Wow - what a few weeks I've had. The play went very well. When the last show came, I had the bittersweet feelings I usually get: relief that it went well, sadness that the troupe is no more, elation that my time is mine again. I've currently got no plans for more directing, but we'll see.

On Friday, I'll be attending CONduit in Salt Lake City. I'd be there all three days, but I sort of messed that up for myself because I was thinking that it was the last weekend in May when it was the second to last weekend in May. Our First Communion Mass got scheduled on Saturday, and I've got to be there, so Friday only for me. (Note to self: always bring your calendar with you.)

So, I'm on two panels, both on Friday. I'm by myself in the first one, so it's not really a panel. I'll be talking about Audiobooks. I'm bringing a bunch of 20-30 second audio clips, and will be starting with Caedmon and Harlan Ellison (HERC), and then I'll rush through history to the current day. The bulk of the presentation will be on current stuff - I'll talk narrators, multi-voice and full cast recordings, where to find audiobooks, good publishers, and current trends in science fiction and fantasy audiobooks. Should be fun.

Right after that I'm on a panel called "Podcasting Your Work", where we'll discuss podcasts and podcasted fiction. Michael Stackpole will be on that panel, too. He's a great writer and the co-host of The Dragon Page. I'm looking forward to meeting him.

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Tonight is dress rehearsal for our production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap. I am the director, and am also playing a small role. Like most plays, I have a great time during rehearsals, then experience a time where I get so busy finishing the set and lining up the final details that it's no fun at all, and then showtime arrives and I start having fun again. Tonight, hopefully, marks the return to fun, because by curtain time I will have done all I can do, and can therefore stop fretting about it.

The cast is doing a great job, but in last night's rehearsal great swaths of script were left out for no apparent reason. Where did those lines go? Where?

Wish us luck. The show runs Fri, Sat, Mon, and Tue.

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In the news from May 2, the Vatican is telling Bishops not to give information in parish registers to the Mormon Genealogical Society of Utah. The reason the LDS Church wants the names on those lists is so that they can baptize these people, by proxy, into the LDS Church.

To be honest, I'm not positive that this stance indicates a shift in the Vatican's position on this, but I have heard LDS Members say that they get records from Catholic parishes. I admit that I felt a bit uncomfortable when they said that, but I thought two things: first, I don't believe that these baptisms by proxy have any effect whatsoever, and second, the LDS Church takes great care of these records, transforming them into data that can be searched by anyone, LDS or not. No one else is preserving these records in this way. I was therefore not concerned about it.

However, in looking at the arguments that have taken place between the Jewish faith and Mormons on this issue, I have come to understand two more things that now give me pause. First, it can be insulting to the living to posthumously baptize their ancestors into your church. The baptism of holocaust victims is a particularly obvious example. Second, it could distort the historical record. In the future, a researcher may erroneously believe that a person was Mormon due to their name's existence in LDS records, when in fact he/she never was.

Regardless, if an LDS member has an ancestor who is Catholic, that person certainly has every right to those records, and I don't see anything here that is an attempt to prevent access to that person.

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Check out Saturday's Sheldon, which made me laugh out loud. The best comic on the web, without question! I never miss it.

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The latest installment of Audiobook Fix (my column at The Fix: Short Fiction Review) was posted on May 1st. I got to write about audio novellas - they are publishing great stuff over at Audible. Check it out HERE.

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"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment."
-- Annie Dillard

I found this here, and looked for it because Ted Chiang quoted it in an interview here.

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And I updated the Excel Format Award list files to include the winners of the 2007 Nebula Awards, which were given this weekend.

The winners:
Novel:
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

Novella:
"Fountain of Age" by Nancy Kress

Novelette:
"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang

Short Story:
"Always" by Karen Joy Fowler

The files are here:
A List of All Hugo Award Winning Fiction (Excel Format)
A List of All Nebula Award Winning Fiction (Excel Format)
A Combined List of All Hugo and Nebula Award Winning Fiction (Excel Format)

The Hugo-only list didn't need updated, but I included it anyway for those who don't know it's there. Congratulations to all the nominees!

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I posted a review of Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold at SFFaudio this morning. Permanent link here.

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It's Spring, and that means it's time to reinstall the level system at the dam. Let's see if I can explain this...

At the top of the dam is a shed:



Inside that shed are electronics that control a valve that feeds water to this pond:



The pond, in turn, feeds an irrigation system that provides water to I'm not sure how many farms. The purpose of the electronics is to maintain the water level of that pond during irrigation season by opening and closing a butterfly valve on a water pipe at the bottom of the reservoir. I installed the processor and wrote the software that does this about three years ago. Since then, I remove the level sensor every fall and then reinstall it every spring, just to avoid unnecessary wear and tear over the winter. After Saturday, they are ready to go!

Chris took lots of pictures and I put them on Flickr - If I've done this right, then clicking the picture below brings you to the whole set:



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Click here for some excellent Hubble pictures of interacting galaxies. It looks like The Andromeda Galaxy and our own Milky Way will be colliding soon. Cosmically speaking, of course.

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Click here for an excellent NPR story about what happens to signals that leave the Earth - will aliens ever hear our 50 year-old broadcasts of The Lucy Show?

The NPR Krulwich on Science series are 7 or 8 minute stories that air once a month on NPR. They are a Bill Nye Science Guy made for radio, but with deeper subject matter. Very enjoyable to hear, and very informative.

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I never tire of looking at this picture of the Earth, which was taken from the surface of Mars by one of the rovers in 2004.

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Ever since I got my iPod, switching to anything else (like a cassette player) is a loss of convenience.

I'm not a huge collector of audio (those I review normally end up at my local library) but there are some things that I don't part with, and some of those things are on cassette. I transferred a couple of cassettes to MP3 with not so good results. What I recorded sounded so terrible that I deleted the file.

This weekend, though, I found these instructions, and have made some very nice sounding files from a couple of irreplaceable cassettes. Those instructions take you through putting the files onto a CD - I wanted MP3 files, so on Step 5 I exported the file as an MP3 instead of saving them as WAV files. I was very pleased with the results, and best yet, that method uses Audacity sound editing software, which is shareware.

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Here's an NPR Radio story about an unexpected meeting that Pope Benedict had with some of the victims of the clergy sex abuse I addressed a few posts ago.

The Pope is not shying away from this issue; instead, he is talking about it every he goes. I did not expect that.

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Wow - now that's a mass. My Catholic experience of late is a little different than what you see here. In my town, there are about 40 of us, and a priest travels in every Friday night and offers mass at the Presbyterian Church.

Yet, watching this mass earlier today makes me feel completely connected. Here was the Pope from Rome celebrating mass with 50,000 people in a stadium in Washington, DC with who knows how many watching on television. Apart from the beautiful music, the mass was the very same thing we do in our little church every week. It's one of the wonderful things about the Catholic church; it doesn't matter what language is being spoken - all of us throughout the world are using the same words, and considering the same things.

Then look 2,000 years into the past over the countless celebrations. It not only makes one feel connected to Catholics today, but all the Catholics that ever were. It's awesome to think about.

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I just found this podcast from Vatican Radio. It looks like it keeps up with the Pope no matter where he is:

http://www.radiovaticana.org/en1/rss_feeds.asp


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Pope Benedict hasn’t even landed yet, and he’s already talking about the sexual abuse scandals that have dominated discussion about the Catholic Church in the United States for a long while. Those comments are from a press conference the Pope held in the air.

I, myself, had tremendous difficulty with this. First of all, how could a priest betray people like that? A pedophile would have to get through years of religious training to get into a position to molest children. How could that happen? And then to find out that it was multiple priests. And then to find out that some authorities in the church not only knew about it, but were more concerned with preserving appearance than with the people affected? It was a lot to bear. Nothing, of course, compared to the victims.

I do appreciate the statements the Pope made on the subject today, but still long for a strongly worded statement from the US Bishops that clearly states that priests convicted of abuse and those who allow it to perpetuate will be defrocked. If such a statement has been made, I haven't seen it. I've seen only documents that talk about forgiveness and rehabilitation and such. In my opinion, that's not enough. A person guilty of such things has no business being a priest.

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Phobos! One of the moons of Mars. I wonder what it looks like from the surface of Mars...

Found on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site.

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