Snapshots Colt .45

Here are 8 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Kristine Kathryn Rusch has done a great service for fans everywhere by publishing the lyrics to the song Janis Ian wrote this for the Nebula Awards banquet. It begins —

WELCOME HOME (THE SFWA SONG)
(Janis Ian)

I learned the truth at seventeen
That Asimov and Bradbury
and Clarke were alphabetically
my very perfect ABC’s
While Algernon ran every maze
and slow glass hurt my heart for days
I sat and played a sweet guitar
and Martians grokked me from afar…

(2) In spite of everything I laughed at this. The xkcd online comic offers a Michael Bay-style cinematic version of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico titled “The Worst Case Scenario.”

(3) How weird is this? Look up “write-in” on Yourdictionary.com, then click on the “sentence examples” tab. Two of the examples are references to Topic A direct from the TAFF.org.uk site. The first, which originated here mentions Martha Beck by name. A second, plucked from the official TAFF Administration FAQ, says “The sole write-in campaign which was felt to endanger the spirit of TAFF did not in fact succeed.” Faanish dictionaries always express the author’s bias, but this is the first instance I’ve seen of a mundane dictionary dabbling in fanpolitics.

(4) A remake or Logan’s Run has been in the works for a long time. Carl Rinsch, who is Ridley/Tony Scott’s protege has been assigned to direct the movie.

(5) William Gibson, in his Book Expo America talk, told the audience there no longer is a future — while insisting he means something different by that than other incipient geezers who have such things in the past:

The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.

Please don’t mistake this for one of those “after us, the deluge” moments on my part. I’ve always found those appalling, and most particularly when uttered by aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future.

(6) The LARRY NIVEN web page (unofficial but sanctioned by the author) has been changed from www.larryniven.org to www.larryniven.net following difficulties with the ISP . It’s possible that there might be “teething problems” with the new address for a short while – broken links etc.

(7) Those of you who commented on my post about TV theme music are likely to enjoy an article titled “Underscoring Richard Wagner’s influence on film music” by Jon Burlingame in the Los Angeles Times:

Millions (billions?) of moviegoers understand the leitmotif concept even if they’ve never heard the term, courtesy of John Williams’ “Star Wars” scores and, more recently, Howard Shore’s epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

“Wagner kept his leitmotifs in a constant state of flux,” notes Chicago musicologist Doug Adams, whose book “The Music of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Films” will be published later this year. “It was not theme and variations. It was a grab-bag of material that was constantly evolving, constantly changing. That’s how Howard Shore treated all his thematic material in ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and that’s largely what Williams does in the ‘Star Wars’ and ‘ Indiana Jones’ films….

One of Wagner’s other innovations involved music matching physical movement on the stage or, as it would later become derisively known in films, “Mickey Mousing,” since music matching action was so commonplace in cartoons. “Hollywood didn’t invent this,” Mauceri says. “The refugee composers” —specifically Austrian-born Korngold and German-born Franz Waxman, both of whom fled the Nazi menace in the 1930s — “were carrying on the very thing that they saw every day in the opera houses.”

(8) Speaking of Colt .45’s (as I do inthe header)… I enjoy the Autry Museum a lot, and get over there at least once a year. It recently featured in an LA Daily News article about a new issue of stamps depicting its namesake, Gene Autry, plus William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and Roy Rogers. I was interested to discover that the images were created by local Monrovia artist Robert Rodriguez.

[Thanks for these links belongs to David Klaus, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian and Australian SF Bullsheet.]

Update 06/21/2010: Corrected the xkcd comic title in hopes of appearing ever so slightly less illiterate…

5 thoughts on “Snapshots Colt .45

  1. In 2), the overall webcomic title is actually “xkcd”; the title of this specific single comic is “worst case scenario”

  2. The lyrics to Janis’s song were published last year in Argentus and are in the Hugo Packet that was sent out by Aussiecon 4.

  3. “The Worst Case Scenario online comic”

    That’s xkcd. You are obviously xkcd-deficient, and must immediately go to xkcd.org or xkcd.com and commence reading all the comics from the first one. Be sure to never miss the text visible only when you run your cursor over the cartoon.

  4. @Steven – How strange memory is sometimes — of course the lyrics appeared in your fanzine first. But when I saw them in KKR’s Facebook post it felt like a new discovery.

    @Gary – Thanks for the pointer about…the pointer. You can be certain I would have missed that without a hint.

  5. “The word usage examples above have been gathered from various sources to reflect current and historical usage. They do not represent the opinions of YourDictionary.com.”

    Pretty hilarious choices, nonetheless.

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