'Bred Crumbs

10:24 PM Dewayne asks, "When you break up with someone, why do they always want a reason? How will that make it better? I hypothesized that perhaps one is trying to better one's self by identifying bad traits such as clinginess."

I think he's onto it; it's both comfort and fact-finding. If the reason is justifiable, you can learn and grow. If the reason is ludicrous (or if it's real but you can't deal with it), you can write off the dumper as insane. It's like getting fired; you'd want to know the reason then, wouldn't you? Indeed, the more I think about it, I think a breakup should require an exit interview with a written evaluation:

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05:54 PM Here's the best passage from an MSNBC story about one of the last people who still collect money from Magic Fingers motel beds (link via NextDraft):

John Scherrer of Longview, Texas, grew tired of his route two years ago. He had been at it for 33 years. And he’d fallen for a woman he had first met during an Internet spades game. So Mr. Scherrer moved to South Carolina to live with her.

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08:19 AM I went to my first* sci-fi convention on Sunday for a day of, as Robbie put it, "nerdly fun." A draw for me was that it was at the Nob Hill Masonic Center, which sits across from Grace Cathedral. This amuses me. It's like a smorgasbord of cults.

We scheduled our visit carefully, making sure we were there for all the Farscape stuff (although Kent McCord, sporting a flowy silver Kenny Rogers mane, went on a little too much about his Ozzie and Harriet/Jack Webb/Glen Larson days) and making sure we missed Kevin Sorbo and the Enterprise losers. The best time was when we roamed the signing and merch area while it was mostly empty during Nichelle Nichols' auditorium presentation. We wound up having a nice chat with Virginia Hey, who gave us chocolate.

(By the by, Farscape marketers: I kept thinking of merch I would buy, if only it existed. I'm thinking specifically of a baseball cap with the Peacekeeper insignia. That would rock.)

Despite the occasional full-on Klingon, the whole thing was surprisingly unscary, at least until the last event. The auditorium was packed when Michael Dorn and Marina Sirtis took the stage, and they were as entertaining as any comedy duo. At one point, Sirtis, who carries a tough-chick swagger, joked that she must be very good actor, since the painfully sweet Counselor Troi is nothing like her. Shame; if Troi were more like Sirtis, I probably could have abided her.

This is when things got a little too Trekkies. One sad woman got up to the Q&A mic and proclaimed that she traveled "all the way from Marin County" (boo-hoo) and had seen Dorn at every convention he's been to. That was it. No question. Worse yet: when Sirtis was talking about the upcoming Trek movie (Star Trek: Psoriasis, or some other highfalutin noun, I don't know), she spoke casually of getting to "drive the Enterprise." A social-skill-deprived goober in the audience -- wearing a Trek uniform, of course -- shouted out, "You don't drive a starship, you fly it!" On the plus side, he was roundly booed by the crowd, and glared at by Sirtis.

There was another highlight that I hesitate to write about in a public space. Vague version: in the days leading up to the convention, we pretended to become obsessed about a lesser recurring character from one of the Trek franchises, but our joke took on a life of its own. When we saw this person at the show, clad and behaving in an appealingly normal way, our strange fixation got the better of us, though we couldn't come up with a concrete reason to talk to the person, since we really don't care for the show or the character. When this person abandoned the signing table for good, leaving behind a hand-drawn sign identifying who the person was and the reason for attendance, we had to have it. And we did. It confirmed what I learned at the first MST event, when a cohort "liberated" the banner of a particularly pathetic group of online fans: petty larceny makes any convention better.

* Yes, I attended both Mystery Science Theater 3000 conventions in '94 and '96, but those were a whole other animal.

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