Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 15

According to official Army reports, Army suicides have taken a big leap over 2010 and 2011 reports. Army deaths from suicide are said now to be running more than 50% higher than those from combat. I think (this is now Fred talking, not some credentialed person) this might have something to do with what psychologists [...]

  Listen, guys. I wasn’t just making conversation when I said I wished I could be at the Worldcon this year. I really do like cons, and I’ve been thinking. There’s going to be a Windycon in November. That’s only a couple months away, and at Windycon, I wouldn’t have to face quite as many [...]

The “maybe” is because some doubt has been expressed. Having heard of what we New York fans did by taking the train to Philadelphia, some British fans promptly organized a gathering in Leeds a few months later. This causes some confusion as to which con deserves to be termed “the first.” Some blog readers have [...]

  To All My Friends at Chicon 7 The 2012 Worldcon I’ve been hoping till the last minute that I could join you, but now it’s definite that that isn’t going to happen. You see, I suffer from a serious and incurable condition. (The medical term for it is “Being 92¾ years old.”) So my [...]

After the Harrison family settled in, just outside of Dublin, I feared we would lose touch with them again. That didn’t happen. Those were the years when the airlines were cutting their prices and increasing their amenities every week or so; world travel became easier for many of us, and tempting science-fiction cons and other [...]

Harry Harrison was a good friend for over sixty years, a fact I’m sure of because I remember when we met. It was way back in the 1950s, when my then wife and I lived in a huge basement apartment in the East Village. We made the best use of it, too, hosting pretty large [...]

That’s the headline we should have run days ago. I started to write something at the time, but it kept getting longer and longer and isn’t finished yet. I hope to post it tomorrow Meanwhile, the New York Times published an even longer obit. (It looks like it began on Page 1, although when you [...]

France doesn’t have a Madison Avenue, but it sure has some enterprising Mad Ave type advertising people. At last year’s Cannes Lions advertising festival, some of them were unwilling to wait until consumers could read and write — or even walk on two feet — to start inducting them into their duties to Consume. So [...]

  “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.” —St. Augustine

Well, it isn’t completely solved, but the number of arrests at the border for illegal crossings is down to its lowest level since — wait for it! — 1972. In fact, undocumented aliens, Mexican and others, are so scarce today that the old-time swarms of fruit and vegetable pickers are hard to find, and many [...]