A whirlwind trip to Toronto: Part 2

The following day saw me getting up in time to quickly visit actor and internationally renowned children's author Adrienne Kress for a photo op with her cat, Atticus. The first results were mixed, with Atticus and me seemingly unable to both look at the camera at the same time. Eventually, though...

Ta-da! Unfortunately, poor Adrienne was under the weather, so, rather than impose on her, I went on my way.

I stopped by the Silver Snail and Bakka-Phoenix Books for a browse. Lots of "Oooo, cool... but I don't really want it myself" at the Snail and "Oooo, cool... but I can borrow it from work" at Bakka-Phoenix. Awesome stores nonetheless.

Then, that evening... the main event! The Tempestuous launch at the Dom.

Wow. One hell of a party. I have never spent such a long, continuous time in a bar or pub. I was there from a little after 6PM and didn't leave until 3AM. Yes, that's right, 3 of the morning clock. Fortunately, my internal clock, still on Pacific time, felt it was only about midnight. (On the other hand, getting up for breakfast at the hotel meant my internal clock also felt like I'd been up since 5 in the morning.) I'll have to confess that for the first couple of hours, I went into my default "wallflower mode". This tends to happen at parties where I only know about 2% of those present. However, by the end of the night I was having an absolute blast!

The launch officially started a 7:30. Folks mingled, ale was consumed (okay, I had Sprite) and, in a back room, the full trailer for Tempestuous was screen on a continuous loop. Largely thanks to director and effects fella Joe O'Brien, it felt more like a trailer for a Lord of the Rings film! Check it out:



After a while, it was time for Lesley to do a reading from the book, which I took a video of:




After the reading, Lesley was then put behind a table to meet fans and sign books. This went on for damn near four solid hours. And somehow Lesley managed to keep her energy high, as well as her enthusiasm for meeting her fans.

A bit of weirdness: There I was, visiting from Victoria, BC, to attend the launch for a Lesley Livingston book. The two important facts there are A) Victoria, BC, and B) a Lesley Livingston book. So, the very day I'm there, the front page of the Victoria, BC, newspaper has an article on the murder of an elderly couple. And the photo of the woman used in the paper is this:


Yup. She's reading one of Lesley books. OooooEEEEEoooo.... Jon Llyr brought the article up on his iPhone and the universal reaction to this from party attendees was, "Oh my God!" Okay, end of eerie tangent.

A few of us who are regular posters at Hardcore Nerdity managed to find each other for some chat. We were eventually joined by Lesley, once she finished signing 823,000 books. And then...

A rock concert broke out. Really. The music for the evening was supplied by one John Stuart Campbell on guitar and eventually people went up on stage to sing some tunes. Most notably Jon and Lesley. Lesley pretty much blew my mind by completely substituting her own voice for a another as she did the Doors' "Roadhouse Blues":



I found myself wanting the whole shindig to never end but, alas, the time came when I had to leave. I had a plane to catch the next day for what would be a 12-hour trip back home.

It was awesome seeing these ridiculously talented and cool friends again and I look forward to visiting them again. Lynn and I hope to head out their way again for next Halloween. Now, we just need to figure out what costumes to wear...

Here's a couple more images from the evening:

Fairies attended the launch. Here's photographic evidence.

Lesley on stage about to rock out with John Campbell.

Jon Llyr in the process of rocking out with John Campbell.

Lesley drinking something blue from the Wondrous Strange-themed martini bar.

Lesley and me with fellow HcNers James Marshall and T. Gregory Argall.

A whirlwind trip to Toronto: Part 1

Some time in December, I received an e-mail invite from Harper Collins Canada, saying "Come on out for the book launch party for the new book, Tempestuous!" It was just a generic thing sent out to people subscribed to news about my friend, internationally renowned young adult author (and former Waitron-9000 portrayer), Lesley Livingston through the HC website.

And, while it certainly crossed my mind how much fun it would be to attend, I didn't seriously consider doing so. But, as I'm reading it aloud to Lynn, she suggests I use a chunk of our AirMiles (unfortunately not enough for us both) and just go. And that I not even tell Lesley, but just show up!

So it was that, a month later, I found myself getting up at a quarter to six in the morning in order to catch a flight to Toronto, Ontario. From Victoria, BC. For a single evening's party. As a surprise. (Although I had told Lesley's boyfriend, Canadian nerd célèbre and former Grot-portrayer, Jonathan Llyr. Who is da man. Hold on, do people still say "da man"? Well, if they do, Jon is da man.)

The trip didn't start at 100% goodness, though. The airport security people had to take the teeny-tiny, fake (well, duh) laser gun that was on my keychain. At least they were apologetic about it. They seemed to realise how silly it was to treat this like a threat of any kind, but still had to enforce the rules. "Is it your Jedi laser?" (I was wearing my Back to the Future t-shirt, so I think they knew I was a nerd.) And, no, I did not point out to them that Jedi don't use guns; I wasn't going to abuse the goodwill that I was getting from them over the issue.

The rest of the trip east was a pretty standard, uneventful (if long) flight and I safely reached my lavish suite in the luxurious Holiday Inn Express in downtown Toronto. Afterwards, at Jon's suggestion, rather than wait until the party the following evening, when Lesley would be swamped talking to and meeting Lord knows how many people, I wandered down to the Dominion on Queen, walked in and plunked myself down in a seat opposite Lesley and just gave a little wave.

Now, I don't usually cause people's jaws to drop, but that night I did. (And, Lesley's mom, if by some chance you read this, I apologize for causing Lesley to cut your phone call short.) After Lesley getting over the initial shock, she, Jon and I sat around for a nice long talk, with subjects ranging from Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's idiocy to having molds made of your head, from music to kids hurting themselves trying to remove their tongues from frozen metal. I even Skyped Lynn using my PSP (which I discovered you can really hold like a phone while using Skype), so she could briefly say hi.

And so, a couple of hours later, I left the Dom with a warm glow (multiple hugs from Lesley will do that to you) to counter the chilly Toronto weather and headed back to the hotel.

But, that was only the first day...

More to follow in a later post. This time with pictures. And maybe video.

A visit to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

(Copied from my blog at Hardcore Nerdity)

In early October, my wife Lynn and I took a couple of days trip to Seattle with another couple, mostly to do a little cross-border shopping. (Fortunately, we managed to squeak this in before the sudden recent plunge in the value of the Canadian dollar. Excellent timing!) But as part of the trip, I decided I needed to visit the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. It's very close to the the city's famed Space Needle and was practically across the street from our hotel.

That's a view of the building from our hotel room. Only half of it is the SFM, with the other being another museum called the Experience Music Project. That funky design is thanks to Canadian designer Frank Gehry. Oh, and the Seattle monorail runs through a big hole in the building.

The entrance is pretty cool. The windows are plastered with collages of SF book covers...

...and images from a host of SF films and TV programs.

However, these scenes are all in danger from the nasty looking spaceship digging its way into the windows!

Eek!

Anyway, once inside, photography is not really allowed so I only have a few photos from this point on (all of them washroom related - you'll see) and will just list some of the highlights. (I'm sure you can see some pictures at the Museum's site).

The first thing you see when entering is a great big replica of Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still. And, damn, he is tall. Immediately after that are some public washrooms. We didn't need to use the facilities, but spent some time gazing at the signs on the doors. And why is that? Here:

When we finally entered the Museum proper, we were greeted to the sight of a large ball hanging from the ceiling with a projector inside, flashing montages and planetscapes onto the ball-shaped screen.

Then, the first true display. And it's for (surprise, surprise) Star Trek. They've got a nice little selection of actual props and costumes from the classic series. An actual captain's chair from the set and an actual captain's uniform worn by William Shatner. And, man, you realise how slim the Shat used to be. There's also a replica of Nichelle Nichols' script for "The Deadly Years". The script is "annotated" by Nichols, which seems to mean doodling and underlining her own lines.

Further along, one display includes Neal Stephenson's hand-written manuscripts for his massive "Baroque Cycle". Hand-written. It's four and a half feet tall.

Blade Runner outfits. Neat. But, boy, was Sean Young tiny.

A section on Social Commentary in SF, mostly literary. Books about subjects like gender issues and overpopulation.

Ooh, a big video wall made to seem like we're looking out on a massive spaceport with dozens of ships from TV, film and books flying by. It's a little jarring seeing the Enterprise followed by the 5-mile-long Red Dwarf.

There's an actual Gemini astronaut's space suit. We boggle at how... flimsy it seems. It reminds one of the crazy/brave thin line. I can't believe people went into the vacuum of space in these things!

A display of vehicles, both large (although in reality small, like the model of the Galileo 7 from Star Trek) to the one-person (like Griff's hoverboard, "Pit Bull", from Back to the Future Part II).

"The Armory"! Nice selection of weapons, both long-range laser types and close-range melee types (bat'leth anyone?). And I can't believe it when I see a Fun Gun from the Doctor Who (classic) story "The Happiness Patrol"! "I'm glad you're happy!" "And I'm happy you're glad!"

A Mars display featuring original editions of The War of the World by Wells, The Martian Chronicles by Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.

And now, the SF Hall of Fame. Looks pretty slick.

All the images of the inductees are etched into blueish glass in a 3D fashion. Very spiffy. There's also a console which allows you to watch brief bios of a number of the inductees.

Next up, a neat display of a number of SF awards, including a number of Nebulas and the 1953 Hugo given to Forrest Ackerman, basically for being the uber-fan that he was.

Speaking of fans, there's a nice, big display devoted to fandom, with a whole bunch of fanzines and a selection of fan-made costumes. We boggle slightly at the incredible detail put into the costumes.

Now we reach the robot display. There's Twiki from Buck Rogers; I discover that it is in fact impossible to see Twiki without automatically going "bidi bidi bidi". There are also copies of Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet and the robot from TV's Lost in Space. They each go through a loop of lines they delivered in their movie/series. The thing is, they've been set up to make it seem like they're having a conversation! They introduced themselves to each other, have a big of an argument and then make up!

Speaking of Forbidden Planet, at some point, we found one of Anne Francis' outfits from that film. Damn, again, another actor who must have been insanely tiny! She must have been something like a size -1!

Another video display, cycling through views over a number of future cities. There's the placid, imaginary world from The Matrix, the dark dystopian Los Angeles from Blade Runner and... the world of The Jetsons! Well, I know which one I'd rather live in.

It just goes on and on. It's delightful! There's just too much to describe it all here. Any SF fan visiting the Seattle area really must give this place a visit. Just make sure you give yourself a good couple of hours.

One last picture. We used a second set of washrooms. I started slightly on entering, confronted with a huge movie poster of Alien Vs. Predator. When exiting, Lynn smiled at me and asked, "Did you have one in yours as well?" "What, you mean the AVP poster?" "That's not what was in mine. I took a picture. I'll show you later." We get back to the hotel room, and Lynn shows me this:

She knows me so well. Now, I just need to find one for our home bathroom.

Where was I? Right, checking into the Vancouver Delta Suites. Niiiiiice place. We checked in with the assistance of the extremely enthusiastic Alison. Along with our keys, we received... a cookie. A pleasantly warm chocolate chip cookie. Each. Lynn and I looked at each other with looks that probably said, "Holy cow! They gave a cookie! A pleasantly warm chocolate chip cookie! Each!" Needless to say, this instantly become our favourite hotel ever.

Our suite turned out to be a corner suite, which meant big windows giving us a view of the city pretty much any direction we chose to face. (I'm not good with heights, yet this didn't bother me. Well, unless I did something really stupid, like press my face right up against the window. Which is something I tried to avoid doing. Duh.)

After getting settled in, we headed out for dinner at Shabusen on Burrard, where much sushi and Korean BBQ was consumed. Yum!

We took a few shots of some gargoyles and other architectural bits on the way there:




And the Vancouver Olympic countdown clock:



Yep, that's a clock all right. ... Okay.

On the way back it poured. We did have an umbrella but we were still pretty wet by the time we made it back to the hotel. Some passing employee spotted us approaching and leapt to help us through the door. Once back in our room, we discovered there was only one robe in the room. Calling down to the front desk produced an extra robe at our door after about, oh, a little more than a minute.

The rest of the evening was spent lounging on the comfy, king-size bed, in our robes watching a little TV. Oh, yeah, we were roughin' it. Late in the evening, we were feeling a wee bit peckish. "Oh, look, 24-hour room service. May we have a fruit and cheese platter, please? Oh, thank you for bringing that to our room. Here's a little something for your trouble. Time to scarf!"



That would be brie event number 1. Eating our lovely fruit and cheese platter in bed.

Tell me why anyone would ever voluntarily go camping for a holiday when this is available?

After a very nice night's sleep, we headed down for breakfast at the hotel's restaurant, Millennium. Brie event #2 happened when I order a large, yummy omelette with ham and cheese.

We checked out a little later (man, we scored on the Easter special - our total bill, with taxes, phone call charges and our room service was less than half the room's normal base rate). A little shopping at Pacific Centre and a little wandering around led us to:



The Vancouver Art Gallery. We decided, sure, what the heck. I rather liked the Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre exhibit and Lynn enjoyed the collection of Vancouver photographs by Fred Herzog. We were both left underwhelmed by the Huang Yong Ping retrospective, though. It was that weird, kind of pretentious art that everybody likes to pretend they understand but don't really. You know you're in trouble when the exhibits materials, instead of reading "watercolour on canvas" or "silver nitrate photograph", contain... "lion feces". Um, yeah.

We headed back to the SkyTrain station, stopping for a bite to eat in a handy food fair. We picked a Café Suprême (which we'd never heard of before) and... brie event #3 happened when I chose a ham and brie pannini. A ham and brie pannini... in a mall food court. Go fig.

We were right on time for the bus back to the ferry, then into town.

Despite working three evening shifts this week, I've felt fairly relaxed this week. I'm putting it down to all the brie.

Day one of our holiday was on Sunday, April 8. Lynn and I got up at the crack of dawn (or close to it, anyway) and headed downtown to board the bus that took us to the ferry, onto the ferry, then off the ferry to downtown Vancouver. We had a pleasant enough breakfast of scrambled eggs and meaty accompaniments on the ferry.

The bus station in Vancouver is only a brief walk from Science World, which was our first destination. The usual interactive sciencey stuff was available and fun was had with those. According to one exhibit, it turns out that Lynn has a much stronger grip than I do, but then I beat her at the wheelchair race simulation. The machine that lets you move a ball with your brain's theta waves was unfortunately not fuctioning, though.

There were two featured exhibits while we were there. One to do with the human body and its functions, another about chocolate. We were each given a Purdy's hegdehog chocolate when we paid for our tickets. Nice.

The chocolate exhibit was mostly displays about how chocolate is made, from cocao beans through to bar format.


The body exhibit had a lot of the usual ick, including displays of implants. Especially creepy was the artifical eye section, although the artificial hips and the like were more interesting. And then there was this:


A breast implant and a testicular implant together in the same box. Thus representing the two human body parts that men care about the most.

After a quick bite of lunch at the Science World's very noisy Triple O's by White Spot (note to self; holiday Sunday = insane amount of kids at Science World), we caught the end of the "LocoMotion" program, where a staff member demonstrates the laws of physics with folks from the audience. Here's the end of the "conservation of energy" demo:


After wrapping up at Science World, we caught the SkyTrain and headed off to the Vancouver Delta Suites, the nicest hotel we have ever stayed in. To read all about it, tune in next time...

BrieFest 2007! Seriously, I had more brie or meals containing brie over the last two days than I have had in, oh, the last two years.

For the Easter weekend, Lynn and I took a rare holiday trip. Just over to the mainland and just overnight, but man it was nice. Pictures were taken and over the next few days, I plan to recount our adventures.

Just... not tonight. Ironically, I need to wind down a bit from my holiday. Par for the course, really.