Category: What the…?

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Ollie North, 2000 A.D.

Kids, you have no idea how evil this man was. Oliver North and Fawn Hall, Key Figures in Iran-Contra Scandal, Are Married – The New York Times share.google/kAouPxzd1kYS…

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— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein.bsky.social) September 9, 2025 at 7:02 PM

Rick Perlstein posted the news that Oliver North and Fawn Hall, two major figures in the Reagan-administration’s Iran-contra scandal, were married in August, 40 years after the events that brought them to public attention. So I guess I might as well post the short play I wrote for my theater class in 1989.

The Cast

Oliver North

Fawn Hall

The People

The Setting

A room like any other room for the small stage. On it are a couple of chairs, a glass and a jug of water on a small table, and, if it is thought necessary, an American flag. There should also be a black flat behind which someone can stand and talk to Ollie as if they were outside the room.

Scene One

[One chair is hidden behind screen. If the flag is used, it too should be hidden. The lights come up on Ollie standing toward the front of the stage. He is wearing his uniform still, but it is somewhat bedraggled and worn. The medals have lost some of their burnish.]

Oliver North

[Putting right hand over heart.] I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all. [Pauses for a moment, then raises arms in an evangelical stance.] Americans, I am Oliver North! [Waits as if for applause, then drops hands and continues.] America is beset by troubles and I know how to solve them! Fot too long have we sat idle and allowed others to maneuver us like pawns in some giant chess game! It is time to take a stand, [Fawn hall enters room, Ollie doesn’t notice her.] one which we can all be proud of—one in which we can be strong! It is toime for America to let the world know that we’re sick and tired of turning the other cheek! Sick and tired of ignoring our own interests in the name of some foreigner’s civil rights! It’s time to let the world know that we’ll do what we want to do…

Fawn Hall

Still working on the speech, Ollie?

Ollie

Fawn! It’s so good to see you again so soon! How’s life on the outside world?

Fawn

Oh, pretty much the same as last week.

Ollie

The jury?

Fawn

Still out.

Ollie

Damn! That’s eleven years! I’ve been stuck in here for eleven years! Eleven years today!

Fawn

I’m sorry, Ollie. I forgot. Things have been so hectic lately. With my television show and everything else, I haven’t had time to organize my personal schedule in weeks.

Ollie

Won’t they ever reach a verdict? My public is waiting for me to be released. There are thousands of people waiting to hear from me—to see me—to touch me. They write me hundreds of letters…

Fawn

How many letters?

Ollie

Well…

Fawn

Ollie, the guards called me up and told me you haven’t had a letter in weeks. That’s why I came again so soon. You know I can’t usually make it more than a couple of times a month.

Ollie

I know. I know. But Fawn, somebody’s got to care, someone’s got to remember. I know that out there in the world there are millions of people who share my vision, my zeal—if only I could get my message to them! The jury has to acquit me!

Fawn

I don’t know, Ollie. Last I heard, they were asking to see all of the documents for the tenth time.

Ollie

If only I hadn’t agreed to sign my name to all of those papers! I was such a sucker for Bush! And that trick with Dan Quayle! What a way to avoid getting impeached! Fawn, you’ve got to help me. Get my name back out into the world. Get me back out into the world!

Fawn

I’ll see what I can do for you, Ollie. It’s not going to be easy, but I’ll try. [Turning to audience.] This is Fawn hall reporting. Today I had a private interview with retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. An old friend and employer of mine, Ollie was convicted on several charges of misleading Congress, and generally doing bad things to the American people. His first trial resulted in a jury conviction in 1989 after only three days of deliberation. He appealed, but the jury has now been deliberating for eleven years, making it the longest jury trial in US history. But Ollie, Oliver North, a man who was once called a national hero by the President of the united States, has been incarcerated in a Federal prison ever since the closing arguments were finished. He hasn’t had the chance to speak out for hiimself and his cause for eleven years—and he is fading. But you can help. All you need to do is believe. If you believe in Ollie and Ollie’s innocence [Ollie looks hopefully at the audience] he will come back! Believe! Believe! Believe! [Fawn looks at Ollie, then back at audience.] Believe harder! Believe stronger! Believe! [She turns back to Ollie.] I’m sorry Ollie. It doesn’t seem to be working. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll be back next week. Promise.

[Blackout.]

Scene Two

[The chairs are now on opposite sides of the table. Ollie is again facing toward the screen.]

The People

[The People are wearing a suit, tie, and glasses. They approach timidly and knock on the flat.] Mr. North? Colonel North?

Ollie

Come in.

People

I’m glad you agreed to let me visit you.

Ollie

I’m glad you came. Sitting in one room for all this time has been rather dull.

People

I’m sorry.

Ollie

Who are you, anyway?

People

Oh, don’t you remember? I’m your defense team.

Ollie

My defense team? I thought they’d all quit.

People

Well—all of them except me.

Ollie

Oh. [He tried not to look too disappointed.]

People

Look, Mr. North, you realize that it’s been a long time for most people. Nobody—well almost nobody—is willing to devote their life to one case, one cause anymore.

Ollie

Why are you still here, then?

People

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve admired you. I grew up in a little town in Iowa called Cornfield. I was just out of high school the summer the Iran-Contra hearings happened, and that town was taken with them like a pig to mud. All through the summer, the folks with VCRs would have neighbors over to a full house while they watched the hearings. The town council renamed Cornfield Street, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North Boulevard…

Ollie

A boulevard…imagine that.

People

…yeah, well, I decided to go into law. I was a smart kid, managed to get some academic scholarships, get through college in three years, and went on to Harvard law, doing summers here in D.C. as a legal aide to your lawyers. Did you know that more than a tenth of the articles published by the Harvard law Review during that period were about you and your appeal? An entire new branch of judicial study concerned with the ramifications of the use of executive privilege regarding foreign covert operations sprang, Atena-like, from your actions. We called it Ollielaw. When I graduated, I got a job doing research on your case. I’ve been behind you ever since. But lately…I don’t know. I took a trip home last month—the first time I’d been able to get away from Washington for six years. Cornfield Street is back to being Cornfield Street. I asked my mom, and she said they changed it back because the new name was just too long to remember. She said nobody had used it much anyway: the old folks called it Cornfield Street, and the kids just called it North Street. People said they were getting confused with the other North Street, and that a town the size of Cornfield didn’t need a boulevard. I asked the mayor what had happened to the street signs and he said he’d used them as slats to repair his hogpen. I guess out in the country it’s kind of easy to lose your focus.

[Blackout.]

Scene Three

[Both chairs are on the same side of the table opposite the side of the stage the flat is standing on. Ollie is seated in one of them. He sits in the chair for a minute, nervously tapping his foot, and pours himself a glass of water. Just as he is about to take a sip, a voice calls out from behind the screen.]

The People

Will the defendant please rise. [Ollie does.] Oliver North, a jury of your peers has found yo guilty of being an albatross around the neck of the body politic. Crimes you have and have not committed lie all around, stinking and sweltering in the hot sun of our consciences. The jury of this appeal has determined that the time has come to eradicate the whole putrid mess from our minds, and for that reason has spent the past eleven years sequestered from the rest of humanity,

During the period of their isolation, polls have been taken among the populace at large. Those polls show that for the past year no one has given a thought to this case except for those people directly involved with it. I admit that I have not considered this trial myself for the past couple of weeks, at least.

The jury thinks that they, and the American people have had enough. They have suggested a punishment that is intended to prevent this sorry affair from ever being dragged into the public eye again, intending to give us a fresh start and a new life for the coming millennium.

Oliver North, I sentence you to a life of silence. The finding of this court is that there shall be no more TV movies. There shall be no more books. There shall be no more speeches. There shall be no more gifts. Whatever you may do now in your private life is your own affair, but no longer will the American people be given monstrous figures to revere and treasure. Oliver North, be quiet.

Any last words?

Ollie

Yes. I regret that I have but one life to give for my country. How’s that?

The People

That’s great.

Fawn

Believe! Believe!

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WE MUST BE CUT TO HEAL

One of the things I’m going to miss with the loss of Twitter (and now Bluesky) is going to be the inability to participate in Severance discourse when it starts back up next week. I got a character wrong on my initial reading of this cross stitch from the wall of Mrs. Selvig’s house in the third episode (it’s about 5 minutes in), but it was good enough to catch the attention of Ben Stiller.

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Bye-Bye, Bluesky?

UPDATE: 6 January 2025. After more than two weeks in Limbo, both accounts are visible again. I noticed @pokermutant.com was working on the weekend, but @darrelplant.bsky.social was still sending content into the void. But as of this evening, on this most auspicious of days, I’m back.

I stopped posting on Twitter two years ago, at least for anything not poker-related (I had two accounts that kept their streams uncrossed). My account wasn’t a major part of my life, but I’d been on there for 15 years, and made a fair number of contacts, including a lot of people I knew from my early blogging years (more than two decades ago, now) and newer folks like Willamette University history professor (and chronicler of 20th-century right-wing kooks) Seth Cotlar, who I’ve had the opportunity to hang out with a bit.

I tried out Mastodon for a while and built up a little network there, finding a number of old game aficionados and luminaries like Winchell Chung, who I knew as the artist for the Steve Jackson minigame Ogre from the 1970s but who’s known even more widely as the man behind Atomic Rockets, a site chock-full of science and formulae for writers and game developers (and anyone else) interested in the mechanics and physics of space travel.

But for any number of reasons, Mastodon never caught on with most of the people I’d been following, with a number of them moving over to the invitation-only startup Bluesky. Eventually, Seth had some invites and I snagged one back in October of 2023, not too long before the platform shifted to open registration.

So, for a year now, I’ve been building up a new circle of old and new acquaintances, making pithy comments here and there. More or less in the ballpark of where I was on Twitter, if not all of the same accounts.

But just before Christmas, something happened. I had a post I needed to edit, and since there’s no edit button, I was going to do my usual thing of making a new post with the edits then deleting the original post before anyone had a chance to like or repost it. When I went to look for the old post in my account’s timeline, it wasn’t there, so I couldn’t delete it. Poking into it a little more, I noticed that none of the items I’d posted or reposted since the morning of December 20th were visible in my timeline.

Last items displayed in my Bluesky timeline, showing a repost from Jon Schwarz time-stamped December 20, 2024 at 6:14 AM, the time (in Pacific Standard Time) when he originally posted it.

At first, I considered that perhaps I’d found my way onto a blocklist that I was on myself, but scrolling a little bit further back, I could still see posts before early afternoon of the 20th.

The last posts visible in my timeline, with the most recent being a reply time-stamped December 20, 2024 at 1:07 PM (Pacific).

Were my posts and replies being entirely blocked? I knew from experience that Clearsky, a tool that interfaces with Bluesky to show lists of users blocked and blocking an account, also had a timeline history

Contents of the Clearsky History tab for my account, showing the most recent post/reply as Mon Dec 30 2024 17:05:10 GMT-800 (Pacific Standard Time) and several other posts in the two days previous (all after December 20th).

So clearly, the data’s out there somewhere. But it’s not showing up on my account in MacOS browsers, on Safari on the iPad, or in the official iOS Bluesky app. Checking in with my wife (she follows me!), they’re not showing for her either (I can see her posts).

For the past dozen years, I’ve been running a Twitter account for poker stuff that I’ve kepty separate from my personal/politics account. Poker Twitter was a bit slow to move over to Bluesky, and it had a bit of a setback when Steve Albini died a few months back, but people were moving over as Twitter continued to decline, so I set up a poker Bluesky account and even went through the ‘verification’ process. After realizing that my main account wasn’t working correctly, I checked it.

Feed from the pokermutant.com Bluesky feed, showing the last post as December 20, 2024 at 10:32 AM.

So I’m not sure where I stand. I’ve contacted Bluesky’s Support email a couple of times already but it’s the holiday, they’re a small team, etc. It’s going to be a real bummer if this isn’t fixed (assuming it’s not something I’ve done that’s made it supposed to be what’s happening).

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Darrel’s Bourbon Pecan Sweet Potatoes

I’ve never really been a fan of sweet potatoes or ‘yams’ as was the custom. My mother made candied yams for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and I happily ate them because Mom made them, but I tended to stay away from at all other times. Barbara hasn’t been a fan either, so they’ve never been a regular part of our mealtimes over the past four decades.

The Christmas after Mom died a decade ago, though, my brother and sister-in-law were hosting the holiday get-together and we were asked to bring the sweet potatoes. I wasn’t about to force Barbara to cook them for a dinner on my side of the families, so I started looking for something beyond some baked yams with marshmallows on top. Something that would cover up my inadequacies as a cook (I really hadn’t done much since we married, Barbara’s a far better cook than I ever will be).

I found a couple of recipes that looked promising. One that’s not on the internet anymore, that was by author Carla Hall (it’s not the same as the one on her site and it wasn’t archived by the Internet Archive) and one from Food.com. I melded them together.

It was a hit, so I was asked to bring them the next year, but I hadn’t really saved the recipes or what I modified. Fortunately, my sister-in-law had asked for it, so I was able to look back through my email archives.

My brother and his family didn’t host every year, though, some holidays they did some traveling. We did our big holiday dinner on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and Barbara never asked me to make sweet potatoes for that. So when I had to make them, I’d just look back for that email.

Then, this year, I was asked again. And I couldn’t find the email. I looked and looked, then finally remembered that depending on which device I’m on, Apple Mail saves my mail into a Sent or Sent Messages folder. They’re both on my email account, I’ve never bothered to figure out how to combine them, but until I checked Sent Messages, I couldn’t find the recipe. And I couldn’t find anything I remembered using Google.

Once I found it, I resolved to put it on Google Docs, and copied the email text to there. The next day, I went to look for it and searched for pecan in my Docs. Turns out I’d already done the same thing in 2023 and had totally forgotten it.

So, this is it, the definitive Darrel’s Bourbon Pecan Sweet Potatoes. I’ve tried to make it as explicit as possible for inexperienced cooks like myself.

Ingredients

4 unpeeled yams

Yam Mix
3 eggs
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 cup whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice (or cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger)
1/4 cup bourbon

Topping
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup flour
1/2 cup melted butter

On Top of the Topping
1/2 bag mini marshmallows

Preparation

Total Preparation Time: 2 hours

Sweet Potatoes

  1. Heat the oven to 375° F (190° C). Put the sweet potatoes on the rack and bake them for 45 minutes.
  2. Remove the baked sweet potatoes from the oven and slice them in half lengthwise (or the other way, if you prefer).
  3. Over a large bowl, hold onto the outside of each section of sweet potato and squeeze the contents into the bowl. The skin should come off easily, you won’t burn your fingers (much).
  4. Mash the sweet potatoes in the bowl.

Mix

  1. In a small bowl, melt 1/2 cup of butter in the microwave or oven.
  2. Add the eggs, granulated sugar, whipping cream, and vanilla to the melted butter and mix.
  3. Stir in the spice mix and bourbon.
  4. Pour the mix into the large bowl with the sweet potatoes.
  5. Use butter to coat the inside of a large casserole dish and smooth the sweet potato mix into the dish.

Topping

  1. Heat the oven to 350° F (175° C).
  2. In a medium bowl, melt 1/2 cup butter.
  3. Add flour, brown sugar and mix.
  4. Into the resulting paste, mix the pecans.
  5. My original notes say to “slather” the topping over the top of the sweet potato mix, but it’s really not liquid enough to spread, so shake it out of the bowl on top of the sweet potatoes and gently push it around to cover the top of the mix.
  6. Add some uncrushed pecans to the top.
  7. Bake for 40 minutes (at 350° F/190° C)).

Once it’s out of the oven, spread as many mini marshmallows as you wish over the top and turn on the broiler. Set the casserole dish on a middle rack where you can keep an eye on the top of the marshmallows so they don’t burn. It can flash over from innocuous to burnt-to-a-crisp in a couple seconds, so don’t take your eyes off them.

And that’s all there is. People keep telling me it’s like having dessert at dinner, which isn’t surprising with two cups of various sugars, sweet potatoes, and bourbon.

Happy Holidays!

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D&D50

So today (or maybe yesterday) is the 50th anniversary of the release of Dungeons & Dragons, which I got into just about a year-and-a-half later after having heard about it at Gandalf’s Den Fantasy Gallery on the mall in central Eugene, where I would hang out after my freshman year at high school between buses.

I was obsessed with creating my D&D settings. Jon Pitchford and I had gone in halfsies on the D&D box (it was $10!) and we played as much as we could given we lived in different parts of town, with my part of town kind of way out of town. When Jon transferred to another high school, he found a crop of players (another Jon, Dave & Allison, and Tom) who ended up being our core for RPGs ranging from D&D to TRAVELLER, Gamma World, Bushido, Champions, and beyond, for about seven years, as the attraction of the armed services to kids without much money ate into our numbers.

I wrote what I thought at the time was a scathing satire about high school cliques my senior year, casting Jocks and Groupies as a monster class called Narcisstics, and sent it off to The Dragon magazine with both my name and Pitchford’s on it because it had grown out of a discussion we’d had. Something like 6 months later, it showed up in issue #24 and I ran over to Jon’s quad room at the University of Oregon. We hadn’t gotten any notice that ot had been accepted, and after a few weeks went by, I sent a message off asking if we were going to get paid; eventually we got a check for $9, which I split with Jon. That could buy us four-and-a-half copies of the magazine.

The spring of my senior year, Gandalf’s hired me to work in the book and game shop. It was a small shop, with usually just one staff member working at a time. For a lot of it, I was the only employee, with the other hours covered by Michael, the owner, and his wife, Lee. In addition to the retail side, Michael had early on made regional distribution deals with TSR, Game Designers’ Workshop, Flying Buffalo, and a variety of game-related companies that produced dice and miniatures, so I worked in their thriving wholesale operation in the basement, boxing up orders to be shipped all over the Northwest. I saw a lot of games, and I spent a lot of my meagre income on books and games.

I’ve written at length about my experience with Christian fundamentalists threatening to picket a talk I was asked to give at the Springfield Public Library here and here, so I’m not going to elaborate.

After most of the gang left town, eventually I did so myself, going back to college. I played games with a couple of guys I met there—though no RPGs—and when they left town, I sort of went down a freelance developer rabbit hole that didn’t lead me to meeting any more, so most of my games have been languishing in boxes for 40 years (it helps to not move for over 30 years), including my D&D stuff. On the other hand, they’re reasonably well-preserved! I did get a chance to play some D&D with one of my nephews a couple of years ago, as he tried his hand at DMing.

Almost forgot! I did (poorly) a little presentation for a live event here in Portland. The recorded version is a lot better.

Everybody’s showing their D&D books. These are my oldest ones.

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EUCON: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention Nobody Expected

May 13th, 1983 was a Friday. Friday the 13th.

It was also the first day of Eucon, a science fiction convention that I’d been obsessively putting together for a year-and-a-half.

I still don’t know what possessed me to think I could organize a con in the fall of 1981 when I wasn’t even quite 20 years old. I’d only ever been to a handful of conventions — a couple of Orycons in Portland, and maybe a Norwescon in Seattle — but I’d never worked on one as a volunteer, much less done of the organizing work. I hadn’t even organized my life.

Norwescon V badge from March 1982

I remember at the time it felt like I was in the middle of a science-fiction/fantasy nexus, which was great for nerd-boy Darrel. I’d been working for a couple years already at Gandalf’s Den Fantasy Gallery, which put me in the center of the things — speculative fiction-wise — in Eugene.

Gandalf’s had opened up in the mid-70s downtown in The Atrium Building (now full of city offices) as a shop selling f&sf books and games. Its opening coincided with the initial release of Dungeons & Dragons, as well as my freshman year of high school, and I traversed downtown daily on the city bus to get to school.

By my senior year (I turned 17 in the middle of that), I’d been hanging around so much that the owner offered me a job, so I worked there through the summer until I went to Corvallis for college, worked at the newly-opened satellite store in the Old World Center there for a couple months until they sold it out from under me, then got back in at the Eugene shop after I ran home to Eugene with my tail between my legs after six months of electrical engineering school (we still used slide rules!)

My dad’s slide rule, which I took with me to Oregon State University in 1979. It’s bamboo with white celluloid, according to its page in the Smithsonian Institution! If you squint, you can just make out “MADE IN OCCUPIED JAPAN”.

One of my friends through high school was a kid my friend Jon Pitchford introduced to our D&D group. His parents were Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight, who — in addition to being authors and editors and involved in the Milford and Clarion writing conferences — knew everyone because they’d been in the business for so long.

There were a couple of other big names in sf&f that lived in Eugene at the time. Dean Ing was there (until he moved to Ashland), as well as the hot property of the moment, John Varley, who was just off of his a Hugo Award/Nebula Award/Locus Award triple crown1.

Because Kate and Damon and Dean and John were there, a fair amount of author traffic came through town on its way north to Seattle from California or vice versa. And they often stopped in for signings at the store. Ted Sturgeon moved to the area a few years before he died in 1985.

With that much author firepower in our little burg2, it seemed odd that there wasn’t a science fiction convention. They were all always going off to other cities’s conventions. Why not ours?

So I started laying out plans. The name was easy. If there’s one thing I’ve always been good at, it’s titles and slogans (admittedly, “Eucon” isn’t exactly rocket science level naming for a convention in Eugene). It’s the follow-through that always gets me.

Where would we hold it? Well, right in the center of downtown, the city was building a new performing arts facility (the Hult Center) and a neighboring hotel (the Eugene Hilton, now the Graduate Eugene?).

At the infamous Springfield Public Library D&D/RPG seminar when the Christians threatened to cancel me if they didn’t get to speak before I did, which did at least get me a bottle of wine as thanks from the children’s librarian (I was still under the legal drinking age) and a letter from Gary Gygax.

My mind reels at what they must have thought at the Hilton booking office when I showed up for my first meeting. The building was still under construction, and I got a tour through the ballroom convention spaces and up in the tower where the guest rooms were, but even with a beard I was at best a cheaply-dressed 20-year-old, looking to rent a good chunk of their new conference facilities for three days. I mean, I didn’t even have a car3.

And for a science-fiction convention? They were obviously desperate to get the place ramped up once it opened.

We needed someone as a headliner who’d be a draw. The local authors were already well-exposed in the Pacific Northwest. I reached for the brass ring, which was, for me, Spider Robinson, at the time well-known for a decade’s worth of stories and collection about Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. He lived at the time in Nova Scotia, and I don’t believe he’d made any West Coast appearances at that point. So Spider was my man.

I think it was John Varley who reached out to him and got him to agree to come. After that it was a matter of getting him a ticket with money I didn’t have, and a travel agency came through with the ticket on credit. No idea how I managed to pull that off; it’s probably cheaper to fly from Halifax to Portland or Eugene now than it was then. And someone had to pick him up, I didn’t have a car.

Charles N. Brown, a co-founder of Locus magazine had been sole publisher and editor there for a decade. He was the other major out-of-town guest we had, coming up from the Bay Area. Everyone else on the flyer above came from Eugene, Salem (at least I think so, Lou Goble was a professor at Willamette University a couple years later), or the Oregon coast (M. K. Wren). I had no pull with any of these folks and no money to offer; their appearance at the convention was solely due to their commitment to fans and friendships with people like Kate and Damon.

The badge I wore on my Mountie uniform as the convention organizer. As you can see, no expense was spared for our name tags.

I wish I could say I had a great time running Eucon. The truth is, I really don’t remember any of it. I rented a Mountie costume (my official title was 1st Sgt. Preston of the Eucon). But apart from that I have no recollection of the three days at the Hilton. I don’t think it was a blackout situation, but somehow the entire thing is gone from my mind; I don’t even remember talking about it for years, and then it was mostly to wonder how — despite having moved into the house I still live in with all my junk just seven years later — all I’ve got left of the convention is a couple copies of the flyer the backs of which I apparently used as scratch paper, the name badge above, and a card I only found a couple of years ago that was given to me by a number of the guests and attendees at an afterparty (which I don’t remember).

Interior of a thank you card with the signatures of Charles N. Brown, Kate Wilhelm, Damon Knight, John Varley, Dean Ing, and others,

As mentioned when I wrote about finding the flyers in a folder in my garage 15 years ago, once upon a time I came across a listing for a copy of the program (which I must have produced because I did all the printed materials) with a “riddle game by Spider Robinson” in it. For $20! If you’ve got one, send me scans or photos.

1 In 1980, at the monthly party Varley hosted at his house, I met my wife Barbara Moshofsky, who I started dating in 1986.

2 These days, it might not seem that strange to some that there were a bunch of science-fiction and fantasy authors in one place, but the landscape in 1983 was a lot sparser. Sf&f movies hadn’t taken over the movie theaters yet, Graphic novels weren’t really a thing (at least not in the US). Video games were chunky blocks of color (if you were lucky) without much in the way of story. The number and range of venues was far more limited: genre magazines, genre books, far more occasional screenplays. For a small city of about 100,000 residents, 4 major genre authors was a lot.

3 This was in the days before not having a car was cool.

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Ode to the Hunan

Barbara and myself at Hunan, in Morgan’s Alley in downtown Portland, on our last trip there together before it closed at the end of 2014. Hunan had been our go-to spot for a treat almost since we’d first gotten together in the late ‘80s. We loved the food, the prices were reasonable (which also appealed to Barbara), and it was on the was from work to our bus stop, so on a night when we were feeling flush, we could stop in. Later on, I had an office in an adjoining building for a few years and Barbara and I could meet after work, or even for lunch, sometimes. We hardly ever went anywhere else for dinner. Barbara ordered the same thing every time we went, while I played the menu field (sometimes with less-than-satisfactory results). On the last trip she made there, Barbara asked the owner, who was retiring after being jerked around by building management (among other reasons), where we should go, and that was how we ended up at Hunan Pearl in Lake Oswego, which has been our go-to for eight years, despite the drive. We hardly ever go anywhere else, and Barbara always orders the same dish, while I play the menu field.

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Fans

On HGTV, ceiling fans are portrayed as outré, but Barbara and I like them. Years ago, we invested in a Hunter anniversary reproduction of one of their 1930s-fans, an enamel-coated cast-iron monstrosity that we kept in our garage for a couple years, then had to take down and re-hang after we’d first put it up when we renovated our living room.

I’ve always wanted to get one of this type of multi-fans that I saw in a bar tonight, where there is a main rotation bar with a fan on either end of the bar. Not this particular one, but a much more industrial version I spotted at the old Lights Plus when we were shopping for light fixtures. Aside from the cost, we don’t have a room big enough for it.

We’ve got ceiling fans in the living room, the office, and the Situation Room (Wolf Blitzer isn’t there, and it’s really more of a hallway than a room, with entrances to the bathroom, the back hall and kitchen, the hall to the living room and office, and the stairs to the second floor) on the main floor, and in the main bedroom upstairs. Mom found a slim-profile extra-quiet fan for the bedroom that doesn’t chop off my head under the low ceiling.

Anyway, no multi-fans.

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The Cats

Both of the cats are eighteen-and-a-half years old. We’ve got so many pictures of them as kittens where they were together, but for a long time they’ve gone their separate ways. This was really no exception, but Tiger Lily decided to jump up on the chair despite knowing Jasmine was up there, so it was a chance to get a rare photo together.