Coming Soon to a Classroom Near You

If anyone's noticed an extra spring in my step or song on my lips in the past week or so, it's because I recently learned that Scholastic has licensed the paperback rights to Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow. It's going to be a school book!

Wow. I did not see that coming.

Scholastic Education will incorporate WHTTWOT into its Guided Reading Non-Fiction Focused educational collection, and also offer it through the usual school book clubs and fairs. Territories will include North America and several international markets. And they want to move pretty fast, with a tentative publishing date of this December.

After learning of the opportunity from my publisher Abrams, I spent a couple of days last week remastering more than 50 pages of artwork for Scholastic. Most of the changes are because Scholastic (quite reasonably) won't print on the different paper stocks we used to recreate my old-timey comic book inserts, so I digitally added a transparent yellow-brown pulpy texture to each page to mimic crummy paper (I created the texture by high-res scanning an actual blank sheet of 30-year-old pulp paper I had lying around). I also took the chance to fix a few text and art errors that've always nagged me.

When WHTTWOT came out, I often said I thought it'd be a great supplement to a school curriculum. My research was extensive, my facts and conclusions solid. I think I connected some novel historical dots. But I didn't really expect anyone to take me up on it, or have any idea how to make it happen. Now it has.

This is really just about the best, coolest outcome I can imagine for this book. Thanks to Scholastic, I will be warping--I mean informing and guiding--young minds around the world. I like to imagine WHTTWOT might hit the right kid at the right time to really make a difference in how they see the universe and their future in it, just as a few key books really made a difference in my life.

I'm never going to the Moon or Mars. But someday, some kid who reads my book might. What's better than that?

Ad astra per aspera!

Proto-Comics

I'd call myself less a student of comics history than an interested bystander. If you're interested, Wikipedia's article on the topic is as good as most. Standard histories date the comic book to early 20th Century humor anthologies, and the newspaper comic strip to Hearst's "The Yellow Kid" in 1895. Political cartoons are much older--Ben Franklin's "Live Free or Die" is one example--with credit usually given to William Hogarth around 1720-30. One of comics' unique devices, the speech balloon, first shows up around then.

Hogarth 1724, with speech balloons scrolling from the characters' mouths.

As I say, that's the standard history. Of course, just as surely as any mention of the Wright Brothers turns up a dozen outraged partisans griping that their guy really flew first, as surely as every mention of Columbus prods someone to champion the Vikings, any claim to be the first comic of this or that sort kicks up an argument.

Some try to discern the origins of comics much deeper in the mists of the past. I'm not sure why. I think sometimes comics lovers are a little embarrassed by our artform and want to dig up a better pedigree. "See, I'm not peasant scum, my great-great-grandfather was a prince!" Others are just honest scholars trying to connect historical dots. It's not unusual to find learned texts on comics that point to the Bayeux Tapestry, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or ancient cave paintings as comics' precursors.

Although very early artwork occasionally displays some of the characteristics of comics, I don't buy it--not unless you want to expand the definition of "comics" to include "any depiction of something happening." None of these examples, in my opinion, shows the essential comicness (comicicity?) of combining art and text to tell a sequential story.

Cave painting, France. Not a comic.

Sections of Bayeux Tapestry, 11th Century: Also not a comic.

Personally, I've always embraced comics as modern vulgar art (in the old sense of "vulgar" meaning common and unrefined--the art of the people). It's messy, random, free, spontaneous, sometimes dangerous, sometimes tasteless and, until relatively recently, free of academic pontificating and elite taste-setting. I like its youth. Comics is Jazz, man. Dig it!

And that was pretty much my entire position on the subject until this morning, when I saw this:

 

Holy Moley! That's from a 12th Century manuscript called the Bible of Stephen Harding, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a comic!

You read it left to right, top to bottom. It's got panels (boxes), descriptive captions, characters' speech floating around their heads--no word balloons, but you can't have everything. And that bottom picture of David and Goliath, with Goliath's enormous size emphasized by drawing him not only bursting through the panel boundary but far into the border with his spear off the very edge of the page itself, is like something Jack Kirby might've drawn (also notice David's sling snapping toward the top of the page). Goliath looks stunned to find a stone embedded in his forehead in mid-strike. It's magnificent! This anonymous artist wasn't just some primitive proto-cartoonist, he was actually good!

There aren't many days when you learn some new bit of information that changes your entire view on a subject. Today is one for me. I like those days.
.

Stop Hitting Your Sister with a Giant Lollipop While She's Sitting on the Toilet

The three videos below have been all over the Internet lately, but as a service to you I've gathered them all in one place. You're welcome.

As related in this article, "Convos with My 2-Year-Old" got started when filmmaker/musician Matthew Clarke was talking to his toddler daughter Coco, "stepped outside it for a second and thought, If she was 3 feet taller, this would be completely unacceptable." These short films play out that premise by re-enacting conversations between Clarke and Coco, but with the child replaced by a grown man. The substitution really hits how self-centered, creepy, and downright psychotic a 2-year-old kid is. Good thing they're so darn cute.

Clarke was surprised his videos went viral, with hits in the millions. I'm not surprised. As Clarke himself analyzed, "It’s concise. A simple but clear concept. It doesn’t take a lot of investment to understand what’s going on." Their beauty is their universality. Anyone who's spent time with a child has confronted the futility of reason, the absurdity of thinking you're going to "win" or should even be competing. The videos also hit the old reliable "kids say the darnedest things" button. If they were comic strips, they'd be hanging on a million refrigerators.

BTW, today's post title is something I actually yelled once, after which I immediately realized how ridiculous I was. As a father of two former two year olds (simultaneously!), I offer you "Convos with My 2-Year-Old" as a window into my past. Worth a few minutes of your time, I think. Clarke promises more to come.

The Nomination's the Honor. No, Really!

My friend Mike Peterson (journalist, editor, and proprietor of the very fine Comic Strip of the Day blog) has a saying: "Plaques are for haques." I get that, especially in his world of newspapering where regional, state and national competitions pass out more ribbons than a jam-making contest at the county fair. Although I ruefully note that, in my two years as a reporter for a daily newspaper, I never won one. Still, if I'd stuck around long enough I would have, and like the 49th person named "Employee of the Month" at a 50-person firm, it wouldn't have fooled anyone.

And yet. I've won some plaques and statuettes and doodads with little spinning globes on top, and I like them just fine thankyouverymuch. A token of respect from one's peers, or from a group that thinks you did a good job dipping into their area of expertise, is very gratifying. They look good on a shelf. Sometimes they get you noticed by people who otherwise wouldn't and maybe help sell a few books. I am happy and grateful for them.

Today is the deadline for comics professionals to cast their votes for the industry's Eisner Awards, to be presented this July at the San Diego Comic-Con. I cast my votes for both the Eisners and the complementary/competing Harvey Award nominations weeks ago, and had a few thoughts about the process.

Voting for these awards is a responsibility I take seriously, but even with the best intentions I find hard to do "right." First and foremost, there's just too much stuff out there for anyone to read it all. If I'm entirely ignorant in a category, I leave it blank. If I've seen, say, three out of five, I think it's fair to cast a vote even though one I've missed might theoretically be better. I make an effort to at least familiarize myself with all the nominees. Excerpts are often available online, and a look through a couple weeks of a webcomic's archives gives a good feel.

Honestly, the first thing I do is scan the list for work done by friends or my publisher, Abrams. I don't think that's a scandalous confession; I'd never base my entire decision on it, and I often vote for something else I sincerely feel is superior, but I think supporting the home team is a valid tie-breaker. I'll especially throw a vote to a pal if it's obvious they're going to get crushed. Everyone, including me, loves an underdog.

When deciding how seriously to take an award, you have to know how they're awarded. For example, Harvey Award nominees are chosen via an open vote of comics professionals; in contrast, Eisner Award nominations are determined by a committee of industry experts (representing a cross-section of creators, academics, retailers, etc.) who look through hundreds of works to put together a short list. In both cases, the nominees are then published and pros get several weeks to vote for their favorites, and there's the rub.

It all comes down to popularity, and why shouldn't it? That's the point. Generally, someone who's been active and beloved in the business for 30 years will beat someone nobody's ever heard of. Generally, a book that sold 500,000 copies will beat a book that sold 5,000. Many years there are one or two critically acclaimed big sellers that take every category they're in*. How could it be otherwise? And yet that outcome has little to do with the intrinsic quality of the work. That's the big grain of salt you've got to swallow along with the results.

I've been fortunate to win both an Eisner and Harvey award; I've also been nominated for other Eisner and Harvey awards and lost. I don't place any importance on the losses--don't honestly remember what they were, except for one that stung. In 2010, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow got an Eisner nomination for Best Publication Design and I sincerely believe that, if you'd locked all the voters in a room and made them read all the nominees, we would've deservedly won that one. But that's not how the process works.

In that case, just knowing that a committee of comics experts had pored through scores of submissions and decided that mine was one of the year's six best-designed books was honor enough. No, really!



* Says the guy who lost to Fun Home and Asterios Polyp.

Evenhanded

Saw an article recently about handedness--how right-handed and left-handed people differ, and what it all means. It's an old pop-sci chestnut, stories propagated every so often by some new bit of research that doesn't really prove anything, but I find them fascinating. Because when it comes to handedness, I'm a mess.

When I was a kid, I was completely ambidextrous. That lasted until the third grade, when my teacher caught me writing the left half of a page with my left hand then switching the pencil and writing the right half of the page with my right hand. Well, she declared that the laziest thing she'd ever seen! From that day to this, I only write right-handed. Although I sometimes wonder if I could retrain my left hand, just to show her.

An off-the-cuff compendium of how I do what:

• Throw: left.
• Bat: right.
• Kick: left.
• Write and Pencil: right.
• Ink and Paint: mostly right but sometimes left (less fine motor control required, I think)
• Golf (I don't golf but have played mini-golf and assume the mechanics are similar): right.
• Tennis: left (when I first played in my early teens I switched the racket from hand to hand depending on where the shot was headed: no backhands! However, I learned that was bad form and I looked stupid dropping the racket during the hand-off, so settled on left).
• Archery: both (I'm left-eye dominant so my own bow is left-handed, but I shoot my daughter's right-handed bow just to keep things even).
• Bowling: left.
• Teethbrushing: both. I switch halfway.
• Scissors: right.
• Kitchen knives: left.

High jump, which I did on the junior-high track team, deserves its own note. I approached the bar from the left while nearly everyone else approached it from the right. All those right-footers typically scooched the landing mat toward the left, either deliberately or just through the repeated momentum of their landings. Consequently, when I jumped in the other direction, about one time out of four I missed the mat entirely and landed on the ground. This was not conducive to an extended high-jumping career.

I enjoy my flexibility. It's been suggested that it accounts for my love of and work in both science and the arts, although I understand the whole "left brain/right brain" thing isn't really true anymore. Every once in a while I do find myself standing in the kitchen staring at a jar in my hands, paralyzed, trying to figure out which hand turns the lid because neither feels right. It's a small price to pay.

One of my identical twin daughters is left-handed and the other right-handed. This would seem to belie the definition of "identical," yet I understand it's common within the Split-Zygote Community (SZC™). Coincidentally, the left-handed kid's name starts with an "L" and the right-handed kid's name starts with an "R," an unintended but swell mnemonic.

In my lifetime, left-handedness has gone from being a sign of something not quite right in the brain to an unremarkable thread in humanity's rainbow tapestry. You hear old horror stories of kids having their left hand tied down so they're forced to use their right, a sinister (heh!) practice I'm glad is mostly extinct. I don't remember any trauma from my third grade teacher's training but do kind of wish she'd left me alone. Would've been interesting to see how I turned out.

Antiquated

Yesterday Karen and I went to an Antiques Fair, which often puts me in an agreeably reflective mood. I like antiques, particularly antique gadgets. If I allowed myself, I could fill a room with old radios (vacuum tubes!) and telegraph equipment (electromagnets!). Fortunately, I remain strong and my home uncluttered. Relatively.

I do have a small collection of stereo cards and a stereoscope with which to view them. These early 3-D Viewmasters were all the rage in the 1890s. I can imagine Victorian parlors with cabinets full of stereo cards, families and guests gathering after supper to go through them.

Like this: a Time Machine that, sadly, only goes one way.

Stereo cards were often published in series with common themes: world travel, religious tableau, slice of life. Some were saucy. These cards would have provided a startling "you are there" experience for people who seldom went anywhere. The Holy Land and other exotic locales were popular topics. World capitals. Natural wonders. And folks sure used to love taking 3-D photos of Niagara Falls.

A typical stereo card (though not one of mine). If you have the knack for "free fusing," you can see the 3-D effect without a viewer. It's like those "Magic Eye" graphics that were popular a few years ago; don't cross your eyes, just relax them as if looking at something far away, and the two images will merge into a center 3-D image. It's a handy skill for evaluating stereo cards in the store.

I don't collect any particular themes; I just look for cards that interest me and are in good condition. It's a cheap hobby--typically $2 to $10 per card. I like photos of places I've actually been myself, as well as vistas of long-vanished life (admirals reviewing an armada of sailing ships, ranks of mounted cavalry, farmhouses on empty plains, cute little kids who all got old and died). Science is always good--one of my favorites is a 3-D image of the Moon, which really drives home the fact that it's a sphere.

If you've mastered free fusing, try this one and be dazzled.

What I appreciate most about antiques are their connections to other people's lives. I saw a fat loose-leaf photo album yesterday that appeared to capture about 20 years of a young couple's courtship and marriage, including the man's service in World War II. What was a treasure like that doing on a table for me to paw through and pay pennies on the decade for? Why isn't it with their family? Did they not have any? Or was it one of those keepsakes that would have been cherished by someone but instead just slipped away, sold off by a greedy great-aunt at the estate sale? Every abandoned photo album is a tragedy, I think.

I once found an old wedding certificate in an antique store. It had small inset photos of the husband and wife, with ornate scroll work and graceful calligraphy. They were married in a small town on the East Coast, and their surname was unusual enough that I thought I had a shot at finding a modern relative. I wrote down the info and went online to find a historical society in their county and, failing that, the town library. The librarian didn't know that particular couple but told me there were families sharing their unique last name all over the place, undoubtedly related. I returned to the antique store and, for sixty bucks, sent a little fragment of someone's history back home, where the librarian was thrilled to get it and hang it on the wall. It was the right thing to do.

Yesterday I saw a cross-stitch sampler done by a young New England girl in 1824. What would she have thought if she'd known that in 2013, a man in California--which was still Spanish terra incognita at the time--would admire her needlework? Would that mean anything to her at all? How could it possibly? But don't you wish there were some way to let her know?

Karen and I are getting to an age where the artifacts we see have gone from being things we remember in our grandparents' homes to things we remember in our parents' homes to things we actually have in our home. Crying out "hey, I bought that new!" at an antiques fair is an alarming rite of passage.

I paid $10 for three stereo cards and Karen picked up a couple of pieces of costume jewelry that looks just like the stuff we used to make fun of my Grandma for wearing but I guess is cool these days as long as you wear it ironically. What our descendants make of it is their problem.

Clair de Lune

Seduced by the crescent Moon, I dusted off my little telescope and took it out for the first time in a long time last night. I don't stargaze as much as I'd like because I'm in a bad place for it: tree canopy blocks most of the sky in my backyard and there's a street light out front. But it was a warm and pretty night, I hadn't yet peeked at Jupiter this season, and I wanted to check out a yellowish star in the southeast that had no business being where it was. So I lugged the 'scope out front and parked it literally under the street light (figured I might get fewer annoying reflections that way) and began my tour.

The Moon was gorgeous, Earthshine illuminating its shaded side. Jupiter was low in the western haze, trembling in the warm air rising from my neighbor's roof, but still and always worth a look. And the yellowish star in the southwest was Saturn, always stunning.

When I was in college, and taught astronomy labs once or twice a week and ran my university observatory's public viewing sessions, I really knew the sky. Not just the names of stars and constellations, but where to find the good stuff. I could spin a telescope around and point it right at a nebula or galaxy without looking, and tell you what it was and how it got there. I liked to flatter myself that I knew my 'scope and sky like a mariner knows his ship and sea. I'm not as facile now as when I starhopped two or three nights a week thirty years ago (and had better eyesight), but it turns out I can still bumble my way around the neighborhood.

People are often stunned when they see the Moon or Saturn through a telescope for the first time. At public viewing sessions, I had more than one visitor peer into the front of the telescope to be sure I hadn't hung a little model in there. Despite millions of photos a million times brighter and sharper than any image I could show you through my 'scope, there's something uniquely thrilling about seeing it in real time with your own eye. It's authentic. If you're looking at something particularly small or obscure, there's a possibility you're the only person in the universe seeing it at that moment. Anything could happen!

Anyway, just before I closed shop for the night, I thought to run inside and grab a camera. I don't have a high-end SLR, just a little point-and-shoot digital camera, and I didn't have the time or inclination to try anything fancy. I literally held the camera up to the eyepiece to see what I could see. My results are below and, to be clear, they aren't examples of my astrophotography prowess that I'm proud of. They're bad. I shot much better pics in college on film. Still, for shoving my camera lens against the eyepiece and clicking away on the automatic setting, I was kind of pleased with the results.

Go out, take a look. Get to know your way around the neighborhood.

The haze in this photo is real. The fog had started to come in.

Saturn. The image is fuzzy because I couldn't hold the camera steady for the 1/8-second exposure. It looked very crisp to the eye. 

And Her Favorite Film is "2001: A Space Odyssey"

Karen and our girls were exploring the features of their iPhones this weekend and started playing with Siri, the upbeat on-board A.I. They discovered they could dictate a text to Siri, who'd then send that text to whomever she was told. Then the text recipient could ask Siri to read the text aloud. You could do it all by voice! No typing necessary! A 21st Century marvel!

I interrupted from the next room.

"Isn't that the same as a telephone?"

While You Wait....

...for me to get less busy, here's a video of a cute puppy to pass the time.



See? The world's not such a bad place after all, is it? You're welcome.

Too Busy

I'm in Cave Mode. It's gonna be slow around the ol' Fies Files for a bit.

One of my daily blog stops, writer Mark Evanier's News From ME, has a tradition of posting a photo of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup to alert his readers to down time. Of course, Mark's so prolific that "down time" for him means seven or eight hours. My down time runs longer and MY tradition is posting this:

Busy writing

Back soon!

XO

B.

More Riverside

Just a few more photos I like from our weekend in Riverside:

A selfie with Karen at the entrance to the Mission Inn

Mission Inn inner courtyard

The Mission Inn pool, with downtown Riverside in the background. The weather was sunny and warm, perfect for a margarita by the pool (so I hear)

 

An open-air rotunda on the Mission Inn grounds.  

The nearby Culver Center of the Arts, where the conference was held.



With Ian Williams just before I went on. I like this because it's a casual candid shot. Just hangin'.

Juliet McMullin introducing me.




Signing books. Arthur Frank is standing; to his right is Ian, to Ian's right is me.

A good angle on the art exhibition on one side of the hall, with the lecture/seating area behind. None of the artwork was original, they were all foamcore posters printed for the occasion. This was a solution we hit on for the Graphic Medicine conferences as well--as much as you'd like to display original art, the care, security, insurance, and other practical details involved in doing so aren't worth it. If one of these easels falls over (and a couple did), nobody panics.

With the fam.

Karen and I at dinner with my sisters on Friday night.

Down by the Riverside

Got home from last weekend's "Medical Examinations" conference at UC Riverside and spent Monday catching up on missed work. Good conference! Especially for the first of its kind. In contrast to the Graphic Medicine conferences I've been involved with, this one dealt with storytelling in a broader sense, with a sort of anthropological academic perspective. Art, theater, history, literature, Native American prayer, comics: it's all good.

As with all conferences, the most interesting and valuable stuff happened between the presentations and panels. I got to spend more time with my friend Dr. Ian Williams, who cartoons under the pen name Thom Ferrier, and I was especially happy to get to know Arthur Frank, a sociologist at the University of Calgary who wrote The Wounded Storyteller, one of the seminal examinations of medical narratives. I confess I didn't know his work beforehand but quickly got up to speed after two or three different people e-mailed me to say, "You're going to be at a conference with Arthur Frank?! Wow!" His talk on the theme "When Bodies Need Stories" was my favorite of the conference, and he's a friendly, witty, brilliant gentleman--a highlight of the weekend for sure.

Registration table for the conference at UC Riverside's Culver Center for the Arts. All the talks were given in the large room behind the table (you can just see a slide projected on the far wall behind the bald gent), while artwork was exhibited on easels in the left and right galleries defined by the columns. It was a nice space.

Many of the attendees were grad students and undergrads hopelessly devoted to Juliet McMullin, the UC Riverside professor who organized the conference. Some had contributed to the artwork exhibited along the sides the room, and a lot of them had read Mom's Cancer, which was gratifying.

Best of all, my sisters Brenda and Elisabeth drove over to see me do my thing, which I think was a first for both of them, and share a late birthday dinner with Karen and me. So I had the pleasure of introducing Nurse Sis and Kid Sis to some people who didn't quite seem to believe they were real. That was fun.

With Juliet McMullin. She's the best.

Kid Sis, Nurse Sis and me flanking a page from Mom's Cancer featuring Kid Sis, Nurse Sis and Me. It's like a recursive Escher etching or something. Spooky.

I think my own talk went well. I had three basic goals: make the case that comics are a medium with unique abilities to tell stories in ways no other medium can; talk about the idea of "community" (communities of family, friends, caregivers, humanity) within Mom's Cancer; and introduce the idea of Graphic Medicine as a body of comics work with its own history and value. That's a lot.

As I prepared the talk, I rehearsed bits of it but never really put it all together and practiced it as a whole. I was aiming for about 45 minutes and figured if anything I'd go long. So I was surprised as I neared the end of my talk to check a clock and see I'd only spoken for 30 minutes. Gosh, I must've been motor-mouthing like a madman! I finished a few minutes later, took some questions, left the stage, and went to apologize to Juliet for coming up 10 minutes short. Karen stopped me:

"But you talked for an hour."

"No, I checked the clock. It was like 35 minutes."

"It was more than an hour."

"No way!"

I appealed to Juliet.

"Everybody seemed to be enjoying it so I didn't want to stop you."

I don't know what happened to the time. I don't know how I misread the clock. When Juliet left a comment in my previous post about loving my 240-minute talk, she was only exaggerating a little. All I know is I that started, WHOOSH, and then I stopped. Luckily I was the last speaker of the day so I didn't intrude into someone else's time. I hate those guys.

The very beginning of my talk, approximately the moment I entered a fugue state.

Anyway, that happened, and then we all signed books. Arthur was dismayed because Ian and I were drawing little sketches in ours. Made him look like a chump.

Signing books with Ian Williams and Arthur Frank. Mom's Cancer sold out and I think Ian did well, too. My vision's perfect out to about arm's length so I often take off my glasses for close-up work. That's a fat new Pentel brush-pen I'm trying out; I liked it!

Day Two was relaxing because I'd fulfilled my responsibilities and could sit back and heckle. Ian gave a great talk that dovetailed well with mine, and I think between us we created a few converts to Graphic Medicine.

What I saw of the city of Riverside was swell, and the Mission Inn where we were lodged is pretty fantastic, in all senses of the word. One look at its website convinced Karen she wanted to come along. It's sort of a Spanish-Moorish citadel that covers a city block and reminded both Karen and me of the Winchester Mystery House, if you're familiar with it, in both its rambling randomness and clear signs of having been assembled by a crazy multi-millionaire. Highly recommended.

How Karen spent some of her day.

Good weekend, good event, great people. Thanks to Juliet, Chikako Takeshita, Laura Lozon, Sharon Rushing, Kara Miller, and lots of others for inviting me, organizing everything, and making us feel welcome. Just in terms of logistics, this was one of the best-run conference I've ever been to. I'm especially grateful to all the attendees and students who stopped to talk so we could get to know each other a bit. That's the best part.

Medical Examinations: Art, Story & Theory

I'm dedicating quite a bit of time getting ready for a talk I'm giving this Friday at the Medical Examinations: Art, Story & Theory conference hosted by the University of California, Riverside. This looks neat!

As I understand it, the broad theme is how people tell stories of illness and care through a variety of media. I'll be talking about comics, as will my UK friend Dr. Ian Williams, but others will touch on storytelling, literature, fine art, theater. It hits my sweet spot of integrating science and art while being very different from the Graphic Medicine (i.e., comics) conferences I've attended and helped organize in the past. Also unlike the GM conferences, there won't be separate academic panels or tracks for people to attend, just us speakers.

I think I'm up for the challenge.

I take my responsibility to "put on a good show" very seriously, particularly when someone else is picking up the tab (and UC Riverside and organizer Juliet McMullin are treating me with atypical hospitality). Whether you're satisfied or not--and you can't be a tougher critic than I am on myself--I try to give my best. At least ever since one engagement I bumbled and hmmmed my way through because I'd gotten cocky and thought I didn't need to prepare because I'd already given the same speech a few times and had it down. Turned out I was wrong. I honestly don't know if my hosts or audience noticed--they seemed happy--but I felt like a goat. Won't happen again.

In any event, this will be an entirely new, never-before-seen talk that right now looks like it'll run somewhere between 8.5 and 240 minutes. I expect to hone in on about 40 to 45 in the next couple of days.

Astonishingly, the conference is Free! However, the organizers are asking people to register so they can get a head count, and I understand spaces are available. Here's the registration site and here's the agenda. I'm speaking Friday at 4:30 p.m. I may have something extra-special planned; I may not. You'll have to come and see.
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