Accumulating Crap: A fan thing?
Dave O'Neill
back from the US to the UK and finally into a place (albeit rented) that we
can call out own.
All of our "stuff" has been in storage for the last 9 months while we were
out of the country and I've just finished unpacking and sorting.
I've done 3 trips to the dump, that's full car loads and a car load to the
local charity shop and, looking around me, I can't see much of a difference.
I even threw out some books (not sure why I had Book 3 of Battletech
anyway) - but it strikes me as slightly insane.
Is this a fan thing? My wife is not entirely understanding about my need to
have back issues of New Scientist to 1984 or the first edition of Omni - nor
does she really understand hording paperbacks.
All my fan friends are the same, but non-fan friends I have noticed tend to
have a lot less in the following categories; books, magazines, fanzines,
assorted manuscripts, games...
Anyway, fingers crossed I'm not intending to move again this year and next
time it will be into somewhere I'm buying... now theres a committment.
--
Dave O'Neill
Principle Word Wraggler - Atomicrazor
The lowest editorial standards on the web!
--
Dave O'Neill
Principle Word Wraggler - Atomicrazor
The lowest editorial standards on the web!
Arwel Parry
O'Neill <da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com> writes
>I've just moved house for the, ummm, 9th time in 5 years - this last time
>back from the US to the UK and finally into a place (albeit rented) that we
>can call out own.
>
>All of our "stuff" has been in storage for the last 9 months while we were
>out of the country and I've just finished unpacking and sorting.
>
>I've done 3 trips to the dump, that's full car loads and a car load to the
>local charity shop and, looking around me, I can't see much of a difference.
>I even threw out some books (not sure why I had Book 3 of Battletech
>anyway) - but it strikes me as slightly insane.
>
>Is this a fan thing? My wife is not entirely understanding about my need to
>have back issues of New Scientist to 1984 or the first edition of Omni - nor
>does she really understand hording paperbacks.
I know the feeling! I can't contemplate moving house because of the
3000+ books in the back bedroom. I was like this in work, too -- before
we moved offices to another floor last November I had to send 9 file
boxes of "stuff" to the long-term storage in the salt mines of
Middlewich before I could move my desk: I just know that as soon as I
throw something out for lack of use I'll need to refer to it again next
week! I think they were waiting for me to clear out the area before they
got round to making me redundant...
--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/
Evelyn C. Leeper
>
> In message <S%1g8.6471$UB4.38...@news-text.cableinet.net>, Dave
> O'Neill <da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com> writes
> >I've just moved house for the, ummm, 9th time in 5 years - this last time
> >back from the US to the UK and finally into a place (albeit rented) that we
> >can call out own.
> >
> >All of our "stuff" has been in storage for the last 9 months while we were
> >out of the country and I've just finished unpacking and sorting.
> >
> >I've done 3 trips to the dump, that's full car loads and a car load to the
> >local charity shop and, looking around me, I can't see much of a difference.
> >I even threw out some books (not sure why I had Book 3 of Battletech
> >anyway) - but it strikes me as slightly insane.
Even that I would donate to a library sale or charity shop rather than throw out.
> >Is this a fan thing? My wife is not entirely understanding about my need to
> >have back issues of New Scientist to 1984 or the first edition of Omni - nor
> >does she really understand hording paperbacks.
>
> I know the feeling! I can't contemplate moving house because of the
> 3000+ books in the back bedroom. I was like this in work, too -- before
> we moved offices to another floor last November I had to send 9 file
> boxes of "stuff" to the long-term storage in the salt mines of
> Middlewich before I could move my desk: I just know that as soon as I
> throw something out for lack of use I'll need to refer to it again next
> week! I think they were waiting for me to clear out the area before they
> got round to making me redundant...
Oddly, I had remarkably little stuff to move at (or bring home from) work.
Partly this was that when they started moving my office every six months or
year, I kept purging old stuff on a regular basis. It's when you've been
in the same office twenty years that's it's a problem.
--
Evelyn C. Leeper
http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
"Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion,
rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science."
--Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"
Brin-Marie McLaughlin
>I've just moved house for the, ummm, 9th time in 5 years
>[snip]
>
>All of our "stuff" has been in storage..
>[snip]
>
>I've done 3 trips to the dump...
>[snip]
>
>Is this a fan thing?
Yes.
Fandom collects. Absolute Fandom collects absolutely everything.
---
Brin-Marie McLaughlin
http://members.aol.com/brininsf/index.html
Merry Meet from San Francisco!
---
"Or fher gb qevax lbhe Binygvar!"
---
To e-mail me, make the 'World' go away
Mary Kay Kare
> I've done 3 trips to the dump, that's full car loads and a car load to the
> local charity shop and, looking around me, I can't see much of a difference.
> I even threw out some books (not sure why I had Book 3 of Battletech
> anyway) - but it strikes me as slightly insane.
For the last several years, my New Year's resolution has been to gid rid
of the clutter. And at the end of Feb, I've done roughly the above and
it make no difference...
>
> Is this a fan thing? My wife is not entirely understanding about my need to
> have back issues of New Scientist to 1984 or the first edition of Omni - nor
> does she really understand hording paperbacks.
>
Yes. Jordin still has papers he wrote in junior high.
You're doomed, that's all.
MKK
--
"Words are the hands of the mind"
Graydon Saunders on rec. arts.sf.fandom
Marty Cantor
>
> I've done 3 trips to the dump, that's full car loads and a car load to the
> local charity shop and, looking around me, I can't see much of a difference.
> I even threw out some books (not sure why I had Book 3 of Battletech
> anyway) - but it strikes me as slightly insane.
>
> Is this a fan thing?
No. Throwing anything away is unfannishness at its worst, fakefan.
I have lived here at Kipple Central for about 14 years and my
collections are quite modest by fan standards, but they are sufficient
to separate the mundanes from the fans. Mundanes look at my book
collection and boggle - fans just *snif* at the small number of tomes
I have. My zine collection, though, is about 6,000 - plus about 800
APA mailings - and that is enough to fill about 24 file cabinet
drawers (plus several shelves) and many boxes of unfiled material.
Along with 3+ cases of yet-to-be-printed-upon paper. And *stuff*.
Indeed, were I to be able to file all of the piles of books and zines
in this place, my landlord would probably see all of this now unused
flat space and raise my rent.
*fnord*
--
Marty Cantor
marty...@netzero.net
Andrew Plotkin
> All my fan friends are the same, but non-fan friends I have noticed tend to
> have a lot less in the following categories; books, magazines, fanzines,
> assorted manuscripts, games...
Well, when we try to define "fandom", the words "reads a lot" and
"plays games" tends to emerge from the whirlwind...
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Colette Reap
>I've just moved house for the, ummm, 9th time in 5 years - this last time
>back from the US to the UK and finally into a place (albeit rented) that we
>can call out own.
My commiserations. I thought I had it bad when I did 5 international
moves in 4 years, but 9? <shudder>
>
<snip tales of accumulation of stuph>
>
>Is this a fan thing? My wife is not entirely understanding about my need to
>have back issues of New Scientist to 1984 or the first edition of Omni - nor
>does she really understand hording paperbacks.
>
I think it helps if your partner is a fan - hence my husband
understands why I not only have the 1st edition of Omni, but the next
9 years and 11 months as well, and as for books - well I had a lot,
but he had more...
--
Colette
* "2002: A Discworld Odyssey" * http://www.dwcon.org/ *
* August 16th-19th, 2002 * Email: in...@dwcon.org *
Evelyn C. Leeper
>
> I have lived here at Kipple Central for about 14 years and my
> collections are quite modest by fan standards, but they are sufficient
> to separate the mundanes from the fans. Mundanes look at my book
> collection and boggle - fans just *snif* at the small number of tomes
> I have.
When I was in Swindon on business last year, I went to Oxford and London
on the weekends, and bought about thirty books. Fans thought this very
restrained; mundanes at work thought this a ridiculously high number.
Doug Wickstrom
<20020302085440...@mb-cf.aol.com>
brinin...@aol.com (Brin-Marie McLaughlin) excited the ether
to say:
>Fandom collects. Absolute Fandom collects absolutely everything.
.sig?
--
Doug Wickstrom <nims...@attbi.com>
"Never proclaim yourself a philosopher, nor make much talk among the ignorant
about your principles, but show them by actions." --Epictetus
Dorothy J Heydt
Marty Cantor <marty...@netzero.net> wrote:
>
>Indeed, were I to be able to file all of the piles of books and zines
>in this place, my landlord would probably see all of this now unused
>flat space and raise my rent.
In _Loitering With Intent_ the protagonist's landlord sees how
she has crammed her little room with stuff, every inch carefully
utilized (not fannish, just shortly-after-WWII) and wants her to
move into a larger room, for more money, on the grounds she's got
too much stuff for the smaller one.
So it's possible you can't win.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Dorothy J Heydt
Colette Reap <col...@lspace.org> wrote:
>>
>I think it helps if your partner is a fan - hence my husband
>understands why I not only have the 1st edition of Omni, but the next
>9 years and 11 months as well, and as for books - well I had a lot,
>but he had more...
Hal and I recently moved from a three-bedroom apartment to a
two-bedroom house. We've set it up like unto a studio with
storage space: the bed, dressers, clothes rack, and four
computers are in the living room. Oh yes, and the table near the
window so the cats can watch cat TV. The two bedrooms are full
of books. The books are all nicely settled, actually, it's the
twenty-five-or-so miscellaneous cartons of miscellaneous
electronics stuff that I'm still trying to get settled. Yes
there is a garage too, and though I've never seen Jordin's it is
possible that ours would give it a run for its money.
Dave O'Neill
"Evelyn C. Leeper" <ele...@optonline.net> wrote in message
news:3C80F843...@optonline.net...
> Marty Cantor wrote:
> >
> > I have lived here at Kipple Central for about 14 years and my
> > collections are quite modest by fan standards, but they are sufficient
> > to separate the mundanes from the fans. Mundanes look at my book
> > collection and boggle - fans just *snif* at the small number of tomes
> > I have.
>
> When I was in Swindon on business last year, I went to Oxford and London
> on the weekends, and bought about thirty books. Fans thought this very
> restrained; mundanes at work thought this a ridiculously high number.
I lived in the US for 5/6 months and ended up with about 100 books - sadly
only a fraction of that could I afford to ship home and had to give them to
other homes.
It hurt.
I think for the last few years I can't think of a week when I haven't bought
at least one.
Dave O'Neill
"Colette Reap" <col...@lspace.org> wrote in message
news:d0s18usmglmgqh1gb...@4ax.com...
> "Dave O'Neill" <da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com> wrote:
>
> >I've just moved house for the, ummm, 9th time in 5 years - this last time
> >back from the US to the UK and finally into a place (albeit rented) that
we
> >can call out own.
>
> My commiserations. I thought I had it bad when I did 5 international
> moves in 4 years, but 9? <shudder>
Only 2 international. The rest around the UK... Let me see...
Preston - Woking, Woking-Kingston, Kingston-Wilesden, Wilseden-Surbiton,
Surbiton-California, California-(insert a lot of temporary addresses), temp
address X - Bath...
Still not something I would recommend to anybody.
> >
> <snip tales of accumulation of stuph>
> >
> >Is this a fan thing? My wife is not entirely understanding about my need
to
> >have back issues of New Scientist to 1984 or the first edition of Omni -
nor
> >does she really understand hording paperbacks.
> >
> I think it helps if your partner is a fan - hence my husband
> understands why I not only have the 1st edition of Omni, but the next
> 9 years and 11 months as well, and as for books - well I had a lot,
> but he had more...
I have the first 4 years of SFX - until I realised that I could stop.
Dave O'Neill
> Arwel Parry wrote:
> >
> > In message <S%1g8.6471$UB4.38...@news-text.cableinet.net>, Dave
> > O'Neill <da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com> writes
> > >I've just moved house for the, ummm, 9th time in 5 years - this last
time
> > >back from the US to the UK and finally into a place (albeit rented)
that we
> > >can call out own.
> > >
> > >All of our "stuff" has been in storage for the last 9 months while we
were
> > >out of the country and I've just finished unpacking and sorting.
> > >
> > >I've done 3 trips to the dump, that's full car loads and a car load to
the
> > >local charity shop and, looking around me, I can't see much of a
difference.
> > >I even threw out some books (not sure why I had Book 3 of Battletech
> > >anyway) - but it strikes me as slightly insane.
>
> Even that I would donate to a library sale or charity shop rather than
throw out.
I couldn't bring myself to. I know its bad of me, but I'd have to have
hidden it at the bottom of something else or they'd have seen it.
>
> > >Is this a fan thing? My wife is not entirely understanding about my
need to
> > >have back issues of New Scientist to 1984 or the first edition of
Omni - nor
> > >does she really understand hording paperbacks.
> >
> > I know the feeling! I can't contemplate moving house because of the
> > 3000+ books in the back bedroom. I was like this in work, too -- before
> > we moved offices to another floor last November I had to send 9 file
> > boxes of "stuff" to the long-term storage in the salt mines of
> > Middlewich before I could move my desk: I just know that as soon as I
> > throw something out for lack of use I'll need to refer to it again next
> > week! I think they were waiting for me to clear out the area before they
> > got round to making me redundant...
>
> Oddly, I had remarkably little stuff to move at (or bring home from) work.
> Partly this was that when they started moving my office every six months
or
> year, I kept purging old stuff on a regular basis. It's when you've been
> in the same office twenty years that's it's a problem.
I once spent a week at my desk tidying and filing to the exclusion of all
else. I was surprised that they were shocked when I resigned.
People can be so unobservant.
Colette Reap
>Only 2 international. The rest around the UK... Let me see...
>
<snip itinerery>
>
>Still not something I would recommend to anybody.
>
Seconded. BTW, I presume all your removal men spoke English? It's real
fun when you move to places where you don't speak the language yet and
you have to deal with local removal companies :-)
Dave O'Neill
> "Dave O'Neill" <da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com> wrote:
>
> >Only 2 international. The rest around the UK... Let me see...
> >
> <snip itinerery>
> >
> >Still not something I would recommend to anybody.
> >
> Seconded. BTW, I presume all your removal men spoke English? It's real
> fun when you move to places where you don't speak the language yet and
> you have to deal with local removal companies :-)
My wife would maintain that the guys from Wimbledon (SE London) who did the
move recently were not English speakers, at least she couldn't understand a
word they said.
The guys in the Bay area had marginal English too, but nominally
communication was possible.
My only problem now seems to be communicating with UK customs who seem every
bit as annoying as their American counterparts. Given I only got the stuff
into the States in September to be shipping back now is a pain in the bum!
A.C.
news:Jeag8.7210$2c6.42923172@news-
> My only problem now seems to be communicating with UK customs who seem
every
> bit as annoying as their American counterparts. Given I only got the
stuff
> into the States in September to be shipping back now is a pain in the bum!
My favorite encounter with customs (an American agent in Toronto):
The guy waves me off the line into the back room, makes me open my bag, goes
through the bag of books I had gotten.
And in a voice that seemed to drip with contempt: "You're a science fiction
fan?".
-
nomadi...@hotmail.com | http://nomadic.simspace.net
"There are several good protections against temptation, but the
surest is cowardice."--Mark Twain.
Ulrika O'Brien
da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com says...
> All my fan friends are the same, but non-fan friends I have noticed tend to
> have a lot less in the following categories; books, magazines, fanzines,
> assorted manuscripts, games...
I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
societies, or, at least, America.
For some months know I've been subscribed to the listserv for
www.flylady.net, a sort of personal coaching system for people who
need help with keeping house, and judging by the *many* testimonials
that go by, all kinds of ordinary people, completely unconnected to
fandom, have allowed themselves to become inundated with crap, too.
You have my very near, dear and heartfelt sympathies on offloading
crap. Hal and I spent over a week recently emptying out our rented
storage space of things that have been sitting for six years or so,
and I'm continuing work on emptying the garage. We've sold off or
donated on the order of 40-50 boxes of books, with a couple of boxes
yet left to be gone through, I've been off to the Goodwill donation
center a couple of dozen times with old clothes and miscellaneous
kipple, and we've binned outright probably 20 - 30 boxes more. And
while I won't claim I can't see the difference, we're nowhere near
done yet. Some of the worst is yet to come: sorting through the
filed and unfiled paper *stuff* to cull out the 5-10% that really
ought to be kept in order to dump the other 90+%. As we've already
found, that part is grindingly slow work.
So I know whereof you speak.
--
Ulrika O'Brien, Philosopher without Portfolio
Only you can prevent solipsism.
Randolph Fritz
Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>
> I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
> of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
> general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
> societies, or, at least, America.
>
Yes. I just moving my ailing mother into a new place. I found junk
from before my birth. I think it's a widespread psych. problem in the
USA, in elders perhaps a hangover of impoverished childhoods in the
great depression. :-(
>
> You have my very near, dear and heartfelt sympathies on offloading
> crap. Hal and I spent over a week recently emptying out our rented
> storage space of things that have been sitting for six years or so,
> and I'm continuing work on emptying the garage. [...]
>
Oh, yeah. My next project...clean up my own stuff. Question for me
is how much of my library of largely sf paperbacks I want to keep.
:-(
Randolph
David Dyer-Bennet
Getting rid of personal papers is so far on the "inconceivable" side
of the line that it's, well, inconceivable. I don't find magazine
back issues especially attractive, because I find I never go back to
them. Books I go back to, so I have to keep them.
I think my generation of fan learned book hoarding behavior as
follows:
1. Discover the books with the atom|rocket sticker on the spine at
the library.
2. Read all of them.
3. Having no more to read, start reading them again. Find you enjoy
it.
4. Move to a different house|school and loose access to the old
library.
5. Read the books with the atom|rocket sticker in the new library.
6. Discover with shocked horror that some of your old favorites
aren't in the new library, and you can't go back and re-read them.
From then on, you want to own copies of books.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd...@dd-b.net / Ghugle: the Fannish Ghod of Queries
Book log: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/Ouroboros/booknotes/
Photos: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/
Rachael Lininger
> "Dave O'Neill" <da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com> wrote:
>
> >I've just moved house for the, ummm, 9th time in 5 years - this last time
> >back from the US to the UK and finally into a place (albeit rented) that we
> >can call out own.
>
> My commiserations. I thought I had it bad when I did 5 international
> moves in 4 years, but 9? <shudder>
In the past nine years, hmm, four states and countless apartment-hoppings. Eww.
> <snip tales of accumulation of stuph>
> >
> >Is this a fan thing? My wife is not entirely understanding about my need to
> >have back issues of New Scientist to 1984 or the first edition of Omni - nor
> >does she really understand hording paperbacks.
> >
> I think it helps if your partner is a fan - hence my husband
> understands why I not only have the 1st edition of Omni, but the next
> 9 years and 11 months as well, and as for books - well I had a lot,
> but he had more...
It helps if your moving help is fannish, too.
I hop apartments again tomorrow. Eek!
Rachael
--
Rachael From the Dilbert Newsletter:
Lininger "You should talk to her.
rachael@ She is a minefield of information."
clue-server.net
Dave O'Neill
"Ulrika O'Brien" <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:MPG.16eae18c2...@news.earthlink.net...
> In article <S%1g8.6471$UB4.38...@news-text.cableinet.net>,
> da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com says...
>
> > All my fan friends are the same, but non-fan friends I have noticed tend
to
> > have a lot less in the following categories; books, magazines, fanzines,
> > assorted manuscripts, games...
>
> I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
> of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
> general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
> societies, or, at least, America.
>
> For some months know I've been subscribed to the listserv for
> www.flylady.net, a sort of personal coaching system for people who
> need help with keeping house, and judging by the *many* testimonials
> that go by, all kinds of ordinary people, completely unconnected to
> fandom, have allowed themselves to become inundated with crap, too.
There's a show on BBC2 at the moment called "Life Laundry" where they go
into peoples houses and help them get rid of crap.
THe couple this week weren't Fans but they did have a lot of crap, but not,
as has been said, our sort of crap.
I'd feel naked without books and magazines.
I even have a Sinclair User from 1983... :-)
Nancy Lebovitz
Randolph Fritz <rand...@panix.com> wrote:
>In article <MPG.16eae18c2...@news.earthlink.net>,
> Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>>
>> I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
>> of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
>> general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
>> societies, or, at least, America.
>
>Yes. I just moving my ailing mother into a new place. I found junk
>from before my birth. I think it's a widespread psych. problem in the
>USA, in elders perhaps a hangover of impoverished childhoods in the
>great depression. :-(
>
increased wealth.
This is the first time in human history that it's easy for people who
aren't especially well off to accumulate more than they can use, keep
track of, or maintain, and I don't think custom has had time to
catch up with the change in circumstances.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com 100 new slogans
Velveeta: So vegetarians can have spam, too
Nancy Lebovitz
Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix1.netaxs.com> wrote:
>In article <slrna82i31....@panix2.panix.com>,
>Randolph Fritz <rand...@panix.com> wrote:
>>In article <MPG.16eae18c2...@news.earthlink.net>,
>> Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>>>
>>> I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
>>> of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
>>> general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
>>> societies, or, at least, America.
>>
>>Yes. I just moving my ailing mother into a new place. I found junk
>>from before my birth. I think it's a widespread psych. problem in the
>>USA, in elders perhaps a hangover of impoverished childhoods in the
>>great depression. :-(
>>
>That might be part of it, but I think it's also a side effect of
>increased wealth.
>
>This is the first time in human history that it's easy for people who
>aren't especially well off to accumulate more than they can use, keep
Slight tweak to phrasing: I meant *even* people who aren't especially
well off.
Ulrika O'Brien
> In article <slrna82i31....@panix2.panix.com>,
> Randolph Fritz <rand...@panix.com> wrote:
> >In article <MPG.16eae18c2...@news.earthlink.net>,
> > Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
> >>
> >> I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
> >> of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
> >> general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
> >> societies, or, at least, America.
> >
> >Yes. I just moving my ailing mother into a new place. I found junk
> >from before my birth. I think it's a widespread psych. problem in the
> >USA, in elders perhaps a hangover of impoverished childhoods in the
> >great depression. :-(
> >
> That might be part of it, but I think it's also a side effect of
> increased wealth.
>
> This is the first time in human history that it's easy for people who
> aren't especially well off to accumulate more than they can use, keep
> track of, or maintain, and I don't think custom has had time to
> catch up with the change in circumstances.
Indeed. I think it was the New Yorker (though possibly it was The
Atlantic) that recently did a piece on the booming business in home
organizing consultants and such, because Americans don't know how to
keep out from under their own clutter.
For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
into the messages, I do recommend the Flylady method for helping to
de-clutter your house and life. Anything that helps me keep on top
of my dishes and laundry without feeling burdened by either has got
to have something right about it.
As I say, you can find it at www.flylady.net.
Ulrika O'Brien
da...@atomicrazor.com says...
>
> "Ulrika O'Brien" <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
> news:MPG.16eae18c2...@news.earthlink.net...
> > In article <S%1g8.6471$UB4.38...@news-text.cableinet.net>,
> > da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com says...
> >
> > > All my fan friends are the same, but non-fan friends I have noticed tend
> to
> > > have a lot less in the following categories; books, magazines, fanzines,
> > > assorted manuscripts, games...
> >
> > I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
> > of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
> > general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
> > societies, or, at least, America.
> >
> > For some months know I've been subscribed to the listserv for
> > www.flylady.net, a sort of personal coaching system for people who
> > need help with keeping house, and judging by the *many* testimonials
> > that go by, all kinds of ordinary people, completely unconnected to
> > fandom, have allowed themselves to become inundated with crap, too.
>
> There's a show on BBC2 at the moment called "Life Laundry" where they go
> into peoples houses and help them get rid of crap.
Yeah, there are all sorts of consultancy services available over
here, too. The major thing about Flylady is that it is ongoing,
incremental, and helps you get out from under your crap your own
self, which I think is important because it reduces the chances of
getting re-buried and having to call in an outside assistant yet
again. Keeping the clutter down is an on-going process, not a one-
time fix, sad as that is for those of us who love shopping for that
one perfect orginizational *thing* that will magically keep
everything in order for us. It's a unicorn.
> THe couple this week weren't Fans but they did have a lot of crap, but not,
> as has been said, our sort of crap.
Yes, fans tend to gather books and keen stfnal and scientific toys
more so than the main stream. Normal people tend to have fewer
books, more "mainstream" magazines, and seem likelier to have
accumulations of things with ducks or chickens on them.
> I'd feel naked without books and magazines.
Me, too, but believe me one can get rid of rafts upon rafts of books
and magazines without ending up anything like "without books and
magazines." I, for instance, am clinging to my THREADS but am
ditching my ORNAMENTs. Should probably zap off an e-mail to Sue
Mason to see if she wants them.
> I even have a Sinclair User from 1983... :-)
I am exceedingly proud of Hal for parting with his run of WIRED, not
to mention the tons of antique software and antique software guides,
documentation, and how-to's he was willing to give up. There Have
Been Sacrifices.
Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey
> In article <a5rk73$2...@netaxs.com>, na...@unix1.netaxs.com says...
> >
> > This is the first time in human history that it's easy [even]
> > for people who
> > aren't especially well off to accumulate more than they can use, keep
> > track of, or maintain, and I don't think custom has had time to
> > catch up with the change in circumstances.
>
> Indeed. I think it was the New Yorker (though possibly it was The
> Atlantic) that recently did a piece on the booming business in home
> organizing consultants and such, because Americans don't know how to
> keep out from under their own clutter.
Did you save the magazine?
--
Puzzling Illinois vanity plate | Bill Higgins
spotted eastbound on I-88: | Fermilab
AMISH 1 | Internet: hig...@fnal.gov
Evelyn C. Leeper
>
> You have my very near, dear and heartfelt sympathies on offloading
> crap. Hal and I spent over a week recently emptying out our rented
> storage space of things that have been sitting for six years or so,
> and I'm continuing work on emptying the garage. We've sold off or
> donated on the order of 40-50 boxes of books, with a couple of boxes
> yet left to be gone through, I've been off to the Goodwill donation
> center a couple of dozen times with old clothes and miscellaneous
> kipple, and we've binned outright probably 20 - 30 boxes more. And
> while I won't claim I can't see the difference, we're nowhere near
> done yet. Some of the worst is yet to come: sorting through the
> filed and unfiled paper *stuff* to cull out the 5-10% that really
> ought to be kept in order to dump the other 90+%. As we've already
> found, that part is grindingly slow work.
One of my retirement projects is getting the house in order. The first
major step was hauling down twenty years of old show business newspapers
from the attic and bundling them for recycling. The next step is
*labeling* all the boxes in the attic, and moving some other stuff up
into it. Then comes actually purging stuff.
For example, one saves the heavy plastic take-out containers that soup
comes in because they're good refrigerator containers. But at some
point one needs to realize that, no, one doesn't really need 100 of them.
Clothing is another issue. One needs to admit that one will never fit
into those shirts that are three collar sizes smaller than one is
currently wearing. (Of course, in retirement, one can wear all sorts of
stuff that one wouldn't have much use for otherwise, which is why I am
glad I never got rid of any of the T-shirts handed out by vendors. :-) )
All this was made somewhat more difficult by the fact that we inherited
the SF club library from work when we retired, and it took a while to
get a thousand books and several hundred magazines properly dispersed
to local and specialty libraries. (The best stuff went to the SFWA
auction.)
Slow but steady, as they say....
Evelyn C. Leeper
>
> For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
> intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
> into the messages, I do recommend the Flylady method for helping to
> de-clutter your house and life. Anything that helps me keep on top
> of my dishes and laundry without feeling burdened by either has got
> to have something right about it.
>
> As I say, you can find it at www.flylady.net.
I went there, but when the first thing I noticed was "how many pounds
can you clean out from your purse?" I concluded this may not be for me.
(My purse is basically a wallet with a pouch attached just large enough
for my palmtop computer.)
Priscilla Ballou
Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
> intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
Red America? To me that means socialist or communist. From glancing at
the page in question, I'm guessing you mean something else. [*]
> into the messages, I do recommend the Flylady method for helping to
> de-clutter your house and life. Anything that helps me keep on top
> of my dishes and laundry without feeling burdened by either has got
> to have something right about it.
>
> As I say, you can find it at www.flylady.net.
Priscilla
--
S plussize L 48 into gardening, cooking, SF, progressive Christian
theology, seeks apt and amusing .sig for her Usenet posts. Reply to
email address.
Ulrika O'Brien
100...@fsgi01.fnal.gov>, hig...@fnal.gov says...
> On Sat, 2 Mar 2002, Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>
> > In article <a5rk73$2...@netaxs.com>, na...@unix1.netaxs.com says...
> > >
> > > This is the first time in human history that it's easy [even]
> > > for people who
> > > aren't especially well off to accumulate more than they can use, keep
> > > track of, or maintain, and I don't think custom has had time to
> > > catch up with the change in circumstances.
> >
> > Indeed. I think it was the New Yorker (though possibly it was The
> > Atlantic) that recently did a piece on the booming business in home
> > organizing consultants and such, because Americans don't know how to
> > keep out from under their own clutter.
>
> Did you save the magazine?
Heh. It's the latest issue, so Hal took it with him back to
Seattle, but I expect he'll pitch it there once he's done.
As it turns out, I know the article is available online, which turns
out to be the wonderful reason to pitch all sorts of things we used
to save. If we really want them we can find them on the web.
Ulrika O'Brien
says...
> Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
> >
>
> > For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
> > intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
> > into the messages, I do recommend the Flylady method for helping to
> > de-clutter your house and life. Anything that helps me keep on top
> > of my dishes and laundry without feeling burdened by either has got
> > to have something right about it.
> >
> > As I say, you can find it at www.flylady.net.
>
> I went there, but when the first thing I noticed was "how many pounds
> can you clean out from your purse?" I concluded this may not be for me.
> (My purse is basically a wallet with a pouch attached just large enough
> for my palmtop computer.)
Not everything they suggest will fit or work for everyone. I'm
still not putting on make-up every day, for instance, and yet have
gotten good results with the system. And certainly our house has
all sorts of categories of paper clutter that don't fit in the
limited universe of paper the system posits, and yet I have
offloaded a whole bunch of paper clutter that *does* fit their
suggestions. As with any tool set, you have to pick out the parts
that work for you.
Ulrika O'Brien
vze2...@verizon.net says...
> In article <MPG.16eaf6213...@news.earthlink.net>,
> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
> > intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
>
> Red America? To me that means socialist or communist. From glancing at
> the page in question, I'm guessing you mean something else. [*]
Not communist, no. It is an unfortunate infelicity in the shorthand
that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
well to the older association of "red". The Atlantic did a piece on
visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
time of year, if you're in Red America.
Ulrika O'Brien
says...
> Slow but steady, as they say....
That is the trick, actually. Do a little bit every day, and the
thing actually gets done.
Nancy Lebovitz
I wonder how stable the information on the web is--it does go away
sometimes.
This doesn't deny the importance of keeping one's magazine
accumulation under control.
Bob Webber
I used "it's in the library on microfilm" as my mantra as I discarded
what seemed like several Tonnes of back issues of Scientific American.
All that damn expensive heavy paper! Not even trying to make
palimpsests out of it, just tossing it in the midden!
--
We're just twisting words because we like the funny sound they make
right before they pop.
-- Kip Williams
Bob Webber
> In article <vze23t8n-BFD636...@news.bellatlantic.net>,
> vze2...@verizon.net says...
>> In article <MPG.16eaf6213...@news.earthlink.net>,
>> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>
>> > For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
>> > intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
>>
>> Red America? To me that means socialist or communist. From glancing at
>> the page in question, I'm guessing you mean something else. [*]
> Not communist, no. It is an unfortunate infelicity in the shorthand
> that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
> election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
> well to the older association of "red". The Atlantic did a piece on
> visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
> that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
> time of year, if you're in Red America.
But you can find these in Massachusetts, and indeed throughout
New England, and we're pretty darn Blue. Or at least Depressed.
Anyway, once again the usages of televison overrun traditional
language values, creating needless confusion. *sigh*
Ulrika O'Brien
says...
One of the hardest things for me to pitch is unused paper. The mind
should rightly boggle at how much we have accumulated, squirreled
away in 3/4 used notebooks and drawing pads and loose stationery and
ghod knows what all. I still remember being given used tractor feed
paper to draw on, and before that, cut up brown paper store bags. I
feel a catch every time I throw away purpose made writing or drawing
paper, even if it's dusty, water-damaged, silverfish filled purpose-
made paper.
Ulrika O'Brien
> I wonder how stable the information on the web is--it does go away
> sometimes.
True enough, but everything's ephemeral if you pick the right time
scale. I remain confident that, for instance, as long as there's a
web at all, there will be ways to find the lyrics to "To Anacreon in
Heaven" on the web, rather than hanging onto a hand-transcribed
copy. Or, there will be libraries. Or I will ask a fan. Because
if we keep keeping stuff on the "this could be useful someday!"
principle then I know for a certain fact that on the day the thing
becomes useful, it will be so buried in other physical batteries for
potential utility that I won't be able to find it or reach it
anyhow. At some point, you have to learn to let go.
Bob Webber
> In article <slrna82i31....@panix2.panix.com>,
> Randolph Fritz <rand...@panix.com> wrote:
>>In article <MPG.16eae18c2...@news.earthlink.net>,
>> Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>>>
>>> I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
>>> of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
>>> general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
>>> societies, or, at least, America.
>>
>>Yes. I just moving my ailing mother into a new place. I found junk
>>from before my birth. I think it's a widespread psych. problem in the
>>USA, in elders perhaps a hangover of impoverished childhoods in the
>>great depression. :-(
>>
> That might be part of it, but I think it's also a side effect of
> increased wealth.
> This is the first time in human history that it's easy for people who
> aren't especially well off to accumulate more than they can use, keep
> track of, or maintain, and I don't think custom has had time to
> catch up with the change in circumstances.
I don't entirely disagree with you, but I think that "less well off"
people have been able to reach this state for some time now. Most
of them probably had one or more compensating special circumstances,
like living on a farm or large property, near a center for the
trade in used books, or through employment in the process by
which a university discarded superseded items. (Scary thought:
Jordin's garage replaced with Jordin's barn.)
Objects help us with out timebinding: there's a story with each one,
and not just the stories printed on the pages of books and fanzines.
That's the broken electrostenciller I used twenty years ago when
it was still working and I could still find the box of styli I'd
bought five years previously, three years after the manufacturer
declared its shelves bare. There's the cassette of "Strange Angels"
I used to play while swooping through the Adirondacks, driving from
Toronto to Keene Valley in a rented Taurus.
And sometimes they prove that you really did go there and actually
did that. Or maybe it's just that some day I'll get interested in
improving the efficiency and specificity of uranyl sulfate extraction
from leachant with reciprocating flow ion exchange columns. Yeah,
that's the ticket...
--
History is an angel being blown backwards into the future.
The angel wants to go back to fix things to repair the things
That have been broken.
But there's a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future.
And this storm This storm This storm
Is called "Progress."
-- Laurie Anderson
Bob Webber
> says...
>> Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>> >
>>
>> > For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
>> > intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
>> > into the messages, I do recommend the Flylady method for helping to
>> I went there, but when the first thing I noticed was "how many pounds
>> can you clean out from your purse?" I concluded this may not be for me.
>> (My purse is basically a wallet with a pouch attached just large enough
>> for my palmtop computer.)
> Not everything they suggest will fit or work for everyone. I'm
> still not putting on make-up every day, for instance, and yet have
> gotten good results with the system. And certainly our house has
> all sorts of categories of paper clutter that don't fit in the
> limited universe of paper the system posits, and yet I have
> offloaded a whole bunch of paper clutter that *does* fit their
> suggestions. As with any tool set, you have to pick out the parts
> that work for you.
And find ways to extend it by defining new classes of clutter and
assigning existing processes as appropriate to each class.
My "purse" category includes my Patagonia shoulder bag, which
sometimes hauls my TiBook in its Timbuk2 sleeve (ghu, I wish I
got paid for product placements!), but sometimes just accumulates
undealt-with paperwork, e.g. for accounts I settle electronically.
Evelyn C. Leeper
>
> One of the hardest things for me to pitch is unused paper. The mind
> should rightly boggle at how much we have accumulated, squirreled
> away in 3/4 used notebooks and drawing pads and loose stationery and
> ghod knows what all. I still remember being given used tractor feed
> paper to draw on, and before that, cut up brown paper store bags. I
> feel a catch every time I throw away purpose made writing or drawing
> paper, even if it's dusty, water-damaged, silverfish filled purpose-
> made paper.
I don't pitch it, but at least I've collected it all into a couple of
boxes so that when a need a pad of paper or a notebook, I can find one.
Since most of the pads of paper are from classes at work, I figure I will
not be getting a whole lot of replacements, and I do use them.
Priscilla Ballou
Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> In article <vze23t8n-BFD636...@news.bellatlantic.net>,
> vze2...@verizon.net says...
> > In article <MPG.16eaf6213...@news.earthlink.net>,
> > Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> >
> > > For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
> > > intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
> >
> > Red America? To me that means socialist or communist. From glancing at
> > the page in question, I'm guessing you mean something else. [*]
>
> Not communist, no. It is an unfortunate infelicity in the shorthand
> that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
> election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
> well to the older association of "red".
Ah! Of course!
> The Atlantic did a piece on
> visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
> that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
> time of year, if you're in Red America.
But we have Christmas Tree Shops in Massachusetts year 'round, and we're
about as blue a state as you can find! (Yes, I know you said it t'other
logical way around.)
David Dyer-Bennet
I largely agree. I never had any urge to keep issues of the New York
Times, or National Geographic, or Scientific American. All those will
be reliably archived in mainstream sources.
I really should get rid of my SF magazines, since I never look at
them, but it's hard. I couldn't possibly just throw them out.
It's inconceivable to get rid of the old correspondence files and
such. That stuff is completely irreplacable, and constitutes a lot of
the evidence and memory joggers I have for my personal history.
Getting rid of old photos is far past inconceivable -- it's downright
evil.
Marilee J. Layman
<rand...@panix.com> wrote:
>In article <MPG.16eae18c2...@news.earthlink.net>,
> Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>>
>> I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
>> of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
>> general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
>> societies, or, at least, America.
>>
>
>Yes. I just moving my ailing mother into a new place. I found junk
>from before my birth. I think it's a widespread psych. problem in the
>USA, in elders perhaps a hangover of impoverished childhoods in the
>great depression. :-(
While those of us who are military-born are known to travel light.
You move stuff too often, you figure you don't really need it.
--
Marilee J. Layman
Bali Sterling Beads at Wholesale
http://www.basicbali.com
Marilee J. Layman
<ele...@optonline.net> wrote:
>Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>>
>
>> For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
>> intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
>> into the messages, I do recommend the Flylady method for helping to
>> de-clutter your house and life. Anything that helps me keep on top
>> of my dishes and laundry without feeling burdened by either has got
>> to have something right about it.
>>
>> As I say, you can find it at www.flylady.net.
>
>I went there, but when the first thing I noticed was "how many pounds
>can you clean out from your purse?" I concluded this may not be for me.
>(My purse is basically a wallet with a pouch attached just large enough
>for my palmtop computer.)
I put a wallet in one pocket and my keys in another. Sometimes I have
kleenex, too.
My brother and his family were here today and while we were out to
lunch, Allison wanted to show me her business card (she paints
sea-related ceramics, thus the name Searamics) and I was amazed at
what she pulled out of her purse -- briefcase size -- before she got
to the cards. And with all that, she didn't have any kleenex, so my
nephew got the packet in my pocket.
Marilee J. Layman
<uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>In article <vze23t8n-BFD636...@news.bellatlantic.net>,
>vze2...@verizon.net says...
>> In article <MPG.16eaf6213...@news.earthlink.net>,
>> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>
>> > For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
>> > intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
>>
>> Red America? To me that means socialist or communist. From glancing at
>> the page in question, I'm guessing you mean something else. [*]
>
>Not communist, no. It is an unfortunate infelicity in the shorthand
>that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
>election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
>well to the older association of "red". The Atlantic did a piece on
>visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
>that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
>time of year, if you're in Red America.
Oh, we have one of those just down the road from me. I went in once,
it smelled like pine and there were fake trees all over.
Marilee J. Layman
<uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> I, for instance, am clinging to my THREADS but am
>ditching my ORNAMENTs. Should probably zap off an e-mail to Sue
>Mason to see if she wants them.
I'm dropping my subs to Bead & Button and Beadwork, not because
they've cluttered, but because there's never anything new in them. I
figure I can glance at them at the library and get better value.
Mark Atwood
>
> I'm dropping my subs to Bead & Button and Beadwork, not because
> they've cluttered, but because there's never anything new in them. I
> figure I can glance at them at the library and get better value.
CatFancy has the same problem.
(The other big cat magazine, "Cats", just folded.)
I noticed a while ago that CatFancy and Playboy have pretty much
exactly the same layout, organization, and practical editorial policy.
Whatever news they carry tend to be small focused clippings of other
mainstream newssources, the most column inches of new text each time
is interviews and fiction, otherwise the text content is recyled each
year with a light edit, and people really buy them for the pictures
and the centerfold.
--
Mark Atwood | Well done is better than well said.
m...@pobox.com |
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Avram Grumer
Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> I am exceedingly proud of Hal for parting with his run of WIRED, [...]
Are the old ones worth anything? If I come across my early copies and
they're worth money I'd be tempted to sell them. If not I'll just trash
'em.
(First post under MacOS X! Woo hoo!)
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, lbh'er va ivbyngvba
bs gur Qvtvgny Zvyyraavhz Pbclevtug Npg.
Avram Grumer
Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> Not communist, no. It is an unfortunate infelicity in the shorthand
> that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
> election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
> well to the older association of "red". The Atlantic did a piece on
> visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
> that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
> time of year, if you're in Red America.
What does it mean if you can find stores devoted to Halloween all year
'round?
Simon Bradshaw
Kay Kare) wrote:
> Dave O'Neill <da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com> wrote:
>
> > I've done 3 trips to the dump, that's full car loads and a car load
> > to the local charity shop and, looking around me, I can't see much of
> > a difference. I even threw out some books (not sure why I had Book 3
> > of Battletech anyway) - but it strikes me as slightly insane.
>
> For the last several years, my New Year's resolution has been to gid rid
> of the clutter. And at the end of Feb, I've done roughly the above and
> it make no difference...
> >
> > Is this a fan thing? My wife is not entirely understanding about my
> > need to have back issues of New Scientist to 1984 or the first edition
> > of Omni - nor does she really understand hording paperbacks.
> >
> Yes. Jordin still has papers he wrote in junior high.
"But does he have his school notebooks from when he was twelve?" asks
Bridget.
I think this may be a subtle hint that I should thin down my own Crap
Pile.
--
Simon Bradshaw sjbra...@cix.co.uk
http://www.cix.co.uk/~sjbradshaw
*** The Science Fiction Foundation ***
http://www.sf-foundation.org
Colette Reap
>I'd feel naked without books and magazines.
Me too. Although I have made a start on my paperwork (old bank
statements and the like) - I have a scanner and a cd burner...
>
>I even have a Sinclair User from 1983... :-)
>
Heh, Thanks to my husband we have _4_ BBC micros in the loft.
I know, I know, not a patch or Jordin's garage...
--
Colette
* "2002: A Discworld Odyssey" * http://www.dwcon.org/ *
* August 16th-19th, 2002 * Email: in...@dwcon.org *
Barry Traish
>should rightly boggle at how much we have accumulated, squirreled
>away in 3/4 used notebooks and drawing pads and loose stationery and
>ghod knows what all. I still remember being given used tractor feed
>paper to draw on, and before that, cut up brown paper store bags.
At work, we produce tons of scrap paper from the computers (paperless
office, of course!). Where it doesn't contain any confidential
information, it is gratefully accepted by the children's wing of a local
hospital for the kids to draw on.
Needless to say I have a couple of draws full of rotting scrap paper
too.
--
Barry Traish
Currently reading: Honor the Queen by David Weber
John Houghton
Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
> web...@panix.com
> says...
> > Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
> > > In article , hig...@fnal.gov says...
My Mom is like that, we'll get letters written on various of my father's old
letterheads, from the 60's. And Mom has moved many times since then, into some
very small places, but still has the box of mostly blank paper.
--
John Houghton jh1...@attbi.com
Solipsism is never having to say you're sorry.
John Houghton
Avram Grumer wrote:
> Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>
> > Not communist, no. It is an unfortunate infelicity in the shorthand
> > that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
> > election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
> > well to the older association of "red". The Atlantic did a piece on
> > visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
> > that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
> > time of year, if you're in Red America.
Hmmm. "The Christmas Tree Shop" started on Cape Cod. Mass. being a "blue"
state.
>
>
> What does it mean if you can find stores devoted to Halloween all year
> 'round?
That you're extraordinarily lucky? Assuming that it has great and
wonderful Halloween stuff in it.
--
John Houghton jh1...@attbi.com
This space unintentionally left blank.
Evelyn C. Leeper
>
> I largely agree. I never had any urge to keep issues of the New York
> Times, or National Geographic, or Scientific American. All those will
> be reliably archived in mainstream sources.
>
> I really should get rid of my SF magazines, since I never look at
> them, but it's hard. I couldn't possibly just throw them out.
I do pull out the old issues from time to time, for stories that were
never reprinted, or were reprinted in books I don't have.
Evelyn C. Leeper
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
--
Evelyn C. Leeper, Military Brat and Co-Owner of 20,000 volumes
Nancy Lebovitz
I still feel bad about throwing out stacks of _Gnosis_ magazine
before I moved to Philadelphia, but it was before eBay, and there
wasn't any obvious way to pass them on.
Nancy Lebovitz
>
>> I wonder how stable the information on the web is--it does go away
>> sometimes.
>
>True enough, but everything's ephemeral if you pick the right time
>scale. I remain confident that, for instance, as long as there's a
>web at all, there will be ways to find the lyrics to "To Anacreon in
>Heaven" on the web, rather than hanging onto a hand-transcribed
>copy. Or, there will be libraries. Or I will ask a fan. Because
Certainly, but that's much more likely to be saved than any random
magazine article.
>if we keep keeping stuff on the "this could be useful someday!"
>principle then I know for a certain fact that on the day the thing
>becomes useful, it will be so buried in other physical batteries for
>potential utility that I won't be able to find it or reach it
>anyhow. At some point, you have to learn to let go.
Probably, and this is also true (though more slowly so) for keeping
things on the computer.
Nancy Lebovitz
>> > intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
>>
>> Red America? To me that means socialist or communist. From glancing at
>> the page in question, I'm guessing you mean something else. [*]
>
>that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
>election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
>well to the older association of "red". The Atlantic did a piece on
>visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
>that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
>time of year, if you're in Red America.
>
so I'm glad the question was asked.
Dorothy J Heydt
Mary Kay Kare <mar...@kare.ws> wrote:
>
>For the last several years, my New Year's resolution has been to gid rid
>of the clutter. And at the end of Feb, I've done roughly the above and
>it make no difference...
I tend to try to do that around Advent.
But I'm doing a fair amount of it because we just moved and there
are boxes and boxes around that I hadn't seen recently and that I
can rummage through on occasion and find stuff that really can be
thrown. E.g., once or maybe twice a week the Mercury News prints
a large ad from Fry's Electronics, advertising what they have on
sale this weekend. The contents of the current page is always of
great interest to Hal, and he detaches that section from the rest
of the paper, folds it to display the most interesting stuff, and
keeps it around on one of the computer desks. Sometimes he even
acts on it (we went to Fry's last night and he bought most of the
guts of a whole new computer).
But if I dig through a box and find the Fry's ads for last March,
or September two years ago, why, they get to go in the recycling,
and so do twenty AOL disks that came in the gaming magazines, and
so do the gaming magazines themselves if they're more than a
couple months old, except for Maximum PC which he keeps forever
but which go into document boxes, and ....
so the second bedroom is still an obstacle course of boxes full
of stuph, but the living room is practically clean now, one
carton of spare keyboards and junk which is going down the hall
as soon as I figure exactly where I'm going to put it.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Philip Chee
>I think my generation of fan learned book hoarding behavior as
>follows:
>
>1. Discover the books with the atom|rocket sticker on the spine at
> the library.
>2. Read all of them.
>3. Having no more to read, start reading them again. Find you enjoy
> it.
>4. Move to a different house|school and loose access to the old
> library.
>5. Read the books with the atom|rocket sticker in the new library.
>6. Discover with shocked horror that some of your old favorites
> aren't in the new library, and you can't go back and re-read them.
>From then on, you want to own copies of books.
Correction: You want to own at least *two* copies of each book, just
in case one gets lost or borrowed permananently.
That PackRatGuy
---=====================================================================---
Philip Chee: Tasek Corporation Berhad, P.O.Box 254, 30908 Ipoh, MALAYSIA
e-mail: phi...@aleytys.pc.my Voice:+60.5.291.1011 Fax:+60.5.291.9932
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
--
ž 20378.00 ž All I need to know I learned from my cat.
Philip Chee
>In article <MPG.16eb13d8a...@news.earthlink.net>,
> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Not communist, no. It is an unfortunate infelicity in the shorthand
>> that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
>> election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
>> well to the older association of "red". The Atlantic did a piece on
>> visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
>> that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
>> time of year, if you're in Red America.
>What does it mean if you can find stores devoted to Halloween all year
>'round?
That you live in Sunnydale?
Phil
---=====================================================================---
Philip Chee: Tasek Corporation Berhad, P.O.Box 254, 30908 Ipoh, MALAYSIA
e-mail: phi...@aleytys.pc.my Voice:+60.5.291.1011 Fax:+60.5.291.9932
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
--
ž 20389.67 ž Love of money is the root of all politics.
Bob Webber
> In article <m2g03ik...@gw.dd-b.net> dd...@dd-b.net writes:
>>I think my generation of fan learned book hoarding behavior as
>>follows:
>>
>>1. Discover the books with the atom|rocket sticker on the spine at
>> the library.
>>2. Read all of them.
>>3. Having no more to read, start reading them again. Find you enjoy
>> it.
>>4. Move to a different house|school and loose access to the old
>> library.
>>5. Read the books with the atom|rocket sticker in the new library.
>>6. Discover with shocked horror that some of your old favorites
>> aren't in the new library, and you can't go back and re-read them.
>>From then on, you want to own copies of books.
> Correction: You want to own at least *two* copies of each book, just
> in case one gets lost or borrowed permananently.
Depends how far you are from possible sources of replacement volumes,
doesn't it? There are an awful lot of books I can count on replacing
(for textual purposes, at least) from a store in Harvard Square.
> ş 20378.00 ş All I need to know I learned from my cat.
You don't need to know how to clean up your own bodily wastes?
Must have quite an underclass over there... (HH,OK)
Bob Webber
> In article <MPG.16eb2ae4f...@news.earthlink.net>,
> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>In article <a5rtpo$q...@netaxs.com>, na...@unix1.netaxs.com says...
>>
>>> I wonder how stable the information on the web is--it does go away
>>> sometimes.
>>
>>True enough, but everything's ephemeral if you pick the right time
>>scale. I remain confident that, for instance, as long as there's a
>>web at all, there will be ways to find the lyrics to "To Anacreon in
>>Heaven" on the web, rather than hanging onto a hand-transcribed
>>copy. Or, there will be libraries. Or I will ask a fan. Because
> Certainly, but that's much more likely to be saved than any random
> magazine article.
I'm thinking that with disks getting so big, one could build a
web cache that effectively stored all the revisions of most of the
web pages one ever visited after it was turned on.
Add the "Box-o-Google" product to index it and there's your
permanent copy of every bit of misinformation you ever gleaned
from the WWW at your fingertips.
>>if we keep keeping stuff on the "this could be useful someday!"
>>principle then I know for a certain fact that on the day the thing
>>becomes useful, it will be so buried in other physical batteries for
>>potential utility that I won't be able to find it or reach it
>>anyhow. At some point, you have to learn to let go.
> Probably, and this is also true (though more slowly so) for keeping
> things on the computer.
But you do get examples of ways in which the relatively compact and
durable storage of computer media, along with powerful indexing
functions, like Henry Spencer's dump tapes of Usenet back to 1981
being used to backfill Google, seem to resist this trend almost
completely. Of course, the actual usefulness of archives of Usenet
is a moot point.
Doug Wickstrom
<avram-827B44....@reader2.panix.com>
Avram Grumer <av...@grumer.org> excited the ether to say:
>What does it mean if you can find stores devoted to Halloween all year
>'round?
That you should probably move away from Sunnydale.
--
Doug Wickstrom <nims...@attbi.com>
"You'll meet heroes and villains, numbwits and geniuses, dullards and
visionaries, gentlefolk and jerks and everything in between. The most
important part is, don't take this Internet stuff too seriously. Always
try to maintain a sense of humor." --Joseph "Doc" Thompson
Doug Wickstrom
<101517341...@aleytys.pc.my>
phi...@aleytys.pc.my (Philip Chee) excited the ether to say:
>In article <avram-827B44....@reader2.panix.com> av...@grumer.org writes:
>>In article <MPG.16eb13d8a...@news.earthlink.net>,
>> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>>> Not communist, no. It is an unfortunate infelicity in the shorthand
>>> that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
>>> election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
>>> well to the older association of "red". The Atlantic did a piece on
>>> visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
>>> that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
>>> time of year, if you're in Red America.
>
>>What does it mean if you can find stores devoted to Halloween all year
>>'round?
>
>That you live in Sunnydale?
You beat me to it.
--
Doug Wickstrom <nims...@attbi.com>
"I know, indeed, the evil of that I purpose; but my inclination gets the
better of my judgement." --Euripides
Ulrika O'Brien
av...@grumer.org says...
> In article <MPG.16eaf7d8e...@news.earthlink.net>,
> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > I am exceedingly proud of Hal for parting with his run of WIRED, [...]
>
> Are the old ones worth anything? If I come across my early copies and
> they're worth money I'd be tempted to sell them. If not I'll just trash
> 'em.
I'm not *aware* of their being worth anything; we didn't check. We
just binned them. We did hang on to a box or so of comic books that
Hal feels sure are worth something. We haven't quite cut to the
bone yet.
--
Ulrika O'Brien, Philosopher without Portfolio
Only you can prevent solipsism.
Ulrika O'Brien
vze2...@verizon.net says...
> But we have Christmas Tree Shops in Massachusetts year 'round, and we're
> about as blue a state as you can find! (Yes, I know you said it t'other
> logical way around.)
We have them in California, too, but not in the Blue parts.
Christmas stores do not tend to show up in urbane, metropolitan
areas, they tend to show up in the parts of the country that also
have the Cracker Barrel demographic, not to mention the Waffle House
demographic.
David Dyer-Bennet
> David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> >
> > I largely agree. I never had any urge to keep issues of the New York
> > Times, or National Geographic, or Scientific American. All those will
> > be reliably archived in mainstream sources.
> >
> > I really should get rid of my SF magazines, since I never look at
> > them, but it's hard. I couldn't possibly just throw them out.
>
> I do pull out the old issues from time to time, for stories that were
> never reprinted, or were reprinted in books I don't have.
My SF magazines date from late enough that there wasn't much of
interest being published in them, according to my current thoughts. I
got into the magazine thing too late, really, and then was a bit
stubborn about it. If there was stuff that had been important to me
in those magazines, I'd be keeping them. They're *not* reliably
archived in mainstream sources, and the stories are often not
reprinted.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd...@dd-b.net / Ghugle: the Fannish Ghod of Queries
Book log: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/Ouroboros/booknotes/
Photos: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/
David Dyer-Bennet
> Marilee J. Layman <mjla...@erols.com> writes:
> >
> > I'm dropping my subs to Bead & Button and Beadwork, not because
> > they've cluttered, but because there's never anything new in them. I
> > figure I can glance at them at the library and get better value.
>
> CatFancy has the same problem.
>
> (The other big cat magazine, "Cats", just folded.)
>
>
> I noticed a while ago that CatFancy and Playboy have pretty much
> exactly the same layout, organization, and practical editorial policy.
> Whatever news they carry tend to be small focused clippings of other
> mainstream newssources, the most column inches of new text each time
> is interviews and fiction, otherwise the text content is recyled each
> year with a light edit, and people really buy them for the pictures
> and the centerfold.
And a number of us around here refer to Cat Fancy as "kitty porn".
Omega
<col...@lspace.org> writes
>"Dave O'Neill" <da...@atomicrazor.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I'd feel naked without books and magazines.
>
>Me too. Although I have made a start on my paperwork (old bank
>statements and the like) - I have a scanner and a cd burner...
That's on the must do list here as well. Only difference is it's to get
rid of the boxes of old newspaper cuttings (I don't trust school history
books so I'm saving science stuff for when the kids do projects,
honest).
>>
>>I even have a Sinclair User from 1983... :-)
>>
>Heh, Thanks to my husband we have _4_ BBC micros in the loft.
>I know, I know, not a patch or Jordin's garage...
>
We've got a small colony of Atari's in ours... along with an old 486 and
an Amstrad.
--
Omega
Omega
O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> writes
>In article <3C8165B5...@optonline.net>, ele...@optonline.net
>says...
>> Slow but steady, as they say....
>
>That is the trick, actually. Do a little bit every day, and the
>thing actually gets done.
>
That's what I keep telling myself. Now if only I stopped playing games,
posting to usenet, reading books etc. I might actually have time to -do-
some of the backlog of sorting out as well as keep abreast of the
current chaos.
--
Omega
Ulrika O'Brien
om...@menageri.org.uk says...
Yep. One of the things that helps is when you actually start to
*believe* that you can accomplish a lot in little chunks of time as
long as you make a habit of using those little chunks of time
*every* *day*. I'm sure that's part of what's behind one of the
central tenets of the Flylady system: "Go shine your sink." It
doesn't actually take that long to empty your kitchen sink, scrub
it, and give it a really good shine, and once you have a shiny,
empty sink, clean counters tend to follow, and all of it gives you a
sense of mighty accomplishment. If you have a clean sink every
morning, it feels like you're already ahead of the game.
Another of the big tools of the system is, "you can do anything for
fifteen minutes." This is important because it breaks down all
kinds of tasks into 15 minute chunks. If you're at all like me, you
tend to wait until [whatever job] has grown gigantic, and then try
to tackle it all at once, which generally means making an even
bigger mess as you try to sort the smaller one, and then get
distracted by ancillary, related tasks, spending three or five hours
at it, and stopping feeling exhausted with your space looking
messier than when you started. This is a sure-fire way to leave
yourself feeling like a failure, and letting the job go even longer
before you have another go at it. Breaking jobs down into tasks
that you can do for just fifteen minutes and then *stop* leaves you
feeling accomplished, and sort of amazed at how little time you
took, which encourages you to do that thing again.
Bob Webber
> vze2...@verizon.net says...
>> But we have Christmas Tree Shops in Massachusetts year 'round, and we're
>> about as blue a state as you can find! (Yes, I know you said it t'other
>> logical way around.)
> We have them in California, too, but not in the Blue parts.
> Christmas stores do not tend to show up in urbane, metropolitan
> areas, they tend to show up in the parts of the country that also
> have the Cracker Barrel demographic, not to mention the Waffle House
> demographic.
Here en Mass. we have at least one Cracker Barrel (the one I know
of is most of the way to Nude Hamster), but I don't believe we
have any Waffle Housen. But we do have Christmas Tree Shops.
Jim Toth
Avram Grumer wrote:
> In article <MPG.16eb13d8a...@news.earthlink.net>,
>> that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
>> election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
>> well to the older association of "red". The Atlantic did a piece on
>> visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
>> that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
>> time of year, if you're in Red America.
>
> What does it mean if you can find stores devoted to Halloween all year
> 'round?
That you're in Orange America, of course.
--
Jim Toth
jt...@acm.org
Mary Kay Kare
> visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
> that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
> time of year, if you're in Red America.
But I can find those in San Francisco and New York and Carmel because
I've been in them. Those are hardly Red Places.
MKK
--
"Words are the hands of the mind"
Graydon Saunders on rec. arts.sf.fandom
Ulrika O'Brien
mar...@kare.ws says...
> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > visiting Red America recently. One of the dead-on observations is
> > that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
> > time of year, if you're in Red America.
>
> But I can find those in San Francisco and New York and Carmel because
> I've been in them. Those are hardly Red Places.
One word for you: tourists.
Marilee J. Layman
<ele...@optonline.net> wrote:
>"Marilee J. Layman" wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, 2 Mar 2002 21:47:09 +0000 (UTC), Randolph Fritz
>> <rand...@panix.com> wrote:
>>
>> >In article <MPG.16eae18c2...@news.earthlink.net>,
>> > Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>> >>
>> >> I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
>> >> of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
>> >> general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
>> >> societies, or, at least, America.
>> >>
>> >
>> >Yes. I just moving my ailing mother into a new place. I found junk
>> >from before my birth. I think it's a widespread psych. problem in the
>> >USA, in elders perhaps a hangover of impoverished childhoods in the
>> >great depression. :-(
>>
>> While those of us who are military-born are known to travel light.
>> You move stuff too often, you figure you don't really need it.
>
>You'd think so, wouldn't you?
LOL Well, books have to come, of course. But I only have one trunk
of "memories" and that gets partly cleared out every now and then when
I have new things to put in.
--
Marilee J. Layman
Bali Sterling Beads at Wholesale
http://www.basicbali.com
Alison Scott
>Yes. Jordin still has papers he wrote in junior high.
I think there's a much better case for keeping genuinely personal
material of this kind, in fact. Most people don't actually accumulate
that much of it, once you've differentiated it from lecture notes,
Happy Meal toys, and helicopters made out of cereal packets.
--
Alison Scott ali...@kittywompus.com & www.kittywompus.com
The Plokta News Network -- News and Views for SF Fans
www.plokta.com/pnn
Dave Weingart
>One word for you: tourists.
In shopping malls?
--
73 de Dave Weingart KA2ESK "There were no wrecks, and nobody
mailto:phyd...@liii.com drownded. I' fact, nothing to laugh
http://www.liii.com/~phydeaux at at all!"
ICQ 57055207 -- Marriott Edgar
Ulrika O'Brien
phyd...@liii.com says...
> One day in Teletubbyland, Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> said:
> >One word for you: tourists.
>
> In shopping malls?
Depending on the mall, hell yes. Just in the area both South Coast
plaza and The Citadel draw obvious wads of tourists. And as you may
recall, the Mall of America is sort of famous for it. In case you
hadn't noticed, lots of places have started selling their local mall
as a tourist destination.
Janice Gelb
>On Sat, 2 Mar 2002 21:47:09 +0000 (UTC), Randolph Fritz
><rand...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>>In article <MPG.16eae18c2...@news.earthlink.net>,
>> Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
>>>
>>> I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
>>> of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
>>> general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
>>> societies, or, at least, America.
>>
>>Yes. I just moving my ailing mother into a new place. I found junk
>>from before my birth. I think it's a widespread psych. problem in the
>>USA, in elders perhaps a hangover of impoverished childhoods in the
>>great depression. :-(
>
>While those of us who are military-born are known to travel light.
>You move stuff too often, you figure you don't really need it.
>
I've wondered whether I just was born without the collecting
gene or whether moving every two years or so starting with
college and continuing for another 15 years had something
to do with it.
I must admit, though, that thanks to www.bookfinder.com,
I recently had to buy another 36" bookcase, thus bringing
my total to three 72" bookcases and three 36" bookcases.
*********************************************************************
Janice Gelb | Just speaking for me, not Sun.
janic...@eng.sun.com | http://www.geocities.com/Area51/8018/
"The legal system prevents us from killing each other. The
etiquette system prevents us from driving each other crazy."
-- Miss Manners
Michael Kube-McDowell
<da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com> carefully left the following
thoughtprints where they could be seen:
>Is this a fan thing? My wife is not entirely understanding about my need to
>have back issues of New Scientist to 1984 or the first edition of Omni - nor
>does she really understand hording paperbacks.
>
>All my fan friends are the same, but non-fan friends I have noticed tend to
>have a lot less in the following categories; books, magazines, fanzines,
>assorted manuscripts, games...
Ah, yes. Too many hobbies, too many projects-in-progress, too many
collections, too many interests, Too Much Stuff, Too Little Space. And
it isn't that it's all chaos and clutter--there's actually a pretty
high degree of organization. There just aren't enough rooms, closets,
garages, shelving units, bookcases, and basements to neatly distribute
it to by category.
When we moved from our townhouse to this modest three-bedroom ranch,
we shattered all the movers' records for a rental--well over 1000
book/LP-class boxes (your basic 12x12x16 U-Haul box, or letter-legal
archive). All witnesses to this two-day marathon swore that the
townhouse and its foundation rose 16 inches between start and finish.
And then there were the two 10x10x10 Lock-and-Leave storage cubes...
We did let go of a fair amount of stuff the first couple of years we
were here, but it's definitely building up on us again.
K-Mac
--
Michael Kube-McDowell, author and packrat
SF and other bad habits: http://k-mac.home.att.net
Preview VECTORS at http://www.sff.net/people/K-Mac/Vectors.htm
Michael J. Lowrey
>
> Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
> > I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
> > of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
> > general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
> > societies, or, at least, America.
>
> Yes. I just moving my ailing mother into a new place. I found junk
> from before my birth. I think it's a widespread psych. problem in the
> USA, in elders perhaps a hangover of impoverished childhoods in the
> great depression. :-(
Cicatrice and I are both the children of Depression-era
couples, so that may be part of our problem with the
non-fannish kibble. "That's too good to just throw away!"
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
hasn't had cop trouble about it lately
Michael J. Lowrey
>
> vze2...@verizon.net says...> > > For anyone who's interested, and has some tolerance for well-
> > > intentioned, Red America-flavored pollyanna Christianity seeping
> >
> > Red America? To me that means socialist or communist. From glancing at
> > the page in question, I'm guessing you mean something else. [*]
>
> Not communist, no. It is an unfortunate infelicity in the shorthand
> that emerged from the voting patterns in the last presidential
> election that the politics of "Red State" Bush voters doesn't map
> well to the older association of "red". The Atlantic did a piece on
> that you can always find whole stores devoted to Christmas, at any
> time of year, if you're in Red America.
The World Is A Very Big Place, indeed. I am totally
flabbergasted, as I had never heard or seen this usage
before, and still find the idea that it is in place out
there somehow quite surreal.
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
who never was even tempted to watch SURVIVOR, either
Michael Kube-McDowell
carefully left the following thoughtprints where they could be seen:
>I have lived here at Kipple Central for about 14 years and my
>collections are quite modest by fan standards, but they are sufficient
>to separate the mundanes from the fans. Mundanes look at my book
>collection and boggle - fans just *snif* at the small number of tomes
>I have. My zine collection, though, is about 6,000 - plus about 800
>APA mailings - and that is enough to fill about 24 file cabinet
>drawers (plus several shelves) and many boxes of unfiled material.
>Along with 3+ cases of yet-to-be-printed-upon paper. And *stuff*.
>
>Indeed, were I to be able to file all of the piles of books and zines
>in this place, my landlord would probably see all of this now unused
>flat space and raise my rent.
I think the ownership of one or more used 4-drawer file cabinets is a
useful criterion for separating Mundane from Fannish. So is knowing
where to buy archival boxes in quantity at a discount, and how to
assemble furniture-in-a-box bookcases from three different
manufacturers without so much as a glance at the instructions.
Gwen and I had three rounds of house-hunting before we finally bought
this place, going into well over a hundred houses. It was a real
education in how ordinary people live.
But I've known of this mysterious divide since childhood. My best
friend in elementary school and I grew up on a street of brick row
homes with single-car garages which shared the lowest level with a
half-basement. His garage had a push mower in one back corner, a
wicker basket holding the rest of the yard tools in the other, and two
bikes parked along the wall. That was it. His father actually parked
his car in the garage every night. I never in 18 years saw a car in my
garage--it was hard enough sometimes to find room for my hand-built
soap box racer, or my bike. There were two workbenches (Dad's and
mine), one and a half walls of 24" deep custom plywwood shelving
holding the rest of the tools, an enormous old chest of drawers which
could stand in as a third workbench if the top was ever clear, and on
and on...I wish I had a photo.
My friend's basement was equally empty--a kid's wooden table with two
chairs (where we played a lot of Risk and Stratego), and two metal
utility shelves on which the games and a few other oddments were
stacked. The rest of the cinder-block walls were -bare-. You could
walk right up to them and touch them--with your -nose-, even. You
could stand in the middle of my basement and not even be able to swear
that it -had- walls.
Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey
> I think my generation of fan learned book hoarding behavior as
> follows:
>
> 1. Discover the books with the atom|rocket sticker on the spine at
> the library.
>
> 2. Read all of them.
>
> 3. Having no more to read, start reading them again. Find you enjoy
> it.
>
> 4. Move to a different house|school and loose access to the old
> library.
>
> 5. Read the books with the atom|rocket sticker in the new library.
>
> 6. Discover with shocked horror that some of your old favorites
> aren't in the new library, and you can't go back and re-read them.
>
> From then on, you want to own copies of books.
I sometimes find myself disagreeing with David, but when he's right,
he's so very, very right.
--
Bill Higgins | On bibliophiles who open bookstores:
Fermilab | "Sadly, some of them do not seem to understand
Internet: | that the process of running a bookstore
hig...@fnal.gov | involves selling your books to other people,
| never to see them again."
| --Michael J. Lowrey (oran...@uwm.edu)
Omega
Kube-McDowell <K-...@sff.net.nospam> writes
>
>When we moved from our townhouse to this modest three-bedroom ranch,
>we shattered all the movers' records for a rental--well over 1000
>book/LP-class boxes (your basic 12x12x16 U-Haul box, or letter-legal
>archive). All witnesses to this two-day marathon swore that the
>townhouse and its foundation rose 16 inches between start and finish.
>
back bedroom is currently used to store the zines and comics, problem
with this is that there is no supporting wall on the ground floor under
where the bedroom wall is, it just sits on the joists, and both the
bedroom and adjacent bathroom doors are starting to stick... I think
I'd better move the stuff into our bedroom, which has the main centre
wall for the house in it, and put the book shelves on the party wall
between us and next door in the spare room. I can't just shift the
shelving with the boxes on it round in the spare room because we
wouldn't be able to fit the double bed, the desk and the filing cabinet
in there then. Well we probably could but it would be nowhere near as
usable.
--
Omega
Margaret Young
<K-...@sff.net.nospam> wrote:
>
>Gwen and I had three rounds of house-hunting before we finally bought
>this place, going into well over a hundred houses. It was a real
>education in how ordinary people live.
>
I know when I was house hunting I was continuously amazed at the
number of people who apparently owned fewer than 30 books (if
that).
We think we may have to get the floors of our house reinforced.
It wasn't designed to have that many books in ALL the rooms.
--
Margaret Young
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Come the apocalypse there will be cockroaches, Keith Richards and the
faint smell of cat pee.
-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
Check out our new Unlimited Server. No Download or Time Limits!
-----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 19 Different Servers! ==-----
Jordin Kare
> Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix1.netaxs.com> wrote:
> > In article <slrna82i31....@panix2.panix.com>,
> > Randolph Fritz <rand...@panix.com> wrote:
> >>In article <MPG.16eae18c2...@news.earthlink.net>,
> >> Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I think you've put your finger on it: accumulating certain *kinds*
> >>> of crap is a fannish thing. The mere accumulation of crap in
> >>> general is a widespread societal malaise throughout wealthier
> >>> societies, or, at least, America.
> >>
> >>Yes. I just moving my ailing mother into a new place. I found junk
> >>from before my birth. I think it's a widespread psych. problem in the
> >>USA, in elders perhaps a hangover of impoverished childhoods in the
> >>great depression. :-(
> >>
> > That might be part of it, but I think it's also a side effect of
> > increased wealth.
>
> > This is the first time in human history that it's easy for people who
> > aren't especially well off to accumulate more than they can use, keep
> > track of, or maintain, and I don't think custom has had time to
> > catch up with the change in circumstances.
>
> I don't entirely disagree with you, but I think that "less well off"
> people have been able to reach this state for some time now. Most
> of them probably had one or more compensating special circumstances,
> like living on a farm or large property, near a center for the
> trade in used books, or through employment in the process by
> which a university discarded superseded items. (Scary thought:
> Jordin's garage replaced with Jordin's barn.)
When I got tossed out of my San Leandro apartment (2 BR + den + storage
room) because the building owner wanted to move in, I couldn't find
anything to rent with as much space at a comparable price, and I
considered getting a permanent "storage space" and moving into a smaller
apartment. I actually found an ideal location: a 1300 square foot loft
over a printing plant, renting for a ridiculous (for the Bay Area)
amount, something like $350/month -- mostly because there was no
elevator; anything you couldn't carry upstairs had to be moved by
forklift.
I was seriously tempted -- and then I realized that if I actually leased
any such space, I'd *never* be able to move out of it.
(I have rented small -- 10 x 10 foot -- self-storage spaces several
times, when the garage overflowed after an auction, but mostly managed
to clean them back out again. Having to write a check to the storage
company every month is a powerful encouragement to get rid of stuff....)
>
> Or maybe it's just that some day I'll get interested in
> improving the efficiency and specificity of uranyl sulfate extraction
> from leachant with reciprocating flow ion exchange columns. Yeah,
> that's the ticket...
When we were in Hay on Wye last summer, I did buy a few technical
volumes that actually looked useful to me -- things like "Handbook of
Refractory Metals" -- and someone else at Jo's wedding, looking at my
prizes, said "I always *wondered* who bought that stuff...."
Jordin
Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey
> In article <Pine.SGI.4.31.0203021726060.2953821-
> 100...@fsgi01.fnal.gov>, hig...@fnal.gov says...
> > On Sat, 2 Mar 2002, Ulrika O'Brien wrote:
> > >
> > > Indeed. I think it was the New Yorker (though possibly it was The
> > > Atlantic) that recently did a piece on the booming business in home
> > > organizing consultants and such, because Americans don't know how to
> > > keep out from under their own clutter.
> >
> > Did you save the magazine?
>
> Heh. It's the latest issue, so Hal took it with him back to
> Seattle, but I expect he'll pitch it there once he's done.
>
> As it turns out, I know the article is available online, which turns
> out to be the wonderful reason to pitch all sorts of things we used
> to save. If we really want them we can find them on the web.
This wasn't much to go on, but I think I found it:
<http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/03/flanagan.htm>
It's Caitlin Flanagan's rundown of books on decluttering, and the emotions
they arouse.
(Will resist the urge to make a paper copy.)
--
Bill Higgins | "Remember, more computing power
Fermilab | was thrown away last week
Internet: | than existed in the world
hig...@fnal.gov | in 1980."
| --Thomas Womack <t...@womack.net>
Michael J. Lowrey
>
> phyd...@liii.com says...
> > One day in Teletubbyland, Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> said:
> > >One word for you: tourists.
> >
> > In shopping malls?
>
> Depending on the mall, hell yes. Just in the area both South Coast
> plaza and The Citadel draw obvious wads of tourists. And as you may
> recall, the Mall of America is sort of famous for it. In case you
> hadn't noticed, lots of places have started selling their local mall
> as a tourist destination.
I learned recently that there are German tour groups that
come to Milwaukee (during the festival season) on cruise
ships through the Great Lakes ; and that the organizers have
learned to allow a full day or two for shopping the malls of
Milwaukee and suburbs.
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
welcomes the tourist euro to Milwaukee
Janice Gelb
>
>I know when I was house hunting I was continuously amazed at the
>number of people who apparently owned fewer than 30 books (if
>that).
>
When I moved a few years ago, I owned three 72" bookcases.
This barely qualifies me as literate among the fans I know.
When the moving service came to pack me and I went to check
on the guy packing the books, he said, "Jeez, you have enough
books to start a library"!
Bernard Peek
O'Neill <da...@NOSPAMatomicrazor.com> writes
>I've just moved house for the, ummm, 9th time in 5 years - this last time
>back from the US to the UK and finally into a place (albeit rented) that we
>can call out own.
>
>All of our "stuff" has been in storage for the last 9 months while we were
>out of the country and I've just finished unpacking and sorting.
>
>I've done 3 trips to the dump, that's full car loads and a car load to the
>local charity shop and, looking around me, I can't see much of a difference.
>I even threw out some books (not sure why I had Book 3 of Battletech
>anyway) - but it strikes me as slightly insane.
I probably have that dubious delight ahead of me. It does seem to be a
fan thing. I was forced to watch the first TV programme in the new Life
Laundry serious. It was a painful experience watching someone's life
being flayed away.
--
Bernard Peek
b...@shrdlu.com
In search of cognoscenti
James Nicoll
David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
snip
>
>I think my generation of fan learned book hoarding behavior as
>follows:
>
>1. Discover the books with the atom|rocket sticker on the spine at
> the library.
>
>2. Read all of them.
>
>3. Having no more to read, start reading them again. Find you enjoy
> it.
>
>4. Move to a different house|school and loose access to the old
> library.
>
>5. Read the books with the atom|rocket sticker in the new library.
>
>6. Discover with shocked horror that some of your old favorites
> aren't in the new library, and you can't go back and re-read them.
>
>From then on, you want to own copies of books.
And then in the 1990s one discovers that a huge amount of
what was comfort reading is irreplacable if sold, being too old
fashioned to be reprinted and disappearing when it hits the used
shelves, leading to more obsessive hording, plus the discovery that
many new books are only on the shelves for a month before disappearing
for*ever* leads to the 1000+ book To Be Read pile.
--
"I think you mean 'Could libertarian slave-owning Confederates, led by
SHWIers, have pulled off a transatlantic invasion of Britain, in revenge
for the War of 1812, if they had nukes acquired from the Sea of Time?'"
Alison Brooks
David G. Bell
<e1p68u02p8aq88cib...@4ax.com> m...@example.com
"Margaret" wrote:
> Colette Reap <col...@lspace.org> wrote:
>
> > Heh, Thanks to my husband we have _4_ BBC micros in the loft.
> > I know, I know, not a patch or Jordin's garage...
>
> Four is impressive, Colette! I've only one. How'd
> he manage to get four of them? They're sturdy wee
> buggers.
>
> And do you have the dual floppy-drive pack, the Z80
> coprocessor, or one of those monster (5MB!!) hard
> drives?
While I still have my TRS-80. I maybe ought to see if it still works,
and try to load some of the stuff I wrote on the machine, and get it
printed out.
No disk drives for that, but I did spend fifty quid on a little 32
kilobyte RAM package which, with a little soldering, gave me an enormous
48 kilobytes of RAM to play with. I used to take a half-dozen lines of
interpreted BASIC and replace it with little chunks of machine code.
The power you can get for the same price is pretty mind-blowing.
--
David G. Bell -- Farmer, SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
Mr. Punch's Advice to a Young Man About to Become a Farmer:
"Marry, instead."
Alan Woodford
wrote:
>On Mon, 04 Mar 2002 18:09:47 GMT, Michael Kube-McDowell
><K-...@sff.net.nospam> wrote:
>
>>
>>Gwen and I had three rounds of house-hunting before we finally bought
>>this place, going into well over a hundred houses. It was a real
>>education in how ordinary people live.
>>
>
>I know when I was house hunting I was continuously amazed at the
>number of people who apparently owned fewer than 30 books (if
>that).
>
>We think we may have to get the floors of our house reinforced.
>It wasn't designed to have that many books in ALL the rooms.
>
>
When we were trying to sell our old place, and still living in it,
people would ask, "have you read all those books?" or "have you
watched all those videos".
In the end, we sold the place to my Mum & Dad, so there are at least a
reasonable number of books, and piles of weird techno-junk. (My Mum
recently got her degree in local history from the Open University, and
my Dad's a Radio Ham!)
The new place is almost big enough; we can put up two couples in real
beds now, and plenty more if thy are willing to share floors. When we
moved in, the neighbours couldn't see why we needed a 4/5 bedroom
place for a couple with no kids!
Books, films and room for good company, what more could a fan want
from a house :-)
Alan Woodford
Men in Frocks, protecting the Earth with mystical flummery!