seven famous people I've met

[totient]

Another meme! This is the seven truths and a lie meme, famous people I've met submeme. Which one of these have I not actually met?

• Samuel R. Delaney
  
• Richard Feynman
  
• Neil Gaiman (before he was dating Amanda Palmer)
  
• Steven Jay Gould
  
• Amanda Palmer (before she was dating Neil Gaiman)
  
• Fred Pohl
  
• Sally Ride
  
• John Scalzi

(comments screened, because I can.)

Comments

[jasra]

Samuel R. Delaney

[totient]

Oh look, I typoed his name in the list. That wasn't meant to be a trick question.

I've met Chip Delany on at least four occasions, most extensively at Readercon but also at Wiscon 30 and a Worldcon and possibly also a Boskone, I'm not sure. I'm never sure what to say about his work, which is sometimes so profound as to be completely incomprehensible. But I've managed to speak on other topics without getting too tongue-tied.

[jasra]

Well, I'm positive you've met the last 4 on the list. And Feynman seems probable, knowing you. :) So Gould then?

[totient]

OK, now that someone else has gotten the Feynman story, I'll do Gould: I took his class as an undergrad. It was an enormous class and not the kind where your average student actually gets to meet the professor, but one time I fell asleep in class and when it had emptied out, he came and woke me up to tell me if I was going to sleep I should do it in my dorm room.

[candle_light]

Neil Gaiman (before he was dating Amanda Palmer)

[totient]

This is probably the least interesting story out of the 8. I ran into him on the sidewalk in Montreal in 2009, as he was getting out of his car. As I recall I bade him welcome to Canada (in English).

[rmd]

Fred Pohl?

[totient]

Many many years ago I was on programming at Balticon. This was so long ago that they still had smoking and non-smoking green rooms. I was passing through the smoking green room to get to the non-smoking one and he was there, holding forth on some topic I don't even recall. I remember being quite surprised to find that he was a smoker.

[chhotii]

How old were you when Richard Feynman died? 17? Where would you have met Richard Feynman as a teenager? I'm going to guess Feynman as the odd man out.

[totient]

17. A few months before he died, when I was sixteen, he gave a talk at the library in Altadena, in which town both he and I lived. Well mostly he played the bongos. I went up afterwards to talk to him, though, because even though I didn't see what bongos had to do with the mischievous spirit he describes in his books, he'd made himself sound like an interesting guy to me.