Friday evening.
Category: Highlights
Pipeline to the Underworld
Sometimes when walking to lunch I pass this pipe sticking out of the ground. I have no idea how deep it goes, or whether it connects to something or just stops. I also have no idea what it’s for, unless as a vent or a placeholder. It just pokes out a couple of feet next to the hedge bordering a vacant lot.
I wonder how much litter collects at the bottoms of things like this. People tossing garbage, leaves falling in, people dropping rocks to gauge depth, people accidentally dropping things like flashlights or keys. If I dropped something important, would it be retrievable? If I couldn’t fish it out with a hook or gum on the end of a string, who would I call? Or would I just have to write it off as lost?
Comic-Con Triathlon: Running Through Downtown San Diego at Night
Friday night at Comic-Con. After walking around all day in costumes, we returned to our hotel, got cleaned up, had dinner at the hotel restaurant and got in line for the shuttle back to the convention center to catch “The Worst Cartoons Ever” at 9:00.
Except only one of us made it onto the bus.
Missing the Bus
We’d thought about going back to the restaurant for dessert later (they had Bailey’s cheesecake), so I did something stupid and went back to check the hours. (If they were going to be closed, we’d go somewhere in the Gaslamp area like Ghirardelli.) This took longer than expected, and the shuttle arrived in the meantime.
The shuttles only run every 20-30 minutes at night, and we had barely 30 minutes to the screening. Chances were if I didn’t catch this one, I wasn’t going to make it.
I fought my way upstream through the crowd that had just gotten off the bus, saw that Katie wasn’t at the stop, and ran halfway down the block as the shuttle pulled away…and immediately stopped at a red light.
I ran to the front of the bus and knocked on the door. The driver gestured toward the back of the bus. I looked back to see if there was another door. Nothing. I knocked again. He glared at me and pointed toward the back of the bus again. It became clear he was not opening that door for anything.
Words Exchanged
So I pulled out my cell phone and called Katie, who was in the process of calling me to ask where the hell I was. Whichever call connected, I started out with something like “The &@^#*& driver wouldn’t let me on the bus!” We each fumed a bit, the light turned green, and the bus pulled away.
I wasted a precious minute trying to decide whether it was worth trying to catch a trolley or something. I figured their schedule was about as bad. Driving didn’t even cross my mind — it probably would have taken me long enough to park that it wouldn’t have helped anyway. If I’d really been thinking I would have walked around to the front of the hotel and hailed a taxi.
Maybe it was that I’d spent the day dressed as the Flash. I decided to run.
Quantum Shipping
Delivering light at the speed of packages! Er, packages at the speed of light!
The only problem is, their tracking system is pretty limited. It can tell you where your package is, or what direction it’s moving, but not both.
Once I even logged in and it had two status notices, one telling me my package had been delivered and one telling me it hadn’t!
I would have called about that, but they would have just directed me to Heisenberg in customer service, and he’s never certain about anything.
(Okay, it’s really the loading dock at an old Quantum warehouse, but what’s the fun in that?)
Casablanca…IN SPACE!
The original Star Trek TV series was famously pitched to the network as “Wagon Train to the stars” (Wagon Train being a then-well-known Western). Star Trek: The Next Generation was in the same mold, with Deep Space Nine described as Gunsmoke (in space!). Babylon 5, while not a Trek series, appeared around the same time and was described as Casablanca (in space). “Sooner or later, everyone comes to Babylon 5.”
So it was kind of odd tonight to watch an episode of DS9 that basically was Casablanca in space.
In “Profit and Loss”, the owner of a local bar encounters the love of his life who disappeared years ago. But she’s here with the leader(s) of a foreign nation’s underground resistance against a powerful military regime — and that regime wants to capture her companion(s). There’s also the matter of obtaining an object so that they can leave safely. She could stay here with the bar owner, but in the end has to leave. Meanwhile, there are shifting alliances as the bar owner has to deal with the local chief of police and other citizens with their own agendas.
According to the writeup at Memory Alpha, the episode was originally going to be more like Casablanca, even titled “Here’s Lookin’ at You…,” but they had to change it due to legal pressure.