Eric James Stone

My view is actually better than it looks like from the photo.

UPDATE: In case you couldn’t tell, some of the whitish blobs on the stage are the Go-Go’s.

Live from the Go-Go’s concert in Las Vegas.
Hope this works.

Watch video. (You may need the latest version of Apple Quicktime Player.)

UPDATE: Ugh. The sound is so distorted you can’t even tell what song they’re singing. (Or can you?) And the video is next to useless. I’m afraid this camera phone really doesn’t cut it as a video camera — or as much of a still camera either. :-(

Yesterday as I was leaving the office, I noticed a fire engine arrive and block off the street to the building next to ours. I didn’t stop to find out what was going on. This morning, however, I found out that it was because employees in a mailroom in that building had found a mysterious white powder in a package.

Apparently one of the employees felt sick, and three employees who had been exposed were taken to the hospital. The area was quaratined, and various emergency services in Orem got to test their procedures for dealing with a possible biological terrorist attack.

Fortunately, the white powder turned out to be neither anthrax nor ricin, and the employees are fine.

Now, here’s the kicker: The package was misdelivered; it was not intended for the building next door, it was intended for my building. For my office. In fact, it was addressed to me — which is why I had messages from the FBI in my voicemail this morning, asking me to call as soon as possible. I called, and the agent wanted to know whether had ordered a Buffy the Vampire Slayer book, and what I knew about the seller. I told him I’d ordered the book through Amazon.com’s marketplace, and other than that I knew nothing about the seller.

So, apparently all this fuss was the result of a misdelivered package. Still, it’s good to know that the FBI and Orem officials are prepared to deal with a threat of this type, should it ever actually happen.

However, I do wonder what I would have done had I opened the package, which I expected, and noticed some sort of white powder. Would I have ignored it, or would I have considered the possibility that it was anthrax? Frankly, at this point I don’t know how I would have reacted.

At least the FBI agent is going to check into how I can get my book back from the CDC.

UPDATE: Changed the link in the first paragraph to a Deseret News story with more information.

UPDATE #2: According to this story, the white powder turned out to be “grounded up packing material.”

UPDATE #3: A wrap-up story from the Deseret News.

I never really got into the whole “reality TV” craze over the past few years. For example, I’ve never watched an episode of Survivor, or any of the marrying-people-off shows. However, my sister Julie forced me to watch an episode of The Amazing Race a couple of years ago when I was visiting, and it was actually kind of fun to watch. So I watched it last season (#4) and now I’m watching it this season.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, it starts with 11 teams who participate in an around-the-world race. Each team consists of two people with some sort of relationship: friends, dating, married, parent-child, twins, etc. Each week (with a couple of exceptions) the last team to arrive at the “pit stop” gets eliminated from the race. There are also various challenges along the way.

The only team that I actively disliked got eliminated this week (week 2), so I guess I’ll have to find someone else to root against. I haven’t really decided who I’m rooting for, yet. Right now I lean toward the team of Jim & Marsha, a father/daughter team.

I saw I, Robot last night. I had been worried, based on the previews, that the movie would make a complete hash of Asimov’s three Laws of Robotics, but fortunately my fears were groundless.

I, Robot is an enjoyable sci-fi action mystery. It won’t rank as one of the all-time great SF movies, though.

You’ve probably heard it said that humans and chimpanzees share about 98.5% of their genetic material.

That makes it sound like they are 98.5% human. That’s close enough that you might almost expect them to demand human rights, rather than to be treated as animals.

Well, there’s another human genetic relative that definitely should not be treated as an animal. It’s not as genetically close as a chimpanzee, since it only shares 75% of its genetic material with humans. But that’s still quite a bit — you might say it’s 3/4 human.

Why shouldn’t it be treated as an animal? Because it isn’t. It’s a vegetable: the pumpkin.

(Hat tip to John Derbyshire at the Corner.)

OK, I’ve hacked MovableType 3.0D so that if someone uses the same combination of name, e-mail address and URL (if applicable) that has been used for an approved comment in the past, their comments are automatically approved. That should prevent the comment spam from showing up, while making it convenient for the usual suspects commenters.

That oughta do it.

UPDATE: If anyone is interested in how to do this hack, just ask.

…but it’s better than an outright rejection.

The editor of Analog has given me the first rewrite request of my career. There’s no guarantee that he’ll buy the story if I make the changes he suggests, but it’s a possibility.

Needless to say, I will make the changes.

As a personal matter, I’d rather sell a story to Analog than to any other magazine, because Analog used to be Astounding Science Fiction, and it’s the magazine that first published so many of the Asimov and Heinlein stories I read when I was young. (I didn’t actually read them in the magazine, I read them in anthologies that were published later.)

If anyone is interested in attending a writers’ group in Utah County, I’m a member of one that meets at 7:00pm every Thursday at the Barnes & Noble on University Parkway in Orem. We’re looking for new members, so if you are serious about writing for publication, feel free to come join us. We have writers from a mix of genres.

There is also a new group for romance authors meeting on Wednesdays at the Barnes & Noble, if that’s the kind of writing you’re specifically interested in doing. (I’m not a member of that group, but one of my group’s former members is.)

Forgot to mention that when I returned from California, one of my SASE’s had returned. It included a form rejection slip from the Atlantic Monthly.

But that’s not all it contained. The poor envelope was nearly bursting at the seams because they had folded up and returned my entire manuscript.

The manuscript was clearly labeled as a “Disposable Manuscript” on its front page.