(1) LITIGATION. Brianna Wu announced in a public Facebook post:
Alex Jones is suing me for defamation. Not a joke. He’s suing Young Turks too.
I obviously can’t comment on the legal aspects of the case until I get representation, but this is my statement for media.
If the Sandy Hook parents can stand up to Alex Jones, I can too.
According to a Boston News story, “Alex Jones Says Brianna Wu Defamed Him in a Tweet”, this is the provocation:
The lawsuit filed in Texas on Wednesday names Wu, as well as Cenk Uygur, of the news outlet the Young Turks, and Mark Follman, of the magazine Mother Jones. It seeks damages and a “jury trail [sic].”
(2) SPACE DRAMA. For All Mankind premieres November 1 on the Apple TV app for those with an Apple TV+ subscription. The series will dramatize an alternate history depicting “what would have happened if the global space race had never ended” after the USSR succeeds in the first manned Moon landing. It’s created by Emmy Award winner Ronald D. Moore (Outlander, Battlestar Galactica), Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi.
Told through the lives of NASA astronauts, engineers and their families, For All Mankind presents an aspirational world where NASA and the space program remained a priority and a focal point of our hopes and dreams.
- Andrew Liptak mentions how much the premise makes him think of Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars in his post about the trailer at Tor.com.
(3) RESTORE THE LEGEND! Chris Garcia has given himself a task – to make Jack C. Haldeman II (or as everyone else called him, Jay) famous again! The legendary writer and SMoF, Jay was also the master of the SpecFi Sports story! This plan all starts with a simple plan – an issue of The Drink Tank!
We’re looking for stories about Jay, personal reminiscences, appreciation of his writings, anything! We’d love stories particularly about folks who knew him from the 1970s and 80s, and especially anything about the Discon II! If you’ve got any photos of Jay, that’d be great, too!
We’ve set November 20th, 2019 as the deadline!
Any questions? Drop a line at [email protected]
(4) GAHAN WILSON APPEAL. Paul Winters, organizer of the “Help Gahan Wilson find his way” GoFundMe, is calling for more donations after Wilson had a medical emergency.
We have a crisis.
Gahan had surgery over the weekend and he was discharged from the hospital yesterday. It turns out that the hospital and the memory care facility didn’t have the best communication going, because today we were told that the memory care unit could not care for Gahan because of the severity of the surgery. The hospital won’t take him back and he can’t go to a rehabilitation facility.
We were informed that for him to stay in the memory care facility, we would need to get him a 24 hour care person to stay with him for the next thirty days until the doctors can assess his condition.
All through this gofundme I have been careful not to take in too much money. A few months ago, I suspended donations because it looked like we would have enough. Today, that all changed. Please, if you can spare any more, we could use it to pay this unexpected expense.
The circumstances of this whole hospital event have been surreal. I will spare everyone the details of the surgery, but we did it because the doctor said he would die without it. None of the medical experts warned or prepared us for the change that would make in his care level after the surgery.
I know that even with Alzheimer’s Gahan wants to live. Whenever we are with him, he speaks of how lucky we all are to be alive and the last cartoon he drew was of a guy holding a sign that read “Glad to remain alive!” I know he was drawing himself. We will keep trying to give him the best quality of life until the end.
(5) ATTENTION, BUCKAROOS! Chuck Tingle’s game was released at the beginning of the month: “The Tingleverse: The Official Chuck Tingle Role-Playing Game”.
This rulebook contains everything a group of buckaroos will need, including four playable types (bigfoot, dinosaur, human, and unicorn), five trots (bad boy, charmer, sneak, true buckaroo, and wizard), several unique ways, as well as hundreds of cool moves that are specially crafted for each unique play style.
Within these 270+ pages you will also find various magical items and a menagerie of monsters, ranging from pesky Void crabs to this villainous Ted Cobbler himself.
The only question left is: what are you waiting for?
(6) WISDOM SEEKER. Likewise, UrsulaV knew who could help her navigate the recent fannish storm.
Tingle even promised to get into the topic on his “My Friend Chuck” podcast — but I must be in the wrong timeline, it hasn’t dropped yet.
(7) THE CAT’S MEOW. Orbit’s cover reveal for Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes explains why we’re interested. SJW Credentials in SFF… Irresistible.
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- September 26, 1937 — The Shadow radio serial premiered with the first episode being titled “The Death House Rescue”. The introduction to the program, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” was spoken by actor Frank Readick.
- September 26, 1987 — Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Encounter at Farpoint” opening episode premiered in television syndication. The series would run for seven years, the longest Trek series to date.
- September 26, 2001 — Star Trek: Enterprise debuted. It was called simply Enterprise for the first two seasons. “Broken Bow” was the name of the first episode. Captain Archer was played by Scott Bakula, star of Quantum Leap. It ran for four seasons before being cancelled.
- September 26, 2007 — The Bionic Woman first aired. This is NBC’s retooling of the 1970’s SciFi channel series Bionic Woman which starred Lindsay Wagner, and now starring Michelle Ryan. It lasted exactly eight episodes.
- September 26, 2014 — Star Wars: Rebels first aired. It was produced by Lucasfilm Animation and set in the Star Wars universe five years before A New Hope. It lasted four seasons.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born September 26, 1866 — Winsor McCay. Cartoonist and animator who’s best remembered for the Little Nemo strip which ran between The Wars and the animated Gertie the Dinosaur film which is the key frame animation cartoon which you can see here. He used the pen name Silas on his Dream of the Rarebit Fiend strip. That strip had no recurring characters or theme, just that a character has a nightmare or other bizarre dream after eating Welsh rarebit. What an odd concept. (Died 1934.)
- Born September 26, 1877 — Edmund Gwenn. Dr. Harold Medford in the classic Big Insect film Them. He showed in the Fifties show Science Fiction Theatre twice, once as Dr. Pliny in “A Visit from Dr. Pliny” and another time as Dr. Lorenz in “The Strange Doctor Lorenz”. (We’re not mentioning his famous role as Santa Claus: since we all still believe, that must be classified as merely a courtroom drama.) (Died 1959.)
- Born September 26, 1927 — Charles Macaulay. He appear twice in Trek, once in “The Return of the Archons” as Landru, and in the “Wolf in the Fold” as Prefect Jaris. He was Captain Townsend in “God Save The Queen” in The Tales of The Golden Monkey, and in the Wonder Woman series, he was Ambassador McCauley in “Formula 407”. (Died 1999.)
- Born September 26, 1941 — Martine Beswick, 78. Though she auditioned for Dr. No, she was instead cast in From Russia with Love as Zora. She also appeared as Paula Caplan in Thunderball. She would appear in One Million Years B.C. opposite Raquel Welch. She made several Hammer Studio films including Prehistoric Women and Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde.
- Born September 26, 1948 — Olivia Newton-John, 71. She was Kira in Xanadu which is considered responsible for the creation of the Golden Raspberry Awards. In 2017, she appeared in Sharknado 5: Global Swarming. A coincidence? I think not. It got a 30% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
- Born September 26, 1956 — Linda Hamilton, 63. Best known for being Sarah Connor in The Terminator film franchise and Catherine Chandler in the Beauty and the Beast series. She also played Vicky Baxter in Children of the Corn, and Doctor Amy Franklin in King Kong Lives. She would be Acacia, a Valkyrie in “Delinquents” of the Lost Girl series, a role she would reprise in two more episodes, “End of a Line” and “Sweet Valkyrie High”.
- Born September 26, 1957 — Tanya Huff, 62. Her Confederation of Valor Universe series is highly recommended by me. And I also give a strong recommendation to her Gale Family series. I’ve not read her other series, so I’ll ask y’all what you’d recommend.
- Born September 26, 1968 — Jim Caviezel, 51. John Reese on Person of Interest which CBS describes as a “crime drama”. Huh. He was also Detective John Sullivan in Frequency, and Kainan in Outlander. And yes he played Number Six in the unfortunate reboot of The Prisoner.
- Born September 26, 1985 — Talulah Riley, 34. Miss Evangelista in “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”, two Tenth Doctor stories. She also portrays Angela in Westworld, and she shows up in Thor: The Dark World as an Asgardian nurse.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Crankshaft obviously has seen authors hawking their books in the dealer’s room.
- Free Range gets a laugh from an unexpected link between the Olympics and UFOs.
(11) KIDS IN THE HALL. The Chicago Tribune says even Stan Lee paid a visit: “He dared to build the Hall of Justice in his backyard — now there’s a superhero museum in Elkhart, Ind.”
As with any decent superhero origin, the Hall of Heroes Superhero Museum here began in ambition and humility, overreach and wonder: Allen Stewart loved superheroes and comic books and spent every dime from his paper routes on superhero comics and toys and refused to throw anything away. His fever never abated, not as a teenager, not after he entered the military, not after he started a family, and so, when he became an adult and made some money in local real estate, he decided to splurge: He decided he would build the Justice League’s Hall of Justice in his backyard.
This was a dozen years ago.
…Still, the Hall of Heroes and its unlikely Hall of Justice were becoming a draw in Elkhart County. Within a few years of opening, he had 10,000 annual paying visitors, and the collection — which he now calls the largest superhero memorabilia collection in the world, and believes is worth about $5 million — exploded to include: a nine-foot tall Hulk statue, a Captain America shield used in the 2011 movie, rare Superman toys, original artwork and the debut comics of nearly every major superhero. His Hall went from something like a child’s bedroom shrine to superheroes to something like a museum.
(12) DEADLY WALL. At Galactic Journey, Cora Buhlert precedes her reviews of the latest (in 1964) German sff with a local news bulletin: “[September 26, 1964] A Mystery Mastermind Double-Feature: The Ringer and The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse”.
…Another visitor who received a warm welcome in Germany was American Civil Rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when he visited Berlin earlier this month. The official reason for the visit was a memorial service for John F. Kennedy, but Dr. King also used the opportunity to visit the Berlin Wall, where only hours before a young man had been shot during an attempt to flee East Berlin and only survived due to the heroic actions of an US Army sergeant who pulled him to safety, a sad reminder that about fifty people have already been killed trying to surmount the Berlin Wall….
(13) THE HUBBLE GAZE. Abigail Nussbaum drills into new sff film Ad Astra at Asking the Wrong Question.
…This is absolutely a film that revels in the stark visual of a single space-suited protagonist made small against a backdrop of endless stars, or in stunning vistas of planetary bodies and orbital installations. It absolutely features long wordless stretches in which the cosmic soundtrack strives to create a 2001-esque sense of grandeur. And it absolutely filters all those sensory feasts through Pitt’s character, a soulful Competent Man whose emotional turmoil is both soothed and magnified by the scale of the setting he’s been placed in, and the challenges of surviving it. But Ad Astra also feels like a film aware of its antecedents, of the movies that have come before it over the last decade and the tropes they’ve established. If it isn’t quite a dismantling of those tropes, it is at least a more measured, more humane response to them….
(14) NOT SURPRISED BY DAN SIMMONS. RedWombat was ahead of the curve, like usual.
(15) ALT-RIGHT HATES SEEING THOSE CLICKS GO TO WASTE. Jon Del Arroz hopes he can rev up the last couple days of his latest Kickstarter campaign by tweeting his own crap about Greta Thunberg. Was getting banned for a week part of the plan? No idea. “BANNED On Twitter And Can’t Promote!” [Internet Archive link.]
(16) SOUND AND FURY. FastCompany explains “What it means that Samuel L. Jackson is the new voice of Alexa”.
…To get started, just say, “Alexa, introduce me to Samuel L. Jackson.” You can then choose whether you want him to use explicit language or not, so it’s safe to assume that those who want him to curse will get a dose of his iconic “Motherf—er!” The beauty of it is, you can always change your mind and toggle between clean and explicit content as much as your heart desires.
(17) NO DISASSEMBLE. BBC reveals how “Bacterial ‘striptease’ evades antibiotics”.
Bacteria have been caught “stripping off” in order to evade antibiotics and survive, scientists show.
Researchers at Newcastle University filmed bacteria “undressing” and taking off their outer layer – or cell wall.
Antibiotics can attack cell walls so scientists think this is a new form of drug resistance and could explain why some infections keep coming back.
But experts said it was still unclear if this was having an impact on patients.
What are they taking off?
Some species of bacteria have a cell wall built out of sugars and amino acids (the building blocks of protein).
It gives the bacterium shape and protection but it is also a weak spot that can be exploited by antibiotics.
The first antibiotic to be discovered, penicillin, disrupts the cell wall and causes bacteria to burst.
The study, published in Nature Communications, looked at bacteria from elderly patients with urinary tract infections that kept coming back.
Researchers spotted that some bacteria were responding to antibiotics by slipping out of their cell wall in order to escape the drug’s effects.
(18) STARKILLER! [Item by Olav Rokne.] Stars and galaxies are being torn asunder, and nobody really knows why. Could it be The Doomsday Machine from Star Trek’s original series? Has some alien civilization found a Tox Uthat? Is it just a bunch of busy Vogons? Well, probably not. But hopefully, Canadian scientists working with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) will be able to figure out the exact mechanism that explains why galaxies are being destroyed. The New York Post has the story: “Something in the universe is killing off entire galaxies”.
The cause of death is thought to be a shutdown of star formation, and a new project aims to use one of the world’s leading telescopes to observe the process in detail.
The Canadian-led project is called the Virgo Environment Traced in Carbon Monoxide survey (VERTICO).
It will investigate how galaxies can be killed off by their own environment.
Principal investigator Toby Brown explained in The Conversation that he is leading a team of 30 experts who will be using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope to map stars being made in our nearest galaxy cluster, the Virgo Cluster.
(19) UP, UP AND AWAY. BBC learns: “Balloon ‘taxi service’ to take satellites to space”.
A satellite delivery “taxi service” using a giant helium balloon is being developed by a start-up company.
B2space is looking primarily to launch commercial satellites, but it has even fielded an inquiry about “space funerals”, sending ashes into space.
…Described as a satellite “taxi service” by the company, balloons have already been sent to the edge of the atmosphere to test their components and systems – their first launch was from Snowdonia Aerospace Centre, and they have since taken off from Shetland Space Centre.
B2space’s technology will use a giant helium balloon to lift an unmanned rocket up over the sea to a height of around 22-25 miles (35-40km). The rocket, carrying a satellite, will then blast into space to deliver its cargo, while the balloon deflates and falls to earth to be retrieved from the sea.
This will be cheaper because the rocket does not have to power itself up through dense air up to 22 miles, using 85% less fuel, and the rocket will be smaller, the company claimed.
(20) MODERN BUSINESS. Not like Macy’s telling Gimbel’s, any more… “Star Wars: Marvel boss Kevin Feige to develop film for Disney”.
The man behind Marvel Studios’ string of comic book movie blockbusters is to develop a new Star Wars film, a senior executive at Disney has revealed.
Alan Horn, co-chairman of Walt Disney Studios, said it “made sense” for Kevin Feige to work with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy on the project.
The film would be part of “a new era in Star Wars storytelling,” Horn told the Hollywood Reporter.
Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios are both subsidiaries of Walt Disney Studios.
Horn described Feige – who has been president of Marvel Studios since 2007 – as “a die-hard fan” of the Star Wars universe.
Under Feige’s leadership, the films that make up the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) have made more than $22 billion (£18 billion) worldwide.
(21) JEDI GAMES. EA has dropped a Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order game trailer — “Cal’s Mission.”
In the Galactic Empire, the Inquisitorius has only one mission: seek out and destroy all remnants of the Jedi Order. Learn more about what Cal Kestis is searching the galaxy for and why the Empire will stop at nothing to bring him down. Become a Jedi in Respawn Entertainment’s third-person action-adventure game, STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order™. Available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC this holiday season, November 15, 2019.
[Thanks to Chris Garcia, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Steven H Silver, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ingvar.]
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@John A Arkansawyer, I really like that article’s take and hadn’t seen it before. Much thanks.
@Peace, I’m so sorry. It’s one thing to realize abstractly that any positive change or advance is going to be too late for someone–but that’s incredibly hard, to have it bite that close. 🙁
@Lis Carey:
Thank you. It was a very strange and surreal year. Romneycare might not have saved him. He was never very wise about his health. But he never had the chance to do better. I got oddly philosophical about it, looked at Romneycare as something that would help so many so maybe people wouldn’t die the way my father did.
My beloved great aunt on my husband’s side made a donation to a lung cancer charity in his name, which was some comfort.
(9) BIRTHDAYS. A belated Happy Birthday to Tanya Huff! I love her work. 😀