1. I continue to marvel (pun intended) at how well-organized Comic-Con. About 150,000 people descend upon it, and the lines move smoothly, the exhibit hall seemed more navigable than in years, the programming was terrific, and even the weather cooperated. Suggestion for the future:  roving peanut sellers offering cold beer.
2. Again, about Comic-Con:  one theme this year was Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality. One panel asked the question “how close are we to creating the Holodeck?” with the answer being:  pretty close. (As long as we avoid the dim-witted Riker’s preferred imaginary jazz club, which writer-producers created in a renewed effort to give his character some, um, character, we should be fine.) Last year, I was impressed with a book I bought heavily featuring Augmented Reality, with the characters frequently leaping off the page. This year, several of the large-scale interactive adventures revolved around Virtual Reality, with visitors helping, say, Vasiliy Fet enlisting your help to fight vampires in modern-day New York. (Unfortunately, I got “infected” and he had to kill me at the end of the adventure.)
3. On Saturday, it rained pretty hard here in Los Angeles. That didn’t stop my wife and me from going to see A Flock of Seagulls in concert outside at the Starlight Bowl in the mountains of Burbank. (It stopped real seagulls, though, because none were sighted.) Only about 20% of the audience showed up, perhaps because of the Angeleno phobia of water from the sky. We just sat there with our big umbrellas and thoroughly enjoyed the show. At one point, I remarked over the quality of the fog machine — it must be enormous! look at all this fog! — before realizing that it was actual fog rolling over from the mountains. Which just added to the experience. The rain came and went and came and went; on the way back home, the sky cleared again, so I pulled over and put the top down.
4. As I had predicted, the next day the Los Angeles Times was filled with dire forecasts of collapsing infrastructure because of all the rain!
5. And then, as I had also predicted, the day after that the Times returned to its dire coverage of the drought!
6. Summation:  No matter what happens, it’s dire! Even though the precise predicament may change from day to day — or return to past themes, as necessary — we’re screwed no matter what. According to the news.
7. I know someone whose business is falling. I just checked his personal Facebook timeline and found 11 posts in the past 24 hours, nine in the day prior, and an average of 10 or more every day, each of them featuring wacky videos from across the globe. None of them about anything important. Correlation?
8. It continues to amuse me that Donald Trump is held up as some paragon of business. His lifelong business is bankrupt. (He’s really good at that one.) His more recent business is celebrity. (Another talent.) Neither qualifies you for any elected office.
9. Before posting this, I double-checked the meaning of the word “miscellany,” just to be sure.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2015 at 7:36 am and is filed under Comics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.