Bill Roper's Journal

So I have been poking around the Filker website, because I wanted to upload the two new songs. Both of them are now up there. And after discussing it with Gretchen, I have now transposed "The Time Travel Cafe" from the key of C to the key of G, which moves it into a more comfortable section of my range. I love it when a conservative transposition works properly.

While poking around the website, I discovered that the alphabetical song list had two links to "The Candy Tree" and none to "Challenge". That is now fixed. I must have messed it up when editing the list at some point.

More disturbingly, I have discovered that "Time After Time", which I wrote in 2015 and have been carrying around in my songbook all of this time, was missing the last line of the second verse. This was true of the original WordPerfect document that I printed for my old paper songbook. It was also true of both the HTML and PDF versions posted on the website. I understand how I might have missed this on the website. The fact that I've been *singing* the song for years from that paper lyric sheet and hadn't noticed perplexes me.

It's a mystery.

I have been going to science fiction conventions since 1976 and have seen a lot of people do a lot of stupid things. But I'm pretty convinced that the stupidest of all of these happened at a long-ago Windycon at the Hyatt Regency Woodfield.

I was in the huge elevator lobby on the third floor when the doors to one of the elevators opened. But the elevator had not quite arrived at the floor yet. That was bad. But the elevator did not stop, instead continuing to slide past the floor, which was somewhat worse.

But the worst thing of all was that some of the fans in the elevator decided to dive out of the elevator as it was sliding past the floor. Happily, no one was injured, but if they'd mistimed their leap or not jumped as far as they had hoped, they could have ended up leaving part of their body in the malfunctioning elevator and the rest of it out on the third floor.

Ick.

I suppose that jumping out looked like a good idea, but I can't imagine why.