(1) SOUNDS LEGIT. Newsweek’s Hannah Osborn reports “Nasa Is Hiring a Planetary Protection Officer to Save Earth from Aliens”. If you want to protect earth from space aliens and have the qualifications, NASA is hiring, on a three-year contract with pay from $124,000 to $187,000.
The headline is a little grandiose – here’s what the job is really about:
The role involves stopping astronauts and robots from getting contaminated with any organic and biological material during space travel.
“NASA maintains policies for planetary protection applicable to all space flight missions that may intentionally or unintentionally carry Earth organisms and organic constituents to the planets or other solar system bodies, and any mission employing spacecraft, which are intended to return to Earth and its biosphere with samples from extraterrestrial targets of exploration” the job advert reads. “This policy is based on federal requirements and international treaties and agreements.”
Still want to apply? The USAJOBS listing is here.
(2) STATS. A snapshot of Worldcon 75 membership, with the convention a week away:
This morning, we had over 2000 First Worldcon members, of a total of 5 700 attending. ????
— Worldcon 75 (@worldcon75) August 2, 2017
(3) HARVEST OF STORIES. Cora Buhlert went into overdrive last month: “The July Short Story Challenge 2017 – 32 Short Stories in 31 Days” . And this is the third consecutive year she’s written a story a day in July!
So let’s talk about inspiration: Where on Earth do you get inspiration for 32 stories, one for every single day? As in previous years, I used writing prompts (Chuck Wendig’s are always good), random generators (particularly name generators are a godsend, because you’ll have to come up with a lot of names for 32 stories) and images – mainly SFF concept art, but also vintage magazine covers – to spark story ideas. By now I have a whole folder on my harddrive which contains inspirational images – basically my own catalogue of concept art writing prompts. Other sources for inspiration were a call for submissions for a themed anthology, a Pet Shop Boys song I heard on the radio, 1980s cartoons that were basically glorified toy commercials, an article about dead and deserted shopping malls in the US, a news report about a new system to prevent the theft of cargo from truckbeds, a trailer for a (pretty crappy by the looks of it) horror film, the abominably bad Latin used during a satanic ritual in an episode of a TV crime drama, a short mystery where I found the killer (the least likely person, of course) a lot more interesting than the investigation. In one case, googling a research question for one story, namely whether there it’s actually legal to shoot looters after a massive disaster (it’s not, though there have been cases where law enforcement personnel was given carte blanche, with predictably terrible results) led me to the story of a man who bragged that he had shot more than thirty alleged looters after Hurricane Katrina (thankfully, it seems he was lying or at least massively exaggerating) and who amazingly was not arrested as a serial killer. This made me actively angry, so I wrote a post-apocalyptic story where a shooter of looters gets his comeuppance.
(4) CRIME BLOTTER. Alison Flood and Sian Cain of The Guardian, in “Beatrix Potter-pinching and Žižekian swipes: the strange world of book thefts”, look at who is stealing books from British bookstores. The sf connection is that at Blackwell’s in Oxford, Tolkien, Pratchett, Jordan, and Martin are among the top authors stolen, Also, “an 80-year-old woman with a Zimmer frame” heisted Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind from Drake the Bookshop in Stockton-on-Tees.
Paul Sweetman of City Books in Hove believes shoplifters appear to have dumbed down over the years. “In the 1980s, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sylvia Plath and Jack Kerouac were the most likely to go missing, The Bell Jar and On the Road competing for being the least profitable books in the shop. We are now forced to keep Asterix, Tintin, Beatrix Potter and Dr Seuss behind the counter.”
(5) ALEX, I’LL TAKE LA ARCHITECTURE FOR $100. The answer is: Ray Bradbury. The question is: “Why Does Los Angeles Have a Mall Based on the Babylon Set From the 1916 Film Intolerance?”.
If you’ve been to the Hollywood & Highland Center and have a working knowledge of silent film history, you may have noticed that the hulking mall’s design has been lifted with mixed success from the Babylon set in DW Griffith’s 1916 epic Intolerance. (An influential and ruinously expensive feat of filmmaking in which Griffith calls out critics of his previous film, The Birth of a Nation, as the real racists; it interweaves tales of intolerance from ancient Babylon, the life of Christ, Renaissance France, and then-modern America). That’s pretty weird, right? What kind of mind came up with that? In a posthumous essay just published at the Paris Review, late science fiction author Ray Bradbury says it was his idea….
Intolerance flopped. There was no money left to dismantle the set, and for a few years it became an actual ruin in the middle of Los Angeles. It was finally torn down in 1919….
In his essay at the Paris Review, Bradbury—who led a campaign in the early 1960s to build a monorail system in Los Angeles—writes about his career as an “accidental architect,” influencing designs for the 1964 World’s Fair, EPCOT, and, strangely enough, the Glendale Galleria…..
Eventually, a group came to him “looking at ways to rebuilt Hollywood”:
I told them that somewhere in the city, they had to build the set from the 1916 film Intolerance by D. W. Griffith. The set, with its massive, wonderful pillars and beautiful white elephants on top, now stands at the corner of Hollywood and Highland avenues. People from all over the world come to visit, all because I told them to build it. I hope at some time in the future, they will call it the Bradbury Pavilion.
The Hollywood & Highland Center opened in late 2001, at the beginning of what has become a wildly successful rebirth for Hollywood. EE&K designed the complex, with a grand stairway leading up to a “Babylon Court” with a replica Intolerance gate (which frames the Hollywood Sign in the distance) and, of course, a few elephants…
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
- August 2, 1971 — Zombies in sunglasses: The Omega Man (Charlton Heston’s version) premiered.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- August 2, 1939 — Freddy Krueger creator Wes Craven born.
(8) POTTER CAST TRANSPLANTS. Variety’s Gordon Cox, in “Meet the Wizards of Broadway’s ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”, reports seven members of the London cast are going to be in the Broadway production, scheduled to open in April.
Seven members of the West End company of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” will open the Broadway production in the spring, including Olivier winners Jamie Parker, Noma Dumezweni and Anthony Boyle.
That trio and four other British actors will lead the cast of one of the most hotly anticipated productions of the Broadway season. The newest chapter in J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” saga wowed both audiences and critics when it opened last summer, and went on to win a record nine Oliviers, including the trophies for Parker (as a grown-up Harry), Dumezwani (as Hermione) and Boyle, who plays Scorpius, the son of Harry’s old nemesis, Draco Malfoy.
On Broadway, Sam Clemmett will reprise his role as Harry and Ginny’s son, Albus, alongside Paul Thornley (Ron), Poppy Miller (Ginny), and Alex Price (Draco). Byron Jennings, Kathryn Meisle and David Abeles are among the new actors joining the hefty cast of 28.
(9) X NEXT. Yahoo! says “There’s A Reason You Should Care About The Next X-Men Movie, And That Reason Is Jessica Chastain”.
On her Instagram page, the actress shared an image of her and James McAvoy – who plays Professor Charles Xavier in the films – and writes that she’s off to join the cast in Montreal.
The actress also captioned the photo “I’m gonna make you cry so hard”, which could give us a hint as to who she’s playing.
Rumours have stated that the filmmakers were looking to cast Chastain as Princess Lilandra of the Shi’ar Empire, and while she hasn’t confirmed this, it’s looking likely.
In the comics (and nineties animated series) Charles and Lilandra are in love, but their duties and very long distance gets in the way of their relationship – hence her comment about making Charles cry.
(10) COMPILATION. Lela E. Buis announces her “Review Project: Greater Inclusion of SFF Worldviews”.
During a recent discussion here at the blog, I was asked to provide examples of underrepresented minority views. I’m now starting a project to review works like this from 2017. I have several candidates lined up, but I’d also be happy to have suggestions on likely candidates. I’m especially looking for Native American and LatinX worldviews, as this group has been pretty scarce in the recent SFF awards cycles, even though Native American and LatinX persons make up about 1/5 of the US population. I’m also interested in other underrepresented worldviews within the SFF community, and I may ask a few people to do guest reviews or articles as the project goes along.
I should probably define what I mean by “worldview.” I’m not looking for just diversity of race, religion, creed, gender, sexual orientation, disability status or national origin in the authors here; I’m looking for authors writing from within their own authentic worldview instead of just replaying Western stereotypes.
(11) ART CORNUCOPIA. Digital Arts Online tells where to find the motherlode: “The British Library offers over a million free vintage images for download”.
The British Library’s collection of images on Flickr are taken from books it has its collection from the 17th, 18th and 19th Century – so well out of copyright – and are vaguely arranged by theme: such as book covers, cycling, illustrated lettering, comic art, ships or children’s book illustration. There’s also a collection of ‘Highlights‘ that’s a good place to start if you just want a general browse.
(12) I’M MELTING! Riffing on a fannish enthusiasm: is vanilla ice cream on its way out? “Is time up for plain vanilla flavour ice creams?”
But for many years, flavours from the big international brands remained stubbornly conservative, dominated by chocolate, strawberry and vanilla.
Now though, thanks to migration, long-haul travel, and the internet, consumers are becoming more adventurous and manufacturers are taking note.
Parlours have sprung up across the US offering Persian-style saffron, orange blossom, and rosewater ice cream, sprinkled with nuts and drizzled with honey; and Indian-inspired flavours such as masala chai, pineapple, and kulfi.
(13) NOT EXACTLY WESTWORLD. Film fans recreated the final set of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (technically not sf-related, but this is a story of fan-level enthusiasm): “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly location reborn in Spain”.
But in 2014, a group of local people decided to restore the site to its former glory. They called themselves the Sad Hill Cultural Association and after locating the exact cemetery spot, with the help of photographs from the film’s final scene, in 2015 they set about the painstaking process of excavating the site.
“At the start it seemed like it was going to be impossible, but bit by bit people from other provinces of Spain, other towns, and even other countries, came to help us rebuild the cemetery and it snowballed,” says David Alba, the 35-year-old president of the association. Aficionados could help finance the project by paying €15 (£13; $18) to have their name painted onto one of the wooden crosses.
Mr Alba remembers a key moment early in the excavation.
“We were digging in the ground and we saw that underneath the earth were the original stones of the central circle of the site, the place where all the actors, the director and all the technicians had walked across during the filming,” he says. “It was like digging in the ground and finding treasure.”
(14) THE BUZZER. Fun for conspiracy theorists: “The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run” (and several other strange radio stations)
In the middle of a Russian swampland, not far from the city of St Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines bordered by a dry-stone wall. This sinister location is the focus of a mystery which stretches back to the height of the Cold War.
It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.
Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.
It’s so enigmatic, it’s as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands, who know it affectionately as “the Buzzer”. It joins two similar mystery stations, “the Pip” and the “Squeaky Wheel”. As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to.
(15) ANOTHER HACKING OPPORTUNITY. More on implantable microchips: one has already been used to infect the system that read it.
Hacking and security concerns, however, are less easily hand-waved away. RFID chips can only carry a minuscule 1 kilobyte or so of data, but one researcher at Reading University’s School of Systems Engineering, Mark Gasson, demonstrated that they are vulnerable to malware.
Gasson had an RFID tag implanted in his left hand in 2009, and tweaked it a year later so that it would pass on a computer virus. The experiment uploaded a web address to the computer connected to the reader, which would cause it to download some malware if it was online.
“It was actually a surprisingly violating experience,” says Gasson. “I became a danger to the building’s systems.”
(16) DEPT. OF WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? A “Chicago Library Seeks Help Transcribing Magical Manuscripts” —
The Newberry Library in Chicago is home to some 80,000 documents pertaining to religion during the early modern period, a time of sweeping social, political, and cultural change spanning the late Middle Ages to the start of the Industrial Revolution. Among the library’s collection of rare Bibles and Christian devotional texts are a series of manuscripts that would have scandalized the religious establishment. These texts deal with magic—from casting charms to conjuring spirits—and the Newberry is asking for help translating and transcribing them.
As Tatiana Walk-Morris reports for Atlas Obscura, digital scans of three magical manuscripts are accessible through Transcribing Faith, an online portal that functions much like Wikipedia. Anyone with a working knowledge of Latin or English is invited to peruse the documents and contribute translations, transcriptions, and corrections to other users’ work.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Lex Berman, Chip Hitchcock, Lurkertype, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
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Whoa.
First!
2) When I first heard about it I thought that was very kind of them. “Isn’t that nice, free memberships for Mel Korshak and Bob Madle.” Then I found out it was for people for whom it was their first worldcon.
14) What do you expect? “Hello this is KGB-SW and at the top of the hour we’ll have our popular call-in host Kim Philby answering your questions about our work in advancing the socialist movement world-wide. For now, some class-struggle music.”
(13) “You see, in this world, there’s two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.”
That line had to have occurred to at least one of them.
Fifth? [‘tick]
14) Speaking of numbers stations, underground music fans were big on them after the Conet Project, a multiple-CD set of numbers station recordings, was released on the Irdial label in 1997and re-released in 2013. However, the recordings are now available gratis on the Internet Archive and the Free Music Archive. The CD set is still available for sale.
Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project
Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/ird059
Free Music Archive: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Conet_Project/
Ticky.
Also, looks like I get to go home today.
@Soon Lee
Good to hear. 🙂
I’m impressed, Cora. I count myself lucky to complete a half-dozen stories a year, usually about 25,000 words total.
And sometimes the stories head off in unexpected directions, all on their own. My most recent WiP started out with the intention of being a sweet, charming twist on an old fairy tale, but now, a few dozen pages in, it’s starting to look like it’ll end up being PSYCHO PRINCESS CRIME SPREE.
More flavours of ice cream seems like a pretty good deal to me, so long as we don’t lose all the old ones.
Speaking of magical books and all, some decades ago, a Cal Tech friend found a classified ad stating that one could obtain a spell to call demons for $10.00. Intrigued, the SF fan (you knew he was one of us, right?) sent off his money, and got back a rather impressive manuscript detailing the calling up of demons. There was a great deal of discussion amongst Tech folk and SF friends about the potential dangers of trying the spells. Finally, the Cal Tech friend sent a letter to the anonymous P.O. Box, asking this very question. The answer was an ad for getting rid of demons for a mere $100.00. So far as I know, nobody tried the spell.
I hsd lemon curd ice cream today. And citron mint sorbet yesterday.
Those flavors can come to the US any time.
Bjo Trimble, since you’ve made an appearance, I’d just like to say thank you to you for all of your contributions to fandom, especially to Star Trek fandom — which meant that I had a fandom to “come home to” after discovering the series, years later, in syndication. 🙂
JJ on August 2, 2017 at 10:01 pm said:
I’ll second that – I found organized fandom because of Star Trek.
@Bjo Trimble: Reminds me of the classic Gahan Wilson cartoon, with a kid selling “Refreshing Drink, $.10” on a brightly lit street corner – and, around the corner, in the shadows, another kid selling “Refreshing Drink Antidote, $10”.
(11) There’s also a collection of ‘Highlights‘ that’s a good place to start if you just want a general browse.
I do hope there is a good selection of “Goofus and Gallant”.
JJ — I’m delighted to find Bjo has been looking in on File 770!
There are eight million scrolls in the Naked Pixel.
I saw the best files of my generation scrolled by pixels.
Mike Glyer: I’m delighted to find Bjo has been looking in on File 770!
I will admit I did some fansqueeing when I saw her name. Back in the pre-Internet and pre-Hartwell days, when I was starving for Star Trek anything, I saved up my allowance and sent away for copies of the “behind the scenes” non-fiction books, which of course had pictures of Bjo, and pages of information about her work in early Star Trek fandom.
3) Thanks for the link, Mike, and thanks for the compliment, Bruce. I hear you about stories going off in unexpected directions.
5) That’s one fabulous looking mall. I’m not normally a fan of reconstructions of destroyed historical buildings like the so-called Humboldt Forum, but for some reason this one works.
12) I’m all for more exciting flavours than traditional trifecta of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, since I find them boring. And even though a whole lot of ice cream parlours in Germany are actually run by Iranian immigrants these days, they still carry the traditional flavours brought by Italian immigrants rather than Iranian flavours. If you find an ice cream parlour that offers more adventurous flavours, it’s usually run by hipsters.
Regarding vanilla ice cream, I’m anosmic (i.e. I have almost no sense of smell). Vanilla is a flavour that anosmics can’t taste (because it’s a smell rather than a flavour) and as a kid, I actually thought that vanilla was a euphemism for “ice cream without flavour”. Of course, as a kid I also thought that people claiming they could smell something was a form of trolling.
15: Ummm, passing on a link to a reader is a standard capability of NFC tags whether implanted or not. No different to trying to get people to click on a link that takes them to a compromised site.
Several weeks ago I had Heisenberg flavoured ice cream (no really). Not quantum mechanical flavoured but rather Breaking Bad themed – it was blue with blue crystals in it.
A noiseless patient pixel, it launched forth scrolls, scrolls, scrolls, out of itself…
@Camestros: “Not quantum mechanical flavoured but rather Breaking Bad themed”
Well, so much for my “how can you be sure?” joke…
4) We are now forced to keep Asterix, Tintin, Beatrix Potter and Dr Seuss behind the counter.
That sounds less like “dumbing down” and more like “people are stealing books for children”. I wonder how it correlates to library cutbacks?
(EDIT: and if, as I suspect, this is “people are reduced to stealing so their children can have nice things” being presented as “people are getting dumber, let’s all laugh at them” then that seems worth getting cross about.)
https://twitter.com/SoonLeeNZ/status/892988731182923780
Proof I’ve made it home. I haven’t been commenting much, but Filers and others have kept me distracted these last few days. It’s been very much appreciated.
I must admit (given that I thought that book was over-long and slow-paced), I was inclined to mutter, “She was a 23-year-old athlete when she started it.”
Well I did find a reference for it but I wasn’t at that location or at that speed
http://www.gelatomessina.com/us/2015/03/were-open-in-las-vegas/
9) Hunh. Sh’iar get knocked about by the Dark Phoenix, then? I don’t remember the comics well enough to remember just what the Dark Phoenix got up to off of Earth.
@Soon Lee. Glad you’re home. Get better!
@Cora I do wonder if that doesn’t explain a lot of Vanilla snobbery (“it’s vanilla so its boring!”).
@Bjo Trimble Reminds me of the “Bowl of chili, 50 cents. Glass of water afterwards, $10…)
14) Things like numbers stations are just plain creepy.
(2) And I really should start packing…
Was there a definite meet up plan?
Even more evil as the water only makes the taste worse.
(12) My favourite combo is matcha and chocolate. Whack some sweet red bean paste in there and it’s basically perfect. I had an earl grey ice cream in Korea last time I was there. Taro ice cream is usually an odd shade of light purple but despite the colour and the fact that it’s potato-based it’s actually a really nice flavour. Charcoal ice cream was also surprisingly nice, although I’ve only ever had it once because it never seemed to come back into rotation at the place I bought it.
There’s also a Korean thing called patbingsu which is shaved ice usually with red bean, honey and other assorted toppings which can sometimes include ice cream.
Cheese ice cream is one I regret not trying the last time I was in Thailand.
Yakult was hands down the most repulsive looking ice cream I’ve ever seen. I didn’t try it because I was off-put by the fact that it basically looks diseased.
I’ve also had the “Thai rolled ice cream” – I didn’t realise this was specifically a Thai thing though. At all the ones I’ve been to, it tends to be vanilla ice cream with flavours/sweets/toppings added during the process of freezing it. It looks really cool but it’s also about 3x the price of regular ice cream and at least to me didn’t taste noticeably better, so it’s probably only worth it the once for Instagram.
Slightly related: for some reason a lot of places in Korea do sweet potato lattes, which are actually far nicer than regular coffee lattes, but sadly lacking in life-giving caffeine. Oh, and in cherry blossom season, Starbucks do a range of cherry blossom-flavoured drinks, which are all amazing.
This is probably the longest thing I’ve ever written on this site.
Meredith Moment: Amazon has Kindle versions of four of Robert Graves‘ quasi-historical novels on sale for $1.99: COUNT BELISAURIUS, HERCULES MY SHIPMATE, HOMER’S DAUGHTER, and KING JESUS.
@Oneiros,
A File770 comment on food ends up being longer than a File770 comment on books?
Inconceivable!
@Soon Lee: Honestly I’m torn on whether to do my thesis on world literature or ice cream culture.
Is this a file which I see before me,
The pixel toward my hand? Come, let me scroll thee.
Oneiros, frankly, I think the research into ice cream culture would be more fun. “I have to have another scoop. For SCIENCE!” <grin>
(Hey, we’re back to 2017! Did the shoggoth run off with the time machine again?)
@Oneiros
Ice cream culture, definitely! Elizabeth David’s “Harvest of the Cold Months” is closest I’ve seen to anything in that line, and it’s really more of a history of ice production.
@Paul
That’s certainly possible, especially since there probably are a lot of anosmics who have never been formally diagnosed or even have no idea they are anosmics, especially if they lost their sense of smell as very young children or were born that way (I’m not sure what it is with me, since I had an accident at the age of three which can cause anosmia, but I have no memory of ever been able to smell like other people). Congenital anosmics also get really good at pretending to be able to smell. I had no idea that anosmia was a thing or that there were other people like me, until I was in my mid twenties and heard a professor mention anosmia in a talk. I later contacted her and told her I had no sense of smell and that I never knew there was a term for it and she promptly asked me if I was willing to be interviewed.
There probably are even more people whose sense of smell is impaired, but not fully gone (I can smell very few things and only at concentrations where everybody else has already fainted), who might still have problems perceiving vanilla flavour.
BTW, vanilla ice cream still has taste for me (I’ve met people who believed eating vanilla ice cream was like eating snow for me and it’s not). It still tastes of cream and sugar and is sweet. It just doesn’t have any flavour beyond that.
@Cora:
Hm, now I wonder how you would experience Cream Soda (vanilla-flavour carbonated drink, basically). To me it tastes both of vanilla and of “fatty”, but I wonder how much of that is a learned association vanilla ice cream.
If you haven’t tried it, I’d be willing to attempt to bring a can to Helsinki, since I seem to recall you saying you’re coming. And then we can do SCIENCE!
Prime Meredith Moment: Lens Of The World by R.A. MacAvoy, which is the first book in one of my favoritest trilogies ever, is available for $0.99 at Amazon and iTunes.
@Oneiros et al. I’m not a fan of tea flavour in sweets – a real drawback when living in most parts of Asia – but I also found taro flavoured ice cream surprisingly nice, as is pea flavour and sweetcorn flavour. I haven’t come across red bean but I can see it working too.
I think the death of vanilla as a flavour is much exaggerated when you consider how many desserts it complements. I couldn’t imagine pairing sticky toffee pudding or rhubarb crumble with anything but a nice creamy vanilla – preferably as close to frozen custard as you can get it.
@Rob Thornton ooo it’s 99p on Amazon UK as well, for those who are that way inclined.
And now for a piece of internet that made my day: The Meeping Angel
The Pixel Scroll at the End of the Universe.
The ice cream comments reminded me of one of my partners in crime at the Oxford NaNoWriMo group, who managed a local ice cream shop. They did things like Marmite ice cream… and, one time, she froze a tub of water, put it under the counter, and told unwitting customers that they simply had to try the “mineral water sorbet”.
Steve Wright, I wonder if we are thinking of the same local Oxford ice cream shop? Their chilli chocolate and Bailey’s flavours will forever have a place in my heart. They also did some kind of beer flavour, IIRC, and once agreed to temporarily rebrand it to help promote a friend’s drama production, but that was more of an acquired taste…
@ingvar
I’d certainly be willing to try Cream Soda in the name of science, though I’m not sure how useful it will be, since I’m not much of a soda person. One of the side effects of anosmia is that a lot of artificial flavourings don’t work as intended and tend to taste chemical. I didn’t know this until I read an article about a man who lost his sense of smell as an adult and complained that sodas suddenly had a chemical tang. And I thought, “Wait a minute, it’s not supposed to taste that way? Actually that explains a lot.”
One of my favourite flavours isn’t a flavour at all, exactly: Clotted cream ice cream. It tastes, as you might imagine, very creamy – but there’s no vanilla or anything of the sort in it. Very tasty so long as you have a fondness for cream.
Otherwise I usually stick to mint or caramel/toffee flavours (I don’t really like chocolate and I prefer fresh fruit to fruit-in-things). I’m a pretty boring ice cream eater, I suppose. Perhaps I should branch out next time I get the chance. 🙂
@Joseph T. Major: the point of @14 is that usually intelligence agencies will have a clue why a transmitter is running — but not here.
@Anthony:
Huh? I think there’s a difference between somebody infecting systems by walking past and somebody clicking on a suspect link; the infectee has no choice in the former, which makes me surprised there are not better defenses — as in, why would a reader accept a link from a chip, instead of straight numbers to do its own processing on? Did some spec writer “think” everything should have the capacity to process a link?
Actually, it’s not clear to me that the reader processed a link, as the story speaks of a ~program small enough to fit on the chip — maybe the reader needs to know when to stop reading? (This is guesswork — I’ve never specialized in security — but seems sensible based on the years I spent noodling with computers, especially fixing read-beyond errors.)
@Oneiros: “Thai rolled ice cream” sounds like almost any ice cream in the U.S.; some mixins are premium brands (e.g. Ben & Jerry’s), but they’re also available from the Boston-local milk handler that does ~base-price ice cream. Was there some difference I’m missing? (Note that Boston also claims to be the creator of the live mix-in, finished ice cream mashed on a marble slab with whatever ~toppings the individual customer wants.)
I doubt that vanilla-as-plain comes from anosmia; really-plain ice cream (“sweet cream”) wasn’t available when I was young, but the sense was that vanilla was the plain flavor (not-flavor?) suitable for topping, e.g., apple pie (cf @Arifel).
Oh, and @1 has made the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-40809566. I don’t think that shows a slow news season; they’ve had a lot of stories relating to space.
I think the reputation of vanilla ice cream as being “boring” comes from a lot of vanilla ice cream, mostly the stuff from big food companies, not actually tasting like vanilla. The real thing, made with real vanilla beans that you can sometimes actually still see fragments of, is glorious and pungent and just amazing, and is striking for how unlike what you get down at the local Dairy Queen it is.
It was my understanding that the vast majority of a lot of foods’ flavour comes from scent (one of the reasons smokers love heavy doses of pepper and hot sauce; they can’t really taste anything else). Vanilla is generally a pretty subtle flavour, so I can see it disappearing completely for sure, but I bet there are a lot of other flavours that are still present but that don’t quite translate in the same way. Sort of like a reverse magic berry, maybe. Fascinating!
@arifel: yep, that’s the one. (Occasionally co-opted as a meeting place for the NaNoWriMo group, much to the bemusement of passers-by.)
@Steve Ah! I was briefly part of NaNoWriMo Oxford in 2009 and now you mention it I remember the Cowley road branch being on the meeting circuit (though I think I only made it there with a couple of others for an evening write in). Wonder if our paths might have crossed back then?