Back Again

I had a pretty good time in Barcelona despite the swarms of teens on tour during their school break or something. It was unusually warm and the weather was great the whole time. I'd only been there once about 26 years ago and it was a brief visit, so it was nice to have time to see a lot of the important stuff. I have been incommunicado with no internet and without a willingness to pay exorbitant roaming fees for my iPhone, so I had no news about much of anything while there, much less anything fandom-related. The hotel where I stayed had Al-Jazeera on its t.v. lineup but not CNN International or any other American cable network; the only English-language news I could get were from France24 English, Russia Today, Sky News, NHK English, and Euronews English (otherwise it was trying to understand Spanish or Catalan news broadcasts). So I heard a whole lot about the Ivory Coast, Silvio Berlusconi's teenage hooker, the News of the World phone hacking scandal, the guy who shot a couple of people on a nuclear sub, etc. but the only U.S. news I heard were narrowly avoiding a federal government shutdown, the Long Island serial killer, and people booing Charlie Sheen's live shows. Really, what did they expect? Sheen still got their money. Suckers.

Fandom news was of course non-existent. My poor fandom-deprived brain played all kinds of strange tricks. One night I had a dream where I went to the store and saw a bag of chips that had an interview with Rick McCallum on it. I thought, "They really need to get going and make Episode III." I woke up and remembered that they did get going and put it out 6 years ago. Another night I had a dream where I was at a Celebration and it was really lame and boring, with nothing going on. At one point I lamented, "What are we celebrating?" Now I did visit a comic book store near my hotel and chuckled at how it looked just like any other comic book store you'd find anywhere, complete with pricey vintage SW action figures and piles of manga. Finding exclusive or different SW goodies overseas is hit and miss, depending on when you visit and this time I didn't find anything new, not even CW stuff. I was deep in the city center, well away from mega stores like Carrefour and I didn't see anything SW related in the department stores. Oh well. The euro was giving the dollar a beating anyway.

So, once I was in a layover at Newark on the way back, I checked Twitter to get the lowdown on anything that happened. Let's see: very good ratings for the CW season finale, Season 4 trailers (which I watched last night), rumors that Celebration VI is returning to Indianapolis, some stuff from Wonder Con, etc..