Things that make me happy! - Part 1

SWEET!!!! I am so excited. I don't think anyone knows this but for years I've had my eye out for anyone 'preferably' giving away rather than selling, back issues of OMNI - which is one of my all time favorite magazines from my past. I think I was in high school when they stopped publishing and that was a very bad day for me, I remember it well. So I subscribe to Freecycle - Alameda and East Bay area. Sometimes people who don't live in the East Bay still post their items on that list and I don't always check it because of that - there have been times where I wanted to get an item but that meant going out to Pittsburg or some other boon-dock type place.

Fortunately I looked at the post from yesterday and, what do you know, there's a couple in Pacifica giving away 4 huge boxes of their entire collection of OMNI. It would have meant me driving all the way to Pacifica, which I was willing to do because it would have been worth the trip, but now it looks like I'll be able to meet the wife at her place of work in Oakland. I am so incredibly psyched!! I am a huge sci-fi and real science fan, not to mention that for those of us who truly believe in the paranormal, this was THE magazine for you. Unfortunately I still have yet to come across anything that can be compared to it today :(. So, in a few days, I will be the proud owner of a collection of OMNI magazines. I will not be scrap booking these, unless some are in un-collectable condition but hope to keep most as my own personal collection. I am really excited to re-start my own research on some particular subjects, and read the information that OMNI exclusively put out on those topics in their issues, many of which, I never got to read. This wasn't tabloid type material, this was pure truth for real believers + excellent reading material from some really fabulous sci-fi writers. For those interested in knowing more, here is the information I pulled up from Wiki:

Omni (magazine)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

OMNI was both a science magazine and science fiction magazine. It contained articles on science fact and short works of science fiction. The first issue was published in October 1978, the last in Winter 1995, with an Internet version lasting until 1998. Bob Guccione described the magazine in its first issue as "an original if not controversial mixture of science fact, fiction, fantasy and the paranormal"[1]

History

OMNI was launched by Kathy Keeton Guccione, wife of Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione, and edited by Ben Bova from 1978 until 1981. Before launch it was referred to as Nova, but the name was changed before the first issue to avoid a conflict with the PBS science show of the same name, NOVA.[2] After Bova left, Editors of OMNI included Richard Teresi, Gurney Williams III, Patrice Adcroft, Keith Ferrell, and Pamela Weintraub (editor of OMNI Internet). Kathleen Stein managed the magazine's prestigious Q&A interviews with the top scientists of the 20th century through 1998. Ellen Datlow was fiction editor of OMNI from the time Bova stepped down in 1981 until the magazine folded in 1998 and Sherry Baker was the Continuum editor, now working as a freelance editor and writer in Atlanta, Georgia. The very first edition had an exclusive interview with renowned physicist, Freeman Dyson, the second edition with American writer and futurist, Alvin Toffler.

OMNI developed a dual personality during its life. In its early run, its high circulation (permitting payment for stories many times higher than that of other science fiction magazines), coupled with some outstanding fiction editors, allowed it to attract prominent speculative fiction writers, and it published a number of stories that have become genre classics, such as Orson Scott Card's "Unaccompanied Sonata", William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" including Johnny Mnemonic" and George R. R. Martin's "The Way of Cross and Dragon". The magazine also serialized Stephen King's novel Firestarter, and featured a short story, "The End of the Whole Mess". OMNI also brought the works of numerous painters to the attention of a large audience, such as H.R. Giger and De Es Schwertberger.

The bulk of the magazine, meanwhile, profiled science and scientists with a visionary, gonzo-style science journalism rooted in story-telling, credibility, and authorial voice. OMNI's Q&A Interviews constituted a collective oral history of 20th-century science told by the world's greatest thinkers in areas from evolutionary biology to chaos theory to space. OMNI celebrated science with an edgy entertaining patter and irreverence. OMNI 's pro-technology orientation has been compared to the later magazine Wired.

OMNI entered the market at the start of a wave of new science magazines aimed at educated but otherwise "non-professional" readers. Science Digest and Science News already served the high-school market, and Scientific American and New Scientist the professional, while OMNI was arguably the first aimed at "armchair scientists" who were nevertheless well informed about technical issues. The next year, however, Time introduced Discover while the AAAS introduced Science '80. Advertising dollars were spread between the different magazines, and those without deep pockets soon folded in the early 1980s, notably Science Digest, while Science '80 merged with Discover. OMNI appeared to weather this storm better than most, likely due to its wider selection of contents.

In its later years, especially the last year or two of the print publication, OMNI was criticized for weighting its coverage more toward pseudo-scientific topics like UFOs and ESP. Some have speculated that this may have been an effort to increase circulation during leaner years, but the strategy backfired. Though OMNI 's treatment of these topics was essentially skeptical, the weighting nonetheless damaged its credibility and led, in part, to its demise. Guccione shut down the print version of the magazine following the Winter 1995 issue due to waning popularity and the many financial difficulties plaguing his company, General Media.


After the print magazine folded in 1996, the OMNI Internet webzine was launched. Free of pressure to focus on fringe science areas, OMNI returned to its roots as the home of gonzo science writing, becoming one of the first large-scale venues to deliver a journalism geared specifically to cyberspace, complete with real-time coverage of major science events, chats and blogs with scientific luminaries, and interactive experiments that users could join. The world's top science fiction writers also joined in, writing collaborative fiction pieces for OMNI's readers live online. *You can see the website and updated blog here: http://www.omnimagonline.com

Though the website generated large traffic, it did not turn a profit. In 1998, Kathy Keeton, whose vision inspired OMNI, died from complications of breast cancer, the staff of OMNI Internet was laid off, and no new content was added to the website. General Media shut the site down and removed the OMNI archives from the Internet in 2003.

TV

A short-lived syndicated television show based on the magazine's format (and called OMNI: The New Frontier) aired in the United States beginning in September 1981, hosted by Peter Ustinov. A French voice over of the show appeared on "Radio Québec" in Canada during 1994.

References in Popular Culture

* In The Fly, Stathis threatens to send Veronica's teleportation story to OMNI -- his own publication, PARTICLE magazine, created for the film, is a clear nod to OMNI.

* In the 1989 romantic film Say Anything, Diane Court has an issue in her bedroom next to her desk. There is also an issue visible in the garbage can in the background when James Court is sitting in the bathtub after having his credit cards declined.

* In Ghostbusters, the Proton Pack appears on a fictional front cover of the magazine.

* In 2010: The Year We Make Contact, a future OMNI issue appeared in front of Roy Scheider on the beach.

* In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a fellow passenger can be seen reading OMNI magazine on the bus that Kirk and Spock take across the Golden Gate Bridge.

* On the 2005 album Robot Hive/Exodus by the band Clutch, the song "Mice and Gods" references OMNI Magazine in the very first line of the song.

* In the film Jurassic Park, Tim Murphy mentions having read an article by Alan Grant in Omni magazine.

Part 2 coming soon!!!!

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First scary storm of 2008!

For those in the bay area, you're probably asleep right now. But I am wide awake! I can't sleep - I love listening to the wind and the rain, actually more like waiting to hear the rain. I got some driving home from Carmel earlier today but it wasn't too heavy as is predicted. What is heavy though is the wind. You see, I live right on the water, on the bay and that makes for much different weather experiences, especially when we get a 'storm of the century' as they are calling it in the paper. It is much more windy here - we've so far gotten up to 72 knots (which is close to 70mph) and it's currently gusting at 60+ with winds at 55 or so blowing strong. I was asleep for a while but then awakened by a loud crash. I thought, oh god, what now?! My cat ran under the bed and I went downstairs to investigate. I discovered our boat, now off of the dock and in the water. Thank goodness my dad had it locked with a long steel wire lock. It was the only thing securing it to the dock. I managed to grab the bowline and tie that to the dock as well. I also almost got blown off the dock! Yikes! I'm now back up in bed, listening to the neighbors' boats bang around, every crash sounds like it may be the last time they see their boats in one piece. And good ridence too - they are evil people and never use their boats, they've just been sitting in the water, rotting for years, taking up wasted dock space and partially blocking our view of our little marina. Thankfully everything on our end is secured and boy am I glad I did come home today. I wanted to stay another day but once again my parents started to drive me crazy, so I decided that 5 days without them at home sounded like a much better bargain. Once again, I save the day :) Hope everyone else out there is faring better.

An example of how intelligent my cat is!

I'm currently in Carmel for New Years and to try to have a few more vacation days until I head back home, although my grouchy parents aren't making it very easy. I wanted to stay an extra day, more than I had originally planned, because I just love it down here and this year the owners of the house aren't returning until end of January. So when I got back from my trip to Oregon, I stopped off at home for the evening, slept on the couch with my kitty, since being in my room would have been way too depressing anyway. I have been trying to teach my cat how to open doors for himself and it never occured to me that this would pose any issues down the road. Another bad thing about temporarily living with the folks, is that they are very insistent that my kitty stay in the laundry room/garage if I'm going to be gone overnight. Of course, when they are not home at all, I don't do this because it's not really fair. And I would have just given him the run of the house this time except I did not know until yesterday that my parents are going to be staying in Carmel a week longer than usual. So all of last night, I thought, damn, wish I could have known that earlier. My cat really needs room to run around and act all psycho and crazy when he is in that particular mood. So as painful as it was, I left him in the laundry room and garage, with blankets on the hood of my car in the garage and his bed up on the washer - to give him more options as to where to sleep, off the cold floor. I left plenty of food + his automatic waterer too and asked a neighbor to come by and check on him a couple of times.

So I just a few minutes ago called to check in. Turns out she went over yesterday, to find the door to the laundry room open - she said I must have left it open, but I didn't. Turns out Kitty opened it himself. My dad beginning of last year installed all new door handles all over the house, the kind that are like a lever, so a cat could potentially reach up and pull on the handle to open the door. I don't know how he did it, because the door swings into the laundry room, not the opposite but he must have known to do that. Smart kitty! Now I'm a bit more happy, not so much worried about him being stuck in the garage area. I asked her to make sure to leave that door open as all of his food, water and litter box are currently in the garage too and I don't want to come home to find any accidents. But I'm just kinda laughing inside at the moment. I am so proud of my kitty. What a smart cat!!!