Yesterday, the stealth bomber flew over our house seven or eight times.

It totally would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for my dogs, who bark like crazy whenever blimps or other low-flying aircraft go over our house.

I guess it was doing a flyover as part of a December 7th memorial.

Elizabeth Bear just sent this sad news over Twitter.

 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A spokesman says sometime actor, literary agent, magazine editor and full-time bon vivant Forrest J Ackerman has died.

I never met him, I’ve never been to his reportedly awesome house, but all of us who enjoy or make a living from sci-fi (or both) owe him a moment of silence and remembrance.

Rest in peace, sir.

Most people who read my blog only do it via RSS and never see the comments, so I’m updating my post to add this comment from reader Stickman: 

I do need you all to know what a class act Forry is.
 
For decades, Forrest J Ackerman opened his private home every week for public tours of his literally overwhelming collection of sci-fi and horror memorabilia. He had a practiced patter and plenty of horrid puns worthy of the founding editor of Famous Monsters Magazine.
 
A few years ago, Mr. Ackerman was hospitalized in serious condition. I had recently lost an inspirational college professor who I didn’t even know was hospitalized, so I made a point of traveling to see Forrest to deliver a rocketship-featuring get-well card.
 
He looked bad. Really bad. He had spinal blocks in following a surgical procedure, a scar on his scalp, his partial dental bridge was out, his skin was ghastly pale, his hair was sickgreased, and his medically paralyzed body was arranged at odd angles within the tucked-in blanket.

He literally looked like the bag of bones he was.
 
And he was smiling at his visitors.
 
He was telling his trademark corny jokes.
 
He insisted I take a complementary copy of Cult Movies magazine, an issue for which he recently wrote a column.
 
He was a gracious host even on what looked to be his deathbed.
 
That amount of grace in a person is stunning to experience.
 
You become very conscious of the air you walk through after such an encounter. He gave me proof of the possibility and ability of Human Grace firsthand. That’s the kind of good man he is.
 
I am glad that in the subsequent years, and the last few weeks, he’s had additional opportunity to receive well-wishers and tributes to him personally as well as his legacy to the fandom that Wil wrote about in the previous post.
 
I’m saddened he’s gone, but I’m glad he existed, as Ray Bradbury said of our purpose, "to witness and to celebrate."
 
RIP, 4sJ.

I need to share this heartbreaking, wonderful and insightful post about friendship and fandom at Firefox News:

This is fandom. Aside from the squeeing, aside from the flamewars, ‘shipwars, and FK wars (don’t ask), it’s about forming a community. It’s about making friends with people you’d otherwise never even meet, and becoming as close to them as your family. Closer, in some cases.

[…]

Being fannish is one thing. We’re good at that. We’ve been obsessing about our shows and movies and books for years, most of us long before we ever met a kindred soul who said those magic words, “OMG, you like that too?” But it’s that second moment which lasts. It’s the relationships we build from the most tenuous stuff, and how we keep building them, and shore up the old ones with jokes and stories and shared experiences and comfort even from far away. These are the things that matter, whether they’re held in common with your best friend from high school, or with this wonderful fan who lives two thousand miles away but shares in every way your deep and abiding belief that Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher should be shagging like weasels. (Please choose your own favorite couple to be shagging like weasels.)

[…]

Fandom’s about not being alone anymore. Maybe you started as a fan-inna-box, two hundred miles from the nearest con and farther still to the nearest fan, but you came here to find friends, and to share your squee, and to create things together, and to say, “I was here, and I loved this thing, and these are the people who will remember me.” Maybe they’ll remember you for that fanfic where you had all the characters doing a kickline, and maybe they’ll remember that filk you did to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and maybe they’ll recall with a smile the weird in-depth meta you did on the time-travel episode, and maybe they’ll remember the vid you did of the dancing penguins, but mostly, the good friends will remember the other things you did and talked about, your pets and your family and that trip you dreamed of and that crazy prank you pulled on your boss and that time you dyed your hair blue. Even if you never met in the real world, the way the mundanes would say you define a friend, they’ll remember.

This dovetails with some of the reasons I love conventions:

Those of us who will cram thirteen of our friends into a hotel room for a weekend to geek out together have a place to go where not only will we not be laughed at for dressing up but encouraged to do it (except the furries; those weirdos are on their own.) We can invade a hotel for a weekend, pretend it’s like the cereal convention in Sandman, and recover enough hit points to survive our real lives until the next one.

I’ve already got a couple of cons on the schedule for 2009: Phoenix Comicon and Penguicon. I’m sure more will be added, and even though I don’t know what they are, I can tell you with complete honesty that I’m already looking forward to them all.