Eric James Stone

The credits are rolling. Spider-Man 2 is great fun. It ranks with the other great superhero movies.

Well, genetically altered blood, if you go by the movie version of events.
Since I was so far back in line for the Harry Potter movie, I decided to go early for Spiderman 2. I am currently the only one in line for the 12:05am showing.
I’m not uniquely crazy — there are already 13 people in line for the 12:01 showing.

After a long period of little or slow progress, I have finished chapter 17. I have now surpassed 50,000 words, and I estimate I’m about 40% done.

I’ve upgraded to MovableType 3.0. In doing so, I have implemented comment moderation for unregistered commenters.

What does that mean? If you register for free at TypeKey, a commenter authentication service, then your comments will appear immediately. (This will work on other blogs using TypeKey as well.)

If you decide to post a comment while unregistered, then I will have to approve the comment before it will appear.

Why am I doing this? Because I’m sick of stupid comment-spammers putting fake comments up on the site that stay there until I notice them and delete them.

I’ve now watched the entire first season — 22 episodes — of Farscape on DVD, plus the first couple of episodes of the second season, in order to resolve the cliffhanger.

And I have to say I’m not hooked. I got bored by the last full episode I watched, and tried to watch the next, and got bored by it, too.

I don’t find myself engaged by the characters. Some of the episodes were interesting, and some of the action was fun, but for some reason the show as a whole just doesn’t seem to work for me. So I canceled all the rest of the episodes that were in my Netflix queue.

So, any Farscape fans want to explain why I’m wrong, and tell me that the show gets a lot better at some point?

I put a short story, “A Quiet Man,” in the mail this morning. I actually sent it to two places at once, which is normally a no-no.

One of the places was the Utah Original Writing Competition. Since the UOWC does not publish the winning stories, that means I am still free to sell the first publishing rights elsewhere. And, since a story is still eligible for the UOWC unless it has been published in book form, that means I can send it to a magazine without any conflict.

The story is neither science fiction nor fantasy; it’s more of a literary/mainstream story. So I sent it to The Atlantic Monthly. Might as well aim high, right?

Today was the 98th birthday of my grandfather, Arthur B. Erekson. We had a family gathering that included four generations.

Now — and I’m sure my brother Michael will correct me if I’m wrong, a 55-mph baseball pitch isn’t considered extremely fast.

Still, I imagine it would hurt a bit if it hit you.

Now, you may be familiar with what a proton is: a sub-atomic particle found in the nucleus of an atom. Needless to say, a proton is very, very, very, very small.

If we take an human who weighs about 150 pounds, their body would contain approximately 6,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 protons. That’s 6.5 * 10^27 or 6.5 octillion protons. under normal circumstances, an individual proton is so small and weighs so little, you could not even notice it.

However, while researching something, I came across information about something that has been dubbed the “Oh-My-God particle.” It was first detected in 1991 by a cosmic ray detector at the University of Utah. Similar particles have been detected since then, confirming the discovery.

The particle is actually a proton traveling at a very high velocity. How high? 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light.

At that speed, that itsy-bitsy proton had as much energy as a baseball traveling at 55 miles per hour.

And no one knows what is shooting protons around at that speed.

The fire alarm went off at work, as it sometimes does, so according to our new procedures we must go across the parking lot from our building. Might as well blog it.

Update: What a surprise! There was no actual fire.

Someone using the return e-mail address nobody@nowhere.com (UPDATE: see my comment below) sent me a message today complimenting me on something I had posted elsewhere. I appreciated the message very much, because I wasn’t sure whether anyone was really paying attention to what I wrote.

Thanks, nobody, whoever you are.

(I almost feel an Abbot & Costello routine coming on…

“I got an e-mail today.”

“Who sent you an e-mail?”

“Nobody.”

“So you didn’t get an e-mail?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then who sent it to you?”

“Nobody sent it to me.”

“So you didn’t get an e-mail from nobody?”

“No, I did get an e-mail from nobody.”