Venue Change for Vulkon in Columbus, Ohio

I just got word this evening that the Vulkon in Columbus, OH on July 13-15 has had a last minute change of venue. The new location is the University Plaza Hotel & Conference Center, located at 3110 Olentangy River Road.

The new hotel has fewer rooms available, so Vulkon has also arranged a room block at the nearby Hilton Garden Inn and will be providing free shuttle service between the two locations.

Check the Vulkon web site for more information about the Columbus convention.

Gardening through Time and Space

Cmdr Z recently passed along a link to a UK web site where participants can send in photos of their garden sheds. The site’s readers can then vote for the prestigious “Shed of the Year” award. A number of the sheds bear a striking resemblance to Doctor Who’s TARDIS.

This should come as no surprise to those of us who have gardens. Whether it’s a huge vegetable garden, or the tiniest postage stamp of a flowerbed, it’s a very familiar problem.

The sheer multitude of tools, stakes, fertilizer, pots, and so on needed to maintain even the smallest garden is so overwhelming that using a spare TARDIS is the only way to avoid having the shed occupy more square footage than the actual garden.

A Browncoat is Born

Back in August I gave my brother a copy of the Firefly box set. He’d heard of the show, but having no great interest in it, promptly put the discs to one side with plans to watch them “someday.”

“Someday” arrived last weekend.

During a phone conversation on Saturday, Dave told me he and his wife had watched the first several episodes. After some thought he agreed that it made sense for a frontier planet to have horses instead of cars (after all building new horses doesn’t require as much manufacturing infrastructure) but overall he was skeptical of the whole “spaghetti western” motif.

By Wednesday they had watched the first three discs and found themselves in agreement with those who feel that the Fox network executives who cancelled the show deserve to be consigned to “the special hell.” (The one normally reserved for child molesters and people who talk in theater.)

I got another email from him this evening. His daughters aren’t old enough to watch the show, but he’s taught them to sing “The Hero of Canton.”