I started Saturday by brunching with the Dell Magazines gang for the annual combined Analog AnLab Awards/Asimov’s Readers Awards breakfast ceremony. I was seated at a long table at Ancho’s restaurant between Connie Willis and Liza Groen Trombi and across from Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead, and Trevor Quachri. The food was fine (though only Connie was enthusiastic about the grits), and the conversation was compelling (as usual). What was unusual this year is that we seemed to expend a great deal of energy before the awards were handed out trying to convince Nancy not to steal one of the miniature milk bottles that contained the cream for her coffee.

Though Nancy will try to tell you that I have a larcenous soul, do not believe her—I am the most honest of men. I was merely far more creative in suggesting the many ways in which she could exercise her thieving inner nature. Connie was equally horrified by both of us, however, which raises the question&#151which is worse, the thought or the deed? The egger-on or the eggee?

After brunch, Gabrielle Faust, Michael Marano and I visited two unique museums—the Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata and the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture.

The Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata is meant to replicate the experience of visiting wunderkammern&#151those curiosity cabinets popular in the 17th century which were the precursors of our modern museums—and of dime museums, in which fraudulent fabulations were often exhibited. You could find on display as part of the museum’s Impermanent Collection a taxidermy pheasant given by John Wayne to a member of one of his film crews, a fudge eyeball handed out by George Bush, Sr. one Halloween during trick or treating, and rivets from George W.G. Ferris’ first ferris wheel. The patter offered by curator Jill Hirt during our tour was as much fun as the exhibits themselves. I enjoyed our visit so much that I’m thinking of offering to loan them a key once bent by Uri Geller when visiting the offices of Marvel Comics.

Gabrielle then recommended that we stop by the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture. The current exhibit was on the poster art of Frank Kozik, who first achieved prominence in Austin’s underground rock scene of the mid-’80s. His dazzling imagery has promoted such bands as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was always more of a comic-book fan than a rock fan, so instead of making me nostalgia for a past spent club-hopping, I was instead reminded of all the underground comics I picked up at my first conventions in the early ’70s when I learned that there was more to comics than spandex.

As much as we were enjoying wandering Austin, it was time to get back to the Omni for the main attraction of the evening, the Nebula Awards banquet. I shared a table with Paul Melko, Bill Shunn, Laura Chavoen, Geoff Landis, Mary Turzillo, Gabrille Faust, Michael Marano and Kamela Dolinova.

I don’t know whose idea it was to give each attendee a small nerf moon with the name of the event printed on it amidst the craters, but I’m sorry to have to report that not all of those present treated those objects in the adult manner in which I’m sure the Nebula organizers wished. Some of us (of whom we shall not speak) flung moons across the room, not always hitting the intended targets, while others hid those moons in places they were not meant to be, behaving, rather than in an adult fashion, in what I’d have to call an adults-only fashion.

As for what was happening on the stage, well, yes, I guess there were some interesting things going on there as well. Toastmaster Joe Lansdale explained why all Texas writers are crazy, with a delivery I could never replicate here but which I could have listened to all night, while Nebula-winner Michael Chabon seemed moved to have been acknowledged as a member of the science-fiction club, and so was himself moving.

I’ll leave it to others to list all the winners, so I don’t repeat what others have already reported, but click here for further photos from the weekend.