Ho Hum

[howeird]

All the UPS stores are closed Sundays here. Luckily an Office Depot near Southcenter was open for UPS shipping, so I dropped the box off there.  Meanwhile I wasted about 1.5 hours searching for an open UPS store.  Got a massage at a place I had not been to in eons. Prices have gone up, so no longer worth full price, but it wasn't a rip-off.

Took the great circle route up 405 across 520 to the Seattle Center, had late lunch at the restaurant in the Experience Music Project building. Nice place, good food, but twice as expensive as it needed to be. Wanted to have a corn dog at the Fun Forest, but the corn dog stand has been replaced by a souvenir stand. Boo hiss. Second choice was the food court inside Center House, but there was a middle school karaoke contest going on onstage, and it hurt soooooooo much. I have performed with many children who can carry a tune, maintain the rhythm and make pretty music, so it annoys the crap out of me when I hear children on stage in a public place who cannot. Three in a row is just wrong of them.

Went to the science fiction museum/hall of fame, which does not quite deserve either name. It's a room the size of a corporate boardroom, lined with glassed-in displays on two sides and a time line mural on the third side (4th side is the entrance). In the middle is a globe about 4 feet radius which is a projector and changes between being the earth, Jupiter, and a sci-fi movie collage. They also have a case containing some models from Lost in Space. The displays are museum-quality, but there isn't much there. A  couple of tunics worn during Star Trek, a model of the Enterprise signed by Nimoy & Takei, a chunk of the control panel self-destruct module. There's a section on pulp fiction with a few old pulps, and a section on women in sci-fi featuring quotes fromn and about Ursula LeGuinn and James Tiptree, Jr. who was really a woman named Alice  (I did not know that). Almost 1/4 was devoted to fandom, with fanzines and con programs, and one case is filled with a selection of awards, including a 1953 Hugo (much smaller than the current ones) and from big names like Sturgeon and Anderson.

Entry fee is $15, which includes the Experience Music Project in the other 3/4 of the building, but frankly I don't like the music it's dedicated to (Hendrix, who was a Seattle native) so I skipped that.

It was raining when I came out, so  I went to Plan B and drove to the Seatac area and parked in the first Starbucks I found. 10 years ago pln B would have been to visit one of the strip joints near the airport, but there are none left worth going to. Deja Vu is still there but they think strobe lights are the best stage lighting, and that drove away most of the customers (including me).

I'll hang around here for another hour then return the car and hike to the Alaska gate to wait for my flight.

Comments

[iamradar.livejournal.com]

Hearing about the SF Museum is distressing...I was there when it first opened and it was much better. I guess they decided that it wasn't worth the effort on keeping more stuff around or something. :(

[howeird]

There is obviously a second floor, but it is roped off and there are no signs that anything is being made ready for viewing up there.

I know some of the history, a friend of mine works at Paul Allen's foundation, and the sci-fi wing was an afterthought. The whole building was meant to be a tribute to Jimi Hendrix and music of the 60's, but somewhere along the way Allen acquired some Trek memorabilia and wanted to show it off. That, and the fact that although from the air the building looks like a giant electric guitar, from the ground it looks like a UFO accident.