Note --This con report is intended for my apa, SFPA. It contains boring personal detail. Read or skim at your own risk. Portions of this report are sufficiently candid that I would prefer that it not be quoted without notifying me first.
I was originally slated to leave for worldcon Thursday morning, arriving Thursday late afternoon just in time to head off to the local synagogue to pick up stuff they were lending us to be able to have Sabbath services. However, a larger-than-usual bonus at work, plus hearing how many people were leaving early for Labor Day weekend, inspired me to change to a Wednesday night arrival.
Monday night, I got some disappointing news: my erstwhile roommate Eve Ackerman wasn't sure she'd be able to make the con, since her seriously ill father had taken a turn for the worst. She was hoping that she'd be able to make it, but it didn't look good.
My decision to wear comfortable but shleppy clothes on the plane on the theory that no one would be around at midnight in the hotel lobby turned out to be a bad one. I stupidly forgot that since the con itself wasn't open yet, the only place for people to hang around and socialize was the hotel lobby. So, I got to greet several friends whom I hadn't seen in a year or more in grubbies. I was presented with an "Emergency Holographic Texan" ribbon, which I accepted even though I wasn't doing any emergency work on this particular convention, but in honor of those worldcons where I *had* contributed last-minute. Thanks to this shmoozing, I ended up getting to my room even later than expected.
After eating my free breakfast back at the hotel (courtesy of the fact that I wasn't able to get the convention rate for the added Wednesday night stay), I went over to Ops to find my "boss" for the con, Laurie Mann, who was running Press Operations and had asked me to help out. I helped her carry a bunch of stuff to open the Press room at the Convention Center. There, we were briefed on how the room would be run, and Laurie showed us a list of problem people who on no account were to be given Press ribbons or attention. Among them was the guy who called me an anti-Semite on the net, who had also been demanding a free Press membership despite being merely a fannish web site designer, and a neo writer named Dan Gallagher who had been making no ends of demands.
After the briefing, I headed over to Registration to become official. Miraculously, despite this being the first full day of registration, there was absolutely no one in the "E-Hy" line, which meant record time to get registered! I then went to Program Participant registration to make sure my mailed schedule hadn't been changed.
Luckily, on my way back to the Press office, I spotted a guy wearing a yarmulke and, as I suspected, he was Harold Feld, the male who was supposed to be accompanying me to the local synagogue that evening to pick up the supplies they were lending us. (I was sure the Orthodox synagogue's hesitation in lending us their stuff because of doubts about what kind of group we were would not be enhanced by having a female handle the Torah scroll.) When I arrived back at the Press office, Laurie asked me to run over to the front of the dealers room, since they had a local radio station who wanted to interview someone about worldcon, and she decided I should do it! The interview was fairly easy to handle, as I suspected it would be, since it basically consisted of the same questions people at work or synagogue generally ask me when I tell them where I'm going Labor Day weekend. ("What do you do at a convention like that?" "Who shows up?")
The Press office was relatively quiet the rest of the afternoon but before the end of the shift we heard first-hand about what was destined to be one of the most talked about incidents at the convention. Kathei Logue, who has run kaffeeklatches at the last couple of worldcons, is going to be running Press next year, so she had been trying to drop by the Press office when her kaffeeklatch duties were over to get a feel for what goes on. Thursday afternoon, she came into the room literally shaking and said she'd had the worst day of her life.
After we calmed her down, we heard the story: seems Jack Chalker had been in the process of getting a cup of coffee at his kaffeeklatch when an overly helpful con staff person started wheeling it away. In answer to Jack's protest, he replied that the coffee was needed for Lois McMaster Bujold's kaffeeklatch. On Jack's following him down the hallway trying to get his coffee back, he saw a dessert cart in Bujold's kaffeeklatch. He was then informed in answer to his question that desserts were only for Hugo nominees. "Apoplectic" seems to be the appropriate word for Jack's state at that point. (For those of you who don't know, Chalker's been nominated 4 times but has never won.) People on the spot managed to calm Jack down and the staff person was chewed out by several experts but I heard at least three different versions of this story by the end of the con, and the staff person in question may be infamous for a while.
After my shift, I meandered through the Dealers Room, which was the earliest I'd managed to get to one in about five years. After quickly grabbing some food in the Food Court in the mall adjacent to the hotel, I changed into my "instant religious girl" clothes and called Eve, getting the bad news that she wouldn't be able to make the con at all. In the lobby, I met the male I was taking with me to synagogue. The synagogue turned out to be closer to 40 minutes away from the hotel than the 20 that had been claimed by my local contact, but he turned out to be extremely friendly and after services, we loaded the stuff into my car and stored it in the Ops safe room.
I changed back into party clothes, and started doing the rounds. Aside from shmoozing, my only other accomplishment was getting into the SFWA suite with a friend. Connie Willis, the toastmistress from last year's Hugo ceremony, gave me a big hug and said how much more she was enjoying this year's con without the worry of being toastmistress. Compared to that, simply being nervous about being a Hugo nominee was evidently a breeze! After getting some compliments from other people about last year's Hugos, I managed to get one of the complimenters to have the door guard dot my badge so I'd be able to get into the suite for the rest of the con. That being accomplished, it was off to bed.
Things were quiet enough that we were able to take turns leaving for breaks, which in my case meant to hang out by the bid tables or do errands. I managed to get to the Fan Lounge and buy Dave Langford's TAFF report from 1980. (I read this off and on throughout meals during the rest of the con and really enjoyed it, not only because of the clever writing but because it brought back a lot of memories of people and events from that epoch in fandom.) Another of my errands was to buy one of the beautiful and unusual Aussiecon 3 T-shirts for Eve and send it back with some papers Howard had FedExed to me. I also ended up running around trying to make sure that Friday evening services would be set up correctly. I left late afternoon to put up the room divider (which this year consisted of easels and large pieces of foam core borrowed from Ops), during which I had a great comparative religion chat with Martin Easterbrook who helped me set them up. I also put up directional signs before running off to the Food Court for another quick meal before services.
Unfortunately, attendance was not all we could have hoped. I needed 10 males there to make the requisite number to say my memorial prayer for my mom, and we only had about 7. Most of the bodies I had anticipated I could snatch were busy either in setting up the very elaborate Boston in 2001 party or getting ready to attend the Chesley art awards. (One body I did snatch away from the beginning of the Chesleys was old buddy David Axler, who graciously agreed to help out until he had to leave for the ceremony, but ended up staying until the end, bless his cooperative little heart.)
We were about 2 short when I did a round of the staff lounge and con suite, standing in the doorway and bellowing for any Jewish males over the age of 13. Amazingly, one guy did come with me from the con suite although he didn't know anything about services. At that point, I was getting desperate, so I was about to go up to the Boston party setup to grab someone when Portland fan Ariel Shattan volunteered to do so instead, and dragged back Michael Benveniste so we made the minyan.
Then, it was party time. I got to the Boston party a little early and discovered the coolest party setup I think I've ever seen: the theme was "20,000 Leagues Under Texas" and the ceiling was covered with blue and green balloons (my main job once I showed up was being a tall person and taking balloons out in the hallway to nest on the ceiling there), the walls covered with fishnet with fish stuffies in them, and the refreshments were real shrimp cocktail and artistic, prepared-on-the-spot candy sushi. (Another feature was the Boston in 2001 "4" logo placed strategically in a window where you couldn't help but see it from their competitor's party across the way.) One of the good things about this party was getting the straight dope from Jim and Laurie Mann behind some rumors I'd heard. (For example, rumor had it that the head of the Green Room had thought she'd quit weeks before the convention, but since her email had never been answered, no one knew she had quit!)
On a party run with Kimiye Tipton and Melissa Wauford, who had helped me out at Magicon's Program Ops lo, these many moons ago, I discovered the SFF.net party. They are the organization that is suing Pesach Lattin, a problem person on Usenet, and just when I was mentioning this as a reason why I commiserated with them, an old Southern fan friend of mine, Dan Caldwell from Nashville, walked up and practically snorted Coke from his nose on hearing me say "accused me of being an anti-Semite."
This panel was one of several that attempted to help orient newcomers to fandom and conventions, and featured a record 3 SFPAns: Dick Lynch, Guy Lillian, and myself. Others on the panel were Andy Porter and Edie Stern. Aside from making sure Andy and Guy didn't talk about their own publications too much, the panel went pretty well. Two audience members afterward thanked me for what they claimed was the most useful thing they'd gotten out of the panel: an offhand remark of mine that the best way to attend parties was to start at the top floor and work your way down so you didn't have to contend much with the elevators!
When I arrived at the rehearsal, things were somewhat chaotic, since they had just been informed a little while previously that the center stairs for access from the audience to the stage had not been acceptable to the fire marshall. This meant that both presenters and winners would have to go through the audience to the curtains and up to the stage from backstage, and presented special problems for presenter and Fan GoH Roy Tackett, who is in a wheelchair. I hung around for a while and offered some suggestions to the house manager, for whom this was not only her first Hugo ceremony but her first worldcon, but after volunteering several times to help out, was told that they were doing ok so, having gotten my assignment and not wanting to interfere with someone else's, I left.
I was pleased to get out of the rehearsal early, because I'd wanted to attend the TAFF/DUFF auction. A nifty and hard to find MatchBox toy of the Sojourner and rover was in the auction, with the box signed by the mission team! It ended up going to Tom Whitmore for $250, which everyone agreed was a bargain. Naomi Fisher picked up a book of Aussie slang. Auctioneer Stephen Boucher volunteered to go through it and mark out the obsolete slang for an extra charge, but Naomi declined, and read us salient passages throughout the rest of the auction. (Her favorite was the expression "I could kick the arse off an emu," which evidently means "I'm in terrific health." I was greatly relieved to hear from Stephen that this phrase is no longer used :-> )
As usual, I was at the auction more for the side comments by the audience and auctioneer than in expectation of buying anything, but then an original paperback of George RR Martin's _A Song for Lya_ came up. Knowing that I was going to be having dinner with him the next night, I thought it might be fun to present him the book to autograph as a neofan might. I had them put it aside so I could pay for it on Sunday.
On the way back to my room to change for the Hugos, I passed a sign outside a cafe inside the mall that listed as their daily special "I have no mouth and I must eat the panini sandwich." (Aside: after the con, I told this to a fan friend at work during lunch; when I got back to my desk, there was a note on my chair that said, How about "The Beast That Shouted `Would You Like Fries With That?' at the Heart of the World").
Once the nominees marched in, fellow audience escort Randy Smith and I took up seats facing the audience fairly near the split in the curtains where presenters and winners would enter and exit. Ruth Sachter stood right at the curtains with a flashlight. Our main task was supposed to be escorting people back to their seats. However, aside from fetching Don Maitz and Forrey Ackerman for staff consultationsaccording to whispered instructions from behind the curtain, I didn't have very much to do. We soon found that most of the people knew where they had been sitting and didn't need any help getting there. However, after about the third presentation, I realized that people were being blinded by the spotlight on their walk from their seats to the curtain, so we started escorting them when they reached the aisle in front of the stage and that seemed to help a lot.
Since the stage had no ramp, the decision had been made to have wheelchair-bound Fan GoH Roy Tackett do his award presentation from the front row down from the stage. This worked fine, but acceptor Martin Hoare started heading for the stage rather than Roy's mike, so I found myself in his spotlight taking him by the shoulders and turning him around! Otherwise, things went fairly smoothly. I certainly had no quibble with most of the winners this year, since they included friends of mine: the Lynchi, George Martin, and Connie, for example. It was lots of fun being one of the first people they saw after they won, guiding them to the curtain.
I personally didn't feel that Toastmaster Neal Barrett's often off-color remarks were completely appropriate for the Hugo ceremony, although quizzing other people afterward I found that most other people thought he was just funny. (My favorite line of the night came not from Barrett but from Don Maitz, who presented the Best Dramatic presentation clips and commented after the Mars Attacks clip that it reminded him of Topo Giogio.) The only other quibble I had was the criminal cutting of the clips for Best Dramatic Presentation, which seemed to somehow miss the dramatic moment in the scene every time. (For example, they cut the Mars Attacks clip of the arrival of the Martian ambassador just before he pulls out the ray gun and starts blowing everyone away!)
I was somewhat surprised to find that I had been included in a list of special thank-yous in the Hugo program since I'd done so little to help out. However, when I went to congratulate Lori on a successful ceremony, she said that she'd learned a lot by following me around the previous year and had even used my letters to nominees as a template for this year, so I felt better.
After the ceremony, I was standing around with George and Parris and their friends John and Gail Gerstner Miller when Gardner Dozois came up and started claiming that his rocket was longer than George's. I told him that was just because he was more excited about winning. After standing in the elevator line for a while, I happened to get in a conversation with a friend of mine working Ops at the elevator bank, and when he saw I was with George he told me about the service elevator, which had been pressed into service for the nominees to get directly to the Hugo Losers Party. We were immediately whisked up to the party, where the nominees were given little chocolate replicas of the Hugo statue. (I was somewhat aghast when George mentioned that this was his first Hugo win in 17 years. I mean, I consider him one of my more *recent* friends!)
At the party, we got the news that Diana had died. I was sure the Brits would be devastated, but when I found a bunch of them at another party, one was merely puzzled as to why a millionaire would be driving such a vulnerable car, while the other was steamed at the American media coverage, which kept referring to "Princess Diana" rather than the correct "Diana, Princess of Wales." I decided to credit this to natural fan cynicism rather than typical British reaction, and later television watching confirmed that. After a peek at the second elaborate Boston party ("A Night in the Seraglio") and a long conversation with Evelyn Leeper about religious pluralism, it was off to bed.
Back at the con, I hurried upstairs to get out of my "religious girl" duds and get to my noon panel on Religion in SF. The only fellow panelist in the Green Room was a very nice, fairly new writer named Pamela Hodgson, and we had a nice chat about comparative religion before heading down to the panel. I ended up sitting to the right of the moderator, a woman named CJ Mills, and on my other side at the end of the table was a young man who had made a pyramid out of copies of his first book and photocopied handouts (which I found out later consisted of the first chapter of the book). We started introductions at the other end of the table, and the panel included Susan Baugh, a librarian; Hodgson; Mary Doria Russell, author of _The Sparrow_, a book about Jesuits in space that had been recommended to me by at least 4 people since I'd arrived at the con; and Dan Gallagher, the guy to my right, who proceeded to outline the entire plot of his book. After some pretty pointed hints, we managed to get the microphone back from him.
The moderator began with a question about how our faith influenced our work (as the token fan, I fudged this into talking about experiences in fandom). Gallagher began talking about when he had felt the call to turn his life over to a higher power, and whether other people in the audience had felt the same, and wouldn't they like to come up and talk about it? Appalled, I had a whispered discussion with the moderator and after some *very* pointed hints (and Evelyn yelling out from the audience, "Janice, take the mike away") she managed to get the mike back. The moderator firmly announced that the panel was solely to talk about religion as it pertained to science fiction, and turned the panel away from the quickly developing revival meeting it almost became. After another incident with Gallagher, we basically stopped giving him the mike.
About halfway through the panel, I decided to write down this guy's name to warn all future programming people never to put him on a panel. It was only then that I realized that this was the same guy that was on Laurie's Press Room persona non grata list! After the panel, I went to tell the moderator this, but Gallagher had already cornered her: "Do you realize that I had something to say about the last two questions you raised?" ["Yes, Dan, that's why we didn't give you the mike"]
I then rushed off to the Hogu Ranquet, the first one I've been free to attend in years. Unfortunately, neither founder, Elst Weinstein or Mike Glyer, was able to attend, but John Novak of St Louis did a credible job, and Dick Lynch and I among others had fun making scurrilous nominations. (We were suitably chagrined when Dick nominated a known Business Meeting creep for fandom's biggest fugghead, which I enthusiastically seconded, only to be told the guy had died this past June!) Some of the better winners were "virulent paparazzi" for Best New Disease and Autumn Jackson for the Greed award. (A full list of winners is available on the web at the LoneStarCon2 newsletter site.)
I really dislike getting books autographed by authors whom I don't know, since I think that merely glancing up to see someone's nametag does not constitute a personal relationship that one could connect with the event. However, during the panel introductions, I'd mentioned that I appeared to be both the token fan and the token Jew on the panel, to which Russell had said no, she had converted a few years ago, and she used the word lansman (which roughly means, "countryman" and is sometimes used by Jews to acknowledge fellow Jews). When I got to the front of the line at the Del Rey booth, I was about to ask her not to autograph the book when she looked up and said, "A fellow panelist" and started to write something in the book. Then she looked up and asked whether there was such a thing as a "lanswoman," at which point we decided maybe it was "lansperson" and that's what she wrote.
Then it was almost time for my 4 pm panel: "Parasites or Part of Us?" This was intended to discuss the growing phenomenon of members of a Usenet discussion group, alt.sex.bondage, and their adherents showing up at conventions because word spreads that they can blend in with the weirdly dressed fans and that there is a tolerant atmosphere. The incident that was discussed most was one that happened at Disclave this year, at which a member of this group decided to anchor a rope to a sprinkler head which, needless to say, was not intended to hold that sort of weight. Several stories of the hotel were flooded or damaged. (NESFA, the Boston SF club, did several themed beanbag versions of their star that they entered in the Art show. One of them was made out of black leather, with studs and a small red clothespin where a nipple would be, with a rope around one of the starpoints, attached to a higher-level sprinkler!)
As usual, this topic of discussion was tricky, as many a.s.b. people tend to think that we're against them because of their lifestyle, and that other people also come to worldcon with only a peripheral interest in science fiction but a heavy interest in one particular thing without people making such a big deal out of it. I thought Leah Smith in the audience had one of the best comments: that the test of a real fan coming to a con for the con is whether they would be there even if their particular interest wasn't represented. Later, in an overflow discussion in the hallway with two organizers of Minicon for next year, I came up with a point that I wished I'd made on the panel: that it was a case of people using our convention for their own purposes rather than participating in the convention.
Mostly, the panel agreed there was a problem, both with a.s.b. as members of the con and the impression that leaves with the general public, and when a.s.b. members don't bother to join the con but simply take advantage of convention room rates and relaxed hotel atmosphere. None of us had very many concrete solutions, except to work closely with the hotel and make sure they are clear on whether people are members of the convention if any trouble arises.
This discussion continued all the way back to the hotel, where I went upstairs to change clothes for the first real meal I was going to have all weekend outside the mall Food Court! I was supposed to meet George RR Martin and Parris, John and Gail Gerstner Miller, Stephen Boucher, Ed Bryant, and Mike Walsh (the Baltimore one) at 6 pm in the hotel lobby, but it was closer to 6:15 when I finally remember most of them were in the *other* hotel. I'd suggested to Stephen that we ask Leah Smith, who in Real Life is a restaurant critic, where she would recommend for dinner and her choice, Boudro's, turned out to be great.
This was my chance to present George with the book I'd bought in the DUFF auction. I presented it to him with the planned flourish and a pen, and had turned to Gail Miller to explain the joke when George said, "I'd be happy to autograph this but it's already been signed!" Sure enough, there was the inscription "To Roger" and George's signature circa 1982. How embarrassing! Otherwise, dinner was very pleasant, as was a continuing conversation in the hotel bar afterward with Mike and Stephen.
More party rounds ensued, and spotting David Bratman at the LAcon thank-you party, I finally got him to explain the Australian ballot to me, as I'd been confused when trying to interpret the Hugo results and gotten two comprehensive but somewhat contradictory explanations from Brad Templeton and Tim Illingworth. That accomplished, I went down to the newsletter office for a planned meeting with Moshe Feder (making appointments is sometimes the only way to make sure you can have a decent conversation with a particular person at worldcon!).
An indication of the level of SMOF rescuing and heavy fannish gossip possible at this convention was an entry in the Sunday newsletter titled "Con Gossip":
"Our theory is that all the conrunners working on this convention have been engaged in unspeakable activities since the moment they arrived.Question: How can you tell?
Answer: Because every time we ask, "Any good stories?" they infallibly say, "Nothing I can talk about." Every one of them. Every time.
One person I was talking to swore that when she arrived at the convention, the first person she saw when she walked in was Ben Yalow. "Ben!" she said, "how are you?"
"Nothing I can talk about," he replied."
After a nice conversation with Moshe catching up on things, we headed off to the Baen party, where I got to see a stunningly slim Toni Weisskopf and drool on pictures of her huge new house in Birmingham which she bought for a price, as new writer and fellow Palo Altan Stewart Cobb and I pointed out, that wouldn't even get you a closet where we live. Moshe disappeared (into the Former Worldcon Chairs party, where he told me later he expected to see me but which no one had let me know about, and which I didn't ask about because it's usually on Monday night!) After that, it was off to the CFG suite where I castigated Roger about the autographed book, with Stephen apologizing as well, and traded SMOF gossip until we saw Covert Beach falling asleep and decided we'd best do the same. After a brief stop at the SFWA suite where we traded customs airport stories for a little while with Parris, I said goodnight to Stephen and staggered off to bed.
I knew I was *really* tired but even through my fog I was pretty sure he didn't belong on a fandom online panel. I got Randy Smith, who was sitting in the front row, to double-check in the pocket program while turning and telling Gallagher politely (in case by some miracle he *was* on the panel) that the subject was Fandom Online, which had nothing to do with literary SF, so I was going to have to ask him not to talk about his book. He sputtered a bit and said something about "it's only for my intro" and I repeated that it was inappropriate for the panel topic and asked him to put his books away. He stood up, said in a very loud voice "You have been very rude and I am extremely insulted," gathered up his stuff and walked out, not before some innocent in the front row said "But she wasn't rude, she was just enforcing the panel topic."
[aside: Needless to say, he wasn't scheduled for the panel, and when I mentioned this to Lori Wolf, with whom I was on a panel next and whose husband had been assistant head of programming, she sighed and said she'd heard he'd added himself to about 6 panels. With growing suspicion, I checked the pocket program and sure enough, he wasn't supposed to be on the Religion in SF panel either. *sigh*]
At five minutes after the hour, only Joe Siclari out of the other scheduled 3 people on the panel had showed up. I convinced Tim Illingworth to come up to join the panel out of the audience, since he runs a few fannish email lists, and also spotted the woman who runs GEnie's Science Fiction Round Table and got her to come up too. The panel went pretty well, with Joe talking about preserving fannish history on the web, and then all of us talking about fannish Internet communication and convention running, and being careful not to disenfranchise those who don't have Internet access. Toward the end of the panel another scheduled participant Earl Cooley, the maintainer of the LSC2 web site, showed up and said a couple of things about con web sites.
I immediately had to leave to get to my next panel, the aforementioned "SF Musicals: All Singing, All Dancing." I got to use the bubblemix Marcia had given me as "special effects," which got a laugh. As I suspected, the panel turned into a discussion on musicals in general than about SF musicals, although we did get to discuss that a little. Walter made a good point about musicals now being more successful in cartoon form than on stage, and Connie had the panelists name our favorite and least favorite musical (since she took 1776, my next favorite was Pippin). Unfortunately, a plan by Walter to get some helium balloons and have the panelists sing in high-pitched voices was foiled by their unavailability :->
As planned, I met Portland fans Kate Yule and David Levine after the panel, but wimped out because of sheer exhaustion from accompanying them to an excursion to a Mexican shopping area. Instead, we had lunch at the mall Food Court and got to chat for an hour or so. I went back to the Convention Center to hang around (my RSI providing a convenient excuse for not *helping* with Teardown) and Peggy Rae Pavlat, chair of next year's worldcon, sat me down to hear about my Gallagher travails, which she'd gotten an outline of from Laurie Mann.
Back at the con hotel, we went to the Dead Dog parties. The combined-worldcon-bids party was, as we had heard in the lobby, jammed to the rafters and really noisy, with the staff lounge being habitable and the CFG suite being ok too. I got some great scurrilous gossip at a couple of the parties (Fuzzy Niven was evidently surrounded by too-eager Dorsai guards in the Art Show when she went to put her own diamond pendant back on. Also Art Show-related, at the gripe session the Art Show came in for some criticism, especially because its hours were not well advertised. The head of the Art Show said that the hours were included on the sheet people filled out when they became bidders. On someone pointing out that not everyone bid on art but that people wanted to come to the art show just the same, she evidently replied that Art Shows were for buying art, not just looking at it. *sigh*)
My favorite thing that happened at the parties was a conversation with some people at one of the parties: nasty but fun SMOFfy humor. Someone was talking about a story they'd heard about the Alamo, that the Texans killed some of the Mexicans who had been fighting *for* them, just because they were Mexican. Someone else muttered "Sounds a lot like this committee"!
After that killer remark, I went down to the hotel lobby to search out Michael Walsh, who'd entered a party, mumbled a cryptic comment to me about the hotel bar, and vanished mysteriously when I turned to answer him. I ended up staying on the comfy couch in the lobby with him and a few others until the insane hour of 3 a.m. I was glad to have the opportunity to chat with him, putting a lie to my plaint much earlier in the con that I hardly ever get to talk to any new people at worldcons any more!