Pixel Scroll 1/10/18 Learning To File, By Tom Pixel And The Scrollbreakers

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(1) THE REFERENCE-SPANGLED BANNER. Artist Taral Wayne has updated his File 770 banner artwork to 2018, with the help of Sherman and Peabody, and the Wayback Machine.

(2) NOM DE CON. The “Phoenix Comicon Is Now Phoenix Comic Fest” reports Phoenix New Times. Although the conrunners declined to explicitly answer the question why, the reporter noted the change follows close on the heels of the San Diego Comic-Con’s victory in a lawsuit about its rights to the name “Comic-Con,” which is hinted at in a press release.

Square Egg Entertainment, the Phoenix-based company that runs the event, sent out a press release on Tuesday, January 2, announcing the rebranding.

And it hints at the possible reason behind the name change.

“In recent months, the use of the word Comic-Con, and its many forms, has become litigious. We would prefer to focus on creating the best events and experiences for our attendees. Therefore, effective immediately, our event held annually in Phoenix in the spring will be rebranded as Phoenix Comic Fest.”

(It isn’t the first time that the event has undergone a name change as it was previously known as “Phoenix Cactus Comicon” from 2002 to 2009.)

Meanwhile, a con in the state of Washington is waiting to see how the region’s larger Comic Cons respond to the court decision before changing its name – the Yakima Herald has the story: “Yakima group watches ‘Comic Con’ naming controversy play out”.

The annual Central City Comic Con in Yakima will hold off on a name change after one of the nation’s largest comic conventions successfully defended its right to the words “Comic Con.”

One of the staff for Yakima’s convention said organizers are waiting to see what other comic conventions in the area will do in response to San Diego Comic-Con’s successful lawsuit….

Yakima’s event attracts an average of 2,000 people a year, compared with the more than 130,000 who attended San Diego’s convention last year.

Burns said the Yakima event does not have a problem changing the name if it has to. She said the organizers are waiting to see whether the Emerald City Comic Con, scheduled for February in Seattle, and the Rose City Comic Con, which will take place in September in Portland, will change their names.

Rose City’s organizers announced on their website that the convention had reached an agreement with San Diego to use the Comic Con name at no charge.

(3) BEAUTIFUL IMAGES OF JUPITER. Via TIME Magazine, “See Jupiter Looking Downright Gorgeous in These New NASA Photos”.

NASA has shared brand new photos of Jupiter taken by the Juno spacecraft, showing the gas giant’s blue-tinged skies.

The Juno spacecraft takes batches of photos about every 53 days as it orbits Jupiter. NASA researchers uploaded the raw images online last month, prompting several people to process the photos into colorful views of Jupiter, including self-described citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran.

(4) LESSON FOR THE DAY. Chloe N. Clarke, in “HORROR 101: Violence in Horror, Part One”, tells Nerds of a Feather readers to distinguish between gore and violence:

A lot of times when I mention being a horror fan or horror writer, people say something about the violence in horror: “I can’t watch that stuff, it’s too gory” or “why would you want to write something violent.” Rarely do I want to go into pedantic scholar mode (except for my poor long-suffering students), so I usually just shrug. However, here in Horror 101, is exactly the place for me to get onto my horror scholar pedestal and say: good horror isn’t about the gory, or shocking acts of physical violence being depicted. Instead, it’s often about the true nature of violence which is the loss of agency.  So in this column, I’ll be talking about violence and agency in horror. Violence is a subject I plan to tackle from a few angles in terms of horror—while this is looking specifically at violence as loss of agency, later columns will address violence and women’s bodies in horror and other issues about the use of violence in the genre.

When we think of horror, we might think of the visceral moments that have stayed with us: the opening murder in Scream, for example, or the shark in Jaws taking off someone’s leg. Those moments stick with us because acts of physical violence cause such visceral emotional reactions: disgust, terror, an empathetic surge at the pain. However, beneath these physical moments of violence are the ones of the more subtle but insidious acts of violence.

(5) IN DEMAND. Breaking a record held by Captain America, “Black Panther had the biggest first day ticket presale of any Marvel movie” reports The Verge.

Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther is already set to have a huge debut at the box office in February. Fandango reports that the first 24 hours of ticket presales for the film were the largest it’s ever seen for a Marvel movie. The record was previously held by Captain America: Civil War, which was released in 2016.

(6) “COMIC-CON FOR WONKS”. The Washington Post’s David Betancourt, in “DC in D.C.: The stars of ‘Black Lightning’ and other DC projects are coming to Washington”, says that fans in the Washington area are going to get a lot of DC Comics panels in the next few weeks, including one with Black Lightning star Cress Williams.

The various worlds of DC Comics, from television to comics to animation, are coming to Washington for a first-of-its-kind event titled “DC in D.C.” — but it’s not just because the two names are the same.

The gathering will feature a who’s who of DC bigwigs participating in various panels, including television producer Greg Berlanti, DC Comics Co-Publisher Jim Lee and Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns, animation producer Bruce Timm and actors from the CW and Fox’s DC-inspired superhero television slate.

“DC in D.C.” will take place at multiple locations, including the Newseum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Lisa Gregorian, the president and chief marketing officer of Warner Bros. Television Group, has been working on bringing DC to Washington over the past three years and says it will be “Comic-Con for wonks.”

(7) THYSSEN OBIT. Greta Thyssen, who appeared in minor sf movies and opposite the Three Stooges, has died at the age of 90. The Hollywood Reporter eulogy begins —

Greta Thyssen, the Danish beauty who doubled for Marilyn Monroe, dated Cary Grant and starred opposite The Three Stooges, has died. She was 90. Thyssen died Saturday night at her Manhattan apartment after a bout with pneumonia, her daughter, Genevieve Guenther, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Thyssen also starred in several “B” movies, including the horror pic Terror Is a Man (1959), a loose adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. On a mystery island (it was filmed in the Philippines), the actress played the wife of a scientist (Francis Lederer) “tormented by unsatisfied desire, desperate to escape a loneliness and her fear,” according to the film’s trailer. Unfortunately, Thyssen’s character has more pressing issues to worry about, namely her husband’s creation — a half-man, half-panther beast. The movie incorporated a “warning bell” gimmick that would alert moviegoers when a particularly horrific sequence was about to take place so that they could hide their eyes. It would ring a second time when it was safe to look again.

Four of Thyssen’s other best-known performances came in the Joseph Kane noir Accused of Murder(1956); The Beast of Budapest (1958); Three Blondes in His Life (1961), opposite Jock Mahoney; and as an enticing pin-up beauty on Uranus in Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962), shot in her native Denmark….

(8) BAIKIE OBIT. Eisner Award-winning Scottish comic artist Jim Baikie died December 29. He was 77. Downthetubes paid tribute —

[He was] perhaps best known to many downthetubes readers as co-creator of 2000AD’s alien-on-the-run, Skizz. He enjoyed a career in comics that began with work for girls titles in the 1960s that would go on to encompass “Charlie’s Angels” and “Terrahawks” for Look-In, 2000AD and superhero work in the United States. He was also a much in demand artist beyond the comics medium.

…In 1991 when he was 51, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. Initially the symptoms were mild enough that he could continue to work until 2004, after which his condition made it impossible to do so. He died peacefully from complications due to the disease.

…While perhaps best known perhaps for his work with Alan Moore on the 2000AD strip “Skizz”, as well as many memorable “Judge Dredd” strips, Jim had a long and varied career as an artist in comics. Born in 1940, he was inspired by comics from an early age, including Hogarth’s Tarzan and humour strips such as Gasoline Alley.

(9) RHODES OBIT. Donnelly Rhodes, most recently seen by fans as Agent Smith in The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow, died January 8. He was 80. Rhodes appeared in more than 160 films and TV series during the past 60 years.

His roles in genre TV shows included The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild, Wild West, The Starlost, Wonder Woman, Airwolf, Sliders, The X-Files, The Outer Limits reboot, The Dead Zone, Smallville, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and Supernatural. He also appeared in several little-known genre films.

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • January 10, 1927 — Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premiered in his native Germany.
  • January 10, 1967 — The Invaders television series debuted.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY SCARECROW

  • Born January 10, 1904 – Ray Bolger, whose Scarecrow wanted the Wizard of Oz to give him a brain.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • John King Tarpinian spotted an unusual parent-teacher conference in Bliss.

(13) DEMOCRAT IN NAME ONLY. A Filer made a typo and in the process discovered that last November someone with a few dollars to throw away amused themselves by purchasing the URL www.jondelarroz.com, and setting it to redirect to www.democrats.org. (JDA’s correct URL is www.delarroz.com.)

Full WHOIS Lookup

Domain Name: JONDELARROZ.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2182181215_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.dreamhost.com
Registrar URL: http://www.DreamHost.com
 Updated Date: 2017-11-01T22:12:15Z
Creation Date: 2017-11-01T22:12:15Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2018-11-01T22:12:15Z
Registrar: DreamHost, LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 431
Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone:
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
 Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM
DNSSEC: unsigned
URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/
 >>> Last update of whois database: 2017-11-03T00:16:42Z

(14) TALKING SHAT. The voice of William Shatner is the big selling point in publicity for Aliens Ate My Homework, for sale on DVD March 6. Here’s the actual story:

Based on Bruce Coville’s best-selling book series, this suspenseful family comedy follows the adventures of sixth-grader Rod Allbright and the extraterrestrial lawmen known as the Galactic Patrol. When a tiny spaceship flies through his window and lands on his science project, Rod and his cousin Elspeth meet a group of friendly aliens, including Phil, a talking plant (voiced by William Shatner). The earthlings quickly join the aliens’ adventurous mission to help defeat an evil alien criminal. After discovering the evil alien is disguised as a human – someone he knows all too well – Rod and Elspeth race to save the world from total planetary disaster.

 

(15) LIST OF FAVES. Dina at SFF Book Reviews details what she likes about “My Top 7 Books of 2017”

My Favorite Books Published in 2017

Katherine Arden – The Bear and the Nightingale

Without a doubt, my favorite book of last year (both published last year and older), this Russian-inspired fairy tale had so much atmosphere and told such a riveting story that it catapulted Katherine Arden onto my top author shelf immediately. Vasya is a fantastic heroine who – despite the slow loss of old beliefs – holds on to the old gods and tries to save her home, all by herself. The snowy landscape, the threat of true winter, the politics and magic and mythology all go so perfectly well together to make this book a perfect read for a cold day by a chimney (if you have one) or in front of a nice steaming cup of tea (if you don’t).

(16) 24. Joe Sherry has his eye on the future in an ambitious list of “24 Books I’m Looking Forward to in 2018” at Nerds of a Feather. He begins with this caveat:

As with any list, this is incomplete. Any number of stellar novels and collections have not been announced yet and will slot into place at some point this year. Some books on this list scheduled for later in the year may be pushed back into 2019 for any number of reasons. Some books are left off this list because they are the third or fourth book in a series I’ve never read. Some books are left off because they are not to my taste and thus, I’m not actually looking forward to them. Some books are left off this list because I haven’t heard of them yet, even though they’ve been announced. Some books are left off this list because, sadly, I completely forgot about it even though I’ve tried to do as much research as possible.

(17) YOLEN. At Locus Online, Gary K. Wolfe reviews The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen.

One of Jane Yolen’s abiding concerns in the hun­dreds of books she’s written or edited has been the ways in which stories and lives shape each other, so it’s not too surprising that her new collection The Emerald Circus begins and ends with actual historical figures, Hans Christian Andersen and Emily Dickinson. In between, we also briefly meet Edgar Allan Poe, Queen Victoria, Benjamin Disraeli, Alice Liddell as an old lady, and even Geoffrey of Monmouth. On the fictional side of the ledger, there are tales and characters drawn from Arthurian legends, J.M. Barrie, John Keats, L. Frank Baum, and O. Henry. What we do not see, with one or two exceptions, are stories that engage with traditional folk and fairy tales of the sort that underlie Briar Rose and stories like “Granny Rumple”.

(18) THROWING ROCKS. Steve Davidson revisits a Heinlein Hugo-winner in  “Retro Review: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress“.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a hard book to review. Like so many others from Heinlein’s later period, there are bits of it I enjoyed immensely and bits that made me want to throw the book across the room (and out the airlock). It is both a story of revolution – both bloody and bloodless – and a description of a very different society, forged by conditions that cannot be found on Earth. In short, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is several different things at once and they don’t always go together.

The background of the story is relatively simple. Luna – a society formed by convicts exiled from Earth – is being oppressed by the Warden and his Dragoons. The Moon is Earth’s main source of grain at this point (quite how that works isn’t clear) and the homeworld is unable or unwilling to realise that the Loonies have excellent reasons to be discontented, let alone make any concessions. Luna is ripe for revolution and just about everyone believes it is only a matter of time before all hell breaks loose.

(19) STIEFVATER REVIEWED. At Nerds of a Feather, Phoebe Wagner devotes a moment to the novel’s taxonomy before diving in — “Microreview [book]: All the Crooked Saints, by Maggie Stiefvater”

A note: Some readers might classify this novel as magical realism. When it comes to North American writers, prefer to use the term fabulism, even if it may not fully encompass the text.

Maggie Stiefvater’s All the Crooked Saints breaks from her usual fairytale folklore style as seen in her bestselling werewolf series Shiver and her acclaimed Raven Boys Cycle about ghosts, magic, ley lines, and more. When I picked up All the Crooked Saints with the excellent cover featuring roses and owls, I expected more of the same.

Instead, this novel opens on Colorado in 1962, describing the conflation of miracles and radio waves. Immediately, this novel felt separate from Stiefvater’s teen folklore oeuvre. Set in the high deserts of Colorado, the novel opens on a family of miracle workers, the Sorias. Three of the youngest are trying to establish a radio station out of a broken-down truck, but while they might be a family of miracle workers, the miracles are reserved for the pilgrims that visit the Sorias, not the Sorias themselves.

(20) IN THE MEDIA. Alex Acks covered the story for Bookriot — “Author Banned From Attending WorldCon”.

Science fiction author Jon Del Arroz (known positively for his novel Rescue Run being nominated for the 2017 Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel category in the Dragon Awards) has been banned from San Jose WorldCon for making his intention to break the convention’s Code of Conduct loud and clear online. More specifically, for saying that he was going to be filming people against their will. He has been offered a refund by WorldCon, as has his wife, according to the convention.

I’m not surprised by this, considering that back on December 19, Mr. Del Arroz was talking publicly about joining SFWA and wearing a body cam into the SFWA suite at the convention. Considering Mr. Del Arroz’s history of harassing SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) members including Cat Rambo, Sharon Lee, and Irene Gallo, this wasn’t met with a lot of joy. A. Merc Rustad has a great Twitter thread that basically summarizes that issue. (Also it should be noted that the harassment extends beyond SFWA members to others in SF literary fandom.)

(21) MORE SHOPPING WHILE INTOXICATED. Cherie Priest answers the pivotal question —

(22) ON A FROZEN PLANET. I got a kick out of this Scalzi retweet – a sci-fi response to his first tweet:

(23) GODZILLA. This trailer for the animated Godzilla series from Netflix touts “Humankind vs. The Largest Godzilla Ever.”

(24) KRYPTON. The first trailer for Syfy’s series Krypton has been posted.

From David S. Goyer, the writer of Man of Steel and The Dark Knight, comes a new story that will change a legend and forge a destiny. Krypton Premieres March 21 on SYFY.

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Nancy Sauer.]

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90 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/10/18 Learning To File, By Tom Pixel And The Scrollbreakers”

  1. Paul Weimer: The PKD award nominees are up!

    I’ve read 4 of the 7 (with another coming up shortly), and would agree that they’re all worthy. 🙂

    The Book Of Etta by Meg Elison
    Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
    After The Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun
    The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt
    Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
    Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn
    All Systems Red by Martha Wells

  2. 50 tons per minute streaming back to Earth.

    One has to wonder why the cargo pods were designed such that they could make it to the surface at orbital speeds. The easiest way to prevent lithobraking is to design the pods to slow down on their way down, or break up if something goes wrong.

    Heinlein got the impact math hilariously wrong in Moon, and generations of innumerate numbskulls think lunar bombards are magic bullets thanks to RAH.

  3. @James: As I recall, you calculated that a direct hit on the Thames might swamp a toy boat (can’t find the link at the moment).

  5. @James I never thought to check that math when I was studying physics years later. Do you have any suggestions on where to look for anybody talking about it?

    It’s sadly been even more years on the downhill side of when I studied physics, but I can try to hum the words.

  6. Lenore Jones / jonesnori: I usually try to reverse the joke mentally to be against someone I sympathize with, to determine if it’s reasonable.

    You’re a much kinder person than I am. If I’d done all the horrible things that JDA has done to so many people and this were done to me, I’d consider it a mild joke at my expense and figure that it was the least of what I deserved. 😐

  7. The easiest way to prevent lithobraking is to design the pods to slow down on their way down, or break up if something goes wrong.

    They weren’t using cargo pods to attack with and things weren’t going wrong. They were flinging rocks and intentionally attempting to hit things.

  8. Speaking of common names … in this odd culture called fandom I am one of three people with the name Michael Walsh. And I’ve met both of them.

    At the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow the Marriott managed to merge my reservation with the one made by Michael Walsh.

  9. @Aaron Sure they were using pods, they needed to wrap something ferrous around the rocks for the catapult to push on. It’s mentioned in the book.

  10. @JJ, I confess I was not at all upset when Chuck Tingle did it to the Pups, so apparently I’m not very consistent. Or maybe Hampus just got me thinking.

    But I do think we are better off strategically if we don’t use the same trolling tactics as people we disagree with, because it makes us look bad to undecideds.

  11. @ John Lorentz, thanks; Now I can’t rid my mind’s eye of the image of Captain Kirk in high heels cramming a microphone into his mouth.

  12. Michael J. Walsh, at the 1989 ABA (predecessor to BookExpo), I met two other Jack Willamson’s besides the one I knew from SF.

    The 2nd Jack Williamson was a former reporter whose first novel, But Not Warriors, had just come out. (I read it. Pretty decent story, dealing with a WWII Army MP company composed of draftees medically unfit for combat, but good enough to be assigned to guard a Japanese internment camp in the Southwest.)

    The 3rd Jack Williamson owned a specialty press that published books about raising goats.

  14. There were two Jeffrey Smiths attending WisCon for years, and once the hotel did indeed get us mixed up. Sadly, Jef Smith died a year or two ago. I wish the hotel could still get confused by us.

  15. @Lenore Jones: I wouldn’t call you inconsistent, or at least, I feel it’s reasonable to view this differently when done to a group (Puppies) versus an individual (JDA). (Granted, I don’t know if that’s how you feel.)

    I’m confused by the “same trolling tactics” reference in this context, BTW. Did JDA or VD or a Puppy do something like this and I forgot about it? (My memory bites.)

    @Hampus Eckerman: Identity theft? The registrant doesn’t seem to be pretending they’re Jon (and a domain name isn’t proof of identity anyway).

    @steve davidson’s comment reminds me that the person who bought it could actually be named Jon Del Arroz or similar. I strongly doubt that’s the case, though.

    – – – – –

    In unrelated but happy book news, the books I ordered with my parents’ present (gift card) have all arrived, some sooner than expected! Oddly, though I chose the “fewer shipments,” Barnes & Noble started throwing books out their door immediately, without trying to group things in fewer shipments. So my 6 books came in like 5 shipments, I think; they all arrived on one of two different days, LOL. Inefficient, but I swear, I checked the right box (it’s required for the free express shipping, IIRC).

  16. There are a few Jeff Warners out there. A well known folk musician, a preacher, a wrestler, and a weatherman. One of them (identity changed to protect the guilty) has wracked up many speeding tickets. More than i have. Many, many more. Every time i have to renew my driver’s license at the DMV, they threaten to withhold it for unpaid tickets*. I have to get them to compare Social Security and/or Driver’s License Numbers. Then they say “Oh, that’s not you. Never Mind!” – until the next renewal.
    Sigh.
    * i pay my tickets immediately: they caught me fair and square, i pay up fair and square.

  17. Just to take the “same names” thing to the ultimate confusion:
    In the 80s I lived in New Brunswick, NJ, near the border with Somerset, NJ.

    A Steven J. Davidson lived in Somerset. I started getting his dunning notices. It took quite a while to sort out.

    I’d not have been that bothered if HE had started getting MY dunning notices.

  18. @Andrew Thanks. I’m going to try to forget that essay the next time I re-read TMiaHM.

  19. There are a LOT of other Matthew Johnsons out there, including the father of my older son’s best friend. I occasionally wish I had used my middle initial when I started publishing, but I suppose it’s too late now.

  20. I have to confess that one of the benefits of using my full name for authorial purposes is that, while I’ve spotted around 2-3 other people named “Heather Rose Jones” online (or at least using that name), none of them either intersects with my circles sufficiently or has similar online prominence. Managing a functionally unique name when your last name is Jones is a significant accomplishment!

  21. I think my name combination is unique. There are only around 100 persons in Sweden with our spelling of Eckerman and Hampus is not that common either. When I was a kid, it was really rare, but then a TV-series used the name for its main character and after that, I had to get used to meet other people with the same name. Still haven’t met anyone older though.

  22. Then there is the Connie Willis conundrum.

    You all know the author, Connie Willis, author of Doomsday Book and many other award winning stories. There is also a Connie Willis, who is/was a big infomercial presenter in Florida. The latter CW, has also done audition videos when trying to get added to Ghost Hunters UFO Hunters. She also occasionally co-hosts The Coast to Coast late night radio show and has done articles on Huffington Post on alien abductions.

    The official Connie Willis author website (which I manage) is conniewillis.net because conniwillis.com was snatched up by the other Connie Willis when random house (who actually owned it early on) let it expire.

    At one of Connie’s recent appearances at a library, they introduced her with a bio combining the two of them. I occasionally get messages on Connie’s FB page (Fans of Connie Willis) for the radio Connie, and the other Connie has occasionally forwarded messages she has gotten for the author Connie.

    What will be interesting to see is how things turn out with Connie’s next novel, which is the Roswell Road Trip/UFO novel she’d started working on before Crosstalk.

  23. @Lee: Some years back, prisoner rights (and LGBT rights) advocate Stephen Donaldson died, and a prominent SFF writer announced the death of Stephen R. Donaldson (author of the Thomas Covenant books) and combined the biographies of the two as well. Adding to the fun was the fact that the author who made this mistake did not take correction well.

  24. @Heather Rose Jones

    When I use Jeff Smith, or Jeffrey Smith, or even Jeffrey D. Smith, there are lots of me. But if I use Jeffrey Diven Smith, I think I’m unique. ( Diven is a family surname, my mother’s maiden name. Her father’s middle name was Miller, his mother’s maiden name.)

  25. Ah, names. There’s a much-less-prominent Stephen King on Amazon, which causes all kinds of confusion and dissatisfied customer comments.

    As for myself… well, I have stories. There’s another “Rev. Bob” – in Texas, IIRC – who takes the title much more seiously than I do. In terms of my real name, I once discovered that someone with my first name, last name, and middle initial was employed at NASA. I also corresponded briefly with an Australian horror writer who shares my first and last name; I jokingly proposed that we should write a book together for the sole purpose of having a public feud over which of us should get listed first on the cover.

    For those curious about what that surname might be, I shall state for the record that I’m a terrible archer, do not know any friars, and have never worn green tights in public.

  26. There’s a woman who writes about aromatherapy who has the same given name/last name as my father’s youngest sister, who wrote a book for [scuba] divers on watching fishes. They are very definitely not the same person – I can’t see my aunt doing aromatherapy at all.
    Amazon has confused them.

  27. If I used my actual last name, I’d be easily confused with a composer, a security guy at Twitter, a major sf figure, another composer, and a bunch of other living people.

    Let’s not even get into the dead folks.

  28. I’m the only person with my name, thanks to a fairly rare first name and a last name that’s not extremely common either.

  30. My father, when he was a lad, heard Walter Winchell (famous radio personality of the ’20s and ’30s) on the radio talking about how he’d just gotten a letter that yet another baby boy had been named after him, and then Winchell went on to say “I’ll bet every one of you listening has a namesake somewhere”. (Not an exact quote, because it was from recollection fifty years later, but that was the idea.) My father immediately rejected this. He had a very rare first name (plugging it into a web name site I see it ranks 402 for male names, at least on that site) and an uncommon last name. So he grows up, takes over the family hardware store, and when he’s in his fifties he starts getting calls asking him to fix plumbing. Which at first he thinks is because of the hardware store…. but then come to find out that a plumber with the EXACT SAME FIRST AND LAST NAME has opened up shop in the same town. No relation that we know of.

    (That same website says that there are two people with my father’s name in the USA. Depending on how often the site updates its database, it’s quite likely that one of those people is my recently-deceased father, and the other is the plumber who moved into the same town.)

  31. Thanks to Google Alerts, there are a bunch of Paul Weimers out there, in science and in real estate particularly. They all seem more successful than I am.

  32. Even with my oddly-spelled last name, there appears to be at least one other person with my name out there. How closely related he is, I don’t know. I suspect if he’s ever ego-scanned himself, he wonders who this person with all of this stuff having to do with science fiction and trains is.

  33. There appears to be 106 people in the US that share my first and last name. Adding the middle initial drops the tally to 48.

    But I appear to be the only one with my rather unusual middle name.

  34. My father had a first-and-last-name-duplicate in the small (population 25K) city that’s the county seat where he lived in west Texas. (They weren’t confusible when together, though: the other one was black, and my father was white.)

  35. @Cassy B: 402? A piker! My name’s 1057th. 😉

    LOL, howmanyofme.com says “There are 1 or fewer people” with my name. Er, yes, well, there’s me. And a cop in the south. And now I’ve found a teen (?) girl with a few YouTube videos. Hmm, “chances are low that someone has this combination of names” – Aha, I see it’s not really going on lists of full names, but just statistics based on frequency of individual names, or something like that. Useless! Though it sounds a lot more confident when it says there are 78 people (that’s very specific!) with my spouse’s name. I’m starting to think that site’s garbage; it lists two famous people with my spouse’s last name that I haven’t heard of, when it should list a famous American poet.

    http://www.dumb.com/namedata claims “There are 1 people” with my name (bad programmer; no cookie for you! that should be “There is 1 person”).

    Quasi-Rleated: This research lead me to a couple of bizarre podcasts of people doing some kind of dramatization of my grandmother talking about her work with my grandfather. Very weird and the photo doesn’t even look anything like her. Time to e-mail these people…. The things you find, I tell ya!

  36. I always knew that there are a lot of people. Though I still can’t grok in fullness just how many, I got a clue when I went to Best Products some years back over a warranty issue with a Walkman (or similar personal cassette player). It was my practice in those days to purchase the extended warranty, so that when the player died as they all die, I’d get a new one handed to me with no questions.

    I gave them my information, and for some reason I got a glimpse of the list of people with my full name, first and last. It was quite a list—and it was a list, specifically, of people named Kip Williams who lived in the United States, and who had bought extended warranties at Best Buy.

    So it’s a little bit less of a surprise now when I see these pretenders with their phony names (on examination, they all seem to be some kind of nickname), though it’s still a little annoying for Academia dot com or dot org or whatever to keep helpfully pointing out to me that I was mentioned 14 times, so I should subscribe to them right away. It’s a big world.

  37. In the fairly early days of the web (latish 1990s) I was showing someone who identified as having a fairly uncommon name* the then novel idea of internet White Pages. He made me print of the listings for the half-dozen or so people with his same name to take home and called them all. At night.

    * howmanyofme.com lists 430 people with that last name in the US, 189,303 with that first name, and 1 or fewer with both names. I see 3 people on Facebook with that name.

  38. There are about 100 people with my first and last name in Germany. One of them works at the orders desk at my favourite bookstore. We met.
    There is also someone with the male version of my name and the same (rare) hobby. The database tends to mix us up.

  39. @Laura Resnick: Oddly enough, I had the exact opposite problem as you with The Refrigerator Monologues: In all but one of the chapters, I knew exactly which characters and storylines Valente was riffing on, and so I had trouble engaging with the stories as stories, rather than as exercises in filing off serial numbers. And so the one chapter that used comics I hadn’t read was the freshest and most enjoyable for me. (Frank Miller’s classic Daredevil run, for anyone who might be wondering.)

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