Los Angeles World Con, 2026, Part 1

It’s hard to justify going to an exotic place (like L. A.) for world con.

 

I know that many of my friends make this as a sort of pilgrimage. I don’t have that desire. To me, WorldCon, while fun, is part of the business. I don’t say I don’t enjoy it. I say that travelling three thousand miles and spending a thousand dollars on hotel bills isn’t sufficient justification for me.

 

A couple of years ago, my wife suggested we glue a vacation to an adjacent locale along with attending WorldCon. This tipped the balance in WorldCon’s favor. 

 

Last year, WorldCon was in Seattle and we spent a week prior going through the Channeled Scablands—which I talked about here.

 

This year, WorldCon was in Los Angeles. I was born and raised in and around Los Angeles. 

 

Southern California has a lot to offer and we had to pare the trip down from what could easily have been a month to only five days. 

 

We flew into Fresno on Friday and were tired we didn’t do much. So the trip really began the next day.

 

Saturday: This had to be Sequoia National Park. My family rented a cabin there when I was six or so and some of my earliest memories was of the trees. Wendy had never seen them and there was a lot of talk of fires, Sudden Oak Death Syndrome, and the like that suggested they giant trees were not long for this world. So, we took a day and hiked as far as I was able.

 

It’s hard to get across the scale of these monsters. I mean, humans can look at a night sky, or a mountain, or the sea and recognize something greater than themselves. But these are not living things. A whale is about as big, I think, as a human can grasp that this is a living thing. And I’m not sure even that works with something like a blue whale. 

 

(Not that it kept us from killing them.)

 

But these make whales look tiny. 

 

They’re old and they look it. Many of them (like several in this picture) are scarred from fires. Some, like the one on the right died of one. But that even exemplifies their age. The dead stump on the right had clearly been consumed by fire. But there was no fire sign around it. There were some others that faced it that showed burn marks—implying the it did not survive but they did. Then, there were other trees with a different burn mark pattern—implying a subsequent fire.

 

And then there is this grove, near the burned ones, that has no fire marks at all. 

 

I think, in this area, there were (at least) two big fires. The first consumed the stump and burned its neighbors. Then, there was another fire that scarred some of the other trees but either skipped the older, burn victims or where the damage was not great. And since then, this other great grove has grown.

 

Sequoias are interesting in several ways. First, the bark is not hard like an oak. Instead, it is fibrous—feeling like a substantial short fiber carpet. Then, in the burn scars, pitched has been exuded and hardened. Some parts are as hard and shiny as obsidian. 

 

We hiked around the are for several hours and found, in that time, two young trees. We were happy to do so. We had seen many, many great giants and middle-aged giants—sequoias don’t taper much as they grow so these are much bigger for the same height than other trees. But we didn’t see any babies. We were getting a little despairing when we found first this one:

 

I think this is only a few years old.

 

 

 

 

Later we found this one. I expect this is less than two years old.

 

The future of the sequoias may not be bleak.

 

Sunday: There were two big reasons we flew into Fresno. The first is that it was only an hour away from the park. The other is Forestiere Underground Gardens.

 

We found this on YouTube about a year ago and was fascinated. Baldassare Forestiere immigrated here from Sicily in the early part of the twentieth century. He wanted to raise fruit trees. He bought some land in Fresno to do that very thing but found it was covered in hardpan—soil with a lot of embedded sedimentary rock. He could not grow a thing here. 

 

Fresno is hot in the summer. Brutally hot. It was over a hundred when we were there. It felt like being in an oven. Forestiere couldn’t farm his land so he had to hire himself out to make a living. Remember the brutally hot part? Now, imagine digging ditches.

 

The nights weren’t much better so Forestiere built a small cellar to escape the heat. Then, he extended it. Lo and behold, once he dug down a half dozen feet or so, he found topsoil. Well, he says to himself. I have water. I have soil. The heat is bearable. All a tree lacks is sunlight. So, he opened up a skylight and planted a tree. Which, over a hundred years later, is still there.

 

The gardens are still there. And it is somewhere between 10-15 degrees cooler. Forestiere worked on the place his entire life and, it is estimated, he may have dug out as much as 20 acres of underground garden. But he left without heirs. His brother finished some of the work Forestiere left but he could not maintain such a large structure. Over time, different sections were sold or filled in. Now, there is a bit over three acres left. It is still in the family and tours are given.

The entry walks you underground and you can feel the temperature drop. Then, they take you carefully through several different rooms, galleries, and tunnels. Here are a few highlights.

 

This is a sort of cathedral room. It has several fruit trees and one, great, grape vine. I couldn’t fit the room properly into a picture but I think this gives the sense of the thing.

The pattern is tunnel through an arch, then a growing space with a skylight or a functional room.

 

 

 

Some of the spaces were large enough to be actual courtyards. 

 

One interesting thing about the place is it didn’t smell musty or feel dam. Forestiere understood drainage and saved the water. He built a fish pond inside. 

 

I could go on for hours—I have on the order of a hundred pictures or so—but I have other things to talk about. 

 

We left Fresno and went west. The plan had two Spanish missions on it and we didn’t want to miss either one.

 

The missions were established between 1769 and 1833. There were 21 of them. Each of them was a city in and of themselves with churches, slaughterhouses, crops, etc. Pretty much all built on the backs of indigenous slave labor. 

 

I’d been to San Juan Capistrano when I was a child but that was too far away for this trip. Instead, we planned to visit San Miguel Arcángel  and La Purísima Concepción.

San Miguel Arcángel was our first stop. It is an actual, working church. The parking lot was filled with parishioners which we carefully avoided lest we give offense. This is a model of the place. 

 

Most of the mission was closed to the public. The church was occupied with a baptism. Almost all of the buildings were occupied with people on retreat. So, while we did spend a fair amount of time there, we don’t have a lot of pictures.

 

On the way to Cambria—the next place we were staying—we did run across an oil field. It was fairly large—perhaps 10 acres or so. It reminded me of when I was a child in Long Beach. These donkeyhead wells were everywhere. The place smelled like my childhood.

 

Monday: We spent the next morning looking for rocks on Moonstone Beach. This is a beach that appears dominated by Scotland: a cool, wet, foggy beach while we were there. People’s pictures of rocks are of no interest to anyone but themselves, so I won’t bore you with them. We did find one moonstone, we think, and some other interesting specimens.

 

But this was one geological feature that we saw over and over. This is called tafoni and the geologic origins of this is unclear. I thought I had stepped into a Roger Dean painting.

 

 

From Cambria, we proceeded south, stopping where we will.

One beach, of sorts, we found about half way to our destination of Goleta.  This layered rock was all over, and eroding mightily. We found bits everywhere. 

 

It was eroding so much that there had been some problems with the cliffs falling down. This was remedied by vast slabs of concrete. Which had been scored to look like the underlying rock.

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday: It was on this leg of the journey that we stopped at Mission La Purísima Concepción. 

 

This is not a working church but a museum. The mission has been well restored and it is huge. Several vast buildings, major areas given over to crops and gardens. A tannery. A slaughterhouse. Stables. Paddocks. Corrals. Various church spaces. At its peak, there might have been better than two thousand people—mostly indigenous, and mostly slaves. 

 

I found this map here. It’s not a great map. Each of the buildings had a chapel. There was a lot more than weaving in the first building. We found a leather shop, carpentry, several kitchens, several meeting rooms, a library, and much else.

This is that first building.

 

This is the chapel in the first building.

 

 

Then, we visited the La Brea Tarpits on our way to Santa Monica—our last stay before Los Angeles.

 

Unfortunately, the museum and much of the park was closed. 

 

But we still could walk around the main pond. It bubbled and stank, as I remembered as a child. 

 

Wednesday: We had three Stations of the Cross I wanted to visit before we reached WorldCon.

The first was the baptism in the Pacific Ocean.

 

 

 

We hadn’t had much chance to just walk in the ocean since we got here. We had some time before the other two Stations, so we walked to the beach and just, well, walked in the water for an hour or so. I have some video but few pictures.

 

The second was the Autrey Museum of the American West. This was not because I had any love of cowboys but because the Autrey Museum had acquired the Southwest Museum of the American Indian. I’m very interested in indigenous pottery and this promised to be interesting.

 

I have to say I was disappointed. Several of the galleries were closed. The remaining ones that did have indigenous art was mostly modern with very little history of any depth. And, as I said, cowboy culture isn’t what I was interested.

 

The last Station was the Griffith Park Observatory.

 

When I was very young we lived in several parts of the L.A. area: Santa Monica, Long Beach, Anaheim, Thousand Oaks, etc. Going into L.A. was always a treat and going to Griffith Park was a special confection. I don’t have many pictures but I do have some video.

 

And with that, we drove down to WorldCon in the home of Disneyland, Anaheim, California, not a mile from where I had spent five years as a child.

 

But that is another tale.

 

State of the Farm: The New Shed, July 2026

I haven’t posted much about woodworking for a while here. 

 

The truth is, the shop has been a bit restrictive of late. I have some interesting ideas but when I get started, I find just getting it organized a problem. 

 

I started with the main shop on one end side of the garage. Originally, it was just a workbench space open to the garage space. Then, after we’d lived there for a few years, I put up a ceiling, walls, and a various workbenches. But the place is still quite small. 

 

I came up with what I call the trolley system: I put equipment such as a bandsaw, lathes, etc., on wheeled trollies and dedicated a portion of the shop to house them. Then, when I needed, say, the drill press, I wheeled it out and did what I needed, took it down, and put it back. It worked quite well.

 

But, as time went on, I found I needed more equipment stations than I had space for. I have multiple sanders for different jobs. For example, I store the spindle sander under a table. When I need to use it, I have to put up a work table, bring it out, set it up, do the sanding, then break everything down and put it back. There’s not enough room to have more than two stations open at once. If I need the spindle sander and the belt sander and the drill press on the same job... well, you get the idea.

 

Some time back, I was given permission to repurpose the left bay of the garage. We weren’t using it for a car—one of our two cars wouldn’t fit, anyway—and I needed space. But I had to share that space with other equipment like the snow blowers, the shredder, gasoline, etc. I had a miter saw stand, router table, and table saw and could not figure out how to fit them into the garage space with those other items. Not to mention the idea of generating a lot of sawdust next to explosive fuel made me a little queasy.

 

The solution was to get a shed to move all of that stuff out of the garage and then make it into a real shop.

 

But first, I needed said shed.

 

I could have built it myself—I’ve built other structures—but I wanted the shed done. I didn’t want to wait on it. So I researched shed manufacturers, sellers, etc. Up here in the north east, there are a lot of vendors to choose from.

 

I had some requirements: 

1. I wanted no particle board or other “fake” wood in the construction. The interior would get wet—it was, after all, going to house the snowblowers. Fake wood can be made waterproof but it doesn’t last forever and when it does fail, it’s not pretty.
2. It had to be big and tall enough to fit everything I wanted.
3. I had a location in mind and whoever was going to sell me a shed had to fit to that location. There was a hill and other obstacles.
4. That suggested this requirement: the shed was to be built on premises. I’d dealt with delivered sheds before and 1) they were almost always made of fake wood and 2) they had to be maneuvered into place. The location got in the way.
5. I needed some help and guidance in site preparation.

These requirements narrowed things down considerably. No Home Depot or Lowe’s sheds need apply.

 

It finally came to three shed manufactures: Eastern Shed, Reeds Ferry Sheds, and Parker Sheds. They were all comparably priced. All of the sheds looked like quality work. 

 

We went with Eastern Shed for a single reason. While all three were quite detailed about the site preparation, Eastern was the vendor that was most committed to helping. They, in fact, gave me two excavators they had worked with before that knew what Eastern wanted. 

 

For excavation, we went with Mike Tuttle. Not only was it a good price, he also was able to schedule within a week. Getting that done quickly gave me a leg up on the ordering process with Eastern. When I could tell Eastern that the site prep was completely done and ready, they could take advantage of that and work me into the schedule sooner.

 

Here is the site as they were figuring out how to proceed.

 

 

Here is the site after they’d done the initial clearing.

 

 

 

This is the site after it had been graveled in.

 

 

 

This is the site finished. Note how they built out the slope up to the front edge of where the shed would be.

 

  

I planted grass on the slope where I knew there would be heavy traffic.

 

 

 

Sure enough, about three weeks after I’d made the order, Eastern contacted me about installation and we set a date. 

 

I had already cleared most of the way into where I knew the truck must enter. Now, I scrambled to finish making sure everything was ready.

 

On the appointed day, they showed up at 7:00 AM with their truck. I was quite glad I had overcompensated in my clearing because they needed it. 

 

 

Eastern Shed (and, I suspect all of the others) prebuild as much as is humanly possible. 

 

 

 

So, construction on site was more assembly than actual building. This was fine with me.

 

 

 

 

Here is the finished product.

 

 

 

 

 

From start to finish, the process took three hours and twenty minutes. Part of that efficiency was pure factory prebuild. A lot of it was building to suit the assembly process. There were a lot of little bits here and there that made what could have been a tough job easy. I’m sure all three of the vendors I examined have a similar if not identical approach: 1) build as much in the factory as possible, 2) engineer the product for easy assembly, 3) train the installers within an inch of their lives.

 

 

Here, I’ve started putting garage material into the shed. I expect to fill it.

 

 

 

My point here is not to be an advertisement for Eastern Sheds or Mike Tuttle, though I am very pleased with their work. My point, instead, is to show how these sorts of exercises ought to work. 

 

I took a year to figure out who the vendors should be, marshal up the funds, figure out the site, and decide what would be the best shed for the money. That work, on my part, paid off because I ended up finding the right people. 

 

The right people are out there. The right companies are out there. 

 

All we have to do is find them.

 

The End of America as We Know It

This was not a  post I wanted to write.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

The post World War II United States—and to a large extent the world—was built on science. 

 

Not just science, mind you. The US was the Big Boss after the war as the only powerful country that wasn’t in one way or another gutted by the war. England was bombed flat. Fance, Germany, Russia, Poland—everyone had to rebuild a country after all that devastation. 

 

We didn’t.

 

It was pretty clear after the war that science and engineering had helped win it. Engineers build things after scientists discover the underlying principles and formalize them. 

 

The importance of medical research goes all the way back to 1887 with the nascent National Institutes of Health. long pre-dating the war. Truman created the National Science Foundation in 1950 and all through the fifties and sixties, its budget grew. 

 

My point is that there are political forces that recognize the need for both medical (NIH) and non-medical (NSF) research. It’s not the only source of scientific research—there are private grant systems and industrial funding. But more than half of American research funding went through NIH or NSF. 

 

Another interesting thing about the NSF and NIH is they weren’t run by political appointees. Grants were reviewed by fellow scientists, not an administration. Not to say that the political environment didn’t have an effect—remember the War on Cancer? But the grant funding was selected by scientists.

 

Similarly, there were advisory councils created during the fifties that cycled scientists into executive administrations. This happened in defense. In the FDA. Anywhere that a given administration wanted to understand the science of a given field. I’ve met people on some of those councils and they have said that they were not given a political agenda to follow. Sometimes they were listened to. Sometimes not. Often for political reasons but the scientists were not required adhere to those reasons.

 

That said, there are also political and cultural forces that don’t like science and don’t like scientists.

 

I’ve never understood this. 

 

Maybe it’s because science is an attempt to discover how nature actually works rather than how we might think it should work. Politics doesn’t seem to work that way.

 

(Side note: I tried to study to be a scientist but realized part way through the process that I do not have the patience. Instead, I went into engineering where the principles are better known and the reward for effort quicker. If I help on a rocket project, that rocket is going to go somewhere and do something. (Or it gets cancelled. Been there, too.) I’ve known scientists working on projects that take a week to set up, another week to run, and a third week to get a result. Three weeks to find out if an incremental part of what you’re doing even worked and with the possibility of a misstep at any point along the way derailing the entire effort. 

 

But I admire them. )

 

Science, then, follows murky paths that may or may not end up being useful. 

 

Take the GLP-1 drugs, for instance. These peptide mimic a hormone system that regulates appetite and insulin action. They were looked at for medical use for years but were frustratingly difficult to work with since they were metabolized almost immediately in the body.

 

Enter the Gila Monster.

 

In the 1980s, it was shown that the venom of different reptiles (notably the Gila Monster) caused enlargement of the pancreas. Later, in the 1990s, John Eng found that article and through that might be interesting. He was doing research in diabetes and found the Gila interesting because it could go for long periods without eating and still maintain a constant blood sugar. He analyzed the venom and discovered a compound that resembled GLP-1 but did not degrade. From this, the GLP-1 drug family derived. 

 

CRISPR is a technique for the precise editing of genes. It’s been incredibly useful in the last twenty years. The CRISPR/Cas9 system was discovered in bacteria as an immune system targeting bacteriophages. No one knew when CRISPR was discovered whether it could be turned into a biological tool. That came after the discovery was made and published.

 

My point here is that you don’t know what research is important until it is. This was the basis of the funding model of NIH and NSF: use a broad brush for basic research. Deny crazy research? Maybe—as long s the definition of “crazy” was clear. Was investigating the properties of Gila Monster venom crazy? Not as it turned out.

 

So, in my opinion, funding mechanisms like the NSF and NIH should be getting lot more funding over time and not less.

 

That, unfortunately, is not the case. NSF and NIH funding for years has been essentially flat. Given inflation, that really means the funding has effectively been cut. Scientists have been oddly mistrusted by politicians such as Nixon and Reagan. (A good history is here, but Scientific American has a paywall. Sorry.)

 

And now the Orange Voldemort. 

 

The most recent budget submitted by the administration to Congress included a 12% cut to NIH and a 54% cut to NSF. Since the start of this administration’s term, many billions have been cut or clawed back. These were awards that had already been given. This included cancer research, social research, immunology research, and many other areas.

 

No scientific area is safe. 

 

If you look at medical history, the first big success story is public hygiene and public health. The second is vaccines. After these two come everything else. 

 

Vaccines seem to be a curious target for this administration. This doesn’t much surprise me since vaccines have been targets for close to the three hundred years since they were discovered. It does surprise me that both the president of the country and the head of the Department of Health and Human Services—both established institutions dedicated to the welfare of the American people—are so hard over to destroy one of the major mechanisms that successfully keep Americans safe. 

 

He’s gone after the measles vaccine. That’s been a rousing success—for measles.

 

Further, RFK is especially down on mRNA vaccines. To the point that his Department has suppressed studies that show their effectiveness. Nor will he publicly back his own proposed CDC head when she is in favor of vaccines. Moderna has developed an mRNA based flu vaccine and wants to get FDA review. They’re having trouble. The hidden success story is that the mRNA technology has been successful in vaccinating against cancer. It’s likely that will be denied to the American public. But Europe will get it.

 

Oh, and those scientific advisory panels I mentioned before? RFK has fired a quarter of them.

 

Then, the OV signed a new executive order to model the US approach to vaccines after Denmark—a country that has a much more homogenous population, is significantly smaller, and—surprise!—has universal health care. He has—again surprise!—not suggested the US have universal health care. I’m sure Denmark’s guidelines are fine for Denmark. They seem a rational country. Our vaccine guidelines used to be geared to the needs of the American people. Now, not so much.

 

Also, apparently the OV thinks RFK should be more hard over against vaccines. And he should prove a non-existent connection between vaccines and autism. Good luck with that.

 

Of course, RFK is a multifaceted problem. He’s also going after antidepressants and mammograms.

 

Essentially, the OV administration is in the process of destroying medical research. 

 

But don’t think it’s just RFK. RFK is the OV’s sock puppet. Have you noticed how he is so supportive of gas stoves? A group was commissioned to determine the effect of gas stoves on asthma. To do this, they planed to take a population of asthma sufferers that had gas stoves in their home and replace them, measuring the nature of their symptoms before and after. They were part way through the study when the OV pulled the plug on their funding. But these researchers didn’t go down without a fight: they published the results they had. You know? Gas stoves are bad for asthma sufferers. 

 

I pretty much thought that these were the sorts of things the OV would attempt—even if I hadn’t, pulling out of the World Health Organization was a pretty big clue. I had hoped that the institutions would prevent him. I did not expect the complete roll over of both Congress and the Supreme Court. 

 

This isn’t a single administration problem. The OV is trying to change how science is funded. How civil servants are hired. How agencies function. He is trying to set his vision of America—run by and for the rich with charity toward none and avarice as its guiding principle—in stone. Scientists are voting with their feet. 

 

This could be the OV’s greatest gift to science—to China.