Eight stories, two videos, some smack and a snack in today’s Scroll.

(1) What does John King Tarpinian eat each year to commemorate the July 20th anniversary of the first Moon landing?

And if anybody asks John “Where were you that day?” he has a good story to tell them.

I was just 15 and my father took a buddy, Mike, and me to Zuma Beach and he returned home.  My parents and Mike’s parents were so engrossed in the landing they forgot about us.  This was in the olden days with no cell phone and the pay phone was broken so we could not call them to remind them about us kids.

There was a group of people with a 9” B&W TV watching the landing on the beach so we joined them.  The battery eventually drained so I took it upon myself to lift up the locked hinged viewing door of a lifeguard station to get at the electrical outlet so we could plug-in the TV and watch Neil and Buzz.

In John’s honor, here’s a Bradbury bonus:

(2) Vox Day did a little housekeeping on his blog to address a chronic problem in a clear, direct and motivating way:

For the love of all that bleeps and bloops, stop whining about spell-checker mistakes and autocorrect errors in your comments already! It’s considerably more annoying for the rest of us to read the inevitable follow-up post explaining that of course you know how to spell whatever word you just misspelled, it’s just that whatever device or software you are using introduced the error without you noticing it before hitting the blue button, than it is to simply skim past the misspelled word itself.

Drawing everyone’s attention to your claim that you really know how to spell a word that you observably didn’t know how to spell correctly is simple pride and vanity, and worse, it’s completely misplaced vanity.

Here’s why. It doesn’t make you look any less stupid to be knowingly using a device that regularly introduces errors than it does to make the occasional spelling error or typo in the first place. In fact, it makes you look at least twice as stupid, because first, either you don’t know how to turn autocorrect off or you actually rely on it. And second, given how often these errors are introduced, you are probably making more spelling mistakes due to using it than you would if you simply relied on your own spelling capabilities.

If you use a spellchecker, that’s fine, but then own it. If it screws up, it’s on you. Deal with it already and stop talking about the stupid things. To quote the VFM, WE DON’T CARE.

I see little of this at File 770 since I installed the editing option, so don’t take it as an oblique message. I just enjoyed the rant.

(3) Check out Joe Phillips’ posters recasting Old Hollywood stars in modern superhero movies.

If you’re curious to see what Marilyn Monroe would look like as Power Girl, or Humphrey Bogart as Hellboy, wonder no more! Joe Phillips’ Silver Screen Heroes series has brought this vision of a better world to life. Phillips not only has a good eye for likenesses, but also a good eye for casting. Clark Gable as Tony Stark is an especially inspired choice!

(4) George R.R. Martin’s plea on Not A Blog for fans to vote in the Hugos was picked up as a news item in the Guardian.

George RR Martin is urging “every true fan” of science fiction to vote in the Hugo awards before the ballot closes at the end of July, for what the Game of Thrones author said was “proving to be the most controversial and hotly contested Hugo race in the award’s long history”.

Larry Correia endorsed the voter participation message and gave it a signal boost:

For once I agree with GRRM. Everybody should vote. The deadline is coming up fast.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/20/george-rr-martin-hugo-awards-vote-game-of-thrones-science-fiction?CMP=share_btn_fb

Since we wrote a novella worth of giant blog posts back and forth, GRRM knows damned good and well the Sad Puppies campaign wasn’t motivated by racism or sexism, but that doesn’t stop him from casually tossing the “neo-nazi” accusation out there… but you should believe him when he says there was like totally never any political bias in the system.

(5) Dr. Kjell Lindgren, Sasquan’s Special Guest, is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station this Wednesday, July 22. Glenn Glazer reports NASA will be covering the launch on television. It will be at 5:02 EST.

Kjell Lindgren of NASA, Oleg Kononenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 5:02 p.m. EDT (3:02 a.m. Thursday, July 23 in Baikonur). NASA TV coverage will begin at 4 p.m.

The trio will ride to space in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which will rendezvous with the space station and dock after four orbits of Earth. Docking to the space station’s Rassvet module will take place at 10:46 p.m. NASA TV coverage of docking will begin at 10 p.m.

The crew will open the hatches between the Soyuz and the station around 12:25 a.m. Thursday, July 23. Expedition 44 Commander Gennady Padalka of Roscosmos, as well as Flight Engineers Scott Kelly of NASA and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos, will greet Lindgren, Kononenko and Yui. NASA TV hatch opening coverage begins at 11:45 p.m. Wednesday.

Lindgren, Kononenko and Yui will remain aboard the station until late December. Kelly and Kornienko, who have been aboard since March 27, will return to Earth in March 2016 at the end of their one-year mission. Padalka, who also has been aboard since March 27, will return to Earth in September, leaving Kelly in command of Expedition 45.

(6) On the SFWA Blog, Lynne M. Thomas, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University, discusses the importance of archiving. She is responsible for collections that include the literary papers of over 70 sf and fantasy authors as well as SFWA’s official archives.

(7) Adam-Troy Castro’s “That Sledge-Hammer was Always Meant To Hit There: A Hugo Theory” reacts to Michael Z. Williamson’s announcement that he is voting No Award in all the Hugo categories.

So far I’ve only seen the rant from {Moronic Massacre-Mocker}, who is being given a time-out from Facebook for hate speech.

But if we permit consideration of the possibility that it has become a meme, it represents a serious shift in strategy and a complete rebranding of the desired goal.

We wanted the ship to sink. We always wanted to make a point about icebergs.

We wanted our village to be sacked. It proves our moral superiority to the huns.

Yes, I just slammed myself in the balls with a sledgehammer. I meant to do that.

Maybe they know how many supporting memberships they paid for and how many they did not. Maybe they’ve convened in panic and discussed how to still pull a nominal victory out of all this. Maybe they’ve said, “We have to sell the premise that if we go down in flames, it’s what we always intended.”

Maybe they’re terrified.

This is just a conspiracy theory, mind you. It might or might not have any validity. But the shift from, “VOTING NO AWARD IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO!” to “WE ARE NOW VOTING NO AWARD EVEN IN OUR OWN CATEGORIES!” does give me pause….

(8) Michael Z. Williamson’s FB timeout, referenced by Castro, presumably was triggered by the grotesque “joke” MZW posted after the Charleston church shootings.

Although MZW is temporarily banned from posting to one account he is rolling along posting his usual fare as “EH Michael Williamson”.

[Thanks to Craig Miller, Glenn Glazer, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories.]