SPRING HAS OFFICIALLY ARRIVED. Went to some friends’ annual Easter breakfast; got to smell cut lawn and see bright sunbreaks (as well as the gent seen above, getting into the true spirit of the season).

For the past week, sunsets finally sneaked past the 6 PM PST mark, putting an end to seasonal-affective-disorder season for another seven months.

And today, Mariner baseball returned. Our boys lost (since when did that ever happen?), but they played a hard-fought contest that literally went down to the final pitch. A good omen.

NORWESCON, the Northwest’s biggest science fiction/ fantasy fan convention, held its 25th edition last Easter weekend at a SeaTac hotel. This year’s theme was “The Road to the Emerald City,” taken from the official Seattle tourist slogan coined by an ad agency in 1982. Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum’s great-grandson was flown in as a guest speaker.

There were also the usual Star Wars and Doctor Who merchandise, homemade fan goods (including Klingon nutcrackers), role-playing-game tables, panels on breaking into the writing biz, Lazer Tag tourneys, video screenings, paintings of buxom droids and cosmic goth-dudes, and costumes everywhere (culminating in a Saturday-night masquerade ball).

Through these events, hundreds of everyday humans (many of whom had what the mainstream media would consider less-than-perfect physiques) get to be adventure heroes; they also get to dream of a more romantic world, freed from the inhibitions of the technocratic civilization science fiction once promised us in glowing terms.