Wednesday, October 22, 2014

MileHighCon -- Friday!

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I'm still on the road and suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous motor inn Wi-Fi.  My theory is that travelers are using the Web more and more but that the hotels and motels are reluctant to upgrade their systems because 1) it's expensive, and 2) they figure that, like everything else electronic, it's going to be obsolete soon anyway, so why waste the money?

But I want to remind everybody that MileHighCon, the Rocky Mountains' premiere fantasy and science fiction literary convention, begins Friday.   I'll be there, I'll be interviewing Phil and Kaja Foglio about plot, and I'll be electrifying a pickle.  It'll be fun.

If you're going to be there, feel free to say hello.  That's what I'm there for, after all.  Theoretically, all the guests of honor are a draw not only because you'll get to see and hear them but because you might meet them as well.  So why not meet us?


And speaking of the Florissant Fossil Beds . . .

Yesterday, I was at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.  It's the dinosaur fossils that draw all the attention, but there's more to the history of life than just the Mesozoic.  The Florissant fossils come from the late Eocene, 35 million years ago and are a fascinating mixture of the huge -- there are several fossilized sequoia stumps on outdoor display -- and the small and delicate.  In the information   center are displayed shall fossils of leaves, insects, and even (I kid you not) fish vomit.  These finely detailed traces of various organisms can tell us a great deal about life then.

My favorite fossil?  The twelve-year-old boy in me likes the fish vomit, of course.  But the aesthete loves the finely-detailed fly (ten percent of all the thousands of fossils found are of near-perfect quality).  And the science geek really likes the fossil tsetse fly.  This is the only fossil of this organism ever found, and it was located far, far, far from its current African habitat.

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