A few months ago, a post of yours made me wonder whether you’re someone I used to know. I could just e-mail you and ask. But that would be boring. Instead-
Are you fascinated by centaurs and those mythical beasts, trolleys?
Do you hold a high military rank?
Or-going with possibility #2
Are a big fan of The Wicker Man?
Can you tell me what Final Mints are?
Or-Possibility #3
You know both of the above folks, but I met you rarely and can’t remember your name(sorry).
Ring, I can’t figure out how to do Cyrillic characters on this board. (They look right purty when I use the symbol set in Word, but they won’t cut and paste - !CA? ;!C7E - see?) But Google will work, as long as you remember that the Exapno Mapcase that comes up as the first hit isn’t me.
jr8, Nonsense. The “real” Exapno Mapcase will never die.
[rimshot]You don’t know what a lay expert is? My wife says that I’m one in a big way. And who am I to disagree?[/rimshot]
Seriously:
I’m nonprofessional, but I know a hell of a lot.
DocCathode, since I read your post with an increasing sense of Huh? I guess the answer is #4.
With your knowledge of publishing and a reference to Scithers as “famed”, I thought that you might actually be him, or one of his close colleagues.
I worked for Mr Scithers[sub]*[/sub] for a brief time a few years ago. Mostly, I read through the slush pile. It was a great learning experience. Best of all, I worked for him just before he lost the Weird Tales name. It was unbelievably cool. Then, I screwed everything up.
Upon leaving, I forgot to return his keys. By the time I remembered, months had passed and I was very embarressed. I panicked. This started off a vicious cycle. By the time I finally mailed his keys back, I figured that I had managed to ruin any trust he had in me and any chance of ever working for him again. Worse, I’d ruin any chances of maintaing a friendship with him. Have you seen Never Ending Story? A boy enters a strange bookstore and takes a very special book. Mr Scithers is the bookstore owner-seeming to be plain and ordinary but filled with wisdom and magic. His house is the bookstore -with wonder stacked upon wonder, each room filled with impossible treasures.
He enjoys drawing centaurs pulling trolleys.
Darrell Schweitzer was an editor and contributor to Weird Tales. He’s the author of The Shattered Goddess, among other things.
He likes designing strange t-shirts including- Tibetan Olympic corpse wrestling team, Final Mints-breath mints for the dead, and a shirt celebrating the festival from the horror film The Wicker Man(can't recall the name. still haven't seen the movie.).
* He'll always be Mister to me. He was an officer and it shows. With but the slightest effort, he can become the most intimidating person you've ever seen. He's generally a friendly, cheerful man. But when he wants to, his voice could stop a pack of charging banths. This and his vast expertise mad me feel like it was blasphemous to even think of him as George.
My mom used to work with a guy named Ray Bourque. He and a bunch of his buddies went up to Montreal for a game and stayed at the same hotel as the Bruins - he kept getting hockey playin’ Ray’s phone calls.
DocCathode, I’ve run into Darrell at many cons, but oddly, for all that I’ve been in the field for over 30 years, I’ve never gotten closer to George Scithers than the business end of a rejection slip.
But I know much about him, and to describe him as “famed” within the field is an understatement.
I’m infamous in my home town as a defender of gay rights and for promoting evolution…you can see one of the articles I wrote on my web site under ‘fun stuff’.
Hmm, I’m not surprised. I remember one day that he mentioned he had to leave early to go meet some friends for dinner. He didn’t consider it worth mentioning that one of the friends was Isaac Asimov.
If I had her auotgraph, it would be a signature under the words “I am a huge fraud and have bilked people out of their money for years.” Otherwise, I wouldn’t care to have it.
Maybe brown can have a spirit sign some piece of paper you have lying around now Flowerchild. That USED to be a pretty common medium trick: spiritgraphy or something.
I’ve always hoped that RickJay was famous magician/actor/author/really cool guy Ricky Jay. Of course, statistically speaking, it’s far more likely that he’s one of several million Richard Johnsons in the world.
But I still get a little kick from imagining that the M/A/A/RCG might be rubbing shouders (electronically) with us ordinary folk.
I’m infamous in my home town as a defender of gay rights and for promoting evolution…you can see one of the articles I wrote on my web site under ‘fun stuff’.