Looking for what you're not going to see
Oct. 29th, 2006 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerI went to Mike Ford's memorial service on Friday, followed by the wake. (For the non-SF-geek crowd: Mike Ford is John M. Ford, author of many, many books including the weirdest Star Trek novel ever published with actual permission. It's possible there's fanfic out there that's weirder than How Much for Just the Planet, but I doubt there's any that's as weird, complicated, and funny all at the same time.)
During the eulogies, people told hilarious stories about Mike -- wonderful stories. Apparently while half-asleep in the back seat of a car late one night, he overheard someone say that "polish" is the only word in the English language that changes its pronunciation if you capitalize it, and instantly piped up with, "tangier." Also, apparently Neil Gaiman is a character in How Much for Just the Planet, because when he met Mike for the first time, Mike told him that he was in the middle of writing a Star Trek novel with Gilbert and Sullivan music in it and Neil said, "That sounds fun! Will you put me in it?" And Mike wrote the brilliant sonnet "Against Entropy" in response to a blog entry by Patrick Nielsen Hayden in which Patrick finished by saying, "If I were a better writer I’d conclude by yoking the trivial to the tragic, relating the twin inevitabilities of death and database error by means of a rhetorical figure involving worms." "Against Entropy" was the first comment to this entry, and it's an amazing sonnet.
The wake was held at the Radisson (okay, technically now it's the Sheraton -- the Minicon hotel). There were a lot of people I knew at the wake. At one point I saw someone familiar and turned to see who it was. When I looked at him straight on I realized it wasn't anyone I knew, and I realized a moment later that the familiar person I had turned expecting to see was Mike.
During the eulogies, people told hilarious stories about Mike -- wonderful stories. Apparently while half-asleep in the back seat of a car late one night, he overheard someone say that "polish" is the only word in the English language that changes its pronunciation if you capitalize it, and instantly piped up with, "tangier." Also, apparently Neil Gaiman is a character in How Much for Just the Planet, because when he met Mike for the first time, Mike told him that he was in the middle of writing a Star Trek novel with Gilbert and Sullivan music in it and Neil said, "That sounds fun! Will you put me in it?" And Mike wrote the brilliant sonnet "Against Entropy" in response to a blog entry by Patrick Nielsen Hayden in which Patrick finished by saying, "If I were a better writer I’d conclude by yoking the trivial to the tragic, relating the twin inevitabilities of death and database error by means of a rhetorical figure involving worms." "Against Entropy" was the first comment to this entry, and it's an amazing sonnet.
The wake was held at the Radisson (okay, technically now it's the Sheraton -- the Minicon hotel). There were a lot of people I knew at the wake. At one point I saw someone familiar and turned to see who it was. When I looked at him straight on I realized it wasn't anyone I knew, and I realized a moment later that the familiar person I had turned expecting to see was Mike.
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Date: 2006-10-30 01:00 pm (UTC)