The three actual LEGO minifigures of Jupiter, Juno and Galileo on the Juno probe as seen before launch. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/LEGO)
(1) LEGO AND JUNO. CollectorSpace tells about three hitchhikers aboard the Juno mission to Jupiter.
The Juno minifigure holds a magnifying glass to signify her search for the truth and her husband holds a lightning bolt. Galileo, who is credited with several important discoveries about Jupiter, including identifying its four largest moons, holds both a model of the planet and his telescope.
The three figures stand along a ledge on the spacecraft’s hexagonal two-deck body, which also houses Juno’s eight primary science instruments, 29 sensors and a first-of-its-kind shielded vault to protect the probe’s electronics from Jupiter’s heavy radiation environment.
“We put these LEGO minifigures on board Juno in order to inspire and motivate and engage children, to have them share in the excitement of space exploration and reaching for the best goals that you can,” Bolton said.
To that end, NASA and LEGO have partnered on “Mission to Space,” a new design challenge that invites children to use the toy building bricks to imagine the future of space exploration.
(2) FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA. HowStuffWorks offers “The 1950s Sci-Fi Movie Quiz”
Even though I scored 24 out of 30, Tarpinian will be disgusted that I got the Ray Bradbury question wrong. So am I!
(3) AUSSIE SF SCREENWRITING COMPETITION. Australia Writers Guild members (only) have until August 22 to enter: “Call for Entries: John Hinde Awards for Excellence in Science Fiction”.
The award was established to encourage, reward and foster creativity in the development and showcasing of science fiction writing for feature film, short film, television, radio and interactive media. It also provides an avenue for unproduced works to enter.
Jesse O’Brien, the 2015 winner in the Produced category for his screenplay Arrowhead, says, “We’re only a few movies away from a significant genre resurgence and if Arrowhead can inspire the imaginations of other writers, then it has done the very best thing movies can do,” he says. “Thank you to John Hinde for leaving this treasure for us to find, and to the AWG for presenting it.”
The Prizes
The competition will be split up into two separate categories – produced and unproduced. Each category will have its own specific prize.
Produced:
- $10,000 cash prize
Unproduced:
- The winning script will be read by an experienced genre producer and the writer will be set up with a meeting with an industry professional hand-selected for your specific piece of work. Associated travel expenses will be covered by the AWG/John Hinde Bequest.
- The winner and all shortlisted applicants will be provided with entry into the AWG Pathways Program – an initiative that provides networking opportunities for writers and the chance to showcase their ideas to industry professionals thereby giving those industry professionals access to quality scripts.
(4) NEILL OBIT. Known for playing Lois Lane in The Adventures of Superman, actress Noel Neill died July 3 at the age of 95. She was a popular guest at media cons, where many fans got to meet her over the years.
Noel Neill and Kirk Alyn (another screen Superman) at Equicon II in 1974. Photo by Dik Daniels.
SF Site News adds:
She retired from acting when the show went off the air, but appeared as Lois Lane’s mother in the film Superman, as well as bit roles in the television series Superboy and the film Superman Returns. She also played Aunt Lois in Surge of Power.
Bleeding Cool’s obit includes other details of her entertainment career.
With the help of Bing Crosby, Noel signed a seven-year contract with Paramount Pictures in 1941. She initially made several short films, then appeared in mostly non-speaking roles, gradually gaining leading lady status beginning with 1944’s Are These Our Parents?
In total, Noel made close to 100 films in her long and incredible career, and surprisingly, most were Western films made in the 1940s and 1950s. She worked with many noted directors such Cecil B. DeMille, Vincent Minnelli, and Hal Roach, and starred with actors Bob Hope, Crosby, Gene Kelley, Clayton Moore, Johnny Mack Brown and William Holden.
(5) TODAY IN HISTORY
- July 4, 1862 — Lewis Caroll first told Alice Liddell the story of Alice in Wonderland.
(6) TODAY’S TRIVIA QUESTION
- Donald F. Glut asks, “Did Forry say, ‘Harpy Fearth of Ghoul Eye’?”
(7) FOURTH WITH. Damien G. Walter wishes us a jolly holiday:
https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/750088153881579520
(8) HUGO NOM COVERAGE. Lisa Goldstein sent a note that she has reviewed “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” at inferior4+1, and wishes everyone, “Happy Fourth! And Fifth!”
(9) GAME OF THRONES. Via ScienceFiction.com — “Cersei Lannister Lets It Go In ‘Game of Thrones’/‘Frozen’ Mash-Up”. How ill!
BEWARE SPOILERS
(10) METAL MEN. Jennifer Ouelette at Gizmodo says a “New Study Busts the Myth That Knights Couldn’t Move Well in Armor”.
Daniel Jaquet of the University of Geneva and several colleagues aim to bust that myth with a new study examining the range of motion and energy cost while fighting in medieval armor. They published their findings in a recent paper in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History.
Medieval scholars have long known that armor worn by knights of that era allowed for far more mobility than most people realize. There’s even a 1924 educational film created by the Metropolitan Museum of New York to address the popular misconception. But until quite recently, little quantitative data was available to support that stance.
(11) JAPANESE CULTURE CON. NatsuCon runs July 22-24 in St. Louis:
NatsuCon is a Saint Louis metro-area based anime convention possessing the sole desire of expanding the appreciation, understanding, and acceptance of Japanese pop-culture in America. By the use of media ranging from art, to music, to visual screenings, NatsuCon strives to present attendees with an accepting, friendly environment allowing guests of all ages to meet and express similar interests. The staff and volunteers of NatsuCon all share the common wish of providing attendees with a fun and welcoming atmosphere. Through educational panels and interactive presentations and events based around precepts of Japanese culture, NatsuCon will offer its guests with an opportunity to empower themselves by increasing knowledge, diversity, and strength of character.
(12) SPOCKUMENTARY SCREENS IN BOSTON. Adam Nimoy’s tribute to his father was shown to Kickstarter donors in Boston last week.
“Star Trek” fans like the character of Mr. Spock because he’s low-key and emotionally detached. But it turns out Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played the Vulcan with the pointy ears, was the same way in real life, which wasn’t so great for his son. That’s the sense one gets watching Adam Nimoy’s documentary about his dad, “For the Love of Spock,” which screened at the Revere Hotel this week. (The movie, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, comes out Sept. 9.)
Monday’s invite-only screening was for Trekkies who contributed to the filmmaker’s Kickstarter campaign, an effort that raised a whopping $660,000. (That ranks as one of the crowd-funding platform’s most successful campaigns ever.)
Introducing “For the Love of Spock,” Adam Nimoy said it was a special treat to screen the film in Boston, where his dad grew up. (The elder Nimoy was raised in the West End and hawked newspapers in Boston Common as a kid.)
(13) YABBA DABBA DUDE. Michael Cavna, who writes “Comic Riffs” for the Washington Post, brings word of a Flintstones comics reboot.
DC COMICS reached out with a mission for Mark Russell. How would he like to write a reboot of “The Flintstones”?
His prompt reply: “I kind of hate ‘The Flintstones.’ ”
The DC editors’ response: They liked his humorous take for his award-winning comic “Prez,” so his distaste for the old animated Hanna-Barbera TV show was not a dealbreaker.
“So I knew from the beginning,” Russell tells The Post’s Comic Riffs, “that it would be a satiric, edgy response to ‘The Flintstones.’ ”
Next month, DC will debut “The Flintstones” No. 1, which slyly unfurls Russell’s sardonic take on the “modern Stone Age family” from the town of Bedrock.
[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus, Hampus Eckerman, Lisa Goldstein, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day John King Tarpinian.]
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Happy Fourth of July to those who celebrate it!
Echoing a slightly belated Happy Independence Day to those in the USA!
As to the Scroll…I got nothin’.
[ticky] and back to Ancillary Mercy .
[ticky]
Check out the Google Doodle right now. Go Juno!
Pride and Prejudice with Pixels
The highly desirable SECOND Fifth.
(And; Yay, Juno! )
Happy Fourth, from the second fifth!
I’m following the Juno mission on my phone while on the bus home from work. Truly we live in a science fictional future.
Also, what ULTRAGOTHA said.
ULTRAGOTHA: Thanks for alerting us to the Google Doodle. Cool!
(2) FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – I’m hanging my head in shame at 22 of 30, because I know better. I missed a Godzilla question! I’m blaming my Hugo reading, which has moved on to the sewer that is Best Related.
My grandmother rode a horse to school and behind one to go to town for groceries, something she told me when we watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon’s surface. I think she might have passed along some of her wonder at the same time.
My grandmother rode a horse to school and behind one to go to town for groceries
So did mine – and she never did learn to drive a car. She lived long enough to see Pioneer’s pictures of Jupiter.
Has someone already brought File770 the video link to the truly epic reading by Mark Oshiro of the brand new Chuck Tingle story at CONvergence? It is NSFW, explicit, gloriously goofy, and meta as heck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIwJuN59wX8
It was a memorable convention.
29 out of 30 on the quiz, although I freely admit that a number of my correct answers were little better than lucky guesses.
26/30. All the ones I got wrong were early in the quiz, so I though I was going to crash and burn.
Today has had meats on the grill, a singalong viewing of the full unedited restored “1776”, and many fireworks of various sizes and legality.
It’s the perfect Fourth.
I was singing to myself when Angie informed me that we weren’t going to be watching 1776 again this year today. 🙁
OTOH, now that she has gone to bed, I’m listening to Hamilton again, so there’s that.
23/30. lots of lucky guesses.
(1) LEGO AND JUNO
So now we’re leaving our toys scattered all across the Solar System!? Mom is going to be so mad! And heaven help us if someone out there steps on one!
😀
Clicky, from the barely awake, on July 5.
20/30, kind of happy with that.
Happy pre-5th and 5th of July to American Filers.
It’s ?eker Bayram (Eid al-Fitr) in this part of the world so I can also wish you iyi bayramlar.
SECOND ROUND OF NOMINATIONS FOR CULT MOVIE BRACKET OPEN.
https://youtu.be/3B49N46I39Y
@Elise I am sad that I missed being at the reading (but I did hear of the epicness of it). Thanks for the video link.
It’s too early, clearly, my score for the quiz was…low.
This week ended up being busier than I thought it would be. (Apparently, when you take a couple of weeks off, things pile up in your absence. Who knew?) I do finally have another mini-review, though:
Divided Allegiance, by Elizabeth Moon
Fantasy, second book of a series. A woman trains to become a paladin.
If the influence of Dungeons and Dragons was evident in the first book of this series, it is even more obvious in this one — a thief checks for traps! Paladins can cast detect evil! And less directly, this one is much more a personal adventure story than the first book, with a lot more magic and derring-do. That made it less interesting to me than the first one for much of it, because it reminded both of a lot of other books I’ve read and a lot of games I’ve played, without adding a lot, although the examination of ethics was interesting. However, this is a book that is VERY MUCH redeemed by its ending. This book goes somewhere unexpectedly *dark*, and in a way that made getting through the D&D adventure parts worth it, even if they were sometimes a little bit of a slog. I’ll be reading book three.
Speaking of Bradbury, I had the lead in Dandelion Wine my senior year.
— Peaked in High School Jim Henley
I also got 22, but I’m quite pleased with that.
I got the Godzilla question right though.
26/30 with lots of guessing, and I missed at least one I should’ve gotten (the Spielberg 2005 remake).
And the movie with the giant octopus was It Came From Beneath the Sea, not Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. I did get the question correct, though.
I kind of hated the FLINTSTONES as well. The art was passable, the animation bad, and the writing was kind of numbnuts repetitive. It borrowed from THE HONEYMOONERS, was about verbal abuse and rubbed me the wrong way. The voice actors were superb.
Being original was not a high spot for Hanna Barbarian.
Thet thing from IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA was not an octopus. It only had five tentacles. Kind of a quintipus. But my memory tells me it resembled a squid.
Well, since everyone else is taking the quiz by making guesses, I’ll just guess that I’d get 25/30 if I were to take it. Quizzes are fun!
[got you all in check(box)]
I was taking the quiz until the squid thing showed up for the wrong movie.
Secritcrush is reviewing the hugo packet. Yay!
http://secritcrush.livejournal.com/
I finally started Seveneves, and guys, I just don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this. On the third page:
WTF? I double-checked with Mr Dr Science, a fencer (competitor, teacher, referee) and he’s never heard this terminology, though he thinks it possible it might have been used in the 18th century or earlier.
These days, fencers almost invariably say “attacker” and “defender” — and the defender is by no means passive. Mr Dr & I wonder if Stephenson is thinking of Japanese seme and uke — except the uke is only truly “passive” in really bad yaoi fanfic.
Ugh. The third page. I don’t know if I’m going to make it to the part with genetics, which is almost certain to enrage me to the point of book-flinging.
Speaking of things I won’t read, in Lisa Goldstein’s discussion of “Seven Kill Tiger” I commented:
So I won’t.
So what of the Neanderthal genes that how been shown to exist in modern humans?
2. Trivia. Adam West did not star in Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Several of the other questions are poorly worded and or answered. I refuse to play.
@Robert Whitaker Sirignano
I think the consensus was it would be difficult to isolate a specific gene marker for a given group of people and, if you could, likely to mutate and effect more than your target.
It’s also not even all that new as a horrifying idea. I recall at least two stories using that idea from back in the 80’s or 90’s. In one the target was Arabs, in the other the Irish. If I recall correctly in the Irish story it mutates and causes mass infertility world wide. Couldn’t tell you the name of either story though.
steve davidson: You’ll have to take it up with IMDB — they list Adam West as one of the “stars” of the film.
It’s tough to be the star, however, when your character dies early in the movie!
RWS:
Yes, Neanderthal & Denisovan genes are widespread (but by no means universal) in un-African populations, and rare (but not entirely unknown, especially in Ethiopia) in African ones. It might conceivably be possible to use such genes to target a weapon that would mostly hit non-Africans (but not by any means all of them), but to use the lack of these genes to target Africans would be super-sloppy.
Any thinking about biological human “races” is inherently suspect, but thinking of Africans as a “race” is *super* suspect and counter-factual.
My main memory from reading Dandelion Wine (probably in junior high) was that I kept thinking “but where are the rockets? When will the spaceships appear?”
It’s probably a good book, at least I read all of it, but I picked up that book at the library because I thought of Bradbury as an SF writer. And I felt a little cheated.
(13) I wonder if a similar conversation happened with the director of the recent Batman/Superman film. That was”edgy” too, right?
The monkey in ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS had a larger role than Adam West. West dies fairly early in the film. The role was a selling point for the film’s advertising. Because. Batman.
I recalling setting DANDELION WINE aside when I read the story about the magic sneakers.
I made a mistake–the Batman TV was two years after the RCOM flick.
Stoic Cynic wrote: “It’s also not even all that new as a horrifying idea. I recall at least two stories using that idea from back in the 80’s or 90’s. In one the target was Arabs, in the other the Irish. If I recall correctly in the Irish story it mutates and causes mass infertility world wide. Couldn’t tell you the name of either story though.”
Could the Irish one be Frank Herbert’s THE WHITE PLAGUE (1982 novel)? Scientist whose wife and children were killed by an IRA bomb goes mad, creates plague (carried by men) that kills women (that’s kinda sort “mass infertility”), releases it in Ireland. It doesn’t stay there.
@Doctor Science
So Teddy nominated a story that involved a) all people designated African dying, b) where the only way the (junk) science could work would be his vaunted Neanderthal DNA?
He seriously just nominated his spank material, didn’t he?
It’s actually worse than that – the science doesn’t really work even with the Neanderthal DNA. The story requires Africans to be not only distinct from all non-Africans, but also genetically similar to each other – i.e. “one race”.
As someone said in an earlier thread (I don’t remember who, possibly Darren Garrison), the plot is comparable to making a bug that targets poodles, huskies, setters, dachs, great danes, and so on – but not labrador retrievers.
24 of 30, but I got the Bradbury and missed the Godzilla.
Glad to know I’m not the only one who watched “1776” in all its restored glory (though I will neither confirm nor deny I did anything which could even charitably described as “singing” along, even to “Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve”).
The statute of limitations on aural assault is a lengthy one here.
(1) LEGO AND JUNO
Was I the only person who looked at the figures and thought that Juno was carrying a frying pan? I mean, it would have fit with her relationship with Jupiter, right?