Bakka Hosts The Cup

MaskedMosaic_Cover_nobleed-318x500Toronto’s famed Bakka Phoenix Books drew an unexpected guest to its April 20 launch party for Masked Mosaic: Lord Stanley’s Cup, the championship trophy of the National Hockey League. Click here to see a photo.

I’ve heard it claimed that hockey is such an ingrained part of the Canadian identity that I doubt a visit from the Stanley Cup would be equalled in significance if the San Francisco 49ers were to loan the 2013 Vince Lombardi Trophy to the Bay Area’s Other Change of Hobbit bookstore.

In the event neither sports reference has the slightest meaning for you, don’t forget there’s still a perfectly good short story collection to consider.

The Bakka launch party was on behalf of Masked Mosaic, a collection of Canadian stories featuring masked vigilantes, superpowered antiheroes and super scientists, edited by Claude Lalumière and Camile Alexa. Writers Mike Rimar, Emma Vossen, Michael S. Chong and Michael Matheson were on hand to sign.

The collection’s full slate of contributors is — , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

[Thanks to John Mansfield for the story.]

He Got The Bug

Mantis robotMatt Denton finally decided making small-scale animatronics for the film industry was too confining and built a giant mantis robot with hydraulic legs.

It took him four years and hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The robot, driver-operated by joysticks within a cockpit, can only travel at 1.5km/h (1mph) and manage a distance of 5km on a 20-litre (4.5-gallon) tank of diesel.

“It’s not about miles to the gallon, it’s about gallons to the mile,” he said.

“It wasn’t built to be efficient and fast. It was built to look cool and insect-like and fun.”

Mission accomplished!

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

A Short History of Hold Over Funds

The TAFF stats left Andy Hooper wondering “Who was the wet blanket who voted to hold over funds? What sort of better candidates do you expect to appear?” Quite like Dante’s Inferno, where the poet asks after describing a heinous crime, “If you would not cry then, when would you?”

Once I savored the drama of Andy’s question, however, I paused for a fact-check. Aren’t votes cast for “Hold Over Funds” in every TAFF race? And I found out, no, there aren’t. So it’s not a purely rhetorical question.

TAFF instituted the “Hold Over Funds” option for the 1966 TAFF race. Co-administrators Arthur Thomson (ATom) and Terry Carr explained the change in TAFF Progress Report 8

“HOLD OVER FUNDS”: New this year is the candidate with the strange name of “Hold over funds”. This choice, which is similar to the “No Award” vote in Hugo balloting, gives the voter the opportunity to vote for no Taff trip in a given year/campaign in the event that either the candidates do not appeal strongly enough or that he feels that Taff should slow down on its program to build stronger interest in the campaigns that are held.

While the voters have never signaled for a full stop – translation: “Hold Over Funds” has never won – at least one person has voted for the option in 28 out of 40 TAFF races held since 1966. (This excludes 1973 for which statistics have never been posted.)

Is there a reason why some races dodged the bullet? As a little thought experiment I made up a list in my own mind of the five most deserving TAFF winners since 1966 and discovered that in 2 of those 5 races at least one vote was cast for “Hold Over Funds.” Not even the most stellar candidates can guarantee to get everybody off the fence.

“Hold Over Funds” has never received more than 15 first-place votes or more than 9 percent of the total vote – records set in the 1982 race between Rog Peyton and Kevin Smith which decided TAFF’s delegate to Chicon IV. Interestingly, 14 of those 15 votes for “Hold Over Funds” came from European fans. Someone may remember a reason, but it’s sure not ringing a bell with me. Not even after looking up the candidates’ platforms. (Thanks to Dave Langford for his TAFF site, indispensible to this spur-of-the-moment research project.)

Rog Peyton
‘Again, I boggle at his staying-power! Chairman of three Novacons, 1977 Eastercon, Brum Group (4 years) and veteran of umpteen other committees, Rog pre-dated me into fandom yet continues stronger than ever. He’s a Publishing Jiant — BSFA Vector, Tangent for 2 years, newsletters, and some superb programme books. His “Andromeda” is Britain’s top SF bookshop; No.1 auctioneer at every con, he’s into films, fancy-dress, art shows — My God, he’s done everything (including calling Harlan in the middle of the night)! Unquestionably our most active fan, Rog already has lots of US friends and richly deserves the opportunity to make many more!’ (Peter Weston)

Nominated by: Jack Chalker, Malcolm Edwards, jan howard finder, Bob Shaw and Peter Weston.

Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith has been around in fandom for some nine years, producing fanzines (Drilkjis with Dave Langford; Dot), writing for fanzines (Nabu, Space Junk, and others), chairing some British conventions (Skycon, Faancon 6), falling over at most others, editing an anthology of British fanwriting for Seacon ’79 (Mood 70), devising the world famous Surrey Limpwrist constitution, and downing the requisite amount of alcoholic beverages. He currently edits Vector, the critical journal of the BSFA, has clean personal habits, and wants to see America and meet American fans before it is too late (ra ra Ronnie Raygun!). All excellent qualities for a TAFF representative and administrator.

Nominated by: Avedon Carol, Eve Harvey, Terry Hughes, Rob Jackson and Ian Maule.

Coming in second, the 1985 race had 12 votes for “Hold Over Funds.” That was the year of Topic A. Yet because in 1985 fans cast a record number of TAFF ballots, 513, the percentage was trivial.

In fact, the 1989 race received the second highest percentage of “Hold Over Funds” votes, 6%, or 10 out of 165 votes, equally divided between voters from each side of the Pond.

Once “Hold Over Funds” became an option it garnered a tiny handful of votes in the next three TAFF races. Not until 1970 did “Hold Over Funds” register zero votes – all the preferences going to Elliot K. Shorter or his competition, Charlie Brown and Bill Rotsler. The latest race to shut out “Hold Over Funds” was 2012, which Jacq Monahan won over Warren Buff and Kim Kofmel.

2013 TAFF Voting

John Coxon released the 2013 Trans Atlantic Fan Fund voting statistics in Taffline #6 [PDF file].   

Voting

N. Am.

Europe

 

Total

Theresa Derwin

5

11

 

16

Jim Mowatt

47

44

 

91

Hold Over Funds

1

0

 

1

No Preference

8

5

 

13

Totals

61

60

 

121

Jim Mowatt won with a first-round majority. He also passed TAFF’s “20% rule” which, explains John Coxon, “meant that each candidate needed to get 10 votes in North America and 11 votes in Europe (‘no preference’ was not included when calculating these numbers).”

Coxon says 58 votes were cast in North America and 60 votes in Europe, and 3 more from the rest of the world — the latter reported in the North America column so it would not become too easy to deduce who they voted for. All voters’ names are listed in Taffline #6. Voter donations totaled $533.23 in North America and £349.68 in Europe.

2013 DeepSouthCon Awards

The Phoenix and Rebel, two traditonal Southern fandom awards, were presented at DeepSouthCon 51 in Atlanta, GA on April 20. The Phoenix is for pros and the Rebel is for fans.

Harriet McDougal accepted the Phoenix Award on behalf of her late husband, James Oliver Rigney, Jr. after all of his aliases were read off — the one everyone knows being Robert Jordan. The winner of the award was selected by the current year’s DSC committee. When you know DSC 51 was also JordanCon 5 the preference is easy to explain.

The Rebel Award was won by Regina Kirby and M. Lee Rogers.

Also presented was the facetious Rubble Award, which went to Pat Gibbs who often runs the DSC’s traditional Hearts competition. The Rubble is decided by previous winners who give it to someone who has done much to Southern fandom.

[Via Guy H. Lillian III and SF Site News.]

Update 04/23/2013: Corrected location of con to Atlanta.

Seen Nick Vanover?

Nick Vanover

Nick Vanover

See story update below.

Denver fan Nick Vanover went missing after attending a local convention, Starfest, this past weekend. His friends and family are worried and a missing persons report has been filed with the police. A call for help finding Nick has gone out on the Denver Comic Con’s Facebook page

We need some help. A friend of ours, Nick Vanover, was instrumental in making Denver Comic Con 2012 happen. Unfortunately, he’s been missing for a few days. We’re worried about him. If anyone has any information about his whereabouts, please PM us. The authorities have said one of the best ways to help out is to get the word out. Please share this image if you are so inclined.

Nick’s father in Virginia adds:

Nick was last seen Friday at Starfest and was despondent because of his job situation. He has not responded to phone calls or texts from family. We are in Virginia and can only depend on Nick’s friends and the police for help in locating him. A missing persons report has been filed and now it is just a waiting game for us.

Update 04/23/2013: Nick Vanover’s father, Alex, reports on FB that Nick called this morning and left a message saying he is in a Denver hospital. He has been located. If Alex posts any further explanation on FB I will follow up.

[Thanks to Curt Phillips for the story.]

Stu Shiffman Update 4/22

Ten months after suffering a stroke Stu Shiffman is regaining his speaking ability reports Tom Whitmore on Stu’s Caringbridge page

Stu is now doing almost all his communication by speech (rather than spelling things out). He’s still a little croaky, but only a little difficult to understand. He’s also continuing to work out a couple of times a week at the gym upstairs. He still can’t stand or walk, but they’re working on keeping his muscles in shape.

This is very fine news!

Snapshots 108 Dragons

Here are 11 developments of interest to fans:

(1) “Career Arc: Harrison Ford” by Alex Pappademas (at Grantland) is a fun read —

Should we start with carpentry? The fact that Harrison Ford spent some years working as a carpenter is one of the cornerstones — one of the load-bearing struts, you might say — of his mythos. He may still be the most famous ex-carpenter since Jesus.

***

“There’s nothing good about being famous,” Ford told an interviewer a few years ago. “It was unanticipated and I’ve never enjoyed it. You can get the table you want in a restaurant. It gets you doctor’s appointments. But what’s that worth? Nothing.”

Question: Can you imagine a less-appealing description of the upside of being a public figure than “It gets you doctor’s appointments”? No wonder Ford looks so glum all the time; he’s been in the game for 50 years and all it represents to him is the express lane to a colonoscopy.

(2) Another unhappy Star Wars vet is the maestro himself. Do you think the residents of Marin County are sorry they made George Lucas mad?

After George Lucas abandoned plans to build a movie studio along a woodsy road in Marin County, he complained about the permitting process in a place so environmentally friendly that hybrid-car ownership is four times the state average.

His next move, some here say, was payback for what Lucas described in a written statement as the “bitterness and anger” expressed by his neighbors.

The creator of “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” is working with a local foundation that hopes to build hundreds of units of affordable housing on a former dairy farm called Grady Ranch, where his studio would have risen.

Now MarinCounty is squirming at that prospect — and it is not a pretty sight.

(3) For 75 years, writers have injected Superman into American politics, from World War II to Vietnam, from race relations to the war on terrorism.

Remember Superman #168 in 1963 where President Kennedy agreed to put on a Clark Kent mask to protect Superman’s identity? A 1970 story called “I Am Curious (Black),” where “Lois steps into a handy Kryptonian Plastimold outfitted with Transformaflux technology that transforms her into a righteous African American woman who goes undercover to expose racial prejudice”? All this and more in the Washington Post op-ed by Glen Weldon, author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography

(4) James Bacon applauds the slate of nominees in the Best Graphic Story Hugo category in a post at Forbidden Planet.

(5) Nolan Bushnell is not a very self-effacing guy, but the creator of Pong and co-founder of Atari is willing to pretend to be one if it will sell copies of his book Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent.

Pong offered a new kind of entertainment with with its black and white graphics and dials to control the on-screen action.

But Bushnell admits they did not even intend to make it.

“It was meant as a training project for one of my engineers,” he remembered.

“And we kept fiddling with it and doing slight improvements.

“One of the improvements all of a sudden made the game completely fun.”

At the time, Atari had been contracted by Bally Technologies – a company now based in Las Vegas and specialising in casino gaming – to create a driving game.

Excited by his new game, Bushnell offered Pong instead.

“We thought [Pong] is so fun, maybe they’ll take this and it will fulfill our contract.

“They said ‘no, we want the driving game’.”

(6) Did it take this long for somebody to finally read the entire 500-page transcript of conversations among the Apollo 10 astronauts? Because it was just last week a New York paper reported about the poop problem in the space capsule. The dialog between Stafford, Young and Cernan makes it sound like one of those Turkish galleys in a Patrick O’Brien novel (“turds everywhere”).

(7) Scott Turow’s New York Times op-ed “The Slow Death of the American Author” complains that emerging digital book technology is being treated as another excuse for publishers to scalp writers —

Take e-books. They are much less expensive for publishers to produce: there are no printing, warehousing or transportation costs, and unlike physical books, there is no risk that the retailer will return the book for full credit.

But instead of using the savings to be more generous to authors, the six major publishing houses — five of which were sued last year by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division for fixing e-book prices — all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties to 25 percent of net receipts. That is roughly half of a traditional hardcover royalty.

(8) Writers have been scuffling since, oh, forever, as Gardner Dozois told the Philadelphia Weekly.

You collaborate with George R.R. Martin in editing themed short-story anthologies. What’s it been like watching Martin’s already-strong genre popularity explode through the American mass culture since Game of Thrones hit HBO?
It’s been amazing watching George’s success. We started out as broke young writers together. I remember, back in the mid-’70s, going to a Nebula Award banquet in New York City with George and trying to find an editor who was willing to buy us dinner, because neither of us had any money; the best we could do was an editor who took us out in front of the hotel and bought us each a hot dog from a hot dog cart. Now he’s perhaps the best-known and most successful writer in the genre, even personally satirized in cartoons and on Saturday Night Live. It’s astounding—but he’s worked very, very hard for his success, and deserves every bit of it.

(9) Vanity Fair contributor Mark Seal’s follow-up comment about the Christian Gerhartsreiter guilty verdict includes the length of the potential jail sentence:

One juror told the media that he would suggest a lighter sentence if the defendant would lead authorities to Linda Sohus, which seems unlikely; among other things, it would mean that the imposter would have to break his silence and come clean. In the meantime, Gerhartsreiter will serve 27 years to life in federal prison, after his sentencing is handed down on June 26. And until then, he’ll receive what he always loved most: attention — though not, to his chagrin, as a Rockefeller.

(10) Guy Gavriel Kay is inspired by history:

Tell us about River of Stars for the reader who’s not familiar with your work.

River of Stars is inspired by history: the remarkable Northern Song dynasty of China (around 1100 A.D.). It moves from the tensions of a dangerous court to scenes involving the most ordinary people in villages so small they aren’t even on the map. One mother does the bravest thing in the book, perhaps, to try to save her beloved, very sick daughter… and all she does is walk, alone, to the neighbouring market town. These small moments in people’s lives are central to how I write.

The two main characters are a man and a woman who are each, in their own way, fighting what their time and world “allow” people to be. The role of women in this very “formal” society is a major theme. The book is pitched on a very large scale–war, peace, politics, intrigue–but I am always as interested in the inner lives and relationships of my characters. That means romantic love, parent-child dynamics, and even two brothers who are among my favorite figures in the novel. I want readers to care about these people and what happens to them.

(11) If you’re having a good day, listening to John Astin read “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe will take care of that…

 [Thanks for these links goes out to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter  and John King Tarpinian. (Hey, dude deserves double mention!)]

Lord of the Wrings

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s latest video from the International Space Station answers the question — What happens when you wring out a wet washcloth in a zero gravity environment? 

The experiment was designed by two Nova Scotia high school students, Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner.

Despite the surprising result of Hadfield’s demonstration, a few droplets do visibly escape off-camera, which made me think about the whole dining, hygiene and waste cycle aboard the space station. How do they prevent mold?

As a student living in a basement apartment one summer in Bowling Green, Ohio I had my own troubles getting rid of water. The humidity was such that once a washcloth or anything else got wet it never dried out until it went through a dryer at the Laundromat. Hadfield doesn’t get the option of the college student’s solution — moving out after three months and letting the landlord figure it out.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

Copies of Uncle Albert’s Are Surfacing

Two fans have already responded to Leah Zeldes’ plea to help preserve copies of Larry Tucker’s audio and video fanzines. Mike Griffin and Jim Meadows have volunteered to let copies be dubbed from their cassettes of a couple issues of Uncle Albert’s Electric Talking Fanzine. More are needed to fill in a set.

Meadows says he has been making good use of his copies as a fanhistorical resource all along —  

I work as a reporter at a public radio station in Illinois (WILL at the University of Illinois in Urbana). A few years ago, when Bob Tucker died, I did a feature story on his death, noting his status as a local author (the Bloomington-Normal area, where he lived for many years, is just one county over from us). I also attempted to sketch in Bob’s reputation in the sf fan community, and used an excerpt of Tucker giving a convention speech that appeared in Larry Tucker’s cassette zine. Much later, maybe a couple of years, I got an email from a son of Bob Tucker (maybe David Tucker?) asking about that speech. I dubbed off the speech and emailed it to him, and he expressed thanks for being able to hear his father’s voice again.