Waaah! Wanna be at Arisia!

So Arisia is this weekend...and even if I could afford the plane fare, hotel room cost, membership etc., I definitely do not need to be missing any more work time from my still-brand-new job (and concomitantly losing the pay from the missed time). My Songbird and I used to go just about every year since we've been together, even after moving to Atlanta. And yeah, I know, it's just a week after GAFilk and all the rest of it...and none of it helps. (And watching Boston Legal three nights ago so did not help.)

Anyone else suffering from the frustration of fannish envy and loneliness this weekend?

†Dang you, technoshaman, you got me to download the silly thing and now I can't stop listening...

In Memoriam: Robert James Fischer, 1943-2008

He came to loathe the country of his birth and publicly said he wanted to see it wiped out...and ended up dying far from its shores. He was given, in later years, to brazen anti-Semitic rants. And he may never have recovered psychologically from the fall he took from the heights of global celebrity, becoming too famous and popular too young.

But for a while, many years ago as an earnest young teenager, he was an American hero and an international chess legend. And he was the inspiration for a musical stage play and a film about a younger champion coming up as the world searched for the next one like him.

Yesterday Bobby Fischer passed away at 64 in his chosen home of Reykjavik, Iceland from what at least one source reports as kidney failure. His 1972 defeat of the now-defunct Soviet Union's then-reigning world champion, Boris Spassky, was and remains the stuff of which great sports moments are made.