lined up for standby tickets overnight I figured, well, perhaps we could try to be back for 2 (for a 4:15 official-lining-up and 5:30 start of taping) and if that went wrong, it would just go wrong. We set out with my father's vague plans to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (my parents are members) and we started out dashing quickly to Saint Patrick' Cathedral which is quite nearby Rockefeller center and also fully heated. The cathedral has been retrofitted to be reasonably wheelchair-accessible, I noticed, except that the entrance doors are those imposing type which weigh about as much as the Twelve Apostles combined. Accessibility is an evolving thing.

From there we went east a couple of avenues' worth, stopping only for the NBA Experience Store where we thought there might be something intriguing or at least novel or maybe some spot where people could embarrass themselves by playing at being basketball players. If there was we never found it, although they did have Real Basketball Player shoes which were very nearly large enough for tracerj's needs, almost. Also the revolving door entrances have as handlebars brass-like fixtures which look like a player's arm with a chunk of basketball so that going in is like bumping into a hydra-armed decapitated professional athlete. I'm not sure that's the experience they were going for.

Trivia: The Great Comet of 1811 viewed from Earth had a nucleus and coma, apart from the tail, which was in visible light larger than the Sun. Source: Comet, Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan. And I realize that 2010 would be a fine year to publish a centennial-of-the-Great-Halley's-Comet-Death-Of-The-World scare, if one isn't already being published, except that the first draft for such a book would have to be turned in, like, today.

Currently Reading: The World Of Caffeine: The Science and Culture Of The World's Most Popular Drug, Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K Bealer.

Comments

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Come now, my feet aren't all that large. Most of the size is due to width, and I have a better grasp of what sizes actually work now.

Still, I'm a 15WW (well, slightly wider), which translates to a men's 14EE. It means I don't find shows that fit unless I go online, and rarely at that.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That does change things a bit; I've only actually seen you in person way back in the late 90s when, I guess for width purposes, you were going with the shoes that were longer than I was tall through second grade. (I've got a similar foot problem in that mine are curled more than standard, so that I need extremely wide shoes and even those get wear patterns that are very distinctive and comically lopsided.)

Unfortunately I can't report their size as they were under glass and no size tag was visible. As they were made for a particular basketball player I wonder if they bother with size labels given that.

[prismo.livejournal.com]

Considering the people lined up for standby tickets overnight I figured, well, perhaps we could try to be back for 2 (for a 4:15 official-lining-up and 5:30 start of taping) and if that went wrong, it would just go wrong.

You know, that's a good attitude to have. I need to adopt that myself.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It would've been a nice attitude if I had been able to keep it quite straight myself. I was fairly anxious most of the day, really, up until I actually had the ticket and the wristband which would prove I was going in.

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

::: as handlebars brass-like fixtures which look like a player's arm with a chunk of basketball so that going in is like bumping into a hydra-armed decapitated professional athlete.

Wasn't that one of Doc Farnsworth's creations in an episode of Futurama? But I think you mean "dismembered." Merely decapitated is what you get in certain store manikins. There appear to be two schools of thought regarding those: abstract and abbreviated renditions of the human form, including those made of bent wire, and high-fidelity models that include nipples. I ask, has there ever been an article of apparel in a family-friendly shopping venue where the effect of a nipple on its draping was a critical consideration? The third category are manikins that look exactly like Elaine from Seinfeld because of the previously unsuspected stalker element in the manikin-design community. Of the three kinds of manikins, the fourth is holographic and alters itself to appeal to passerby and follows them down the street, and these do not exist yet but we can expect to be aggravated by them any day now, or decade, or possibly never, which would be the preferable option for most shoppers, except the masochists seeking a fashionable neurosis about which to gripe.

::: except that the first draft for such [a centennial celebration of Comet Halley-mania] would have to be turned in, like, today.

Depends on the turnaround of the publication. Are there any SF e-magazines anymore, or did they collapse in the Great Failure To Monetize of 2007? And there's always self-published. "This time-sensitive book did exist in a timely fashion, even if you didn't know about it! Five people did, and since some finite number will never know about any particular thing, of what matter is the magnitude of that group?" I suggest someone start writing the definitive quincentennial celebration of the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar (1582) now, just to get a jump on things.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

>: Wasn't that one of Doc Farnsworth's creations in an episode of Futurama? But I think you mean "dismembered."

Might've been one of his creations; certainly it doesn't seem out of line for him. Unfortunately despite getting the fourth season of Futurama as a Christmas present --- and picking up the first series as a Circuit City Going Out Of Everything sale item --- I haven't had time to actually watch them. I need to start doing the ``free step'' exercises on the Wii which let me watch something else for a twenty or thirty-minute block and watch during that, although it's surprisingly challenging for me to manipulate all the remotes necessary to do that coherently.

Dismembered may be right, but my mind is capable of imagining a strange hydra-like human variant with a quartet of arms and no particular legs worth speaking of, with the torso being the main axis around which the door rotates. I attribute this to Stanley Weinbaum, who being dead can't disclaim responsibility for it.

>: Depends on the turnaround of the publication. Are there any SF e-magazines anymore, or did they collapse in the Great Failure To Monetize of 2007? And there's always self-published.

I don't know any science fiction e-magazines around yet --- really, the only one I was that aware of was Helix and that for the editor-in-chief's ongoing efforts to set the land-speed record for bizarre misbehavior. I suppose Analog could be up for an article or two, but that does assume they're going to be around in 2010.

Self-publishing ... well, I don't know about that. I have been working up something like that by treating this Livejournal as a daily column with a reasonably rigid deadline but it'd be nice to write something ambitious and that I got paid for. I do know someone who's got things published through Associated Content, but I haven't got clear just how it is writing things gets turned into having things edited and paid for.

There's always fresh books about the history of the calendar out. Probably there always will be as long as people keep writing biographies of George Washington and having to explain his birth date and year.