Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction editor Gordon Val Gelder writes:

"I just got a box of fifty advance copies of the July 2006 F&SF sitting here.

I'm looking to give away these copies to the first fifty people who ask for one.

The catch is this: if you want one of the copies, you'll have to blog about the issue. Your blog can say anything, even 'I'm only writing this blog entry about F&SF because I said I would to get a free copy of this magazine.'

I'm particularly interested in getting younger readers to blog, so if you're a parent of a teen, ask him/her if they want a copy.

This promotion isn't limited to young readers, though. If you're 112 and you blog, you're welcome to a copy also.

Just contact us at Fandsf - at sign - aol dot com. "

In a sneaky two-for-one post, I'm hereby blogging my desire for a free copy as well as letting people know, should they be interested in doing the same. Yes, Mr. Van Gelder, to make it explicit, I'd like a copy of your excellent magazine. Being, however, a horrible cheapskate, I do not want to pay you any money for it.

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In other news, computers suck. I've been substitute-teaching through the Capital Area Substitute System out of the Ingham Intermediate School District. They had me assigned to teach out in Waverly today (which I did). The assignment was supposed to end at 12 noon exactly. On my way back to East Lansing (a good 20 minute drive in itself) I made a couple stops, so I could fax an apartment application for the fall to a landlord in Miami. Still, despite these extra-cirriculars, I'm back well before 1 in the afternoon, at which point I find not one, not two, three or four, but *five* answering machine messages from CASS's automated robot voice asking me to punch in my identification number so I can receive a job offer.

So, upon getting these, I immediately call the system...and, naturally, whatever the job was has disappeared, so I get a little "no more job information available" robot-voice-message.

See, computerized systems like this all secretly work on the assumption that personalized technology allowing instantaneous teleportation from one location to another is not only possible but widely available even to the poorest among us. For evidence that this folk belief is widepread among these primitive AI systems, and not just the automated substitute-teaching variety, I refer you to the example of on-line college course scheduling programs. If you register for two classes, and Class A ends at 12:30 and Class B begins at 12:29, then naturally the computer won't let you register for both of them, since there's a time conflict. If, on the other hand, Class A ends at 12:29 and Class B begins at 12:30 on the other side of campus, the computer will allow that. It reasons, naturally, that backwards travel through time is physically impossible, so there's no way to show up on time to Class B in the first scenario, but that since it takes less than a second to teleport accross campus, 59 seconds is more than enough time to find your seat, take out your notebook and be ready to learn once 12:30 rolls around.

From their perspective, it makes perfect sense. So, taking literally the beliefs of its robotic bretheren, the CASS system thought that if it had scheduled me up until 12 noon in Waverly, 12:01 or so would be a perfectly reasonable time to send an automated phone call my way in East Lansing to offer me something else. If I'm so lazy that I don't teleport back to East Lansing once I'm done in Waverly, then hey, fair's fair, it'll offer the job to some one else.

Like I said, computers suck.

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In happier news, I finally got my diploma from Western Michigan (where I graduated with an MA in Philosophy in December) in the mail today. No good place to put it, just now, so I'm keeping it in the big fold-protected envelope it came in, but I took it out to look at yesterday and I got a kick out of looking at it, proof of two years of hard work, and...well, OK, two years of sleeping in until noon and taking afternoon classes and hanging out in people's offices and gabbing about philosophy and going out to drink and play pool on a regular basis and somehow drawing a biweekly paycheck for this lifestyle (which, did, granted, also include doing things like "teaching" undergrad logic classes, although I can't guarantee that any actual learning was going on on the other end.)

In any case, rightly or wrongly, it feels like an accomplishment. Or at least it makes me feel less stupid, like, yeah, I might embarassingly often have trouble following simple geographical directions from Point A to Point B and, yeah, the simplest technological devices have a tendency to baffle me (although as I've gotten older I've slowly but surely figured out how to work a toaster), but I can't be that stupid, right? I mean, I do have a master's degree in Philosophy.

(I also have a BA in History and Philosophy from Aquinas College, but then again, George W. has a BA in History, from Yale no less, so that clearly doesn't prove anything.)

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In the mail today, I also got my big packet from Clarion West, with housing and health forms to fill out as well as some general introductory information. This summer is starting to feel wonderfully and terrifyingly real.