"Not now, Igor!"

Gwern Branwen · 18 Jan 2021, 17:21 · from 2021-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gwern at gwern.net (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2021 12:21:00 -0500
Subject: (urth) "Not now, Igor!"
Message-ID: <CAMwO0gw7N6TXkw1jn-tXv-zNDVpsBN+z_GmF5c=J9gjdB=byAA at mail.gmail.com>

> I saw him at Dragoncon. He invented one of the machines that makes Pringles, and told a story from his time there.
>
> They were tweaking a machine and for some reason it had to be really steamy, so they built a sort of indoor shed to contain the steam. He and a lab partner worked in there a lot, and they dealt with the steam in different ways. He wore a white lab coat. His partner, who was about six foot eight and solid muscle, wore nothing but shorts.
>
> The company liked taking tourists through the area. One day, Gene and his partner were in the shed and finished something up, Gene opened the door, and there was a big group of tourists just outside. There he was, steam billowing out, lab coat, right behind him an apparently naked giant, and all these people just stared at him.
>
> So he said "Not now Igor, there are people here" and closed the door.

https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/bdhx61/rip_gene_wolfe_19312019/ekymzc4/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25652868

-- 
gwern
https://www.gwern.net

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net