I was browsing the web, and stopped by the Meisha Merlin website, and noted the following announcement:

Meisha Merlin in collaboration with the Robert A. Heinlein trust are proud to announce the printing of the Virginia Edition, the definitive collection of Robert A Heinlein. This historical project will span 40+ titles over four years. Included in this Limited Edition series will be many never before seen passages that had been edited out in subsequent printings. Our desire is to produce a collection true to the spirit and vision of one of our genres greatest authors.

There are all sorts of things that disappointed me about this, but the main ones are that I’d hope such a project might have come from one of the mass market publishers, and that they might have learned from previous unexpurgated Heinlein texts, and stuck with the original published versions. In fairness, I will say that it’s much less disappointing than what has happened with the Fritz Leiber and Clifford Simak reprint series, but it does make it seem like some strange, weird irony that these classic authors are being published in this manner. It makes you appreciate how lucky Edgar Pangborn has been.

I was browsing amazon.com and I note that ibooks will be reprinting Best Short Novels: 2004 in January 2006 in a trade paperback edition as The Best Short Science Fiction Novels of the Year. This is a happy thing. I hope everyone will join up at the SFBC and buy the books there, but if you can’t, this is a great way to have the book come out.

I know a couple people who have worked in Japan for a while over the years. The latest is Kim Selling, who is writing about her experiences in her journal.

I have a pair of Grado SR-80 headphones. I bought them one wet, rainy evening about eight years ago, when Marianne and I went shopping down on Shattuck in Berkeley. I’ve bought several other pairs of headphones over the years, even tried out Charles’s expensive noise reduction jobbies and nothing comes close. I bought a pair of Sennheiser noise reduction headphones last August, used them and like them very much. I let the old Grado’s fall out of use, but then a while ago all the fiddling around unpacking the Sennheiser’s just got too annoying and I plugged them into Bob the B2 Stealth Walkman, and damn if they didn’t sound good. Need to find a new pair of foam ear pads, but other than that, they’re the best thing I’ve ever heard. If you ever need headphones, start here.

The good folk at Interaction have announced the 2005 Hugo Award nominatees. Many congrats to K.J. Bishop, the first Australian (to my knowledge) to be nominated for the John W. Campbell Award.