My goodness, I'm bushed.
A very long work week. And what is our reward? Well, a day trip to the cottage on Saturday to shut the place down for the Winter. We may elect to stay over night, but then again, we may decide to come back tomorrow night. Depends.
After work this evening we decided to have some fun, so we went to the Casino for the buffet dinner. It was pretty good. The salmon was much better than we expected it to be. The carvery beef was delicious. The mussels tasted like more. The chicken in gravy was to die for. Only the bread pudding was disappointing. We later learned that the man who had made bread pudding as part of his job for 30 years, retired recently. The people who picked up the mantle have, well, a bit of room for improvement.
We waddled out of there and played the slots for a few minutes. I had a five dollar bill in my pocket, and that is exactly how much I gambled with. When it was gone, I stopped playing. Patricia wanted to play a second five dollar bill, but the machine would not accept it. So, we validated our parking and left.
We went to the Chapter's in Bayer's Lake to look around. I bought the current issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. I used to have a lot of back issues of "IASFM" but gave nearly all of them away a couple of years ago, even the early ones edited by George Scithers, which may have been a mistake. I got the one tonight because it was the 40th anniversary issue. 40 years. I remember reading ads for the magazine's first issue when I was a much, much younger Bevboy.
I adored Asimov's writing back in the day, even the stuff that should have made me wince. In light of the recent news about Louis C.K., Charlie Sheen, Kevin Spacey, and all the others, people writing about their boorish behavior 30+ years ago should have made me take notice, but usually didn't.
Asimov, revered as a science fiction icon, and who died in 1992, also wrote quite a few mystery stories, of the puzzle variety. Someone would die, or have something stolen, and some smart arse character Asimov had created would solve the crime and make us feel stupid for not having figured it out ourselves.
He was revered, but in recent years, there have been persistent stories of his behaviour toward women, pinching bottoms, groping, that sort of thing. He would also admit to some of that crap in his writings. "I dropped off the latest Black Widower short story to the EQMM offices and chased [editor] Eleanor Sullivan around the desk", was something he wrote about with no trace of shame or guilt. The tone was jaunty if anything.
Other writers have done some things they shouldn't have. I am still not sure if the time writer Harlan Ellison groped writer Connie Willis' breast at a science fiction convention was his idea of schtick, or what it was, but Willis didn't like it very much at all. Her latest novella is in the issue of IASFM that I bought this evening, by the way.
There are so many more examples, most of which I don't know about, and will serve as a surprise if and when they do.
I also know of some things that have happened in government over the years that should not have happened, like the time a woman was informed by a male manager that her maternity leave had been "excessive", despite the complications associated with her pregnancy; or the time another woman suffering from severe migraines was reprimanded for taking too much sick time. These things both happened years ago, but those managers would likely be embarrassed if word got out about what they said back then, today. They could not get away with that stuff today.
(No. I'm not giving out names. My sources are second and third hand at best. I have no proof.)
We live in interesting times, don't we?
Time for bed. Bevboy seepy.
See you tomorrow, or Sunday.
Bevboy
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