Pixel Scroll 8/1/18 For I Must Be Scrolling On, Now Cause There’s Too Many Pixels I’ve Got To See

(1) THE COCKY SOLUTION. The hydra sprouts a new head in the Authors Guild’s report on “Quantumgate: Son of Cockygate”.

The Cockygate case is close to resolution: the parties have entered into a settlement agreement and author Faleena Hopkins has filed a request with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to withdraw her “cocky” trademark. Other recent applications to register questionable trademarks for book series, however, do remain a matter of concern. A recent misinformed attempt to register a common book cover template (which is not a trademark under any interpretation of the law) was withdrawn after some backlash, thank goodness, but a recent application to register “Big” as a series title is still under review.

Now, another romance writer has applied to register the term “Quantum Series” in connection with her “series of fiction books.” When the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, became aware of this application, they approached the Authors Guild for assistance. We recommended counsel to SFWA, and Eleanor Lackman of the law firm Cowan, DeBaets Abrahams & Sheppard LLP is taking up the case by filing an opposition to the proposed trademark on behalf of SFWA member Douglas Phillips, who has his own “Quantum Series” of books”…

The Trademark Office clarified that the owner of a trademark in a book series title cannot use that trademark against single book titles. Since single titles cannot serve as trademarks, they also cannot infringe series title trademarks. So, if another author or a publisher ever tries to stop you from using a single book title because of their series trademark, you can tell them to take a hike. Only series titles can infringe another series title. [emphasis added]

(2) BELLA NOVELLA. Wired’s Jason Kehe applauds “The Rise of the Sci-Fi Novella: All The Imagination, None of the Burden”.

…The form, after all, honors the genre: The novella traces its origins to fairytales and morality plays. Proto-fantasies, basically. In that sense, Tolkien’s world-building was never native to the genre. He simply blew up the balloon.

A balloon which is now about to burst. More than ever, successful world-building seems to require of creators a transmedia commitment to spin-offs and prequels and various other increasingly extraneous tie-ins like comic books and card games. Consumers are rightly overwhelmed. The joy of the sci-fi novella, by contrast, is in its one-off-ness, its collapsed space, its enforced incapaciousness. Authors can’t indulge family trees or maps; they must purify their storytelling. One or two main characters. A single three-act quest. Stark, sensible rules. (And no Starks.)

Containment need not mean compromise. In many cases, spareness heightens prose. My favorite of Tor’s wide-ranging catalog is Kai Ashante Wilson’s A Taste of Honey, a stunning romance that unfolds on the shores of a remote god colony. Something like math poeticized, or poetry mathematized, at novel size the book would’ve gone down way too rich. At 158 pages, though? Practically perfect. Deadlier serious but no less compelling is Laurie Penny’s Everything Belongs to the Future, in which the rich can extend their youth by centuries while the poor age and die naturally. The paltry page count lets Penny, in full author-activist fervor, get away with punking up the familiar biotech premise. Plus, you can read it in one sitting, the way the good lords of lit intended.

(3) CLARKE WINNER’S NEW STORY. Paul Weimer weighs in about “Expectations of Genre: The Expert System’s Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky” in a review for Tor.com.

This novella’s contribution to that conversation is that, in order to colonize distant alien planets already full of life, change, severe change, is needed. This puts The Expert System’s Brother into dialogue with novels such as Stephen Baxter’s Flux (where humans are altered to live on a neutron star) and James Blish’s Surface Tension. All of these stories explore the idea that in the end, it is not easy to change people to survive and thrive on alien planets. There are severe costs and consequences to doing so, to the point that those who do so might lose most of their connection to who and what they are. But those costs are absolutely payable, and are worth doing. We are never so much human as we are exploring, heading out there, and changing ourselves and reinventing ourselves to do so.

(4) OKORAFOR. A BBC profile: “Black Panther spin-off author Nnedi Okorafor’s African inspiration”.

…Okorafor’s journey as a writer began at 19. That year, she was paralysed from the waist down after an operation to correct scoliosis.

Distraught as she realised her budding athletic career would be cut short, Okorafor began writing short stories to occupy her time.

When she recovered, she took a creative-writing class at university.

Her rise in the world of speculative fiction was “gradual”, she says, mainly because no one knew how to place her work.

By the time she published her debut novel Zahrah the Windseeker in 2005, reviewers struggled to understand it, she says.

“It was young adult science fiction with Nigerian mysticism, blended with fantasy and written by a Nigerian American – I was confusing and many didn’t know how to read me.

“But over the years, the more I wrote, the more known I became. I was slowly somewhat understood, and thus enjoyed.”

(5) YOU COULD L**K IT UP. Laura Anne Gilman tells why research is a necessity in “A Meerkat Rants: History will F*ck You Up” at Book View Café.

Here’s the thing. I wrote urban fantasy for a long time .  A dozen+ books’ time, in fact.  Books set in New York, a city that I know reasonably well.  And I still had to pull out the map and get on the subway, and check shit out, to make sure I had my facts straight, because trust me, if I got it wrong, someone (probably many someones) would let me know.

As an aside, did you know that the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge is painted purple-ish?  Also, that if you start taking photos of the underside of a bridge, a cop may give you a very thorough side-eye?  Always bring your id and your business cards with you when you Research, kids.  Seriously.  I shit thee not.

But that’s fact-checking, Person with Opinion says.  That’s not research.  It’s all still made up.

At this point I usually stop to remind myself that the agency bail fund probably won’t cover even justifiable homicide, so I only ask my interrogator if they ever wrote a research paper in their lives, and if so how they gathered the material to do it.  If they say “Wikipedia,” I give up and drown my sorrows in whisky.

(6) A GRAIL-SHAPED ENDING. In The Hollywood Reporter: “Monty Python Archive Unveils Unused ‘Holy Grail’ Sketches”.

Michael Palin’s private archive, deposited at the British Library in London, is set to go on display to the public later this month, but The Times of London reports that its contents includes several major unseen scenes written by Palin and Terry Jones, his writing partner in the Monty Python group, whose other members included Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, John Cleese and Graham Chapman.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail famously ends abruptly when King Arthur (Chapman) is arrested by police just minutes before a final climactic battle. However, according to The Times, Palin’s draft scripts show that this decision was only made to cut costs, and that a mighty fight was due to take place between the knights of Camelot, the French and also the killer rabbit of Caerbannog (a much-loved character from a previous scene).

(7) COMPELLING CROWDFUNDING. Joe Stech has launched a Kickstarter to fund Compelling Science Fiction: The First Collection, a hardcover print collection. The table of contents with 27 fantastic short stories by 24 authors is at the link. Swag is available for heftier pledges.

(8) MEXICANX INITIATIVE ANTHOLOGY. Fireside has set up a Kickstarter for the “Mexicanx Initiative Anthology”. They’ve already surpassed their $1,500 goal with pledges totaling $2,382 as of this writing.

Contributors include: José Luis Zárate, David Bowles, Julia Rios,  Felecia Caton Garcia, Iliana Vargas, Angela Lujan, Raquel Castro, Pepe Rojo, Alberto Chimal,  Gabriela Damián Miravete, Andrea Chapela, Verónica Murguía, Libia Brenda, and Richard Zela.

Our goal is to raise $1,600 to cover printing and shipping costs. Any funds raised above the goal will be split evenly among all the authors and artists who graciously donated their time and words. The anthology has been edited and laid out and features a beautiful cover by Mexicanx Initiative founder John Picacio.

We plan to print 200 copies of the anthology; 80 will be held for members of the Mexicanx Initiative and contributors, and 120 signed and/or numbered will be available as backer rewards. All copies will be brought to Worldcon 76 in San José, California, where they will be signed and available for pickup. If you are not attending Worldcon we will ship your copy and any other rewards you purchase.

(9) WORLDCON DOORS OPEN THESE HOURS.

(10) TRIVIAL TRIVIA

More than 80 million years separated the Stegosaurus from the Tyrannosaurus Rex. But the so-called Age of Mammals — which began when the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out — has been going on for about 66 million years. This means that we are closer in time to the T-Rex than the T-Rex was from the Stegosaurus. [Source: Smithsonian Institute.]

(11) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • August 1, 1971 — Charlton Heston as The Omega Man premiered in theatres

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

  • Born August 1 – Oona Laurence, 16 Celebrity Ghost Stories, a Penny Dreadful short and the animated Pete’s Dragon series. 
  • Born August 1 – Jack O’Connell, 28. Role in 300: Rise of An Empire, also Robot & Scarecrow, an animated short about a robot and a scarecrow (voiced by him) who fall in love at a summer music festival, and the lion in Jungleland which or may be not be based on an Asian theme park.
  • Born August 1 – Jason Momoa, 39. DCU as Aquaman in of course Aquaman, Justice League, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Khal Drogo in Games of Thrones, Conan in Conan the Barbarian and Ronon Dex in Stargate: Atlantis. 
  • Born August 1 – Sam Mendes, 53. Producer of Penny Dreadful, Shrek the Musical, and Stage Director for the tv version of Cabaret (“Which allows me to note how much i really, really like Leiber’s The Big Time novella,” says Cat Eldridge.)
  • Born August 1—John Carroll Lynch, 55. Considerable genre work starting with the Voice from the Grave horror series, and including The Visitor series as well as the Apollo lunar landing series From the Earth to the Moon, Star Trek: VoyagerCarnivàle, The Walking Dead and American Horror Story.

(13) BIRTHDAY KING. Steven H Silver’s August 1 celebrant is Ray Palmer – “Birthday Reviews: Raymond A. Palmer’s ‘Diagnosis’” at Black Gate.

Although Palmer wrote short stories and novels, he was best known as an editor. From 1938-1949, he edited Amazing Stories and from 1939-1949 he edited Fantastic Adventures as well for Ziff-Davis, resigning when they moved production from Chicago to New York. He formed his own company, Clark Publishing, and began publishing Other Worlds Science Stories from 1949 to 1957, during which time he also edited and published Fate Magazine, Universe Science Fiction, Mystic Magazine, Science Stories, and Space World. His assistant in the early 1950s, and often times credited co-editor, was Bea Mahaffey. Palmer is perhaps best remembered for publishing the fiction of Richard Shaver and promoting Shaver’s stories as non-fiction. In 1961, comic author Gardner Fox paid tribute to Palmer by using his name for the DC character the Atom.

Did you miss any? Silver has cataloged last month’s work — “Birthday Reviews: July Index”.

(14) COMICS SECTION.

  • Sheldon does another cartoon profile on an early leader in the science fiction genre. Given the breadth of his work, he may have founded an empire!
  • At PvP, Scratch wants to adopt an heir – but can’t seem to get through to his prospect, a dedicated book reader –

July 30
July 31

(15) HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!

(16) CATS SLEEP ON TWITTER. Claire O’Dell cuts out the middleman –

(17) HAYLEY ATWELL VISITED BRADBURY’S MARS. Nerdist lets you “Hear Derek Jacobi and Hayley Atwell Bring Ray Bradbury’s THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES to Life” (2017 post, but news to me!)

While the characters that Jacobi and Atwell are playing in this aural adaptation of The Martian Chronicles were arguably written as American, I somehow don’t think fans are going to hugely object to Captain Wilder and Spender suddenly sounding impeccably English (please don’t let me down by being petty, Internet).

(18) LEAVES HIS COMFORT ZONE. Sean Grigsby takes the challenge:

(19) BREWPRINT. It’s a rare piece of news that makes a person want to move out of the U.S. but not to Canada! From VinePair: “MAP: The Most Popular Beer In Every Country”.

Ed. Note on North America: Although Anheuser-Busch InBev still markets Budweiser as “the King of Beers,” in the U.S. Bud Light outsells Budweiser by a wide margin. Ironically, in Canada, where the company owns iconic local brand Labatt, the company has sold more Budweiser than any other brand for nearly a decade. In 2012, the Toronto Star published the article “‘Sniff of death’ taints iconic beer brands,” which provides analysis on how Budweiser came to be the best-selling beer in Canada.

(20) BESIEGING YOUR BANK ACCOUNT. As Seen On TV, as they say: “Game of Thrones castle can be yours for less than $1 million”.

If you’ve been bargain shopping for one of the Great Houses of Westeros, get ready for the deal of a lifetime.

Gosford Castle, a 19th-century country house in Northern Ireland that was used to portray the Riverrun castle on Game of Thrones, is for sale and accepting offers over £500,000 (or $656,452), according to its online listing.

Riverrun, first depicted in season 3 of the acclaimed series, is the former seat of House Tully, and the current lawful home to House Frey. While the castle itself is not often seen on the show, its occupation has long been the subject of strategic interest for the series’ main characters.

(21) SPACE OPERA PILOT. Robert Hewitt Wolfe of DS9 and Andromeda fame is doing something interesting on Twitter. Several years ago he wrote a pilot for a space opera on SyFy that would be called “Morningstar”. It ended up not being made. But under WGA rules he retains publishing rights, so he’s publishing the script for the pilot on Twitter, one page per day for 95 days. He’s already 2/3 of the way through. The thread begins here.

(22) SHARK JERKING. People used to do “Stupid Crook Reports” at LASFS meetings. This would have been prime material: “Shark kidnapped from Texas aquarium in baby’s pram”.

A shark disguised by thieves as a baby in a pram and abducted from a Texas aquarium has been found and returned.

The horn shark – called Miss Helen – “is in quarantine right now resting” and “is doing good so far”, San Antonio Aquarium said.

On Saturday, the shark was grabbed from an open pool by two men and a woman, then wrapped in a wet blanket and put in a bucket with a bleach solution.

The public helped track the thieves and one suspect is now in custody.

(23) NUMBER ONE. Marvel’s C.B. Cebulski introduces a new Captain Marvel comic book series.

Carol Danvers has been involved in some of the biggest adventures in the Marvel Universe…but in her new series, she’s going back to the basics with Margaret Stohl, Carlos Pacheco, and Marguerite Sauvage at the helm. Marvel is proud to present this behind-the-scenes look at THE LIFE OF CAPTAIN MARVEL #1, featuring Stohl and Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski! “This is a story about Carol Danvers. We’re taking Carol back to basics,” said Cebulski. “We hear that a lot, but this is something where we’re going to dance between the raindrops and find the secrets of Carol’s origins that are based in the roots of her family.” “It’s really a family story and it’s as much about the human instead of her as her Kree powers,” added Stohl.

 

(24) GET WOKE, GO FOR BROKE. ScreenRant ponders “What If Trump Was President When Captain America Was Woken Up?”

Before he was elected in 2016, Donald Trump had a small cameo appearance in New Avengers #47. In that comic, Trump failed to pull over to the side to let an ambulance go past, so Luke Cage gave him a hand by picking up his limousine and moving it out of the way. An irate Trump threatened to sue Luke, but then quickly thought better of it.

 

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, Mike Kennedy, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Danny Sichel, Paul Weimer, Michael O’Donnell, Dann, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day IanP.]

52 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/1/18 For I Must Be Scrolling On, Now Cause There’s Too Many Pixels I’ve Got To See

  1. (1) There was another copyright troll in the news today — some dude in the Midwest who is trying to make everyone in Hawaii stop using the word “aloha” because he included it in the name of his restaurant. Sounds like the kind of guy who makes his poke with herring and lutfisk, and mayonnaise.

    (3) Eeeeexcellent, I love Tchaikovsky’s books. He’s gonna win a Hugo some day.

    Oh good, I’m not quite old enough to be Jason Momoa’s mother so I don’t feel nearly as bad about objectifying his Aquaman poster. Such a fine looking young man.

  2. @2: not quite as out of whack as some of Wired‘s commentary on genre; at least he admits that novellas can multiply serially.

    @19: but a Canadian beer is the most popular in the UK. (Possibly because there are so few lagers and huge numbers of ales — but I wonder where Bass stands.) I remember a Canadian telling me that Molson’s exported only the “moose piss” that wouldn’t be drunk in Canada. That was 35 years ago….

    edit: sacrificial pre-Fifth!

    Meanwhile, some news on important food groups:
    Germany celebrates 500 years of beer purity
    but is drinking so much they’re running out not of CO2 but of bottles to put the beer in.
    And Belgium claims to have invented the french fry

  3. Seems to me that Sheldon’s profile gets one thing very wrong: Asimov didn’t wear cloth ties “wide enough to hold the 1970s” – he was well known for wearing only bolo ties. Just as he saw no need to shave the sides of his face, he saw no need to wear big cloth things around his neck.

  4. @9: It’s a strange thing that the gentleman who was asking about the Worldcon Hours was someone who I went to High School with (and am still in contact with via FB)

  5. Also born on August 1st (2018)–my new grand-niece, born at 10:01 this morning! (The second family member with August 1st as a birthday.)

    I’m still waiting to find out her name. (That will probably come tomorrow.)

  6. @John Lorentz
    Congats on the new grand-niece!

    19) German beer culture is very regional, i.e. every bar or restaurant in a given city serves the beer from the local brewery, while 20 kilometres away, a completely different brand is served. Nonetheless, I have my doubts that Oettinger is really the bestselling beer in all of Germany, since it’s not really a brand that’s very visible. Okay, so I’m on the other side of the country from the Oettinger brewery, but there are still four or five brands I’d assume sell better than Oettinger.

    Regarding Belgium, Stella Artois always seemed to be more present and visible to me than Jupiler, but again there is a regional divide with Stella Artois being more popular in the North (which is the part of Belgium I’m more familiar with) and Jupiler more popular in the South. Though my favourite Belgian beer is Trappistes Rochefort 10.

  7. @Chip Hitchcock

    @19: but a Canadian beer is the most popular in the UK.

    They don’t make anything of the Canadian origins in the UK marketing nowadays, it’s just presented as a generic lager. Carling is ubiquitous though – if a pub has three or four lagers on tap then you can pretty much guarantee Carling is one of them.

    (Possibly because there are so few lagers and huge numbers of ales — but I wonder where Bass stands.)

    Yeah, it’s a first past the post survey and the ale market is much more fragmented.
    Bass is probably mid-tier nowadays in the UK, you don’t see it on draught that frequently outside of the midlands.

    @Cora

    19) German beer culture is very regional, i.e. every bar or restaurant in a given city serves the beer from the local brewery, while 20 kilometres away, a completely different brand is served.

    That’s how the UK used to be, before the breweries went through a big period of consolidation. (It also didn’t hurt that the breweries tended to own the pubs!) It’s going back in that direction again with the rise of popularity of craft ale, plus some anti-monopoly action against the industry.

  8. Chip Hitchcock on August 1, 2018 at 7:26 pm said:

    @19: but a Canadian beer is the most popular in the UK. (Possibly because there are so few lagers and huge numbers of ales — but I wonder where Bass stands.) I remember a Canadian telling me that Molson’s exported only the “moose piss” that wouldn’t be drunk in Canada. That was 35 years ago….

    I didn’t even know Carling was Canadian! It’s been marketed in a very English way for decades – football, lad culture etc.

    I don’t think Bass is very popular in the UK. I can’t remember seeing it on sale in Scotland or in Yorkshire when I lived there, but ale can be quite regional. I enjoyed being home last month and being able to buy Black Sheep in most pubs I visited.

  9. @Hampus
    I’ve never had that, but it can’t be as embarrassing as Bud Light for the US.

    @Mark
    We’ve gone through a brewery consolidation as well and plenty of traditional breweries are now part of international conglomerates. But beer culture is still very regional. In the North, Becks dominates (and Bremen is Becks ground zero) with Jever and Flensburger trailing behind. Becks also bought up several small breweries, so while you can still buy Hemelinger, Remmer and St. Pauli, it’s all Becks these days and Becks belongs to AmBev (boo! Hiss!). One of the first things AmBev did was retiring the beloved Becks beer horses, who used to supply pubs and bars in the city of Bremen via horse drawn beer carts. Those beer horses were some of the most stoic horses I have ever seen. Absolutely nothing could faze them.

  10. (19)
    Bud and bud light: watery piss
    Carling: piss
    Bintang & Chang: horrifyingly bad.
    Singha: tolerable in the heat of Thailand
    Guinness: I drink this if there isn’t a decent ale option and I’m in the UK
    Brahma: ugh
    Birra Moretti: drinkable
    Tiger: tolerable
    Beerlao: surprisingly good (at least Beerlao Dark anyway)
    Cass: drinkable but if given the option I usually go for MAX instead.
    Asahi: my go-to in Japan, just ahead of Kirin.
    Corona: disgusting with or without lime

    Well, I think that’s all the beers I’m familiar with in that list.

  11. I’d be surprised if Carling is the most popular larger north of the border, Tennants probably still squeaks it.

    Local favorites are the Edinburgh duo of Deuchars IPA and Caledonian 80/- (renamed Edinburgh Castle now I think)

  12. Also, that if you start taking photos of the underside of a bridge, a cop may give you a very thorough side-eye?

    Also, try taking pictures of a refinery. Actually, don’t. That got me into trouble even though I wasn’t on the grounds…

    And hey, I’m a scroll item again. Hurrah!

    (I have had a busy week, two podcasts releases, two book reviews released…). Someone in DMs on twitter asked me “Are you *everywhere*? Well…

  13. If you’re looking a Big Beer that is drinkable, I am a fan of Negra Modelo. It’s a dark lager from the maker of Corona and I like it–just a tad on the malty side. It’s not the beer of your life, but it makes a good beer for “right now.”

    Congratulations, John!

  14. It turns out to be 15% of a GoT castle – what’s for sale is 15 bedrooms out of a 99 bedroom property, possibly with planning permission (the estate agent listing doesn’t seem to specifically mention planning permission) for conversion into 6 apartments.

  15. @Oneiros Myanmar beer is pretty drinkable, probably on a par with Tiger. I’ve had Snow beer but it’s apparently really forgettable – I think it’s maybe a less tasty, more gaseous version of Tsingtao (which I’m also surprised it outsells)?

    Now I’m back in the UK I am exercising my prerogative to drink no disappointing lager as long as there’s a better beer option available – which, these days, there always is! Perhaps one day the IPA will take over South East Asia, and I’ll have one more reason to return…

  16. Someday I need to write a sad ballad about the plight of the stout-drinker during the summer months when the selection starts to dry up.

  17. @Arifel: I would’ve thought Myanmar beer would at least be available in Chiang Mai but I don’t think I’ve seen it anywhere. Just what I think of as the three Thai beers (Chang, Leo and Singha) and often Beerlao, and sometimes a Japanese import (Asahi or Kirin usually, I think I’ve seen Sapporo once or twice). I’ve also just never been across the border in that direction for various reasons.

    Thinking about it I must’ve had the Vietnamese beers at some point (I was there for 2 months and definitely drank alcohol at the time) but I can’t recall them at all.

    I find lagers much more generally acceptable in hotter temperatures but I would kill for a reasonably priced IPA in SE Asia.

  18. @John Lorentz: congratulations!

    @Cora: a data point: I found Jupiler in mini-cans in one of Brussels’s major railway stations. Does Stella stoop that low?

    @rob_matic: and I thought Carling was a US label, because I remember singing commercials from the early 1960’s (when AFAICT the beer market was not favorable to mass imports). Fascinating to hear that it’s so dug-in in England.

  19. @2: “Incapaciousness”? Does Wired have any editors?

    @19: One of the reasons that I was not much of a beer drinker for, say, three or four decades was that most of what was available was of the Bud/Miller thin-and-sour lager or pilsner variety. I rather liked the German beers I first encountered in the 1960s, but they were not what was on offer most places. Then small breweries started offering something better, and now I will have a Deschutes or Surly with a meal. (Well, half a short one–I’ve no head for alcohol, so I share it with my wife.)

    To me, the international and American popular-beer lists suggest a world of guzzlers–an impression reinforced by a lifetime spent in university towns. Years ago, we spent a term in Alnwick, Northumberland. Just down a curving street from the residence (a castle, but that’s another story) were two drinking establishments, one with a Budweiser sign in the window and the other an 18th-century pub with real beer and old guys with shepherd’s sticks and dogs at their feet. The students never got past the Bud sign, and I don’t recall ever seeing any in The Old Cross, aka the Dirty Bottles. (Apparently in the intervening thirty years, the pub has been closed and then renovated and perhaps gentrified. I hope there are still old guys with dogs and a weekly quiz night.) I used to get funny looks for asking for a half-pint, which I suspect was considered a lady-size drink.

  20. (6) When I was in high school, I bought a tpb book version of the script for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It appeared to be an early version of the script where various scenes had been changed or deleted. I’ve wondered if that was accurate or if it was all just sort of made up.

    Bits of the script did appear in Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail CD ROM game. Like King Brian the Wild who liked killing off close harmony groups. In the script, Sir Robin’s minstrels were killed off by King Brian instead of being eaten during the winter.

    And there was much rejoicing.

  21. David Goldfarb says Seems to me that Sheldon’s profile gets one thing very wrong: Asimov didn’t wear cloth ties “wide enough to hold the 1970s” – he was well known for wearing only bolo ties. Just as he saw no need to shave the sides of his face, he saw no need to wear big cloth things around his neck.

    Actually he did wear cloth ties as a Google image search shows including one in this photo:

    Isaac Asimov | Memory Alpha
    https://goo.gl/images/BNR4Nj

    Skinny ties, wide ties, bolos, no ties — I’d say he did as he damned pleased.

  22. 19) Pripps Blå? ?

    Back in the year *mumble mumble*, when Pripps had recently been bought by Carlsberg, we had a salesman from Carlsberg who they billed as a beer expert come to our bar to teach us about beer. He maintained that Pripps Blå was, objectively, the best beer available at Systembolaget. Since it had the biggest sales numbers. We treated his opinions with the respect we felt they were due following that statement. But at least he was correct about the technical details of brewing beer.

  23. I have a friend in Australia who’s been doing a series of “Around the World in 80 Beers” reviews of Aussie beers for quite a while now. He passed 80 a long time ago, and I think is up to somewhere in the neighborhood of 150. The reviews are fun to read even though I hate beer. (And yes, I have tried “good” beers. The problem is that I hate the taste of alcohol, period.)

  24. Pripps Blå used to have lousy sales numbers until their brilliant ad campaigns in the beginning of the 90:s with boats, archipelago, summernights – everything a Swede will long for. When they changed campaign, they started to lose sales again. The only way they could regain sales was through lowering the price. And thats where we are: A cheap no good beer.

  25. (23) NUMBER ONE

    I’ll be interested to see how this new Captain Marvel series turns out. I’ve stalled out of the current run, despite liking the design, as the writing doesn’t work for me.

    Comicsgaters will probably still continue to hate it for misogynistic reasons.

  26. 19) Even with artisianal brewing, the only use I have for lagers is making shandy.

  27. I did some research regarding Germany’s most popular beer brands. And while Oettinger actually was Germany’s most drunk beer for a few years, they have been surpassed by Krombacher by now. And Krombacher is a very big and visible brand, so I’m not surprised that it’s the most popular beer in Germany. Local champion Becks sits at number 5.

    As for Oettinger, the reason behind their high sales in spite of relatively low visibility seems to be that it’s sold in bigger bottles (0.5 litres vs. 0.3 litres for a normal beer bottle) and is cheaper than other brands, which means that it’s favoured by high volume and/or low income drinkers. Oettinger also doesn’t advertise and focusses on supermarkets rather than pubs, which further reduces its visibility. It also has a reputation as cheap and nasty, just one step above “snail beer” (cheap discount store beer in plastic bottles that’s only good for trapping snails). Still better than Bud Light, though.

    Nonetheless, I’m stunned that even though Oettinger is apparently very popular, I don’t know a single person who drinks it. Even university students, who are often low income and high volume drinkers, drink Becks. I suspect it’s the regional factor in play again, because Oettinger is a Bavarian brand and here in Bremen and surroundings, Becks is massively dominant. There are also regional taste differences. North German beers, whether Becks, Jever, Flensburger, etc… are fairly bitter and hop heavy, whereas South German and Bavarian beers are milder.

  28. Cat Eldridge: Skinny ties, wide ties, bolos, no ties — I’d say he did as he damned pleased. Ellison, IIRC in the DV forward, says that on first meeting, Asimov was wearing a “Wally Cox bowtie”. I don’t remember seeing him wear a bowtie any time I saw him (mixed from 1973 onward), but I can’t swear as I’m probably worse at noticing male clothing than most men. OTOH, I note that Asimov looks relatively young in that picture — not college age but I’d believe a report that it dates from the 1950’s. (The meeting described in DV probably would also have been in the 1950’s.) The bolo ties may have become a habit later.

    @Cora: amending my earlier: the small cans were in a vending machine. Only time I’ve seen beer in a vending machine anywhere. (Now watch a horde of Filers assert that all civilized countries have beer in vending machines….)

  29. My only relevant piece of beer brand data is that evidently every bottle of beer that has ever been drunk on the property I now own was a Corona. I have no direct evidence regarding beer in cans. But the bottles were all Coronas.

  30. (2) BELLA NOVELLA. “The joy of the sci-fi novella, by contrast, is in its one-off-ness, its collapsed space, its enforced incapaciousness.”

    “one-off-ness”? Well, if it’s an actual stand-alone novella. 😛

    (24) GET WOKE, GO FOR BROKE. Hahaha oh ::sob:: it’s funny because it’s sad because it’s true. Great video, though!

    @Lace: Thanks for the link; that was great. 🙂 Meow.

    ETA: @Various: Beer. Yuck. You can have mine!

  31. When I was a student at Iowa State, the drinking age was 18. There were a lot of bars in Dogtown, and all most of them had on tap was Budweiser and Schlitz. To me Schlitz tasted like Alka-Seltzer, so I drank a lot of Bud. In the dorms we tended to try whatever was cheap at Hy-Vee. I found out there were worse beers than Bud. Milwaukee’s Best….isn’t. I think they put Buckhorn through the buck. Schmidt’s was only marginally drinkable, but for a while it came in pretty cans, and we went through a few 12-packs when a friend with that surname wanted to make some craft projects from them.

    Nowadays I’ll only drink Bud if it’s free and nothing better is available. I have noticed that the yahoos who throw beer cans around in the state forest nearby seem to mostly drink Bud Light.

  32. Soon Lee asked:
    So the collective noun for Filer is…horde?
    Considering the preponderance of Social Justice Credentials, i would suspect a more proper word would be ‘Clowder’. And with the vast personal ranges of Mt. Tsundoku amongst Filers, the root word ‘Clutter’ also holds true.

    Hmmm. “A Clowder of Filers”? Some purring, occasional hissing, some napping, occasional pissing outside the box, some finicky tastes, and sometimes a howl…

    Yup. Clowder.

  33. Re collective nouns – I think a bickering of Filers sounds quite nice.,

    @NickPheas: I drank some kind of beer on a river cruise in Egypt and it left a distinct lack of impression on me. Perhaps it was their Stella.

    @Ann Sheller: that makes me very sad, though not quite as sad as going to the crag at Railay and seeing cigarette butts and plastic water bottles littering the ground. Climbers should know better 🙁

  34. @Anne Sheller: “I have noticed that the yahoos who throw beer cans around in the state forest nearby seem to mostly drink Bud Light.”

    It’s a health thing–they’re rehydrating. Don’t think of them as beer cans. Think water containers with trace amounts of beer-like contaminants.

  35. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work socially (most rehydrants don’t shut down the superego), and isn’t reliable biologically.; a recent BBC story suggested that a little beer may do something for thirst, but the common image is that beer makes people piss out more than they take in. Bob Shaw once suggested this as a way to provide reaction mass for a spaceship (in a Serious Scientific Talk, not a story).

    When I was canoe-tripping in far northeastern Ontario, we called that kind of people “clubbers”, possibly because they were believed to come from social clubs rather than an organized(?) camp. I couldn’t tell you whose broken bottle sent someone back to base for stitches as it was underwater. That was very strange territory; much of the “solid ground” between lakes was a stinking bran-and-molasses effect called muskeg (which I am boggled to see this software knows how to spell), but most of the islands were rock outcroppings, so throwing bottles from an island into the water was seriously antisocial.

    @Soon Lee: I think the collective noun for Filers on the warpath could be “horde”; I yield to the collective judgment (and am among the 10,000) wrt Filers in their default form.

    @Lace: a fun bit of fluff.

  36. Beer can and drink can littering used to be a big problem in Germany, too, but then the government introduced a can/bottle deposit for drink cans and plastic bottles. You have to return the bottle/can to a store to get the money back. This drastically reduced litter, because more people returned the empty cans/bottles to the shop and what is thrown away is picked up by bottle collectors. It also nearly killed drink cans, because if both cans and bottles carry a deposit, you might as well use bottles. Not to mention that the glass bottle deposit is actually lower than the deposit for drink cans and plastic bottles.

  37. Some states in the U.S. have had bottle deposits also, for decades now, and I believe it has had a similar effect. Unfortunately the state I live in is not one of them. I wish it would be passed nationwide, but that’s a poor hope in the present climate.

  38. There have been deposits for reusable glass bottles and beer crates for decades in Germany, but expanding that to one way packaging such as drink cans only came in in the last 10 to 15 years.

    I also remember seeing bottle collectors in the US.

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