Deadly Week

Obits of the week:

Forrest J. Ackerman, on December 5, of heart failure, at 92. I would not count myself as a actual science fiction fan, but I've read a lot of it, and his lifelong efforts to promote the genre were probably on balance all to the good (though here I invoke Sturgeon's Law, which I frequently do).

Bettie Page, on December 11, who after treatment for pneumonia slipped into a coma from which she did not recover. She was 85. Under all the smiles and winks and teasy silly costumes (and yes, sometimes the ropes and ball gags), she was a very beautiful woman who looked human, not at all like modern centrefolds (who all kind of resemble a shaved boy with long blonde hair and huge mammary implants).

YearEnd StartMonthPost Meme

Yeah, why not, it's about that time...

Instructions: take the first sentence from the first post of each month this year and paste it here.

January: "Some interesting questions here - the notion first occurred to me when I read about things like the Robin Sharpe case: in effect, any thought that anyone commits to any kind of enduring medium that could conceivably be seen or heard by someone else, and then be taken as offensive by that person (or worse, an ill-defined "community"), will get you in trouble."
[comment on a CBC article on "virtual crime and punishment vs. free thought"]

February: "Been a definite chicken-theme this week."
[each day had a chicken-related event, including revelation of the oldest chicken joke in print]

March: "Copy and paste into a new post: Use the 1st letter of your name to answer each of the following..."
[silly meme about "b"]

April: "I dreamt last night that I was at a community centre or something like that and Barack Obama was sitting at my trestle table, shovelling dry coffee grounds into a 7-11 Bubba Keg."
[How prescient.]

May: "Hardly surprising at all, when you stop to consider that
1) there is a strong genetic component to autism spectrum disorders,
and even more importantly
2) autistic children grow up to be autistic adults."
[comment on article on how autistic parents tend to have autistic children]

June: "What the hell does this have to do with anything?"
[comment on asinine decision by Vancouver School Board striking a committee to study how the Olympics could be worked into the curriculum]

July: "Pretty obvious when you think about it, that is if you spend any time around gamers and if you think about Myers-Briggs stuff."
[comment on an online survey of 645 self-identified hardcore historical wargamers, showing that most of them were INTJ or ISTJ]

August: "Well, if you've followed the story so far (http://ltmurnau.livejournal.com/188757.html if you haven't), I didn't expect to hear back from Bandy's Guardian ever, but I did, only a day or two after posting my (admittedly rather snarky) account of what happened."

September: "This says it all for me: [cartoon denouncing greengrocer's apostrophe] Honestly, people people (claps hands) what does it take?"

October: "The entire staff of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (all four of them) have been laid off by Oxford University Press due to declining sales of print dictionaries."

November: "I first heard of Yma Sumac through the Re/Search book Incredibly Strange Music, and then heard some of her actual music on The Ernie Kovacs Record Album."
[obituary]

December: "It's been almost a year since I went to the Naval Postgraduate School for a conference on Irregular Warfare, at which one of my game designs was very prominent."

So, perhaps I could say that the meme-related content of this blog has dropped way off - only 20 posts with that tag this year. Gee, what an accomplishment.
(oh dammit, this one's #21...]