Looking Stoopid

This post is gonna make look stupid, but it's kinda a cool story.

On Sunday during the con last weekend, I went to watch the "Junkyard Wars" competition. In case you do not know the concept or never saw the show on cable, "Junkyard Wars" is where teams are given a pile of junk and some tools and are instructed to construct a device that performs a specific task out of the junk. My friend Brewser, being the engineer of our little band of geeks, signed up for it.

After he signed up for it, I thought about it for a minute and for some reason I asked the 2 guys next to me if I could join their group as teams needed at least 3 people. There names were Charles and Michael. Another person joined us (his name escapes me) and we went to work.

The task was to make a device that would place a Beanie Baby about 30 feet onto a trash cover. We all looked at the pile of junk for 5 minutes and thought up a plan on what and how to make the Beanie transport.

Long story short we sucked. Big time. All we thought of was to make a giant rubber band out of police safety crossing tape to slide the Beanie on a gas stove plate. At least we got closer than Brewser's team, who managed only to run over their Beanie twice with their contraption.

Still, we had fun. As we said our goodbyes to each other, Charles says to Michael "At least you have your art to look back on". I was a little puzzled by that statement, but said "good game" to my teammates and moved on.

I walked over to Bismo, who was looking on during the game and said "That was cool that you were working with Michael Whelan."

I said "You know him?" (this is the part where I look stupid).

"Well, yes, eh! He's a guest here at the con. He did the covers for the 'Dragonriders of Pern' books among other things.

Bismo did go on to say that he thought it was kinda cool that I didn't know who he was and he was right (Either that or maybe he was trying to make me feel better - to his credit he does that sometimes when I do something stupid). When I got home I looked up his website and saw all the cool art he has done and that he's won 14 Hugos and all that. (This is the part that I find out I look really stupid.) This guy is like the SF artist equivalent of Greg Maddox. And I spent 2 hours with the guy making something out of a junkpile.

I guess it was just ignorance as I'm not a big SF art guy. The only person I really know in that area is Bob Eggleton, another multiple Hugo winner who I and Capn Ho briefly knew before he made it big, but I doubt he would remember us these days. In retrospect I'm glad I didn't know him at the time as I'm sure I would have acted differently.

And the moral of the story, kids, is that it's better to look stupid in front of your friends than world renowned artists.