… made its debut at Readercon! Because I was right, that Marriott was freezing.

Here are pictures:

(photo credit: Katherine Meusey)

I got a ton of compliments on it! Here is a little backstory for those who missed the saga. And if you would like to have a Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan of your very own …

Is online here. I loved the first question–I believe this is the youngest person who’s ever written to me. And no, I don’t know if the child is a boy or a girl.

And the winner is …

BobP for

Bette Davis
Intrigued us with that look she gave us
Angelically pledged to speak “good” of the dead
So when Joan Crawford died, “Good!” she said.

Congratulations, BobP! If you’ll e-mail me your address, I’ll send you your signed copy of Miss Conduct’s Mind over Manners.

Thanks to all who entered and voted!

The voting hours for the clerihew contest have been extended to midnight tonight. Right now it’s a neck-and-neck race between Bette Davis and John Wayne? Who will win? Hang tight and find out!

In the meantime, some amusing press coverage of my reading in Kansas City.

And if you still haven’t had enough clerihews–for today itself is clerihew day, you know–check out this batch of Sarah Palin clerihews, and enter your own if you’re so inclined.

In advance of my Kansas City reading tonight, I got some good publicity–a bit on the Fox WDAF morning show here, and a radio interview on the legendary Walt Bodine Show on KCUR, the local NPR affiliate. I used to be a theater publicist in KC, so it was great fun to go on the shows that I used to book people on myself!

On Facebook, you can “like” someone’s updates by clicking on a little thumbs-up button. You can’t “dislike” an update, though, and of course there’s a fan group advocating for a dislike button.

FB users, what you do think?

Personally, I’m agin’ it.

Granted, the “like” button doesn’t have all the subtlety one might wish. What is it, exactly, that is being “liked”? The style or the substance of the update? I have sometimes “liked” updates by friends who were complaining about some minor calamity or other. I hope they realized I didn’t actually like the fact that they had a fender-bender or a sinus infection, but rather admired the outraged wit with which they conveyed this news.

So “dislike” might be good in order to respond to bad-news updates. (MINOR bad-news updates, that is: a Facebook thumbs-down would be an appropriate response to having to work over the weekend, not to the death of a parent.) I also know some people who like to post really bad puns and Borscht-Belt quality jokes sometimes, for whom a “dislike” button would be appropriate. Then again, that’s such a pathetic form of heckling I would be revealing myself to be no better a heckler than they are comics.

But aside from those situations, it seems that an FB “dislike” button would add to the aggressiveness and polarization that the internet already facilitates far too well. I only have about 150 FB friends, but they span the political range from followers of Lenin to followers of Limbaugh. Partially because of this, I don’t often post updates on political matters beyond the occasional fangirl squee about some outfit of Mrs. Obama, or my happiness that another state has legalized gay marriage.

In general, political or not, I have a policy that if you don’t agree with one of my updates, e-mail or message me, don’t disagree in a comment. I don’t think Facebook is a good place for complex philosophical discussion, and I don’t want any of my FB friends–who, of course, mostly don’t know each other–to hurt the feelings of any other friend, deliberately or accidentally. If you believe homosexuality is immoral, I’ll discuss that with you. But not on my online living room, in front of all my gay friends. That’s just rude. (Obviously there is a place for arguing and even trash-talking on FB, but that’s in the realm of sports rivalries, pop-culture debates, private jokes, and the like. Not serious stuff.)

I’ve had to delete the occasional comment and explain that policy to friends on occasion, and generally folks have been very cool with it and get that I’m not shutting them down, I’m just asking them to take the conversation elsewhere. But I think a “dislike” option would just be … too tempting. And you probably wouldn’t be able to delete it if someone “disliked” your post either, the way you can a rude comment.

So that’s why I’m against it, which, as you can see, stems from my experience in trying to maintain an interesting and useful Facebook life in which the diversity of my network is a feature, not a bug.

What’s your take?

Guess where I’ll be this weekend? Readercon!

You either know what that is and are thinking that I am even cooler than you had suspected, or you don’t know what it is and that vague feeling of pity you’ve been having for me lately is growing.

No worries. Readercon is a science fiction convention here in the greater Boston area–Burlington, to be exact. From the website:

Readercon is, depending on your point of view, either an annual literary conference (except it’s infinitely more fun than that) or an annual science fiction convention (except we’ve stripped away virtually everything except talking about and buying books).

I think this sounds absolutely terrific, and not just because 1) I look like Spock and 2) SF fans are unlikely to judge the Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan. (Of course I’ll need it. The convention’s at the Burlington Marriott. Have you ever been to a summertime convention at a Marriott that wasn’t freezing?) But also because the program sounds fascinating. Check out this talk, for example:

Minds differ, and nothing reflects those differences more directly than the use of language. When a story’s first-person narrator has a mind significantly outside the norm, their altered diction provides a (sometimes purposefully cloudy) window into their altered thought processes. What are the protocols and challenges of reading a text where the narrator is autistic (Peter Watts’s Blindsight or Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark), insane (Bester’s “Fondly Fahrenheit”), mentally slow (Flowers for Algernon), impossibly brilliant (Camp Concentration), or unclassifiably damaged (Liz Hand’s Winterlong)? How do we infer the mental states from the altered and often unfamiliar diction? And what does that tell us about the relationship of mind to language?

Or this one:

Is Darwinism Too Good For SF? This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

This is exactly the kind of thing my friends and I like to talk about!

And, well (blush), I’m doing panels too! One on my PhD research, which was on the psychology of storytelling:

Narrative Psychology and Science Fiction If a character gets shot, it’s a mystery story. If a character gets shot with a phaser, it’s science fiction. But are there elements to science fiction that go deeper than the surface tropes? Psychologist and writer Robin Abrahams discusses what cognitive psychology and her own research say about mental models of literary genres — including science fiction, fantasy, and horror — and what personality factors correlate with a liking of different kinds of stories.

… and one based on Mind Over Manners:

IDIC for the Pre-Federation World: Coping with Diversity (Robin Abrahams). The Vulcans allegedly had a slogan “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations,” which is pretty big talk for an entire race of people who all have the same haircut. In the 21st century, however, diversity is increasing — and increasingly hard to deal with. Robin Abrahams, writer of the Globe’s “Miss Conduct” social advice column and the new book Miss Conduct’s Mind Over Manners, discusses diversity of values, priorities, and experiences. Can we really say that nothing human is alien to us? How do we cope with the “other”? And how can we use science fiction to help us address contemporary social dilemmas?

If you like to read science fiction too, I hope to see you there!

You people OUTDID YOURSELVES! Our selection committee found it very difficult to stick to only five clerihews, and had to nominate six finalists instead. Here they are, for your voting acumen.

Voting will be open until noon (Eastern time) on Friday, July 10.

Bette Davis
Intrigued us with that look she gave us
Angelically pledged to speak “good” of the dead
So when Joan Crawford died, “Good!” she said.
by BobP

When it comes to chortling loudly at the boss’s jokes, nobody can
like Ed McMahon
He knew his earthly race was run
when he got an envelope that said, YOU MAY ALREADY BE DONE
by DMajor

John Wayne
Got shot in movies and barely felt pain
In Iraq I am miserable just from being hot
Those movie soldiers are a tougher lot.
by Neil Gussman

Steven Jobs
Charon stow thy oar, keep cast thy anchor, not yet are we given over to sobs
A few months off, a brand new liver, our man Steve is getting well
And thankfully so, as unlike you, he keeps us away from the “Gates” of Hell
by VickiB

Ogden Nash
Got some measure of fame and some measure of cash
By proving that there was a market for poetry that contained absurdity,
And that people didn’t even mind if you invented the occasional wordity.
by Seth

Marilyn Manson
Will someday headline a theater in Branson.
Every show will be a shocker
As he mumbles the lyrics and struts with his walker.
by Billiamo

 Loading ...

By Any Good Books/Mixed Reviews, here. This reviewer looks at some interesting stuff–I think I’ll be adding her to my blog feed!

Happy Fourth, everyone. I’ll be in Springfield, Missouri, for Independence Day, celebrating with my mother and cousins. Monday I’ll drive with the ConductMom to Kansas City where I’ll be getting to see some old friends, and also do a book reading (Rainy Day Books on July 8 at 7pm). So posting may be slow next week, though I hope to have some good pictures to show you when I return.

This will be a trip to remember, I think. I haven’t been back to KC for 10 years or so. Some things I plan to do in on the trip:

1. Learn to shoot! One of my cousins has promised to teach me how to fire a gun, which I’ve been wanting to learn to do for years. I suspect the rest of my red-state cousins are getting no end of amusement out of this request of mine.
2. Give a reading at the same bookstore my mother and I used to go to on Saturday afternoons. Some serious home-town-girl-makes-good action going on there!
3. Be a guest on the same radio talk show I used to book actors on when I was a theater publicist.
4. See my high-school librarian, and probably several other high-school teachers.
5. Reunite with two friends whom I haven’t seen in 15+ years in one case and 20+ in the other (thank you, Facebook!)

So it should be an amazing blast through my present, past, and future!

If you haven’t been keeping up with the Miss Conduct blog, you might want to check out this question, the excellent (and fairly short) comment thread that ensued, and my responses (I & II). We dug into that “rude v. hurtful” distinction in some interesting ways.

Have a happy Fourth!

A post on Salon’s Broadsheet that brings together several themes we’ve been talking about of late: Facebook, narcissism, parents v. nonparents (this came up on Wednesday’s chat a bit):

What happens when the Mommy Wars and online oversharing collide? Well, if STFU, Parents is any indication, the answer involves a seemingly endless supply of Facebook status updates involving bodily fluids. The blog chronicles some of parents’ (and mostly mothers’) most disgusting and narcissistic posts.

…

Unsurprisingly, STFU, Parents has already awakened the ire of moms and dads who don’t see the humor in the site. “You know what?” writes a woman named Miriam in an e-mail posted on the blog. “If people don’t like parenting updates on facebook, they should unfriend that person and get the fuck over it.” She goes on to call the anonymous blogger a “bigot” and wonders whether “STFU blacks” and “STFU gays” are on the way.

I’m not sure that accusations of anti-parent bias address the real problem. More to the point, good luck trying to explain to your college-aged daughter why she shouldn’t post pictures of herself vomiting on Facebook when you already did, sixteen years ago.

Today’s hourly forecast from Intellicast.com:

Really, Dr. Oz? I can look and feel like a teenager again for free?

For free? Honey, not for a million bucks.

Surely you’ve encountered “chuggers”–the British term for those young people employed to accost you on the street and ask for donations or signatures for a worthy cause. (Charity + muggers = “chuggers.” I do love the Brits.)

Slate’s Sandy Stonesifer sorts out the ethical and etiquette dilemmas these folks pose. Good read. (Amusingly, the person who wrote her about this is from Boston. I wonder which group of activists she encounters most often? I run into them in Harvard Square, of course, and at Porter outside my gym. Et vous, if you’re local?)

I plan to do it today. We’ll see if technology will foil me yet again. If not, you can click on this link to join in from noon-1 (come on in! the water’s fine!) or to read the transcript afterward.

UPDATE: Whoops! Link fixed.