(0) TRAINING COMPLETED. Thanks to you who wished me a good trip to New Mexico for my mother’s 91st birthday celebration. I’d say your wishes were effective, not only because we had a fine reception and dinner, but because my Amtrak experience was far superior to that of the folks who left Los Angeles aboard the previous day’s Southwest Chief. The Santa Fe New Mexican has the story —
Passengers and crew aboard a Chicago-bound Amtrak train spent the night stopped in Northern New Mexico hill country after the lead engine struck a boulder and partially derailed.
No serious injuries were reported, but the two engineers in the lead engine were taken to a hospital for evaluation, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said Friday from Chicago.
The incident occurred Thursday evening on Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks in a rural area near Watrous about 105 miles northeast of Albuquerque.
…The train’s second engine and all the cars remained on the tracks and the train still had power, heating and toilet service while it remained at the derailment site, the Amtrak spokesman said.
Not to overstate things — I would have missed the excitement anyway, since my destination was one of the last stops before they hit the rock, however, it still felt like a narrow escape.
(1) RUH ROH! Last month Amazing Stories’ Steve Davidson shared the long history behind “Why Amazing Stories Isn’t Back on NBC”. However, over the weekend the media reported “Steven Spielberg will revive ’80s NBC series ‘Amazing Stories’ for Apple”.
Apple is making a major statement on its television ambitions as it nears an acquisition of an original series from filmmaker Steven Spielberg.
The tech giant is close to a deal to buy a new version of Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories,” the Emmy-winning sci-fi anthology series that ran on NBC from 1985 to 1987.
NBCUniversal, which co-owns the rights to the property, confirmed that an agreement is imminent. Apple declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal Tuesday.
A scripted series with the imprimatur of Spielberg, one of Hollywood’s most-heralded producer-directors thanks to “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Schindler’s List” and the “Jurassic Park” franchise, and his company Amblin Television, will be a demonstration of the tech giant’s clout as it enters the television business…
More as the story develops.
(2) PUPPY LOVE. Yahoo! says get your Kleenex ready — “Carrie Fisher’s dog watching the new ‘Star Wars’ trailer will destroy you”.
Millions of Star Wars fans watched the new trailer for The Last Jedi on Monday night — including one very good boy.
A photo of Gary, Carrie Fisher’s beloved French bulldog, was posted to his official Instagram account on Monday, and, guys, we’re warning you — it’s going to make you whimper….
(3) WHO ARE YOU? Jim C. Hines, in “A Plea to Conventions About Name Badges”, asks conventions to fix a problem that people have been complaining about the entire time I’m been in fandom.
I have a favor to ask of conventions: please design your badges so that names can be easily and clearly read.
I’ve never been good with names. It’s frustrating as hell, and it’s become a bigger problem as I travel to more conventions. I get introduced to so many people, and within 24 hours, a lot of those names escape my brain like Batman villains from Arkham Asylum.
Jim provides illustrations of what works for him, and what doesn’t.
(4) A NEW YORK COMIC CON STATE OF MIND. The Washington Post’s Aaron Gregg, in “Marvel cancels comic book deal with Northrop Grumman after Twitter backlash”, says that Marvel cancelled a proposed partnership with Northrop Grumman (whose “Northrop Grumman Elite Nexus” superheroes were supposed to team up with The Avengers) after lots of fans objected, noting, among other things, that Tony Stark gave up his defense contracts.
Marvel teased the partnership Friday morning in a tweet that promised more details in a presentation the following day at the New York Comic-Con festival. A retro-style comic book cover temporarily posted on Marvel’s website featured a team of “Northrop Grumman Elite Nexus” super heroes fighting alongside Marvel’s popular Avengers superheroes. The cover was quickly scrubbed from the company’s website, but not before it went viral on Twitter.
Twitter users ridiculed Marvel, accusing it of partnering with “death merchants.” Some pointed out that the Marvel character Iron Man, alias Tony Stark, had been the billionaire CEO of a company that built advanced weaponry but had turned his back on the weapons business after seeing its effects. Angry fans called out specific Marvel executives, and at least one suggested publicly protesting the issue at Marvel’s Comic-Con booth.….
(5) SZECHUAN LETDOWN. Meanwhile, another corporation was breaking hearts in the culinary arena. Michael Cavna and Maura Judkis, in “McDonald’s botched its ‘Rick and Morty’ Szechuan sauce stunt, and fans are not happy”, report that McDonald’s has disappointed thousands of viewers of the Cartoon Network show Rick and Morty. After 45,000 people signed a Change.org petition inspired by the show calling on the company to bring back Szechuan Sauce (originally created to promote Mulan in 1998), McDonalds promised select locations would have the sauce, but only a few did.
One Washington Post reporter was among those “Rick and Morty” fans who went questing Saturday for the fabled sauce, driving to three Maryland locations — one of them listed as an official “participating” outlet — and none had received a Szechuan shipment. One restaurant tried to pawn off Sriracha sauce. Another tried to sell the tangy Signature sauce. And a third outlet’s shift manager came to the drive-thru window to apologize profusely — clearly this wasn’t her first “Rick and Morty”-related apology of the day.
(6) REMEMBER WHEN? The Atlantic bills this article as “Revisiting Star Trek’s Most Political Episode” – which is saying something about a series that often delivered messages.
“It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that they’ve given up.” This was how Commanding Officer Benjamin Sisko, played by Avery Brooks, described early 21st-century Americans in an episode from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. When it aired in 1995, “Past Tense” spoke to contemporary concerns about homelessness by telling a story set in 2024—the near future for viewers, but the distant past for characters. In the two-part episode, Sisko and two of his companions from the U.S.S. Defiant find themselves stranded in San Francisco, where they’re reminded that the federal government had once set up a series of so-called “Sanctuary Districts” in a nationwide effort to seal off homeless Americans from the general population. Stuck in 2024, Sisko, who is black—along with his North African crewmate Dr. Julian Bashir and the fair-skinned operations officer Jadzia Dax—must contend with unfamiliar racism, classism, violence, and Americans’ apparent apathy toward human suffering.
(7) TRIVIAL TRIVIA
Tiaan Jerjerrod was the project manager of the second Death Star, which was destroyed at the end of Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi. Supervising Jerjerrod was Emperor Palpatine’s right-hand man, Darth Vader. (Source: Death Star II: A Project Management Case Study.)
(8) TODAY’S DAY
Ada Lovelace Day
Ada Lovelace Day, whose goal is to “… raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and maths.” (Wikipedia)
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- October 10, 1965 — The Red Baron first appeared in Peanuts comic strip.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY EXPLORER
- Born October 10, 1861 — Fridjtof Nansen, whose arctic navigation inspired fellow Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl. His ship, Fram, shares a museum with Kon Tiki and Ra.
(11) COMIC SECTION.
Martin Morse Wooster approves this “old school groaner” in today’s Frank and Ernest.
(12) SCI-FI SWINGS LIKE A PENDULUM DO. In “‘Blade Runner 2049’: Why some science fiction writers are tired of dystopias”, a recent article by the Christian Science Monitor, several sff authors suggest that they are tired of the wave of grim visions of humanity’s future. Is it time to create more works around an optimistic future based on expanding technology and human understanding?
In “Blade Runner 2049,” which opens Friday, post eco-disaster Los Angeles has built a massive coastline wall to fend off rising ocean levels. Few of the overpopulated city’s human or android occupants have ever seen a tree or a real animal. The incessant rain is as dour as Harrison Ford’s facial expressions. Worst of all? One character bemoans the fact that there’s no more cheese in the world.
Recent dystopian blockbusters seem to be jostling in a grim race to be the first to reach the seventh circle of hell in Dante’s “Inferno.” But some science-fiction writers are tired of the sorts of pessimistic futures depicted in movies and TV shows such as “The Hunger Games,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Black Mirror,” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
In response, influential authors Neal Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, David Brin, and Kim Stanley Robinson argue that futuristic fiction should, instead, offer an inspiring outlook about mankind’s ability to shape its destiny. But do the kinds of stories we tell ourselves have a cultural impact on shaping a better tomorrow?
“I want to nod at something that Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker about the dangers of drowning ourselves in dystopian stories,” says Christopher Robichaud, who teaches a class at Harvard Extension School on Utopia and Dystopia in fiction and philosophy. “The utility dystopian fiction used to serve was to bring problems to our attention and seek solutions. But the danger is that these stories can become a collective act of despair in response to current events.”
(13) SPACE TUTOR. In “Astronaut encourages kids to flip for STEM”, the Washington Post’s Marylou Tousignant says that the Air and Space Museum recently hosted a webcast with astronaut Randy Bresnik on the International Space Station where he had floating candy and showed kids an official NASA barf Bag.
If you could ask an astronaut orbiting in space any question, what would it be?
Students from several Washington-area schools got to do that recently at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum as part of its “STEM in 30” program.
Among other things, they wanted to know: Is it hard to move around up there? Can you watch TV? How do you know when it’s time for bed? What if you get sick?
(14) GRIM TIDINGS PODCAST SEEKS SUPPORT. The hosts of the Grim Tidings Podcast have invited fans to support them via Patreon. Rob Matheny and Philip Overby focus on interviewing authors, editors, and agents working within the Grimdark sub-genre. They have recorded over 100 episodes including luminaries from the field such as Joe Abercrombie, C.T. Phipps, Anna Smith Spark, Brian Stavely, Michael R. Fletcher, Sebastien De Castell, Laura M. Hughes, and Deborah A. Wolf.
(15) HAIR APPARENT. Is singing songs like this the real reason John Scalzi constantly needs to think up new names for his band?
I LIKE EWOKS AND I CANNOT LIE
YOU OTHER REBELS CAN'T DENY
WHEN A 'WOK WALKS IN WITH A FURRY LITTLE FACE
AND GETS ALL YUB NUB IN THE PLACE https://t.co/mwTc4mioUE
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 10, 2017
(Just kidding – I laughed….)
(16) A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT. Alex Acks finds more to criticize about fantasy maps in a post for Tor.com — “Tolkien’s Map and the Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth”.
…So what is it about the mighty Anduin that makes me tilt my head like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise? There are four main factors, in ascending order based on how easily I’m able to mentally excuse each point.
It cuts across two mountain ranges.
There is one fact you really need to understand to grasp the basics of how rivers work. Ready? Water flows downhill. That’s it. That’s the secret. Water flows downhill, and as it flows it tends to erode sediment and transport it downstream, and over long enough periods of time, that gets us our classic V-shaped river valleys and a ton of other morphological features. Which is why, when a river is on a collision course with mountains—normally places where the elevation goes up—you have to stare at it for a minute.
This is the easiest oddity for me to find an excuse for—because it is actually something that happens in reality! For example, the Colorado River cuts pretty much perpendicularly through the entire Basin and Range Province of North America. And the reason this works is because the Colorado was here before all that extensional tectonic silliness happened and the basins started dropping down from the ranges—and that process of down-drop was slow enough, relative to the ability of the Colorado to cut its own channel, that the river didn’t get permanently trapped in one of the basins.
So if we make the assumption that the Anduin existed before the mountains—and assume that the mountains uplifted in a natural way, thank you—it’s very possible for it to have cut down fast enough to maintain its course despite uplift. (Keep this in mind, we’ll be coming back to it later…)
(17) KEEP ON SWIMMING. And over the weekend Camestros Felapton gave us “Even More Plot Elements of Fantasy Maps”.
Big Islands
In Earthsea islands are large and numerous, in Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, islands barely appear and are small. In both cases they are locations and destinations and themselves contain terrain.
In Tolkien’s wider work, Númenor is the most notable island – a version of Atlantis, which itself gives us a classic inspiration for islands in Western literature. Oceanic islands can be countries with their own terrain but cut off from surroundings. Le Guin depicts the islands of Earthsea more like medieval era city-states with a wider common culture but no central authority.
It is interesting to me that Tolkien, who draws on many aspects of Britain and Britishness in building Middle Earth, avoids the island quality of Britain. This despite a tendency to mythologize the insular quality of Britain in English propaganda-history both in high-culture (Shakespeare’s ‘sceptered isle’) and low-culture (‘fog in the channel, continent cut off’). George R.R. Martin’s Westeros does this by having it be an eratz England circa the War of the Roses (with Scotland being another place full of ice zombies). Westeros’s scale seems flexible but it’s primary plot role as an island is to be a container. Events are within Westeros (up to the Wall) or beyond (either over the wall or on another continent).
The point being – oceanic islands are treated as political units rather than as terrain.
(18) JUXTAPOSITION. The title of Max Florschutz’ latest post halted me in my tracks — “Being a Better Writer Delayed” — until I remembered “Being a Better Writer” is a recurring topic at his Unusual Things blog.
(19) HOLY BLEEP. Camestros Felapton subjected his precious bodily fluids to a famous corporation’s bizarre new offering, “Coca-cola with coffee”.
…There is also a weird slimy quality to it. It’s like drinking coke but a bit more unpleasant.
The coffee is “real” and from Brazil. If I was Brazil I might object to the free advertising.
(20) X-FILES SEASON 11 TRAILER. The truth etc. etc.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Christian Brunschen, Chip Hitchcock, Dann, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]
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/Ewok-Stalk
(0) TRAINING COMPLETED.
Welcome back Mike!
(2) PUPPY LOVE.
… gosh, it’s dusty in here.
“You keep using that Pixel. I do not think it Scrolls what you think it Scrolls.”
Glad the trip went well. When I heard about the Chief getting rocked, I couldn’t figure out if it is the one you had been on, although I knew it was a couple of stops after you would have left the train.
[godstalk]
c4c
And fifth! Woot!
/Porgstalk
1) I’ve been hitting every comment section of every online publication that has covered the story with this message:
“Steven Spielberg doesn’t own the rights to the name “Amazing Stories”. The current publisher, Steve Davidson, does. Read about it here at http://amazingstoriesmag.com/nbc-amazing-stories/”
However i have only one media account (this one), and that severely limits my reach. So anybody else who wants to help get the word out should feel free to copy paste and post.
Have we done:
In a scroll on the web there lived a pixel. Not a nasty, dirty, wet scroll, filled with the ends of trolls and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy scroll with nothing in it to comment on or to eat: it was a pixel-scroll, and that means comfort.
Fans? I mean…they clearly like the show but EVERYTHING Rick recommends is either
a. horrible or b. horrific or c. an attempt to get a person to do something that will humiliate them and amuse him…and so they try to by a gloopy sauce because a dangerously manipulative character said they should?
You’d never catch me consuming something disgusting just on the basis of the shallow marketing of some giant food corporation.
(19)…ah damn.
19) This was done before, though in smaller containers – Coke Black. On its own, it was… odd. As a vodka mixer, it was delightful.
Will you walk into my Pixel, said the Scroll to the File. ‘Tis the prettiest little Pixel that ever did you spy.
BladePixeller: Wake Up! Time to Scroll!
Mike informed me of his coverage of the Apple thing. It’s in mainstream press, so obviously no problem.
But I did beg off giving him more info until I have had a chance to coordinate my response…which is not a positive one.
I was blindsided by this news…and both I and my attorney are – some words describing surprise, confusion and mystification – that NBC would apparently try to sell Apple corp something they don’t own.
NBC does not currently have a license to use the name. They were notified of breach in May…they threatened to sue me…I agreed to renegotiate with them…and in the midst of that (NBC telling us they were discussing things with lots of people, which was most likely a delaying tactic) putting this deal with Apple together.
I do not think Apple wants to begin their television career with a trademark infringement suit.
We may have difficulty getting through to Apples corp legal dept…so if anyone has good contacts with higher ups over there, I’d appreciate hearing from them.
and my general response to this is NBC, two strikes, you’re out.
Previously I posted this on behalf of Filer Lee “Starcat” Billings:
I’ve been feeling increasingly worse for a couple of months, and all the tests were coming back “can’t see anything wrong here”. I finally collapsed in my doctor’s office due to dehydration, and she sent me to the ER. The people there listened to my description of what had been happening and admitted me for a CAT scan. That showed a mass on my pancreas, and the subsequent biopsy came up malignant. Now waiting for an appointment for a full PET scan, which will tell us exactly what we’re up against. If it hasn’t spread, it will be treated surgically. If it has, I’m looking at chemo.
She has now provided an update:
The mass is only about 3 cm, but it’s wrapped around the celiac artery. This means it’s inoperable, and there are also a couple of spots on my liver that look dubious. Chemo, here we come.
The good news, such as it is, is that there’s no evidence of lymph node involvement. This means we can probably hit it with a combination of chemo and targeted radiotherapy and knock it out completely. In the meantime, I’m on heavy duty painkillers. I get to have a port installed on my chest tomorrow. This is going to take out most of my fall and holiday season, after having lost my summer already. I am not a happy camper.
Right now she’s accessing the net through a cell phone, which is not ideal for reading File 770. If you wish to contact her, you can use the email fgnepngwrjry@tznvy.pbz *.
* rot13’ed for spam avoidance
For more Alex Acks goodness, I talk to Alex about a bunch of stuff, and reveal the cover to their next novel, at BN SCi Fi:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/space-bikers-return-cover-blood-binds-pack/
Not to be pedantic (he said, being pedantic), but tbmk the Red Baron never actually “appeared” in the Peanuts comic strip. (Googling, I find he may have shown up in a related video game.)
Here’s something that gave me a few (painful) laughs: The Creative Writer’s Autoreply
Steve, please keep us posted. At least post links to appropriate court filings. And do talk to the folks behind popehat.
Tom Gaults library in this article will certainly look familiar to some filers.
JJ, I have all the sympathy for her, as sometime in the next couple of weeks, I’ll get a port for chemo. They give chemo 2:1 odds of knocking it out, but it’s operable (that’s going to be after the chemo). (CT and PET scan were Monday. Doctor should have the results today or tomorrow. I do NOT glow in the dark – that isotope has a 110-minute half life.)
Bruce Arthurs: you’re correct that the Red Baron was never shown the Peanuts as Schulz had a belief that adults should never be shown and thus the Red Baron who may or may not have existed was never shown. Snoopy did have a rather vivid imagination.
Re Amazing Stories ownership. Apple would, as has been documented myriad times in new stories over the decades, have done research of who actually owned the rights to Amazing Stories. They rather obviously decided that NBC was the rightful owner of the rights.
If it goes into the Courts, we’ll get to se why they believe this as I seriously doubt they’ll drop their plans now.
@steve davidson:
Have you tried reaching Eddy Cue (@cue) on Twitter? He’s not in legal, but presumably has a hand in the content side.
My contacts in Apple legal are not particularly high placed, but high enough that I’m somewhat confident an e-mail would get to the right inbox and be read (I have no insights into how Apple legal operates in such cases, so I make no claims whether you’d get a response out of it).
I can be reached at my file770 user name at gmail.com.
12) I find it rich that the author of Aurora is coming out against dystopian SF.
45,000 people sign a petition asking McDonalds to bring back the Szechuan sauce. You know how many packets they produced? 4,000. 20 packets each for 200 locations. This is their most half-assed marketing effort since suggesting that people might want to fuck cheeseburgers.
@Peer: working link to Tom Gault’s library
I just made a small contribution here.
20. I would submit that if you’ve been searching for the Truth for 11 seasons and haven’t found it yet, the chances are pretty likely that you never will.
@Geoffrey Lamb, I would argue that Aurora is mildly utopian, in that the outcome (Trarengvba fuvc ynhapurq, znxrf vg gb qrfgvangvba, svaqf vg arneyl unovgnoyr, znxrf vg onpx gb rnegu jvgu fbzr cnffratref yvivat gb gryy gur gnyr) is better than what is likely to happen in reality. It’s just that the space colonizing SF genre tends to be so wildly utopian that any attempt to inject a bit of reality looks like the grimmest dystopia in comparison.
Just picked up a copy of Steven Brust’s Vallista in a local store.
@StephenfromOttowa
SQUEE
I don’t think ‘better than what is actually likely’ makes things utopian in itself; the intention of Aurora was certainly to argue that interstellar travel is unlikely to work. On the other hand, neither is it dystopian, in that it predicts only the failure of a particular project, not the general worsening of the world as a whole. Robinson has written other books about how, if we concentrate on this world, we can improve it.
@chip hitchcock. Thanks!
@Darren Garrison – I like Rick and Morty, but I’m not into stupid ad campaigns inserted as cutesy “content.” I also haven’t watched the latest season, so maybe that McDonald’s ad thing is funny enough to make up for the whole advertising-invading-content thing (doubt it). Regardless, that reference to the hilariously stupid previous ad campaign – which I’d totally forgotten about – was worth the eye rolling about the R&M story itself.
Oh, also, glad you had a good trip, Mike. How was the train ride, aside from the narrow escape? I imagine it would be a beautiful ride. I’d like to take a train through the Southwest at some point.
@kathodus: AFAIK, the original bit wasn’t actually paid advertising, it was just one of those things that Harmon and Roiland do from time to time, and I think they chose that barely-remembered thing as a kind of avatar for all things minor and stupid. Fans blew it thoroughly out of proportion, because fans. McDonald’s was trying to capitalize on it, but none of their stuff was directly linked to R&M because they have no legal relationship and can’t technically reference the show directly in their materials. From a modern advertising point of view, it was a brilliant move from McDonald’s; they get to capitalize on a hilarious throw-away bit they had no part in at almost no real cost. Unfortunately they don’t actually “get” how fans react to things, and woefully underestimated what it was going to take to pull it off. (Also the fans behaved like jerks.)
Anyway, point is, it wasn’t some kind of injected marketing thing, it was just a joke that struck a chord with fans and that a company found a way to capitalize on. You are safe to watch S3 without worrying about cutesy disguised ad campaigns.
(0) I wonder if any of the passengers had the unsettling feeling they were about to enter an Ursula Vernon story.
7) It all becomes clear to me now, why every Star Wars story told revolves around the same people/family
According to the linked article about the Death Star II, “a galaxy over 100 light years across and consisting of over 5 million sentient beings.”
So based on this article, the entire Star Wars galaxy has the population of Sydney Australia. And it is 1/1000th the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy (the distance from Earth to Nu2 Draconis A). This also means that Han Solo’s Kessel Run was nearly 40% the width of the galaxy.
@August – Thanks for the clarification. I was still planning to watch it, regardless, but it’s nice to know it wasn’t a commercial tie-in.
ETA: The recently-relayed-here story of Oor Wombat’s husband’s Strong Independent Chicken was the final straw. I have set up a Patreon account and begun Patreonizing Vernon.
@Steven: So between the demolition of Alderaan (“Millions of voices cried out…”) and the destruction of the two Death Stars the galaxy is basically depopulated.
Clickity
@Anthony: To quote Douglas Adams:
Population: None. Although you might see people from time to time, they are most likely products of your imagination. Simple mathematics tells us that the population of the Universe must be zero. Why? Well given that the volume of the universe is infinite there must be an infinite number of worlds. But not all of them are populated; therefore only a finite number are. Any finite number divided by infinity is zero, therefore the average population of the Universe is zero, and so the total population must be zero.
To be “advertising”, it would need to be something somehow sanctioned and paid for by McDonalds, and it wasn’t. Just Weird Random Rick Shit.
(ETA and just as the Rick and Morty line was in no way sanctioned by McDonalds, the McDonalds promotion was in no way sanctioned by Rick and Morty.)
@Darren – That was hilarious.
That’s a globular cluster, not a galaxy! 🙂
In fact, that’s almost exactly the size of M22, the first globular cluster ever discovered.
P.J. Evans, I am so sorry to hear that you are going through this, too. Please post here if there is anything we can do to lighten your burden. I will be sending good thoughts your way, and hope that your treatment goes well.
Camestros:
The first line was used as a title 29/11 last year*, and I took the liberty of expounding in a comment: “… not a nasty, dirty, wet scroll, filled with sodden paper and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy scroll with nothing in it to sit down on or to read: it was a pixel-scroll, and that means books. ”
* Or 2016-11-29, to use a proper international date format.
“A Scrolling, overCommenting, tin-Pixeled Fifth-tator with delusions of Godstalkhood”
Waiting for a staging of the Porg and Fett opera.
“I loves you, Porg” ?
JJ, I’ll accept that, and wishes for getting necessary information (and care!) out of the care providers who seem determined to provide as little of both as possible. (Haven’t they ever dealt before with people who don’t have spouse/child available?)