Well, another happy and good day of science-fiction convention going has passed into history.

The day started at home, because Condor is a local Con, sharing breakfast time with my sweetie—wife discussing the possibility of replacing our aging automobile. After dropping her off at an appointment I drove the con and got there early enough to snag a few mini-donuts from the con suite and a soda before heading off to the first panel on armed alien invasion.

That first panel was very entertaining, but that’s a forgone conclusion with Kollin brothers (authors of The Unincorporated Man series) on the panel.

The second panel of the day also was the final panel upon which I appear, it discussed the ethics of uplifiting, the process of taking an animal species and bringing it to human level of intelligence and awareness. The star of the panel was David Brin author of many many SF tomes, including the Uplift War Series. I achieved my objective and did not look like a fool.

At noon my sweetie-wife and stopped for lunch, enjoying fries and a good chili (though she considered the Kidney beans in said chili a mistake) before continuing.

After lunch we attended a one-man presentation on UFO conspiracies and their history. He traced back to the origins of the ‘Men in Black’ (who in the UFO mythologies are aliens and are not on our side) along with a lot of other material. (Really 272 ‘crash sites’ around the world? The aliens can’t fly can they?)

The next panel was bad science, examples of science distorted by politics, religion and other influences. It did degrade into just a global warming debate and so we covered a lot of ground and it was worth attending.

The First Contact: establishing relations panel turned primarily into a discussion of intelligence and culture and how strange it might be and how easily first contact could go wrong. The panel seemed to agree that among first contact linguists there would be a high body count. The real Red Shirts of SF.

Alternate Forms of Life lost half their panelist before they started, but still managed to cover the in and out of weird biology that has been presented in SF.

The final panel of the day was held in a meeting space where the lights had been dimmed and no brought them back up. While this might have been suitable for a horror themed panel, for discussing immortality it was less than ideal. The panel stayed primary in the magical forms of immortality (think Cpt. Jack Harkness in Torchwood/Dr. Who.) and that was less than ideal for myself. In the end my sweetie-wife and I bailed early and headed home to dinner and board and card games,