Another baby panda!  We’re getting another baby panda! 

Foggy fade-to-flashback moment: The soon-to-be big sister in December 2005.

Science and the Superheros.  Apparantly some of the back stories are, um, fiction.

Downtown now, having spent the morning interviewing candidates for scholarships from the Cal Alumni. This is money I’ve given over the twenty or so years I’ve been an alumni, so it’s nice to have a say in how it’s being spent.

Apparently the buzzword of the year is ‘non-profit.’. Everyone wants to work for one when they graduate. I guess that using the word is supposed to be appealing to us bleeding-heart Berkeley liberals. But the three this morning professing this professional goal all had trouble saying what they wanted to actually do.

Non-profit is a tax status, not a calling. Do they want to rescue stray animals? Feed the sick? Defeat cancer?   Organize a massive comic book convention? Bring classical music to the huddled masses?  UHhhhh. ‘I just want to give something back.’

Safe answer, but probably not what a candidate for a leadership scholarship should be saying. I just wish one of them would’ve had the cajones to say ‘I want to ——– and make it into a successful business at the same time. I think housing the poor/curing the sick/protecting the abused/giving the geeks a place to be geeks can be profitable with the right business model, and I plan to prove it.’ That would’ve been worthy of a Bear.

Not still at ComicCon, though I wish I still were.  Attending vicariously today through the magic of texting and someone geekier than I who bought a four-day pass.  Godblesshim.  Really should have stayed there myself though.  At the end of the day I should have hidden myself away in the folds of Jabba’s blubber.  There probably would’ve been enough room for Spinner and a viking or two also.  I could’ve hidden in there at night, and simply ignored the office Friday, or maybe forever.  Halle the Blackberry would stop beeping at me sooner or later. 

Because as much as I enjoy the mandatory tan-maintenance siestas and the progressive office policy on porn in the workplace, sometimes I really miss getting paychecks on time and not of the bouncy variety.  I really do.  And I like SciFi and geeky costumes, and should have spent more time and money filling in the extensive gaps in my Akira books, and even more time hunting for Transformers for Hensley’s leashholder.  Because at the end of it all, he who dies with the most toys does win.  I know it’s true because I saw it on a t-shirt.

ComicCon, once we got in the doors, was a blast.  No reservations, no second thoughts, no regrets.

We browsed, we shopped, we gawked, we shook hands, and we posed for photographs.  We watched a lot of the world go by, and every now and then recognized someone.  We were amazed at a certain celebutard who was hugging children and looking remarkably sober, saw one blogger from a distance but lost him in the crowd, got a photo of Randy with Aaron Douglas of Battlestar Galactica, and got a photo of Chuck with David Prowse as he was autographing a photo for the two of us.

Lots more photos of the other attendees with the cooler costumes and a few with the various statues and manniquins.  Not that anyone was rude about posing for photos, but sometimes the nonanimate superheros were easier to approach.  That and I didn’t have to feel quite so inadequate at the thought of seeing a photo of myself next to their superhero abs.

Pre-registration was a joke. The line is at least five or six times as long as the line for the people who just showed up, and those bastards get shade. It took us more than twenty minutes to hike to the end of our line. Uh oh, looks like we stretched the rent-a-cops to the limit – SDFD is doing crowd control now. I hope someone is being held responsible for this gross mismanagement.
[Via BlackBerry]

Hanging out with robots is cool.  I love my SciFi.  I can embrace my inner geek as well as anyone, and in two hours I will be at ComicCon having as much fun as anyone can have indoors with thousands of strangers.

Sitting on the deck right now letting a writing project bouce around the inside of the skull. Hopefully it won’t break the china before it comes to a stop. I know the facts, the evidence and the law to do this, but in the words of a psychotic former boss, I haven’t decided how to tell the story yet. Something that will resonate with the audience-of-one. Is it a trajedy of a woman dying of cancer? Or is it a drama centered on the greedy alcoholic ex? Whatever. It will sort itself out in time. Until then, the bouncing continues. I can sit here and let the hummingbird inspire me. Ah to have an attention span of ten seconds and live solely for the next high-sugar snack. That’d be the life.
[Via BlackBerry]

No, I’m not here.  If I were here, one of my local friends would come over here and slap me upside the head, so I must emphasize that I’m not here.  I’m out working, because sometimes litigation deadlines do that to you by converging from everywhere at once.  Besides not being here, I most definitely did not spend the weekend at Pride, a great party where caterers dipped cream cheese in chocolate and fed it to you on skewers, or reading the new Harry Potter book.  Just wanted to make that clear.  And I will mostest definitely not be at ComicCon this week either.

I’ve been in San Diego six years now and just had my first Night Zoo experience.  Apparantly, just like in the wild, the cool animals do the interesting stuff in the dark.

Instead of floating like a rock, the hippo was doing high-speed laps by running underwater on her toes in a scene that brought the original Fantasia to life.  The wild puppies were running around and fighting over a bush instead of looking for ways to beat the heat.  Monkeys, gazelles and a poor lone polar bear were ‘doing things like they do on the Discovery Channel.’  The giraffes were moping around like their turn-down service was running late, and a peacock was prancing around the grounds of the Horn and Hoof Mesa mocking the caged land animals with both his freedom and his plumage. 

But despite all those sights and spectables, all those examples of the wonderful diversity of the animal kingdom, probably the most memorable experience of the evening was enjoying a young tour bus driver entertaining the pedestrians near his empty vehicle by singing sea shanties as he made his required but pointless rounds.  So, what would you do with a drunken sailor?   Remember, it is Pride this weekend in San Diego.