Pixel Scroll 6/19/17 Have Scroll, Will Pixel Reads The File Of A Man

(1) DISCOVERY PREMIERE SET. SciFiNow.uk has the headline story: “Star Trek: Discovery air date confirmed, beaming down in September”.

The show will launch on Monday 25 September. Which is actually not that far away when you think about it, we can be patient.

Another important detail is that the 15 episode series is going to be split into two chunks. So we’ll get weekly episodes from 25 September through to 6 November. Then there will be a break until it returns in January 2018. So, there will be more patience required, but not too much.

“Star Trek, one of the most iconic and influential global television franchises, returns 50 years after it first premiered with STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. STAR TREK: DISCOVERY will follow the voyages of Starfleet on their missions to discover new worlds and new lifeforms, and one Starfleet officer who must learn that to truly understand all things alien, you must first understand yourself. The series will feature a new ship, new characters and new missions, while embracing the same ideology and hope for the future that inspired a generation of dreamers and doers.”

(2) ON AN EVEN KEEL.  Adam-Troy Castro makes an important point about keeping things in perspective: “I Am Not Owed Awe”.

There’s a scene during the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, the same work that introduced Hannibal Lecter, filmed twice for the movies and once for the TV series, where the serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy tells a captive, “You owe me awe.” This is megalomania, and one way you know the speaker is fucking crazy.

Nobody except a madman or a total asshole thinks he’s owed awe. Oh, you can make a certain exception to someone who occupies a position where awe is expected: a President, a Pope, a King, a legendary musician. In many cases, though, even they know that they receive awe because of what they are, not so much because of who they are. Get elected President, and even if you’re a total piece of shit you will expect to be greeted by orchestras playing “Hail to the Chief.” It’s part of the job description. Write Game of Thrones and you will receive awe because people are rapt. But that is not awe for you, the being who took a shit and didn’t quite manage to fully clean his ass this morning. You are still a flawed being.

Artists can earn awe. Artists can come to expect awe. The sane don’t think they’re owed awe. And the sane don’t get upset, to the point of rallying legions of single-minded asshole fans, to run amuck harassing people for the sin of not treating them with awe. That’s crazy. That’s tunnel-vision of the most insipid sort.

I am not owed awe. You are not owed awe. Nobody is owed awe.

(3) SF COSTUMING FANHISTORY. The International Costumers Guild has released a video about 16 People Who Defined Masquerade Costuming.

These artists helped to shape the art of Masquerade Costuming, which has been recognized as a legitimate art form by 4 English speaking countries and Japan as of 2014. The images are being collected for preservation by the Library of Congress.

 

(4) BOLLYHORRORWOOD. The BBC begins with some contrarian career advice in “The benign menace of Bollywood’s cult ‘monster'”.

“Don’t do a horror film unless you’re the monster. Horror audiences come to see the villains, and they come back again when those villains are in the sequels,” wrote The Economist magazine, listing things an actor should never do.

In India, many of the best-known Indian “villains” got into cinema hoping to be the hero. Things didn’t go to plan and they spent their screen-time plotting fantastic heists and murders, eyeing the heroine and getting beaten up. With some notable exceptions, like Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha – villains turned heroes – this was the norm.

What about monsters then?

In India, the movie monster became a staple of horror films made by a group of brothers called, simply, the Ramsay Brothers. Five of the seven brothers are still around, and one of them, Shyam, is still quite active.

Between 1972, when they made their first proper movie Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche, literally “six-feet under”, and 1994, when they made their last big movie, Mahakaal, the Ramsay brothers churned out movie after B-grade horror movie.

(5) LEIGHTON OBIT. Fanzine fan Rodney Leighton (1948-2017) died June 18. The SF Site News story says the Nova Scotia fan stayed with paperzines to the end. His titles included Life of Rodney, The Mail Carrier Brought It, and Rodney’s Fanac. His friends Steve George, and later Chuck Connor, put scans of these zines on eFanzines so he’d have some feedback from readers on the internet.

(6) BILL DANA OBIT. Comedian Bill Dana, famed for his Jose Jimenez character, died June 15 reports SF Site News. Dana was also a comedy writer – he created Don Adams’ “Would you believe…?” gags.

While Dana’s ethnic humor would not be accepted today, it was still in vogue sixty years ago. According to The Hollywood Reporter

The nation was introduced to Jimenez in a comedy sketch on [Steve] Allen’s variety show in November 1959. Struggling to speak English, Jimenez appeared in a Santa Claus outfit as an instructor at a school for wannabe Kris Kringles and interviewed by “Man on the Street” Pat Harrington Jr.

“I said, ‘My name … Jose Jimenez,’ and the [live] audience laughed,” Dana, a Massachusetts native of Hungarian-Jewish descent, recalled in a 2007 interview with the Archive of American Television. “I remember thinking, ‘This guy just said his name and everybody [went crazy] …’

…On Garry Moore’s variety program, Dana appeared as Jose the Astronaut, then recorded a comedy album with that material from a live show at the famed hungry i nightclub in San Francisco.

He sent a test pressing of the disc to the original seven Mercury astronauts — and they loved it. Alan Shepard took the code name “Jose,” and Jimenez became the astronauts’ “mascot,” Dana said. When they weren’t working, the pilots hung out at Dana’s house, and years later, he was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame. (Footage of him as Jimenez on The Ed Sullivan Show can be seen in the 1983 film The Right Stuff.)

…Though it seems hard to believe in this age of political correctness, Dana and his character were embraced by the Latino community. He was honored by the National Hispanic Media Coalition and worked, largely behind the scenes, as an activist. He gave up playing the character but later regretted that.

The José Jimenez character was also one of the figures who popped his head out the window watching Batman and Robin climb a building on Batman.

(7) TODAY’S DAY

Garfield the Cat Day

Garfield The Cat Day is celebrated annually on 19th June. The day is set aside to honor all things related to the ginger feline. Garfield was famously created by cartoonist Jim Davis and appeared in a cartoon strip on 19th June 1978. Garfield’s owner: Jon Arbuckle and his dog friend; Odie, also appear in the cartoon strip.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • June 19, 1958 — Wham-O filed to register Hula Hoop trademark
  • June 19, 1992 Batman Returns hit theaters.

Batman Returns, released June 19, 1992, featured less kid- friendly characters than its predecessor. Gone was Jack Nicholson’s The Joker, and in his place were the grotesque Penguin (Danny DeVito) and a sexy Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), whose costume bore a striking resemblance to something that could be purchased at a BDSM shop.

These bold characters helped make the movie a classic, but also alienated corporations such as McDonald’s that had a newfound interest in the movie franchise business via promotional tie-ins – and complained loudly about the film’s darker tone.

(9) SINCE GAMERGATE. Keri Allan’s article “Fair play: How welcome are women in games design teams?”, in for Engineering & Technology, the on-line newsletter of the UK professional body, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, includes a quote from Brianna Wu and a mention of Rhianna Pratchett.

Sampat says it’s a mistake to believe that the furore of GamerGate ended sexism in the sector. “In a lot of ways it sucked being a female developer before GamerGate, and things are slowly getting worse because people treat ‘women in games’ as a solved problem – like GamerGate was a weird year-long blip and now sexism in our industry is gone. (But) the boots on the ground are still there being assholes to women.”

Having written about anonymous harassment of women in the industry during the height of GamerGate, Brianna Wu began to receive threats of her own. She believes there’s now a better sense of the issues out there, but policies aren’t necessarily changing in response. Feeling so strongly about equal treatment in the workplace, she’s now running for Congress.

“What makes me want to scream is that no one knows me for my engineering work, only my views on women’s equality. I’ve worked so hard to become an engineer, but the truth is you’re put in this impossible situation where you can smile, go along with the system and get fewer opportunities, or speak out and be put in this box. There’s a heightened awareness, but these congenital problems aren’t really solved. I believe women need to step up and run for office, and I hope to use my position to hold hearings on sexism in the tech industry.”

Other responses to GamerGate have included promoting the hashtag #OneReasonToBe. This was started by games narrative writer Rhianna Pratchett so women could share positive experiences about working in the industry and reasons why they love games. This has gone on to spawn a popular annual panel at the Games Developer Conference (GDC), highlighting great things the sector has to offer women.

(10) ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW. Catherynne M. Valente’s Refrigerator Monologues gets an 8/10 rating from Dina at SFF Book Reviews:

From the New York Times bestselling author Catherynne Valente comes a series of linked stories from the points of view of the wives and girlfriends of superheroes, female heroes, and anyone who’s ever been “refrigerated”: comic book women who are killed, raped, brainwashed, driven mad, disabled, or had their powers taken so that a male superhero’s storyline will progress….

Each gets to tell her story in turn and here’s where my love for this book begins. Because it may be fun figuring out which superhero you’re reading about, but it is even more fun how every woman tells her story in her own voice. Pretty Polly (the Harley Quinn of this universe) talks just like you’d imagine she would. Kind of sweet-ish and girly, with a fair bit of madness added to the mix. Blue Bayou sounds angry, Paige Embry is just totally endearing, and Julia Ash (whose villain’s is aptly named Retcon) felt kind of resigned. The voices always fit and the stories these women have to tell are engaging and intriguing for more than one reason. First of all, they’re just interesting stories. Secondly, they would have fit so beautifully into their respective universes – why isn’t there space in a Spider Man movie to show Gwen Stacy as more than just the hero’s girlfriend. She had a life before him and she had a life with him, just like all the others. Their demise was incredibly heartbreaking, although obviously we know from the start that they die and if you remember the original comic books how they die. To me, that’s just another sign of how amazing a writer Valente is. If you know what happens and how it happens, and all she does is give you a little background info, give the character who is about to die a little agency and personality, and it hits you deep in the guts anyway, then yeah… that’s a great writer!

(11) CYBERPUNK DAYS. Jesse at Speculiction looks back at Lewis Shiner’s 1984 novel Frontera.

As the title hints, Frontera is about a liminal zone.  Proverbially this would be between civilization and the wilds, but in the novel’s context, there are more specific terms.  One would certainly be between existent and breaking technology.  Another is locations possible to be inhabited by humanity; Mars can be altered for human life to survive, but it’s an unnatural existence.  And the last major frontier addressed is the personal.  Dislocated from home, the major characters on Mars all are dealing with existentialist angst.  Few, if any, live in a mental comfort zone.  Curtis, the colony leader, channels his uncertainty through rigid control in an attempt to mitigate his underlying fears.  Kane dreams wild dreams of Greek dramas by night and by day questions Pulsystems intents for him. (Given how strongly our solar system reflects contemporary civilization’s dependence on the Greeks, this is a nice parallel.)  Reese, the aging astronaut, can’t face up to certain realities, and takes comfort in drink.  And disaffected by the political scene, Marysia attempts to come to terms with her new life on Mars in balance with what she knew on Earth.

(12) STYLE MAVEN. Scott Edelman is preparing to make a fashion statement at the Worldcon.

(13) FROZEN DEITIES. Fantasy-Faction’s Laura M. Hughes praises The Blood-Tainted Winter by T.L. Greylock.

Speaking of gods: no doubt you’ll recognise a few of the names mentioned throughout this story. Odin, of course; Loki, too, as well as others such as Heimdall and the Valkyries. The Blood-Tainted Winter isn’t self-conscious of itself as a Norse fantasy, yet Raef’s tale evokes a vivid sense of place and time that thoroughly immerses the reader in a land of gods, battle and betrayal. Greylock doesn’t force the Norseness so much as nurture it, weaving familiar aspects of the mythology into the book in a way that doesn’t dominate or overshadow the story being told.

You could argue that the book’s beginning is a little too leisurely; however, I enjoyed having the opportunity to get to know the protagonist a little better – and to feel pleasantly surprised and intrigued when the following chapters have him reacting in a most unexpected manner. I will say that Greylock does a wonderful job of patiently unfolding the story through the eyes of its protagonist. Raef is distant and, at times, unfathomable (though not unlikeable), functioning more as a window onto events than as someone the reader can sympathise with or live vicariously through.

(14) EARL GREY TIME. Elizabeth Fitzgerald has her Australian National Convention report up – Continuum 13.

In keeping with the natures of the protagonists, Seanan had two different kinds of cake from Cake and Madness. One was a traditional cupcake with glittery frosting. And the other… well, the other was a bit disturbing.

Watching it be eaten was a little like finding myself in the middle of the zombie apocalypse.

She also has Storyfied the panels she livetweeted.

And to wrap up the night, Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff discussed 1001 ways to die in space. They left the room crying with laughter, thanks to their morbid senses of humour.+

(15) BOTS. The BBC gets a JPL spokesman to tell about “Five robots that are changing everything”.

From robot simians that can clean up nuclear accidents, to powered exoskeletons that enable you to lift huge objects, robotic technologies are developing incredibly quickly. Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, chief engineer at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks us through five robots that are changing the world.

(16) FUNNY COMMERCIAL. Sometimes people see an item and ask “Why’s that on File 770?” I have carefully searched this video without detecting any science fictional references. So when somebody asks that question, I am going to need to quickly change the subject.

Maybe I can change it with the help of an anecdote Cat Eldridge sent along with the link, about his own Coca-Cola experience.

True story. Well mostly. Once upon a time in a country where we had no intelligence assets I had a medical officer who insisted it was safer to drink coke than it was to drink the water, even the water hotels insisted had been boiled. This was the high octane stuff, full of real sugar. Drank at least three bottles a day while I was in country.

Now that the two female staffers who decided to mix and eat a salad and not soak it in iodine had a very unpleasant outcome when they discovered most explosively that it was grown in night soil… Need I tell you what night soil is? There’s a good reason the Viet Cong dipped their pungee sticks in it…

(17) NEW MEDIA CON. At VikingsCon, “Meet the cast of the History show Vikings”. They promise Amy Bailey (“Kwenthrith”) and Alexander Ludwig (“Bjorn”) will be on hand October 21-22 at the site in Maryland.

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Bill Burns, Cat Eldridge, David K.M. Klaus, Lex Berman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]

69 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/19/17 Have Scroll, Will Pixel Reads The File Of A Man

  1. (10) I would give it a much higher grade than 8/10. It was… super.

    I’m sorry I’ll show myself out.

  2. (2) Well said, Adam-Troy. Nobody is owed anything, much, but awe is definitely highest among the things not owed.

    (3) Excellent; make all the “cosplay” kids watch it.

    (6) He was super-popular back in the day, always on Ed Sullivan. When I saw him again as an adult (and found out his actual ethnicity), I was all “wow, we had terrible taste back then”. But it’s nice he got to hang with the astronauts.

    (7) Celebrated by who, exactly? Jim Davis and his accountant?

    (12) Not a fashion statement so much as a fashion argument. But the original tweeter is correct.

    (16) You bet I drank Coke in Mexico. Right out of the bottle, and with that wonderful real sugar.

  3. “Hurt-feelings Harry”

    *snort*

    I’m really tempted to come up with a logo for WBI (Whiny Baby International). 😀

  4. (16) SJW credentials, aren’t they automatically at least SFF-adjacent? Works for me…

    (10) and (13) both sound interesting (particularly The Refrigerator Monologues).

  5. Camestros Felapton: I stole your idea

    OMG, it’s a really good thing that I was not currently consuming the wine and lemon tarts with which Timothy bribed me  which I received from an anonymous benefactor, or I’d have had a huge mess on my keyboard.

    Well done you, Cam. Well done. 😀

  6. @kathodus

    Seconding lurkertype on The Refrigerator Monologues. Just got it this afternoon. I’m only halfway through (it’s short but I only had limited reading time tonight). Very nice voice. I can picture the comic panels as I read it. The story of Julia Ash made me angry because of the logic of the story. Can’t rate it until I finish but well worth a read so far. Tor had a sample up a few weeks ago if you want to get a taste.

  7. 5) There were times I worried about Rodney Leighton. He mentioned he lived alone in the woods, and if he fell/jumped into a snowbank, they wouldn’t find him until spring, for example. But he stuck it out until the end.

    6) Curiously enough, there was an X-15 pilot who was also named Bill Dana. Don’t know if the two ever met.

    The point about the “José JImenez” act, I think, was that the astronauts could confront their fears — and laugh at them. Remember, “our rockets always blow up.”

  8. @Camestros: (WBI logo)

    Y’know, there’s something almost vaguely kinda familiar about that somehow… 😉

  9. (6) I’d seen that bit in The Right Stuff, of course; it’s nice to finally have some context around it.

    Hugo reading: Finished All the Birds in the Sky, which was very good and which I’d be hard-pressed to describe; then made my way through all of the short story nominees (well, with one glaring exception), which were also generally quite good. I’m rather beginning to suspect I won’t make it through all of the nominated novels, especially since after I finished the short stories last night, I started a brand new 600 page sword & sorcery anthology.

  10. 4 – Makes sense whether it’s Bollyhood or Hollywood. People refer to different series as the Chucky or Jason or Freddy movies, not by the names of those that stop them, because they’re the main character. Evil Dead is one of the few I can think of where the hero is main character rather than the monster.

    9 – There are honestly people who think that because of GamerGate we live in a post-sexism games industry? That’s wild. GG just helped highlight some of the problems within the industry as it reacted to the vileness of the harassment campaign, but those problems didn’t magically go away. Turn on a light in a room with cockroaches and those cockroaches scatter but you still got a bug problem.

  11. I’m not surprised that Latino audiences liked the sketches. Jokes about struggles with language-learning are especially funny to intermediate and advanced learners, and they often serve to illustrate difficult language points better than any rule could. I think the problem here is that today they seem to have a racist tinge to them.

    My best story along those lines was when I was working for Microsoft and doing a lot of joint work with our office in Japan. My Japanese is (or at least was) B2, which is the threshold of fluency. (Jimenez is speaking B2 English. It’s fast, it’s mostly right, but it’s far from perfect.) We’d just finished our first successful project, and the Japan team were pressing me to use the “friendly” forms of the language, not the formal ones I’d always been told to use.

    So we have this big meeting with the boss for the Japanese team. (About the equivalent of my boss in the US.) We talk through our plans for the next project, and we’re all in agreement. A really easy meeting. So I decide to say something like, “Let’s do it!” Just as I start to say it, I realize I should use the friendly form, “Soo shiyoo!” not the formal “Soo shimashoo!” But I’m awkward with those, and I end up saying “Soo shiro” instead.

    Total silence falls, and everyone looks shocked. (Never a good sign.) That’s because what I actually said translates more or less to “So fucking go do it!” (This is the notorious Japanese “brusque imperative.”)

    The boss asked why I said that, and I explained that they’d been complaining that my Japanese was too polite. Now he turned to the rest of the team with an ugly look on his face. (He thought they’d been teaching me inappropriate expressions without me knowing it.)

    One of the engineers asked if I meant “Soo shiyoo.” Then I saw it. I put my hand over my mouth, said “Oh no!” in English, and the whole room burst out laughing. Some people laughed until they cried. When he stopped laughing, the boss said, “More friendly language is good, but be a little more formal than ‘soo shiro.'” That set everyone off again. (Including me.)

    Almost everyone who studies a language seriously has stories like that. They’re not bad because they bring you closer to the people involved, and you always learn from the experience. That might explain why Latino audiences originally liked Jimenez’s routine: It made them smile.

    Some monolingual English speakers, though, probably hear it as reinforcing their beliefs about the lack of intelligence of Latinos. Sigh. People like that are why we can’t have nice things.

  12. On the BILL DANA SHOW, I found the character to be kind of child like about the new place he has adopted, was generous with his time and like to make friends. Of course, he’d get himself in trouble for misunderstanding context–Jose give the IRS a generous “tip” which was misconstrued as a “bribe” Johnathan Harris’ response to his actions were sharp and clipped, but he accepted him.

    Of course, people kept talking about “the dumb Mexican” rather than the context. *sigh*.

  13. Hurt-Feelings Harry still has hurt feelings after winning a Dragon Award.

    This should not be so, for as we’ve all been told, the Dragon Award is the greatest honor in SF/F because it is voted on by a countless legion of fans.

    The hurt Harry feels is so deep he could win all the awards and still feel hurt.

  14. @3: ISTM that the video is a little short on history; the tech may have been lighter-to-nonexistent, but there were serious Worldcon masquerades at least as far back as my first (1974) — along with a major costume exhibit in 1980 — and there were major costumers then and earlier (e.g., the Resnicks). I wonder whether they settled for what they had video of, rather than trying to put together the whole story? Or are they focusing on people who did just costuming? (Not quite — I know Pierre Pettinger was a Sasquan VP — but I remember when people who masqueraded almost always did other things as well.)

  15. No I would not give you fifth note
    On this strange and mournful day
    But the pixel and file reunion
    Is only a posting away

    (7) I remember I used to love Garfield when it came out. I bought the first small collection of strips in 1980. At the time Garfield walked on four legs and didn’t speak. (Thought bubbles only.) I guess what Garfield does best is makes me appreciate the comics that continued and maintained a certain level of quality.

  16. Jim Davis no longer really draws or writes Garfield. It’s a comic strip “block buster”–games, toys, mugs and movies with none of them anywhere near good. Rubbish that panders to the LCD.

  17. “Eight files high
    And when you scroll down
    You find that it’s
    Stranger than known….”

    [godstalk]

  18. Re 2)

    I had been avoiding puppydom for the last little while – too many books – and I hadn’t realized the size of the rent-free apartment OGH has in HFH’s (love the coinage, by the way) head.

    Call it a monument to satiability, or good mental health, or what have you. Six months after they put the avatar of all of their resentments into the White House, and they’re still all oppressed because other people have different opinions. To quote a musical most of them probably hate, they will never be satisfied. Not a nice way to live?

    I don’t like going to projection as a go to explanation, but some days… Good God.

  19. @TYP if you’d like to see further bizarro behavior, drop down the rabbit hole into JCW’s accusations against Filer Camestros regarding their previous discussion about global warming (I discovered this rabbit hole in the comment section of LC’s latest unhingery).

    Summary: They had a pretty in-depth discussion about “lefty” science-based scares, and went into global warming and eventually DDT. Camestros presented his case solidly, refuting JCW’s (and other posters’) points, generally very politely (sometimes it’s hard not to be a little snarky when people are replying as if your every statement is a lie). That conversation was a while ago. In the current ravings on LC’s blog, JCW accuses Camestros of various nefarious behavior in that debate. LC’s fanbase piles on Camestros, Camestros defends himself by providing links to the debate that show JCW’s… mistaken recollection. LC’s fanbase continues to pile on, suggesting projection is very likely the reason they believe OGH’s summaries of posts he reports on is the extent to which Filers have read Puppy posts.

    For all they call us vile and accuse us of piling on and etc., it looks from my perspective like the average poster on LC’s blog is as vitriolic and 1/4 as coherent as the top three confrontational posters here. I recognize this could be due to confirmation bias on my part.

  20. @Kathodus

    DDT? Seriously? That’s a little special, as it’s been settled science long enough to have had grandkids. Climate change is up there too, I suppose.

    I guess the paranoid style is simply more comfortable for some.

  21. @TYP – I’ve seen that a lot recently – that Rachel Carson was wrong, and because of this, millions of people around the world have died of malaria. I haven’t been able to find any resources explaining what she was wrong about, though. Regardless, it seems those people are wrong, because DDT is not banned for anti-malarial use. According to what I’ve read, the DDT thing is part of a larger campaign to discredit science possibly started by tobacco lobbyists. Goes along with climate change “skeptics.” Camestros’ explanation was pretty interesting.

  22. The DDT-“debate” was restarted by Michael Crichton as one of those things, were regulations killed “millions of people”. Of course its easy to argue, if you dont mention any facts… (like DDT has been tried as a pesticide outdoors and found wanting by several parties, including the US army or that its impossible to kill all insects in any area with anything save nukes or that it was developed and is only effective indoors, where its still used in many countries today or that an American book hardly had any impact in china or… anything really)
    Its part of the anti-science, anti-regulation campaign of right Hawks and as its core has nothing to do with DDT. Its people like hearing themselve say something they percieve as a clever argument.

  23. @kathodus, I suppose I can look at their “concern” about DDT as an anti-malarial agent as a positive? After all, those places where it is currently (still) used for that are often places some of the Puppies, or anyone at Castelia, are not often accused of showing much concern for.

  24. I’ve been called on to help with my mother-in-law for a few hours. So today’s Scroll will be posted rather late.

  25. Applause to Camestros for the WBI thing. Most excellent.

    As for Hurt-Feelings-Harry, I suspect even he realizes that he’s burned so many bridges at this point that his only hope is to keep on charging straight ahead. It’s not much of a hope (a “Charge of the Light Brigade” outcome at this point is probably optimistic), but it’s not like he has other options, really. Well, except to admit he’s been being an ass. (And who wants to do that?)

  26. Robert Whitaker Sirignano on June 20, 2017 at 8:54 am said:

    Insect.

    And are you asserting that insects aren’t animals? All true multicellular life that isn’t a plant or a fungus is an animal. (I say “true multicellular” to deal with edge cases like volvox and slime molds.) “Animal” is not a synonym for mammal, or tetrapod, or chordate.

  27. “And I will Scroll 500 Files”

    (And I will scroll 500 more,
    Just to be the fan who scrolled a thousand files
    To read Mike Glyer’s lore.)

  28. When John Stossel was ABC’s token Libertarian, they once gave him a whole hour of 20/20 to challenge conventional thinking. One of his topics was that DDT should be used to control malaria. That was probably a decade ago.

    Are we not Scrolls?
    We are pixels!

    (Or if you want to go to inspiration you could do something with Island of Lost Scrolls which would be later remade as The Island of Dr. Mike Glyer.)

  29. “And I will Scroll 500 Files”

    (And I will scroll 500 more,
    Just to be the fan who scrolled a thousand files
    To read Mike Glyer’s lore.)

    Pixelation! (Pixelation!)
    Pixelation! (Pixelation!)
    Pixe-la-di-di-da-da da!

  30. MoMA’s Upcoming Sci-fi Exhibition Is the City’s Best Summer Attraction

    Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction, will be at the MoMA July 17 through August 31, with 70 science- fiction films from 22 countries “including the United States, the Soviet Union, China, India, Cameroon, Mexico and beyond.” It is organized by curator Joshua Siegel.

    Buster Keaton’s The Electric House with piano accompaniment… wishing NYC was an option for my summer plans, but work renders it unlikely.

  31. I know one person’s response to some of the ethnic cartoon characters on TV. My future roommate Sam was, I believe, not enthralled with the Frito Bandido, who was all over TV when I was in sixth grade. I found later on, though, that Speedy Gonzales was in some ways his avatar—not for running fast, but for his legendary prowess in romance. He also found the other mice in the cartoons quotable: “Slow Poke Rodriguez… he pack a gon.” Parenthetical note: the Bandido was voiced (as was Speedy) by Mel Blanc, whose various ethnic impersonations may be the part of his voice repertoire that has aged the worst. The difference in the characters, though, is the difference between a somewhat myopic look at a people and a malicious lie about them.

    Lace, once a year (September, perhaps) the Naro Theatre in Norfolk has Chris Kypros play live piano accompaniment for silent comedies. I watched a bunch of Keaton that way. I should say, they used to have, as I haven’t been around for the last dozen years of it.

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