By Rich Lynch: A few days ago, Nicki finally located something that I’d been trying to find for a very long time – the program book for the 1981 Mill Valley Film Festival. And boy howdy, seeing it again brought back a lot of memories.
Back then I’d been out in California on a business trip that had extended over a weekend in early August. So on the suggestion of my friend Maureen Garrett (who, at that time, was in charge of Lucasfilm Ltd.’s Star Wars Fan Club) I’d met up with her on a pleasant Sunday afternoon to take in some of the event.
Mill Valley is located in southern Marin County, just a few miles up the 101 from the Golden Gate Bridge, and in the early 1980s it was the home of Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic special effects studios. So, as you’d expect, there was a Lucasfilm-related program item on the Festival’s schedule – special effects guru Richard Edlund gave a presentation that had included (to Maureen’s surprise) the effects-laden closing scenes from the recently released Raiders of the Lost Ark. But I’d missed it! – it had taken place a couple days earlier. No matter, there were plenty of other things of interest to me the day I was there, including one I had most wanted to see – a two-hour slide show-assisted talk by the great Bob Clampett.
Bob Clampett, as many of us are no doubt aware, was a famous animator and director of cartoon productions. From the early 1930s to the mid-1940s he worked on the Looney Tunes series along with other renowned animators such as Friz Freling, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones, and along the way creating the Tweetie Pie character that was a comedic foil to Sylvester the Cat. And from the mid-1940s on, his claim to fame was the popular Beany and Cecil series, featuring Beany Boy (a yellow-haired lad who always wore a propeller beanie) and his pal Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent. In his presentation, Bob brought us through his long history as an animator and creator, and a fascinating ride it was. I remember that he didn’t really talk very much about other animators he worked with, preferring instead to tell us about his personal history. And it was filled with anecdotes. One of the more humorous ones was his efforts, during his time with Looney Tunes, to see what he could get away with in terms of putting stuff in the cartoons that would evade censors’ cuts. He’d include some funny stuff he knew would be objectionable so that the censors would zero in on those instead of other more borderline gags – those other jokes were the ones that he’d actually wanted in the cartoons.
It was all really, really entertaining. And I remember that it was over all too soon, at least for my liking. By then it was mid-evening and dinner time for Bob and the several Festival staff who were with him, but he still took the time to sign autographs and chat with well-wishers. That’s where I got my program book signed by him. And that’s where Maureen took a photo of the two of us together – it’s one that I now treasure.
And then he was gone, in more ways than one. I never got to see him again, and it was a huge loss to the world of animation when only three years later he died from a heart attack. I remember that just as he and his companions were getting ready to leave the Festival, he said (and I paraphrase as best I can after all this time), “Hey, let’s go and get some dinner!” Bob was looking at Maureen and me when he said that, so for a second or two my eyes widened by the prospect of breaking bread with him. But then reality prevailed as he turned toward one of his companions and they all walked away. And soon after that, I bade farewell to Maureen and began my trip back to Silicon Valley to prepare for the Monday workday.
It was all a very long time ago. But whenever I look at that photo I still wonder, at least a little, if it really was an invitation for dinner. I don’t get to know that, of course, but there are a couple things I do know – it was pretty special getting to meet Bob Clampett…and I’m never gonna lose track of that program book again!
(1) SMELLING BEE. “How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?” in The New Yorker begins with a rant against the prevalence of the English language, however, there are some interesting anthropological bits, too:
…Western writers have long assumed that human beings have an inherently limited capacity to describe some senses, with olfaction ranking as the most elusive. We can speak abstractly about colors (red, blue, black) and sound (high, low, loud). With smell, though, we usually give “source-based” references (“like cut grass”). But the cognitive scientist Asifa Majid, now of Oxford, and the linguist Niclas Burenhult, of Lund University, in Sweden, have shown that this needn’t be the case. They discovered that the Jahai, hunter-gatherers living at the border of Malaysia and Thailand, have a rich vocabulary of abstract smell words. One Jahai term, itpit, refers to the “intense smell of durian, perfume, soap, Aquillaria wood, and bearcat,” Majid and Burenhult report. Another, cnes, applies to “the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some species of millipede, root of wild ginger, leaf of gingerwort, wood of mango tree.” Subsequent research has found large olfactory lexicons in at least forty other languages, among them Fang, Khmer, Swahili, and Zapotec.
It makes a difference. In a study that Majid and Burenhult conducted a decade ago, Jahai and English speakers were asked to identify and name twelve smells, including cinnamon, turpentine, gasoline, and onion. English speakers, despite their greater familiarity with the odors, faltered….
…Twenty years ago, abstract smell vocabularies seemed ridiculous. Burenhult studied the Jahai language for a decade, even writing a doctoral dissertation on its grammar, before Majid asked him to run a battery of tasks that revealed Jahai speakers’ exceptional way of talking about smell. Other linguistic features once assumed to be universal-such as tenses, personal pronouns, and even, potentially, a distinction between nouns and verbs-have turned up missing when greater numbers of languages have been scrutinized. Likewise, we’ve enlarged our sense of the metaphors used to map concepts. English describes acoustic pitch using a verticality metaphor (high-low), but a study by experts in musical cognition found that people around the world use at least thirty-five other mappings, such as small-big, alert-sleepy, pretty-ugly, tense-relaxed, summer-winter, and-in the case of some traditional Zimbabwean instrumentalists-“crocodile” (low pitch) and “those who follow crocodiles” (high pitch)….
Everett’s book revels in such discoveries, which multiply the conceivable differences separating languages. In a recent review of the research literature, the language scientist Damián E. Blasi, along with Majid and others, listed the many cognitive domains that English seems to affect, including memory, theory of mind, spatial reasoning, event processing, aesthetic preferences, and sensitivity to rhythm and melody.”
Eagle-eyed fans may have been a little surprised to spot a magazine containing a promotional picture for the Doctor Who 2023 specials featuring Noble actress Catherine Tate.
In a whirlwind couple of seconds, we see the Doctor and the occupants of what looks like a soccer-loving barbershop (in what’s certainly not the U.K.) sucked out into some kind of cosmic storm. If you look closely at the magazines fluttering by, you can spot a magazine with the aforementioned image….
…Davies: Because what you get, Steven, is a fool because he throws away huge movie franchises every time he does a Doctor Who story.
Moffat: So do you.
Davies: There’s River Song — could be bigger than James Bond every day, and now there’s the Time Hotel that could run for 20 years as a television show.
Moffat: You know you’ve got an idea that’s good enough for 45 minutes of Doctor Who if you’ve got a movie idea. If you just pissed away a franchise, yeah, I might give you 45 minutes….
(4) UNIVERSITIES PRESERVING SFF. Fanac.org’s next “FANAC Fanhistory Zoom” is “Out of the Ghetto and into the University: SF Fandom University Collections”. To attend, email fanac@fanac.org.
Most of us are collectors (or at least accumulators) of science fiction memorabilia. And others are researchers and historians. Our first program should be interesting to all of you. We will be interviewing the Curators of three of the largest library collections specializing in science fiction, fanzines, comics and other related materials.
Come to find out what is in their collections, what they want for their collections, and how to use them. January 11, 2025 – 2PM EST, 11 AM PST, 7PM GMT London, and 6AM AEDT (sorry) Sunday, Jan 12 Melbourne
Jason W. Ellis, Associate Professor of English and Coordinator, City Tech Science Fiction Collection at New York City College of Technology says:
Our sign-in sheet recorded 58 attendees, but I’m guessing the attendance across the day was between 75-100 people as some folks, including students, didn’t sign-in. I even heard one positive take on the symposium via the telephone grapevine from a past colleague who I didn’t know attended. In any event, it took an army to chow down 10 pizzas at lunch!
(6) CLASSIC COMIC STRIP COLLECTIONS. These used to make ideal holiday gifts. CBR.com gives us the “10 Best Comic Strip Collections, Ranked”. “…The best comic strip collections feature the best comic strip titles and probably contain strips significant to its legacy and/or offer insight into its creation….”
Coming in at number six:
Pearls Before Swine: Sgt. Piggy’s Lonely Hearts Club Comic: A Comic Strip Collection About Life, Death, and Everything in Between
Starring anamorphic animals named after the animals they are, Pearls Before Swine explores themes of death, meaning, and the world’s chaos with irony and visual humor. It’s named after the Bible verse, Matthew 7:6, which contains the phrase, “Do not cast your pearls before swine,” meaning don’t impart wisdom on those who won’t appreciate it. This is a pun because Rat, a cynical and snarky loudmouth, often feels this is what he’s doing when talking to Pig, a literal swine who is kind-natured and naïve. Pearls Before Swine also stars Goat, a character often annoyed at Rat and Pig because he’s more educated and informed than them, and a family of crocodiles who always fail at killing their zebra neighbors.
Roughly half the strips in Pearls Before Swine treasuries, which collect the strips in the previous twocollections, have notes under them from Pearls Before creator Stephen Pastis. Pearls Before Swine: Sgt.Piggy’s Lonely Hearts Club Comic is the first Pearls Before Swine treasury and showcases where it all began. The strips in this book were made before Pastis started drawing himself as a character to make meta-commentary, but it still had plenty of other laughs, including a strip where Pig orders bacon and says it’s a “pig-eat-pig world.”
(7) RAY, BART AND HOMER. Phil Nichols’ Bradbury 100 podcast devoted a recent episode to “Ray Bradbury and The Simpsons”, tracking down every reference the series has made to Ray.
A few weeks ago, there was a new episode of The Simpsons which was entirely based on the works of Ray Bradbury. “Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes” is not the first time Ray has been referenced by the show. In fact, the number of Bradbury allusions across all of The Simpsons (i.e. on TV, in comics, and in books) now totals: thirteen.
In this episode I detail them all!
Many of them are represented by audio clips. But there are a few gags which are purely visual, including the comic-book and book appearances, and so I’ll present a few of them below. (Click on the images to embiggen!)
…Saturday evening, the drama reached its peak during a lavish five-course dinner under a heated tent. The menu featured a Crenn Caesar salad, savoy cabbage, steak wing lamb, and soy custard, paired with fine wines. But before dinner was over, the chef’s driver, Charlie Carr, was killed.
The tension escalated when a dinner guest was poisoned for suggesting Sinclair’s death wasn’t an accident, putting her in the killer’s crosshairs.
In the end, we learned the killer and his motive…
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Galaxy Quest
By Paul Weimer: Galaxy Quest — the best movie about Star Trek fandom of all time?
Very possibly yes.
In the days before The Orville (which has neatly taken up the Galaxy Quest banner in some ways), Star Trek’s self importance was sometimes overweening. Oh you could see and find some deflation of the seriousness of movies like Star Trek the Motion Picture now and again in the Star Trek canon (Star Trek IV in particular). But the strong desire and passion of fans was something that was mocked for a long time, and by William Shatner himself.
On December 20, 1986, the infamous “Get a Life” sketch was aired on Saturday Night Live. It’s worth seeing if you haven’t seen it. People forget that at the end Shatner “recants” his rant against the fans and says he was just channeling “Evil Kirk”. Everyone remembers how for the first 6 minutes of the episode he rips and destroys the enthusiasm and geeky intense interest of those same fans.
So, Galaxy Quest is a corrective, I feel, to that sketch and those perceptions. And at the time I saw Galaxy Quest in 1999, I had been to one Star Trek convention (with Marina Sirtis and George Takei). I knew and know the passions of people for a property, a franchise, an imaginary future. I share them, after all.
Galaxy Quest channels all that, and with love and respect, but knowing how silly its own source material is, uses it. From the funky controls on the bridge, to the “choppers” in a passageway that Sigourney Weaver’s character calls out as being stupid, the movie shows the absurdity of following a property so closely. And yet in showing the absurdity of it, it also shows the love, respect, care and humanity of fans of a property. (Consider how the fans come together to help land the remnants of the ship). It’s a movie that touches the heart and knows when to cut from horror, to comedy, to moments of tenderness and pathos. There are few episodes, or movies of the actual Star Trek than can say the same.
And the casting is perfect. Tim Allen as the clueless captain? Sigourney Weaver, whose sole job is to repeat the computer? The late Alan Rickman, horrified he has, by Grabthar’s Hammer, been permanently typecast? Tony Shalhoub as the slacker chief engineer? All of the cast understood the assignment and give the movie their all. The movie is peppy, doesn’t flag, and entertains thoroughly. It satirizes and respects and loves Star Trek, and its fans.
Also, in 2020, inspired by this movie, I went out of my way in my trip around the “Utah 5” to see Goblin Valley State Park, where the alien planet with the beryllium mine (and the rock monster) was filmed. Friends, it is as alien and weird as the movie makes it out to be.
Never give up, never surrender may be Captain Taggart’s catchphrase, but it’s some damn fine advice for life, too.
For the final Christmas of the 20th century, Santa dropped off an extra special gift to movie lovers: Galaxy Quest, a Star Trekparody that’s also so much more.
In it, Tim Allen plays egotistical actor Jason Nesmith whose claim to fame was portraying the Captain Kirk-like lead, Commander Peter Quincy Taggart, in the cheesy 1980s sci-fi show Galaxy Quest. Years after Galaxy Quest has concluded, Nesmith and his co-stars are scraping by with personal appearances at sci-fi conventions. Things take a twist, though, when real-life aliens — who have mistaken Galaxy Quest as real — abduct the actors to help save them from an extraterrestrial warlord.
In the 25 years since its release, the movie has turned into a legitimate cult hit, and so, to mark its 25th anniversary, here are 25 behind-the-scenes tidbits about it…
Here are two particularly juicy tidbits – imagine Galaxy Quest helmed by the same director as Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis, and with a different cast.
21 Why Ramis Left the Project
According to Dean Parisot, who ultimately directed Galaxy Quest, “The studio wanted Tim Allen to do it, but Harold didn’t want to do it with Tim.” Additionally, producer Mark Johnson said, “Harold didn’t do the movie because we couldn’t cast it. The people we went to all turned it down, and by the time we got to Tim Allen, Harold couldn’t see it.”
20 Ramis’ Pick
Ramis had originally wanted Alec Baldwin for the lead. Other casting choices proposed were Steve Martin and Kevin Kline.
(12) ALL SINGING, ALL DANCING, ALL GRINCHING. Cat pointed out a huge oversight in yesterday’s Scroll – I should have followed his Grinch TV memory with a link to Martin Morse Wooster’s “Review of ‘Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas – The Musical’”, an account of the stage production from 2016.
I saw Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas!—The Musical last night at the National Theatre in Washington. From the musical’s website and Wikipedia, I learned that this musical has been around since 1994 and has played in 41 other cities in the U.S. before it showed up in Washington….
….You know the plot. The citizens of Whoville are looking forward to Christmas when they can get lots of stuff and eat many sugary treats. Then that mean Grinch shows up and steals all their stuff. But why? Deprived childhood? Acid reflux? The answer here is that the Grinch is tired of all the noise the Whovians make. At that point I started cheering the Grinch on….
The NHS in England is launching a world-first trial of a “gamechanging” artificial intelligence tool that can identify patients at risk of type 2 diabetes more than a decade before they develop the condition.
More than 500 million people worldwide have type 2 diabetes, and finding new ways to spot people at risk before they develop the condition is a major global health priority. Estimates suggest 1 billion people will have type 2 diabetes by 2050.
The condition is a leading cause of blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, strokes and lower limb amputation. It is often linked to being overweight or inactive, or having a family history of type 2 diabetes, although not all those diagnosed are in those categories.
Now doctors and scientists have developed a transformative AI tool that can predict those at risk of the condition as much as 13 years before it begins to develop.
The technology analyses electrocardiogram (ECG) readings during routine heart scans. It can detect subtle changes too small to be noticed by the human eye that could raise the alarm early about a patient on the road to getting type 2 diabetes.
It could enable early interventions and potentially help people avoid developing the condition altogether by, for example, making changes to their diet and lifestyle….
(14) SCIENCE IN THE ASTIN FAMILY TREE. [Item by Andrew (not Werdna).] This short documentary discusses “The AD-X2 Controversy” — in which the evaluation of the effectiveness of a car battery additive led to the firing (and later reinstatement) of the head of the National Bureau of Standards Allen Astin. The documentary features interviews with Astin’s son John Astin and grandson Sean Astin. Further details in the Wikipeida here: “AD-X2”.
Hoping for a white Christmas this year? Well, even if there’s no snow where you live, at least you can enjoy these images of a “winter” wonderland on Mars.
Taken by the German-built High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter in June 2022, and by NASA’s NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on September 2022, these images showcase what appears to be a snowy landscape in the Australe Scopuli region of Mars, near the planet’s south pole.But the “snow” seen here is quite different from what we have on Earth.
In fact, it’s carbon dioxide ice, and at Mars’ south pole, there’s 26-foot-thick (8-meter-thick) layer of it year-round. (These image was actually taken near the summer solstice, not the winter one — it’s very cold here all year long.)…
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Paul Weimer, Andrew (not Werdna), Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
By Cora Buhlert: On December 25, 1985, He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special aired for the first time in the US. I’m not sure when and where I first watched it. The Christmas Special definitely felt familiar, when I watched it as an adult, so I must have seen it as a kid. However, it never aired in Germany until a channel I don’t receive reran the entire Filmation cartoon in the early 2000s, so I suspect I must have seen it in the Netherlands via Sky Channel.
In 1985, He-Man was at the height of his popularity and his twin sister She-Ra had been introduced earlier that year. The FilmationHe-Man and She-Ra cartoons were watched by millions of children and adults, so the time seemed perfect for a Christmas Special. There was only one problem. Both He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power are set on alien planets, so why would they celebrate Christmas? We never learn much about the religion of She-Ra’s adopted homeworld Etheria, but we have learned quite a bit about the religion of He-Man’s homeworld Eternia in the past forty years and none of it is suited to a Christmas type winter holiday.
Eternians worship three or sometimes four animal deities: Zoar, the falcon, which is the best known, Ka or Serpos, the snake, Ha’vok, the ram, and Horokoth, the bat. Except for Ha’vok, all deities are female and have female priestesses who can literally turn into an avatar of their chosen deity and often a male champion who can call on the powers of said deity. There’s also an element of ancestor worship in Eternia and two afterlives, Preternia, a Valhalla type afterlife where all the great heroes ride dinosaurs and hang out in the shadow of the greatest playset ever built (which sounds like a six-year-old’s idea of heaven) and Subternia, a hellish underworld which is for everybody who’s not a great hero. Eternian theology wasn’t fleshed out until decades later, based on throwaway remarks in the Filmation cartoon and the vintage mini-comics. However, it’s obvious that none of it is in any way compatible with a Christmas type holiday. What is more, Eternia is tidally locked and divided into a light and dark hemisphere, so it’s not clear if they even have winter, since we only ever see snow and ice, when our heroes venture into the polar regions.
However, writers Bob Forward and Don Heckman had an ace up their sleeve, namely the fact that Queen Marlena, mother of Prince Adam a.k.a. He-Man and Princess Adora a.k.a. She-Ra, is an Earth astronaut named Captain Marlena Glenn who crash-landed on Eternia and fell in love with King Randor. So Queen Marlena could be used to introduce Christmas to Eternia (and indirectly she also introduces democracy to the planet in later iterations of the story).
The Christmas Special opens with a panning shot of Eternos Palace in the snow – so apparently there is winter on the light hemisphere of Eternia after all. The interior of the palace is bustling with activity and pretty much every heroic He-Man and She-Ra character can be seen hanging out together and preparing for a party. Indeed, one of the biggest pleasures of this special is seeing all the He-Man and She-Ra characters together on screen and interacting for once, even if many of them just make cameo appearances. It’s also fun to see who’s chatting or flirting with whom – He-Man characters are mostly male and She-Ra characters are most female, so we have gender parity for once. That said, with all the members of She-Ra’s Great Rebellion partying on Eternia, now would be the moment for Hordak and the Evil Horde to conquer Etheria with those pesky rebels out of the way.
The party preparations are being overseen by King Randor and Queen Marlena. From their dialogue, we learn that the reason for the bustle is the upcoming twentieth birthday of Adam and Adora. It’s also the first birthday that the twins will be able to celebrate together, since Adora was kidnapped as a baby by Hordak and raised as a soldier of the Evil Horde, until Adam tracked down his sister and made her see the light and accept her destiny as She-Ra. Queen Marlena wistfully remarks that all the bustle reminds her of Christmas back at home, whereupon King Randor asks, “Christmas? Is that an Earth holiday?” And yes, I’ve been accused of being too hard on King Randor, but he and Queen Marlena have been married for twenty years at this point and yet he never once asked her about the traditions of her home planet? It’s also interesting that the Christmas Special establishes that Adam and Adora’s birthday is in late December just before Christmas, which directly contradicts Mattel, cause according to them He-Man’s and therefore also She-Ra’s birthday is October 12. It won’t be the only plothole and inconsistency in this special.
Two key cast members, however, are absent from the party preparations: Duncan a.k.a. Man-at-Arms and Prince Adam. Instead, Duncan feels the need to test his latest invention, the Sky Spy, a rocket which is supposed to spy on Skeletor and his Evil Warriors, and Adam is helping him. Though personally, I suspect that both Duncan and Adam wanted to escape the attention of Adora’s flirtatious friends. After all, Duncan is hinted (later confirmed) to be in a committed relationship with the Sorceress of Grayskull (who does not appear in this Special for reasons unknown) and quite a few of She-Ra friends have been shown to have a crush on Adam and/or He-Man and even pursued him quite aggressively. Adam fleeing his own birthday party and Adora’s friends also reminds me of the older brother of a school friend who would lock himself in his room, whenever his sisters had friends over. Once he ventured down the stairs to get something to drink, saw us dancing in the living room to George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” and promptly retreated up the stairs again in obvious panic that a gaggle of teen girls would have their way with him. Indeed, one of the great strengths of the Filmation He-Man and She-Ra cartoons and probably the reason they endure is that even though the situations are outlandish, the characters and their behavior are relatable.
Perennial troublemaker Orko is also shirking the party preparations and instead sneaks into the Sky Spy and finds himself trapped in the cockpit just as Duncan launches the rocket. Orko messing with the controls sends the rocket off course and also brings it to the attention of Skeletor who promptly decides to capture the rocket for himself. This leads to a fun aerial fight scene where He-Man (flying the then new Laser Bolt vehicle, even though it is a ground vehicle in toy form) and She-Ra on her flying unicorn Swift Wind stop Skeletor and his minions: Two-Bad, Spikor, Webstor and – oddly enough – Rattlor. Because in the toyline, the ratlle snake like Rattlor is second-on-command of the Snake Men, a completely different villainous faction who would not appear on screen until the 2002 reboot, and in the Filmation cartoon, Rattlor is usually portrayed as a member of the Evil Horde and not of Skeletor’s gang. This makes Rattlor the only character to have been a member of all three villainous factions at one point.
Of course, He-Man and She-Ra prevail and fight off Skeletor, who promptly ejects all of his minions from his airship with only one parachute for the four (or five, if you count Two-Bad as two characters) of them. Meanwhile, Orko tries to use his magic to intervene in the fight. His spell works as well as his magic usually does, namely not at all, and so the Sky Spy with Orko still aboard speeds off into space and through a wormhole, probably the same one that brought Queen Marlena to Eternia.
At any rate, Orko finds himself headed for a familiar looking blue planet and crash-lands in a snowy forest. No sooner has he arrived that he hears someone calling for help and finds two children about to be buried by an avalanche. Orko saves the kids, his magic working for once. Interestingly, immediately after arriving on Eternia, Orko had to rescue an approximately ten-year-old Prince Adam and Baby Cringer from a swamp, so apparently it is his destiny to always have to rescue children in trouble, whenever he arrives on a new planet.
The children, Miguel and Alisha, explain to Orko that they went into the woods to get a Christmas tree and got lost. “What’s Christmas?” Orko asks and so Miguel and Alisha explain everything to him – after retreating to the Sky Spy for warmth. Coincidentally, until rewatching the special I had completely forgotten that the two children are implied to be Hispanic – a nice reminder that Filmation included character diversity in their cartoons almost forty years ago.
Back on Eternia, Man-at-Arms succeeds in tracking down the missing Sky Spy and Orko. “Those are the coordinates of Earth [actually, it’s the phone number of Filmation Studios in the 1980s],” Queen Marlena exclaims and we’re not sure if she’s more worried about Orko or her home planet. Man-at-Arms is pretty confident that he can get Orko back via a transport beam he developed. However, he needs a rare crystal not found on Eternia to power it, which leads to a sidequest where She-Ra and her mermaid friend Mermista travel to Etheria to get the crystal from a monster-infested pool. Once She-Ra has retrieved the crystal, Man-at-Arms uses his transport beam to rescue Orko and the Sky Spy. However, he gets more than he bargained for, because the transporter brings along Miguel, Alisha and their Christmas tree as well.
Miguel and Alisha, who are otherwise remarkably unfazed by everything that’s going on, are worried whether they will be home in time for Christmas. Duncan is confident he can send them back – however, the crystal needs time to recharge. So Queen Marlena suggests turning Adam and Adora’s birthday into an impromptu Christmas party. Of course, none of the assembled Eternians and Etherians have any idea what Christmas is, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to give the kids a wonderful holiday. And so Perfuma uses her plant-powers to provide seasonal decorations, while Bow composes and performs a (rather cringeworthy) Christmas song.
Meanwhile, Horde Prime, supreme leader of the Horde Empire, summons two of his most ambitious lieutenants, Hordak and Skeletor, and informs them that a most dangerous force has arrived on Eternia, namely the spirit of Christmas, to spread peace and love and goodwill. Horde Prime wants the Christmas spirit delivered to him and crushed and he will richly reward whoever succeeds. Now Skeletor actually used to be a member of the Evil Horde and student of Hordak, who is the younger brother of the never fully seen Horde Prime, until Hordak abandoned Skeletor on Eternia, when a certain infamous baby stealing expedition went awry, and Skeletor struck out on his own. Hordak and Skeletor also really don’t like each other and tend to trade blows and insults, whenever they meet, a rivalry Horde Prime is only too happy to exploit.
Hordak succeeds in abducting the children and Orko as spreaders of the Christmas spirit, but his very suggestively shaped helicopter is intercepted by – no, not Skeletor, but yet another faction of villains, giant robots called the Monstroids. There actually was a toy called Monstroid, though it looks nothing like the creatures seen in the Christmas Special. The Monstroids chase off Hordak and his minions and imprison the children and Orko for reasons best known to themselves. However, the kids don’t have to languish in a dungeon for long, because they are rescued by small robot creatures called the Manchines. The Manchines were never made as toys, even though they look very toyetic. I suspect they were planned at one point and then abandoned.
He-Man and She-Ra also arrive to turn the Monstroids into scrap metal. Meanwhile, Skeletor takes the opportunity to kidnap Miguel, Alisha and the Manchine puppy Relay, whom Alisha is holding. However, he didn’t account for Hordak, who returns to shoot down Skeletor and his prisoners, forcing them to crash-land in an icy wasteland. With his Sky Sled wrecked, Skeletor and his prisoners have to trudge through the snow. Initially, Skeletor isn’t at all concerned for the welfare of his prisoners, even though Miguel and Alisha are freezing, but eventually he relents, magics up warm winter coats for the children and even agrees to take along the puppy Relay.
The scenes of Skeletor and the children trudging through the snow are among the funniest in this special and possibly the entire series, for it turns out that even Skeletor is not immune to the Christmas spirit and to puppies licking his skull face. And so Skeletor – quite against his will – helps to protect the children from Hordak and Horde Prime, proving once again that even though Skeletor is an iconic villain, he has a seed of good inside of him – unlike the pure evil of Hordak and Horde Prime.
In the end, everybody is happy except for Hordak and Horde Prime. The assembled Eternians and Etherians hold a giant Christmas/birthday party before sending the kids back home. Adam even dresses up as Santa and is quite shocked when Adora is not remotely fooled by his disguise. And because this is a 1980s Filmation cartoon, there of course is a moral segment where Prince Adam tells us that even though not everybody celebrates Christmas, the spirit of the season lives in us all.
In spite of plotholes and random sidequests, He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special still holds up. It not the best episode of either He-Man or She-Ra, but it’s so much fun. I was also surprised how much action Filmation managed to cram into only forty-five minutes. Highlights include any scene with Skeletor and/or Hordak as well as the sheer number of characters seen and interacting on screen.
The Filmation He-Man and She-Ra cartoons are often considered twenty-five minute toy commercials, even though the cartoons aren’t actually all that great at selling toys. Characters from the cartoons don’t appear as toys, characters from the toyline don’t appear in the cartoon and if they do, they often look nothing like their toy counterparts, because the cartoon designs were often based on early prototypes. Filmation and Mattel co-operated closely on the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons, but Filmation still had a lot of freedom with regard to storylines and characters. The Christmas Special is actually more successful as a toy commercial than many other episodes, because it’s notable that a lot of the characters highlighted, such as She-Ra’s friends Mermista, Perfuma and Peekablue or Skeletor’s unusual selection of minions, had recently come out as toys, as did the Laser Bolt vehicle and the Monstroid, though neither works or looks like they do in the cartoon.
He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special is free to watch on the official YouTube channel here. So what are you waiting for? Bring the spirit of Christmas to your home today.
(0) Yes, I celebrate Christmas, and if you celebrated any holiday today I hope you’ve enjoyed yours just as much as I did. I spent mine hanging out with my brother’s family. (P.S. While it wasn’t an ecumenical decision, I did drink a Diet Pepsi last night.)
“Santa Mike” by Lynn Maudlin
(1) LOVELY CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS. Galaxy used to have an annual tradition….
(2) THE SCIENCE OF READING TO KIDS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal is out. One festive season story is whether or not reading bed-time fantasy (fairy tales) to children confers additional health benefits…. “Good nights: optimising children’s health through bedtime stories”.
Healthy sleep is a public health priority, with at least a third of children and adults reporting insufficient sleep. It is essential for children’s growth and development and optimal physical and mental wellbeing. Consistent bedtime routines, with a calming activity before bed, such as a bedtime story, can promote healthy sleep. Some traditional fairy tales and classic children’s fiction that have soothed many a child to sleep may also include information about the benefits of sleep and the characteristics of sleep disorders, providing accessible and engaging ways for parents or carers, healthcare providers, and educators to discuss healthy sleep with children.
(3) IS THE 2024 2000AD ANNUAL WORTH IT?[Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I don’t know if this is a thing in the US, but over here in Brit Cit, the pre-Christmas season sees the publication of comics’ annuals. These are large-format hardbacks featuring stories from the comics.
2000AD used to produce them back in the late 1970s and early 1980s but have not done so for the past 24 years, instead they produce special, 100-page editions of 2000AD. However, this year they have gone back to form and produced an annual! (With two alternate cover desgns.)
Now, at £25 (about US$30) it might be a little expensive for some. However, die-hard 2000AD fans will be tempted. Here, while there are new Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Lawless and Rogue trooper (feature film hopefully coming this year), all the other material – Judge Anderson, Tales from the Black Museum, Mean Machine, more Rogue trooper and more Judge Dredd, is reprinted old material. So if you are a long-standing 2000AD fan – and, standing at over six feet, I am– then you will already have all these in your collection.
Yet, such is the length of 2000AD’s history (over 47 years) that many will have only come to Tharg’s (the editor’s) fold in recent years and so may only now get to see this reprinted material for the first time.
But fear not any fellow old Squaxx dek Thargo (2000AD fans), this year 2000AD are still producing their 100-page special Christmas edition of all new material as well. What joy!
2000AD is available from all large, specialist SF bookshops that have a decent comics section or online at www.2000AD.com.
Christmas murder mysteries can be traced back to detective fiction’s golden age between World War I and II. Before World War I, Christmas short stories and detective fiction had been steadily growing in popularity throughout Victorian and Edwardian Britain, eventually developing into the more complicated mysteries of the interwar period….
This is a time for ghost stories. There’s a reason Shakespeare tells us: “A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins.” And why Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and its (superior?) muppets version have retained popularity.
Since pagan times, people have believed in the supernatural potential of the winter solstice. It’s a liminal moment, when the darkness retreats and the light returns, a hinge point where the door between the living and the dead can swing open. (Other liminal moments are considered supernaturally powerful, too. Midnight, for instance. And its opposite – The Apparition of Mrs Veal, sometimes described as the first modern ghost story, has its spirit appear at noon.)
So, as we approach the end of one year and the start of another, do enjoy some spooky stories. The list below features some suggestions beyond the Victorian classics, to give you a nice, contemporary creep….
(6) ES COLE (1924-2024). Fandom recently learned that Esther Cole, who co-chaired the 1954 Worldcon in San Francisco with her husband Les, died a month ago at the age of 100. Rich Lynch has written a tribute: “Farewell, Dear Lady — Es Cole (1924-2024)”.
…Along with his peers J.G. Ballard, Samuel Delany and Philip K. Dick, Malzberg was a central figure in the movement of science fiction away from the external world of adventure fiction and outer space into the psychological torments and struggles of inner space. Technology, these writers all understood, is not something external to humans but changes how we think and how we feel: The registering of technological change in the realm of emotional life was their literary project.
Malzberg was a particularly kindred spirit to Dick, another speed demon—one who batted off books in a matter of weeks during amphetamine-fueled binge sessions at the typewriter. In an interview in the late 1970s, Dick said, “In all the history of science fiction, nobody has ever bum-tripped science fiction as much as Barry Malzberg.… he’s a great writer.”…
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)
Once upon a Christmas season, there was a television show called How The Grinch Stole Christmas. A television show that explicitly had a message that Christmas was neither a celebration of the birth of Christ, nor was it something that comes in a box, but rather is a matter of remembering that we hold each other in our hearts. Warm, fuzzy, and aggressively secular. In 1966 no less!
Aired on December 18 on CBS, the short film, just 26 minutes long, aired on that network for 21 years; ABC has aired it starting 2006, and then Turner Broadcasting has been airing, well until now as you’ll see below. I just watched it after getting it off iTunes where it comes bundled with Horton Hears A Who. (Both of these would be made into films that were awful.) This animated version was written by Christine Kenne from the brief children’s book by Theodore Geisel writing as Dr. Suess; it was produced by him and Chuck Jones who also directed it rather brilliantly.
The animation style looks more than a little flat but that just adds to the feel of it being a folk tale about a villain in his lair high on the mountain, The Grinch, who decides he can’t stand all the noise and commotion of the Whos down in Whoville enjoying Christmas. Not to mention his disgust at them eating the rare roast beast. So he concocts a brilliant scheme to dress as Santie (sic) Claus and take a sleigh down into Whoville (his dog Max with an antler tied to his head being a poor substitute for a reindeer) and steal everything down and including a crumb of food so small that even a mouse wouldn’t eat it.
So up to the top of Mount Crumpet he rides waiting for them to all go ‘boo who’ when they discover everything is gone, but instead he hears them all signing out in joyful voices thereby providing the upbeat moral of this which I noted previously. Hearing this, his heart grows multiple sizes and he rescues the now falling load with ‘the strength of ten Grinches plus two’. Riding into Whoville, he grins ear to ear, and he, the now reformed Grinch, has the honor of carving the roast beast.
I watch it every year this as I really like it. I love the bit, used twice, of increasingly small Whos, once serving tea and the second time a strawberry to a small Who girl, by coming out of a series of covered dishes.
A final note must be devoted to this being I believe the last performances of Boris Karloff who both narrated it, voiced and made the sounds of The Grinch and of this tale which I noted above sung all of its songs save ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch’ which was, though uncredited, sung by Thurl Ravenscroft, one of the booming voices for Kellog’s Frosted Flakes. Karloff won the only performance award he got as he was awarded a Grammy in the Spoken Ward category!
It’s one of the best Christmas shows ever!
It is streaming on Peacock now. So go watch it. The Suck Fairy says you really should.
(9) MORE MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Aurora Winter.]
The Lion in Winter (1968 and 2004)
In 1968 MGM Studios teamed up with James Goldman to adapt his play The Lion in Winter for the screen. At the time the play had been a flop, running for a mere eighty-three performances on Broadway two years previous. The movie was made and was not only a success, but also breathed new interest into the stage version. I first encountered the 1968 film in University and read the script.
The title, for those of you rusty with your English history, refers to King Henry II (the lion was his crest) being in the “winter” of his life. At this point in history King Henry II had a kingdom that stretched into France and was in need of choosing his heir. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry’s wife, was imprisoned in a castle (thanks to Henry who was the key keeper). Goldman’s story is a fictional account of the Christmas court held to determine the future king. A complicated story this is, the wit in the script combined with the actors’ stellar timing make it worth watching again and again.
Seven characters, each tremendously important, make up the cast . . . and what a cast it is. The role of the fifty-year-old (quite old for 1183) King Henry is played by a mature Peter O’Toole. Katherine Hepburn was granted the role of the spunky and vivacious Eleanor of Aquitaine. The three sons up for the throne are: Richard (Anthony Hopkins), John (Nigel Terry), and Geoffrey (John Castle). Let us not forget Alais (Jane Merrow) either, the young girl given to Henry by the French king sixteen years before to one day be the bride for the chosen king. Beyond this it is useless to explain more of the plot as it is far too complicated.
I said that the timing was crucial to the success and enjoyment one can experience with this film. While some may not appreciate a film that finds its humor through fast paced, verbal, intelligent wit with little ‘sight gags’ and no slapstick, I adore it. Each scene seems half the length it actually is because these actors are so tight in their character that they can fire one-liners back and forth without ever seeming fake or forced. One gets the sense that these conversations might have occurred between Eleanor and Henry, Henry and Alais, Richard and Philip, John and Geoff.
The technical aspects of this film are quite impressive too, period costume more accurate than those generally seen in such films. The whole movie takes place within Henry’s castle in Chinon, a vast castle in the cold of December, and the production crew made sure we felt the draft from the open spaces and cold stone. The cinematography often mirrors the long walking shots that we now see all the time on West Wing, creating the feeling that we have been transported back centuries to drop in on this family crisis.
While this film does have some minor downfalls — Morrow’s Alais is a bit too whiney for my taste and a few gems were cut from the original text and replaced with extraneous muck (I’m still holding out for the version that leaves those gems in) — they are easily ignored and outdone by the beauty of the final work. It is no surprise that this launched Anthony Hopkins into stardom, or how so many see Hepburn (she did win the Best Actress Oscar for this role) and O’Toole as the definitive Eleanor and Henry. If, somehow, you have missed this piece of film history, go rent the DVD, sit back, and allow yourself to be transported back to 1183.
I am not a big fan of remakes when it comes to the film industry, especially when the original was so fantastic. But every now and then someone comes along and surprises me with a new-old movie that is as good, or better than the original. This was what I discovered after I watched the 2004 version of The Lion in Winter.
The script is still the same screenplay adaptation Goldman wrote for the 1968 film. The entire framework in the technical areas remained untouched. The actors were the key to bringing this new version to life. I should think it would be rather intimidating to attempt to play Eleanor of Aquitaine or Henry II after Hepburn and O’Toole. The director cast Glenn Close as Eleanor and Patrick Stewart as Henry and the choice could not have been better. Close and Stewart bring to the film a chemistry and wit that Hepburn and O’Toole never did.
With repeated viewings Hepburn’s Eleanor eventually struck me as being a little devoid of the true stoicism and sarcasm that I see the character as having. Close presents an Eleanor whose emotional indicators are much more subtle, the way the character reads on the page. Stewart, too, breathes new life into Henry’s role. He keeps up with Close’s pace and allows enough of Henry’s heart into view, rather than only his determined grip on power; we can stand by him rather than judge him too harshly.
Unfortunately, this film forgot that the story is really about the whole royal family, not simply about Eleanor and Henry. Because of this I think that the supporting cast was not really allowed to find their individual moments in the spotlight the way the play and original film do.
They also, for reasons unknown, decided to skip over the tension between Philip (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and Richard (Andrew Howard). It is one of those little things that doesn’t seem that important to the overall piece, but really it is a massive turning point in the script and I think must be portrayed with that in mind.
Overall, the new version surprised me with just how good it was. As it turned out, my fears about the new version were unfounded, even though it was not without its own disappointments. Luckily, I can fully recommend both versions to anyone who might be interested in this little bit of fictionalized history. In fact, watch them both, one after the other in either order; you won’t be sorry.
[Reprinted from Sleeping Hedgehog.]
(10) TODAY’S ANNIVERSARY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938)
December 19th eighty-six years ago, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas was first published by the Collins Crime Club. In the States, it bore first the title of Murder for Christmas and later A Holiday for Murder when published in paperback. It was the nineteenth novel with him as the Belgian detective; it retailed at seven shillings, six pence.
Critics generally thought it was one of her best mysteries. The New York Times Book Review critic Isaac Anderson said of it that “Poirot has solved some puzzling mysteries in his time, but never has his mighty brain functioned more brilliantly than in Murder for Christmas.”
The story was adapted for television for an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, first aired in the UK on Christmas 1994. The BBC has produced it twice for radio with it first being broadcast on Christmas Eve 1975 with John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot. A second production was broadcast on Christmas Eve 1986 featuring Peter Sallis as Poirot. BritBox here in States is now where you can watch this series.
ABE currently has a UK first edition the cover art below of course for a little over $8700 with this description, “A fine copy with one small neat contemporary date inscription to corner of flap. Some light sporadic foxing to preliminary pages (only). Covers are bright and have no bumping to corners or fading to spine. In original near fine price clipped dust jacket with some archival restoration chiefly to spine tips. An excellent copy.”
(12) EMMA BULL ON CHRISTMAS TAMALES. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Emma Bull, who for a while lived with her husband Will Shetterly in Arizona, says “We have to have tamales on Christmas Eve. Fortunately, local tamale specialists La Loma make excellent ones, since I’m way too lazy to build ’em myself.We have to that ‘have tamales on Christmas Eve. Fortunately, local tamale specialists La Loma make excellent ones, since I’m way too lazy to build ’em myself.’ She added a bit later that the filling is, “Anything vegetarian: cheese and peppers, mostly, or tamales de elote, which are slightly sweet corn masa. Served with roasted garlic salsa and spicy guacamole. The one year Will and I made our own tamales, the filling included wild rice, which sounds weird but which was really tasty.”
(13) THE FIRST ONE IS FREE. Max is sharing the first full episode of “Creature Commandos Season 1” to entice subscribers.
Amanda Waller assembles the Creature Commandos — led by General Rick Flag Sr. — and sends them to Pokolistan to protect Princess Ilana Rostovic.
(14) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Dan Monroe reveals the many ways in which the award-winning Peanuts classic differs from the version originally aired in “Whatever Happened to A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS?”
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Lise Andreasen, Rich Lynch, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
By Rich Lynch: There was sad news today. I found out that a dear friend for more than 30 years had passed.
Esther Cole had been a science fiction fan for a lot longer than I had known her – more than 80 years, in fact. She had met her husband Lester in 1944, and from the way she’d described it he had pretty much swept her off her feet:
“Les came a-wooing with a copy of The Black Flame. In it, the protagonist wears a gown of Alexandrites, so when Les told me Alexandrites sold for $10,000 a carat and promised to drape me in them, my answer was YES YES YES YES YES (exactly like Sally to Harry).”
Esther and Lester Cole at the 1954 Worldcon. Photo by Wally Weber.
Lester and Esther Cole were members of that famous West Coast fan club, The Elves’, Gnomes’ and Little Men’s Science Fiction, Chowder, and Marching Society which in the 1950s had several claims to fame, the most notable of which being an actual claim for a tract of land on the moon. It had resulted in mainstream news coverage around the world. A bit later in the decade they were the host organization for the 1954 World Science Fiction Convention (held in San Francisco), and that had been the conduit for my first contact with Les and Es.
It was back in 1991, when I’d been doing some background research for a new edition of Harry Warner, Jr.’s 1950s fan history book A Wealth of Fable, that I’d contacted them to gather additional information about the 1954 Worldcon for which Les had been co-chair and Esther the treasurer. It was two years later, at the 1993 Worldcon (also in San Francisco), that I got to meet them – they had attended to participate in discussion panels about fandom from that fabulous decade of the 1950s. I was moderator for the panel about the `54 Worldcon and I remember that it was both informative and very entertaining.
It was the beginning of a terrific friendship with the Coles, and following the convention Nicki and I persuaded them to contribute essays to our fanzine Mimosa. The first of Es’s appeared in the 16th issue, in December 1994, and described the half century that she and Les had been fans. It was titled, appropriately, “I Married a Science Fiction” and evoked a comment from another fanzine publisher that this was the kind of article he would want to build an issue around. After that there were three more by her that we published: “Stalking the Vampire”, about how an invasive bat (which may or may not have been Count Dracula) had disrupted things in the Little Men’s suite at the 1952 Chicago Worldcon hotel; “The Gods of Rushmore”, about how the return trip to California from the 1952 Worldcon had included a brief side trip into the Twilight Zone; and (in our final issue) “Hot Watermelon”, about another epic Worldcon road trip, this time from Oakland to New Orleans for the 1951 Nolacon. Good reads all of them, and each one filled with history about that golden era of fandom.
Nicki and Es during out 2018 visit. Photo by Rich Lynch.
Nicki and I visited the Coles several times at their home in Ventura after that memorable 1993 Worldcon, the last time in the summer of 2018 on our way up the California coast to Worldcon 76. When it came time to plan for the trip we had many options for places to go and things to do before we ended up in San Jose. But every one of them included a stopover in Ventura. Les and Es were both in their nineties and even though neither they nor we wanted to acknowledge it, we all knew it might well be the last time we’d see each other.
It turned out that Les had not been feeling well and had just returned home from a short stay in the hospital, but Es was as buoyant as we’d remembered her from our previous visit a dozen years earlier. We sat around the dining room table with her, bringing back some of the memories from the past quarter century of our friendship and telling her about some of what was going on in current-day fandom. Time passed too quickly, and then it was time to go.
We never saw them again. Les’s health continued to deteriorate and he died about a year after our visit. And, just today, I learned of Es’s passing. She had moved to an assisted living community in Ventura about a year after Les died and this past year had reached her 100th birthday. She’d stopped answering emails and surface mail a few years ago, and every December since then we’d sent her a holiday greeting card hoping that it would not come back to us. But this year it did.
I called the assisted living community and asked about her, and that’s how I learned that she had died. The woman I talked to told me that it had happened less than a month ago. And that she’d had a peaceful existence in her years there.
So here I am today, looking at that returned holiday card and remembering some of the visits that Nicki and I had made over the years to see her and Les. The card had come back with the usual “Return to Sender” ink stamp, but it also had something that, while true, was unintentionally amusing: “Unable to Forward”. Pretty sure Es, wherever her spirit may be, is chuckling about that. Farewell, dear lady. I’m missing you.
(0) Heading back to spend Christmas Eve at my brother’s. Thanks to Cat for doing some heavy lifting today providing items to suit the season!
(1) THE POINT. Charlie Jane Anders discusses paid sff book reviewing in “What Are Book Critics For?” at Happy Dancing.
…In any case, my sense is that a healthy book-review ecosystem would include both cheerleading and harsh criticism. Possibly from the same person in the same place, possibly in different places for different audiences. We need to bang a drum in support of the great books that are possibly slipping through the cracks — which is also an increasing problem, as I wrote about a while ago. But we also need to point out the ways in which authors and publishers are short-changing us by failing to deliver the best versions of their stories.
One bedrock principle that I think applies for both cheerleading and harsh criticism? You have to review the story someone wrote, not the book you wish they had written. If someone wrote a book about pirates, there’s no point in complaining that you wish they’d written a book about circus performers instead. You chose to pick up a book that wasn’t your cup of tea, and you could have known in advance that it was about pirates if you’d bother to read the back cover. Get over it! (Also, if you hate books with yellow covers, just don’t read books with yellow covers. It’s not that hard.)…
As a bonus, Anders circulated gift links to a pair of her recent columns for the Washington Post.
A stack of mid-’70s Marvel Comics memos reminds me which Golden Age greats Stan Lee didn’t want invited to the 1975 Mighty Marvel Con, my discomfort with what is probably a comic book editor’s most important role, the day I donned a Spider-Man suit and crawled around the Bullpen, how Uri Geller destroyed my key to the Marvel Comics men’s room, my snarky response when a publisher wanted me to find the smoking gun which would shut down our competition, why our softball team dubbed me the “Most Improved Player for a Boy,” and much more.
(3) A CROW GIRLS CHRISTMAS. Cat Eldridge has a look at Charles de Lint’s Newford Stories: The Crow Girls where he says of the Crow Girls of ‘all the immortal shapeshifting being that inhabit the Newford stories, the most charming at least for me are Maida and Zia, the two crow girls, who look like pinkish teenagers all in black naturally. After you read that review, you can experience them firsthand in A Crow Girls Christmas written by Charles de Lint and charmingly illustrated by his late wife, MaryAnn Harris.
“We have jobs,” Maida told Jilly when she and Zia dropped by the professor’s house for a visit at the end of November. Zia nodded happily. “Yes, we’ve become veryvery respectable.” Jilly had to laugh. “I can’t imagine either of you ever being completely respectable.”…
(4) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Ellen Kushner’s The Golden Dreydl
Someday I’ll get blasé about the amazing things that show up unexpectedly in the post.
But that won’t happen for quite some time if exquisite things such as Ellen Kushner’s The Golden Dreydl (Charlesbridge, 2007) keep showing up here! This short novel holds wonders which will brighten up anyone who reads it. It’s that good.
A golden dreydl is, in case you haven’t encountered one, a toy, the name being Yiddish, dreydl for ‘to turn or twist’. It is a 4-sided toy marked with Hebrew letters and spun like a top in a game of chance. It’s common enough that many children not Hebrew have played with one in the days when such simple toys were all there were for entertainment. (I am not being nostalgic — just stating what was. Times change, toys change.) This dreydl, this golden dreydl, is not a simple toy but rather one capable of true magic. Indeed for one small girl, Sarah by name, on a winter’s night at her family’s Chanukah party, this toy will bring wonders.
But before this charming book, there was a wonderful CD and Judith Gennet who reviewed that recording for us back a few years ago tells what this story is about:
The plot to the story is as follows. One Chanukah night, a tradition-weary child named Sarah receives a magic golden dreydl (a clever cross between a top and a die) from her Aunt Miriam. While fighting with her brother, the dreydl is catapulted disastrously into the TV screen. Crack! Later, Sarah finds the dreydl laying on the floor in the form of a girl, and they then leap through the injured screen into the golden dreydl’s world, sort of like an Oz or Wonderland. (A TV screen? How symbolic!)
Oh, but not all is well in the world that the golden dreydl comes from, as here be dragons which are most unfriendly.
The Golden Dreydl was inspired by the music of the renowned band Shirim, who created a klezmer version of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker Suite’ for Chanukah. (Really — it does work rather well!) Did I mention that what appears to be a toy is really a princess? Thought not. Suffice it to say that Sarah has a guide to this world — that princess. Is a good story. Indeed it is. As Judith said in her review of the recording, ‘be a fun album for kids, for those interested in Jewish heritage, and for adults who like fairy stories. The Golden Dreydl could easily evolve into a holiday tradition.’ I agree.
Like Jane Yolen’s The Wild Hunt, I adore this novel. Both the text by Ellen Kushner and the design of book itself are perfect. Each novel has illustrations that add to the enjoyment of the text; each is a short enough read (as is any great fairy tale) that it lends itself to repeated reading either for your own pleasure or loud to others. Though both are too recent to be classics yet in children’s literature, they should be within a few years.
Oh, do buy the recording as well. You’ll find it just as charming.
[Reprinted from Sleeping Hedgehog.]
(5) SPEAKING OF THAT RECORDING. Learn all about “Ellen’s Musical Picks for the Holidays” at (the modestly-named) Ellen Kushner’s Bad Advice newsletter. “…with an exceptional number of footnotes, even for me, including but not limited to a whole separate substack about the life and times of public radio in America, + some other stuff.”
…I love a live audience like a dog loves a bone. In fact, one of them, The Golden Dreydl: a Klezmer Nutcracker for Chanukah, which I created and performed with Boston’s Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, has had more lives than an empty jam jar: first it was a holiday radio special, then an album, then a book, then a kids’ play in NYC. You can hear the album on streaming services like Spotify, with my narration….
For my money you cannot possible do better for Christmas Cheer than going to the Bahamas for the great singer/guitarist Joseph Spence’s attempt to remember the words to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” and finally deciding no one really cares, and just doing it his way.
It will make you laugh. It has been test-driven in the Kushner/Sherman household is how I know.
(6) COMICS SECTION.
Bizarro finds the Peter Principle applies at the North Pole.
(7) HOLIDAY SHOPPING. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] It’s a decade old but worth linking to: “Small, Strange Businesses” at Kathleen, Kage and the Company.
Christmas was a great time for Kage [Baker]. Before we began working Dickens, she had me drive her to favourite malls or department stores, where she would spend a happy afternoon working her way through her Christmas list. It was always enormous – she was one of 6 true-born and a few foster siblings, most of whom had also promptly had offspring; she was a several-times-over honourary aunt, too. The pile under our Christmas tree was always huge – at least until we took most of it over to someone’s house on Christmas morning….
… She ranged from Halcyon to Cambria-By-The-Sea when we lived on the Central Coast, a 50 mile arc through vineyards and meadows full of white cattle and egrets and matillja poppies … from the post office across the street from the Temple of the People (you could buy essential oils and activated crystals in both places), via the lead soldier store by Moonstone Beach to Heart’s Ease Nursery: the small businesses Kage favoured outshone Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. And they were real….
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Scott Edelman, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
Disney, 20th Century, and Sony just did something that major studios haven’t done in two decades: Released a brand new film on VHS. Boutique physical media labels and collectors online have been selling new movies on VHS for a while, and occasionally a smaller indie studio like A24 will put a specific movie out on tape. When it comes to the big studios, though, there hasn’t been an official VHS release since A History of Violence back in 2006.
That changed this month with the home debut of Alien: Romulus. In honor of the success that Alien found on VHS back in the ’80s and ’90s, the team behind Romulus wanted to produce a nostalgic replica that movie fans could appreciate. So Disney (whose physical media now runs through Sony) put out a very limited release of Alien: Romulus on VHS. The preorders sold out quickly and now the only way to find an official copy is to look for resellers online, so you’ll likely pay a bit of a premium….
(2) THE IMMORTAL SHORTS OF SFF. New Scientist has posted a list of “The 26 best sci-fi short stories of all time – according to New Scientist writers”. Lots of legitimate picks here – classics by Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, Russ, plus more recent candidates for sf immortality by Jemisin, Roanhorse, Martha Wells. Here’s an example:
Fire Watch by Connie Willis (1982)
There is a popular what-if scenario of going back in time to assassinate Adolf Hitler before he can start the second world war. Connie Willis’s 1982 novelette Fire Watch takes a completely different tack by immediately plunging its time-travelling narrator into confusion as he appears in London during the Nazi German Luftwaffe’s bombing raids in 1940. The narrator is tasked with joining fellow volunteers in the seemingly Sisyphean task of putting out incendiary bombs on the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral that threaten to burn down the hallowed landmark, even as he struggles with his real assignment of trying to figure out why his history professors have chosen to send him back to that harrowing period without adequate education or preparation. As an added complication, the narrator begins to suspect a fellow fire watch member of subversive wartime activities while he himself struggles to blend in and avoid blowing his cover with the locals. As the narrative follows a series of dated diary entries from the increasingly paranoid and exhausted narrator, Willis’s story shines by treating time travel as a tool used judiciously by historians to bear witness and deepen their understanding of humanity, rather than depicting it as a superpower for manipulating the past or future. Jeremy Hsu
Nearly a decade ago, my now-husband first introduced me to the Star Trek franchise by way of the series Star Trek: Enterprise. “You’ll like this one,” he assured me, “it’s got a dog in it.”
Porthos, the dog belonging to Captain Jonathan Archer, portrayed by Scott Bakula, is one example of Star Trek’s odd pets. They’re cute and lovable, but there’s something just not quite right about them. It wasn’t until 2009’s Star Trek cinematic reboot when Scotty, played by actor Simon Pegg, says that he tested the particle beam on “Admiral Archer’s prized beagle” that I realized why. The dogs, cats, fish, Targs (Klingon boars), and other animals of Star Trek are portrayed as individual domestic pets of their owners when they are in fact maritime animals.
In 1898, the Southern Cross Expedition took around ninety dogs to Antarctica.1 The dogs were brought for their power, for their ability to carry people around camp in the most inhospitable conditions. As the first canines to set foot in the South Pole, though, these dogs were also agents of colonization – proven by a massacre of penguins that magnetic scientist William Colbeck described as “heartbreaking.”2 But this doesn’t feel like any of the pets I know of in the Star Trek universe. Despite being a Beagle, Porthos isn’t known for his hunting abilities. Captain Picard’s fish, Livingstone, certainly isn’t much of a threat. Grudge the cat from Star Trek: Discovery is, perhaps, the closest match, but still not an obvious representation of colonial domination.3
As I read more about the Southern Cross Expedition, I realized the dogs’ roles were much more complicated. During a particularly harrowing part of the expedition, some of the men were pushed to the limits of exploration. Left with limited options and dangerous conditions, the explorers measured their humanity by how each man treated the dogs. Physicist Louis Bernacchi wrote of his disdain for commanding officer and surveyor Carsten Borchgrevink’s “barbaric” treatment of the dogs after the especially tragic death of the dog Bismark. In his own writing, Borchgrevink described scientist Anton Fougner as “noble” for working to dig a grave in the frozen earth for his puppy.4 The role these dogs played during the most intensive part of the journey was to reflect the scientist explorer’s humanity back to them.
In this lens, the Trek pet who best symbolizes these dogs is Data’s cat, Spot. On a traditional maritime ship, Spot’s role as a cat would be pest control. He would spend his time hunting rats and cockroaches. He might even share this role with other animals like chickens or a small terrier. On the Enterprise, Spot’s role is to humanize Data, both to others on the ship and to Data himself. The odd thing about Spot, though, is that this is largely where his story line ends. At the risk of being too punny, we don’t ever “see Spot run” – down the corridor, to his friends, or into trouble. Unlike other maritime animals, Spot isn’t everyone’s cat – a mascot….
Earlier this year we invited scientists from across the world to send in their images in the categories of Astronomy, Behaviour, Earth Science and Climatology, Ecology and Environmental Science, and Microimaging. We are delighted to now present the winners and runners-up, including our overall winner from the Behaviour category Angela Albi for her image “The hunt from above”.
“We’re known as the bumper sticker couple now, I’m sure,” said Brian Gebhart, 32, who, with his fiancée, Alyssa Walker, 30, runs Frog Mustard, one of the most prolific creators of this genre of bumper stickers. They release a handful of new ones each week to their more than 35,000 Instagram followers, whom they call the Frog Army.
The couple started the company last winter, after Mr. Gebhart had a mountain biking accident and needed extra money to pay for a surgery. They came up with Frog Mustard — a moniker as nonsensical as many of their designs — by using a random name generator.
Their first designs included a sticker that read “E.T. for City Council” and another with a crying kitten and an appeal to fellow drivers: “Sorry for speeding! But my cat is at home alone!”
By the spring, after a series of viral TikTok posts, the business was growing ever faster. Soon, the couple was investing in an industrial vinyl printer and operating out of their basement home office in Kent, Wash. The business is now a full-time job for Mr. Gebhart, and Ms. Walker maintains a corporate tech job while producing many of the designs.
Frog Mustard now averages 1,200 orders a month with a stock of about 350 designs, they said.
In American culture, where cars are often seen as physical extensions of their owners’ personality, bumper stickers have long been a way to make a vehicle distinctly your own, reflecting your politics and interests. They used to represent earnestness and authenticity: This car really did climb Mount Washington; I do support this presidential candidate; my child actually is an honor student….
Sing to me, muse! Details of Christopher Nolan‘s star-studded next project at Universal have finally been revealed.
According to a new X post from Universal Pictures, the filmmaker’s next project “is a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology. The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to IMAX film screens for the first time and opens in theaters everywhere on July 17, 2026.”…
(7) A ROOM OF HIS OWN. George R.R. Martin was feted when he visited his childhood hometown of Bayonne, NJ: “A Day to Remember” at Not A Blog.
…Bayonne has changed some over the years…the city has lost all its movie houses, and Uncle Milty’s Amusement Park where I had my first job… but the projects are still there, and Brady’s Dock, and Mary Jane Donohoe School on 5th Street… the candy store on Kelly Parkway where I bought my comic books and Ace Doubles is still there, and so is the Fifth Street Deli-Ette… oh, and Hendrickson’s Corner, and Judicke’s sprinkle Donuts…
And the public library remains… changed some, yes… but better than ever.
I remember the library. I always will.
And it would seem that the library remembers me. They have just completed some renovations, and did me the honor of naming one of the new rooms after me: the George R.R. Martin Room for Popular Fiction. To mark the occasion, they declared October 15 to be George R.R. Martin.
That is… so cool, so… so… well, words fail me….
…The library also added a wonderful mosaic dragon to its decor.
(8) NICE HOLIDAY MILK STOUT AND NAUGHTY EGG NOG ALE. [Item by Denise Kitashima Dutton.] I love a good stout. Hell, I’ll even take a mediocre stout if I’m really desperate. Because there’s nothing like the full-bodied flavor of a dark beer. So when Flying Dog Brewery here in Maryland decided to repeat their “Naughty” and “Nice” brews this year, I was excited to learn that “Nice” would be a Holiday Milk Stout. When I found out that “Naughty” would be an Egg Nog Ale? I was a bit iffy. But I’ll cop to a particular bias here; as a Marylander, I like to play favorites with my breweries. Doesn’t mean I don’t have favorites elsewhere – hello there, Shiner and Three Floyds – but the brewers in my home state do get a special benefit of the doubt. So I decided to tuck into both.
First off, let’s go Naughty, shall we? Medium-tall head, nice and foamy, quick to dissipate. Beautifully clear and golden (a much lighter color than their press images), with an almost champagne-like carbonation effervescence. While the “yellow beer” is something that everyone can recognize, there’s a warmth to this golden color, and the long-lasting fizz makes me want to keep tipping it back, if only to get yet another look at those tiny bubbles.
Then there’s the aroma. A nose that sends out the spices, but not with a wallop; a scent that invites rather than demands. That comes with the tasting. There’s a strong allspice and nutmeg hit on first sip, and while the spices are definitely loud and proud, it didn’t shock me out of a second sip. Or a third. There’s no rum notes here, though the idea of a barrel-aged Egg Nog Naughty wouldn’t be amiss. It’s just spice, spice and a touch of fizz.
As with Shiner’s Texas Warmer, this is a beer that ain’t afraid to get right up in your face. And I respect that. While the heavy spice may put off some, if you’re having a cheese and charcuterie evening, a sugar cookie sampling, or just want a bit of holiday spice while watching A Christmas Carol for the umpteenth time, Naughty‘s got your back.
Then there’s Nice, which starts off with a light, quick to dissipate head. And is that a hint of cascading that I see? Absolutely. Who doesn’t love watching their beer move in the glass like that? The beer itself is an absolutely gorgeous, clear, deep chocolate brown color I could get lost in. And with a 7.2 ABV, that’s not necessarily a figurative statement.
Nice is almost creamy, as a milk stout should be. The chocolate is a strong nib flavor, with a hint of toasty/smokiness that balances out the sweetness. This is a rough-trade sweetness; think the umami of cocoa rather than the overkill of candy. The creaminess of the mouthfeel and the bitter tang of the chocolate combine nicely, giving Nice a wonderful drinkability.
Another sip, and I catch a hint of Nice‘s fizzy, almost sharp, carbonation. But it’s such a fine bubble that it’s buzzy rather than off-putting. There’s no effervescence here, but with such a deeply colored beer, it’d be almost impossible to see anyway. Plus, anything overly fizzy would get in the way of the robust flavors in this stout.
I’d recommend this for dessert binges, a hearty brunch with pancakes and maple sausage, or as a dessert in and of itself. I’d also love to be able to find a six-pack of this to take camping; I’m betting s’mores would be a wonderful go-with. Nice is exactly that; robust but not heavy, flavorful but not too “busy”, smooth but substantial.
And yeah, I decided to do a half-and-half. And let’s just say that while these two beers play well with my tastebuds separately? It’s like sucking back a mouthful of Christmas tree if you combine ’em. I just can’t hang with that much powerful flavor all at once.
Naughty Egg Nog Ale Style: American Strong Ale ABV/Alcohol By Volume: 8.4%
[Reprinted fromGreen Man Reviewbecause it’s too good not to share.Denise Kitashima Dutton has been a reviewer since 2003, and hopes to get the hang of things any moment now. She believes that bluegrass is nothell in music form, and that beer is better when it’s a nitro pour. You can find her at Atomic Fangirl, Movie-Blogger.com, or at that end seat at the bar, multi-tasking with her Kindle.]
(9) GWYNETH JONES SF WRITER ON CHESTNUTS. [Item by Gwyneth Jones.]
Gwyneth Jones
Chestnuts, I’m obsessed with chestnuts at Christmas.
The obsession dates back to childhood, when chestnuts roasted over the coals on a fire-shovel were a winter treat, back in the primitive and labour intensive days when my parents’ house was heated by an Aga (solid fuel range) in the kitchen, and coal/wood fires elsewhere. And marrons glacees were the ultimate in sophistication… until I finally tried them, and wondered what the fuss was about. (I’m sure they’re very nourishing, by the way.)
Now I live in Sussex, I expect to forage a kilo or so of sweet chestnuts in October or November. After that it’s hit or miss. One year I slung them in the freezer wet and still in the shell & they defrosted as mush. Another year I left them in a copper bowl in a corner they went mouldy & the bowl suffered too. The supermarket then provides, boring!
Still, enough times the chestnuts survive, and then it’s the awful day of reckoning. People will tell you (e.g. Elizabeth David, see below) that there is a knack to peeling chestnuts and once you know it you will never look back. They lie. Usually it’s pure masochism, burned fingertips, outbursts of rage.
Then you eat them with sprouts and crispy bacon or put them in the stuffing. But this is one of the best rewards for all the pain:
Chestnut and Chocolate Cake.
Shell and skin 1lb (450g) of chestnuts.
Cover them with milk (either skimmed milk or half and half milk & water), and simmer until very soft — about an hour. Drain off the liquid & sieve or mash the chestnuts to a smooth puree. Save the liquid, it’s a beautiful stock base.
Make a syrup with 3 oz (100g) sugar and 2-3 tablespoons of water. Add this to puree, with 2 oz (about 70g) softened butter. When you have these ingredients well mixed leave to stand. Brush a small loaf tin, or other half litre/1 pt rectangular mold, with sweet oil (almond oil or similar), and fill it with the soft “dough”. Set to chill in a refrigerator for 24hrs.
Next day, make a chocolate coating with around 100g dark chocolate, adding a couple of teaspoons of sugar to the melted chocolate, & let the paste cool slightly. Turn the chestnut cake out of the mold, use a smooth-edged knife dipped in water to coat it with chocolate. Leave to chill again before serving.
This recipe is from Elizabeth David, French Provincial Cooking. You will find the lies about chestnut peeling on p. 265, blotted with my tears.
[From the Archives of the Sleeping Hedgehog.]
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
December 23, 1960 — Twilight Zone’s “Night of The Meek”
On December 23, 1960, Twilight Zone’s “The Night of the Meek” first aired. It was one of the six episodes of the second season which was shot on videotape in a failed attempt to cut costs. Networks and their bean counters.
This was a Christmas-themed story with Art Carney as a Santa Claus fired on Christmas Eve who finds a mysterious bag that gives an apparently unlimited stream of gifts. But before we learn that we have this opening scene and narration:
“As snow begins to fall, a drunk Henry Corwin (Carney) wearing his Santa Claus suit, leans against a curbside lamppost. He is approached by two tenement children begging for toys, a Christmas dinner, and ‘a job for my daddy.’ As he begins to sob, the camera turns to Rod Serling standing on the sidewalk:
“This is Mr. Henry Corwin, normally unemployed, who once a year takes the lead role in the uniquely popular American institution, that of the department-store Santa Claus in a road-company version of ‘The Night Before Christmas’. But in just a moment Mr. Henry Corwin, ersatz Santa Claus, will enter a strange kind of North Pole which is one part the wondrous spirit of Christmas and one part the magic that can only be found… in the Twilight Zone.”
The script would be reused in the Eighties version of this series, and on the radio program as well.
Serling ended the original broadcast with the words, “And a Merry Christmas, to each and all”, but that phrase was deleted in the Eighties for reasons never made clear and would not be back until Netflix started streaming the series. The series runs on Paramount+ now in its original full, uncensored version. The line is still missing from all the DVD versions.
John Fielder who is Mister Dundee here would have a second Twilight Zone appearance in “Cavander is Coming” in which he has the lead as the Angel Harmon Cavender.
Oh, and let’s note that it’s a cat that mysteriously starts off this tale by knocking down a large burlap bag full of empty cans, which when Corwin trips over it, is then filled with gifts. See cats are magical!
Serling ends with this narration:
“A word to the wise to all the children of the Twentieth Century, whether their concern be pediatrics or geriatrics, whether they crawl on hands and knees and wear diapers or walk with a cane and comb their beards. There’s a wondrous magic to Christmas and there’s a special power reserved for little people. In short, there’s nothing mightier than the meek. And a Merry Christmas to each and all.”
One morning in early 1985, the comic strip creator Berkeley Breathed received a call from an unlikely fan: Ronald Reagan.
Breathed had started “Bloom County,” the wily tale of several eccentric middle-American animals — human and otherwise — five years earlier. Its cast included an emo penguin named Opus as well as Bill the Cat, a droopy-tongued, occasionally comatose former presidential candidate with a penchant for Tender Vittles and cocaine.
On its surface, “Bloom County” didn’t seem particularly Gipper-friendly. But a recent installment had featured a flattering image of the first lady, Nancy Reagan, and the president wanted to express his gratitude.
When Reagan finally reached Breathed at his home in Iowa City, the cartoonist had stepped out of the shower. “Mr. President,” Breathed told Reagan, “you should probably know I’m not wearing any pants right now.” Their chat went well, and not long afterward, Breathed found himself seated with Reagan at a state dinner, where the two discussed the president’s film career….
(13) WHEN THE MOON IS IN THE SEVENTH HOUSE. “Particle Could Be Portal to Fifth Dimension: What Is Dark Matter?” at Popular Mechanics. I had to run a link to a headline about the “Fifth Dimension”. I didn’t know any more about the subject once I finished the article, but it did leave me humming the “Wedding Bell Blues”.
Scientists say they can explain dark matter by positing a particle that links to a fifth dimension.
Our knowledge of the physical universe relies on the idea of dark matter, which takes up the vast majority of matter in the universe. Dark matter is a kind of pinch hitter that helps scientists explain how gravity works, because a lot of features would dissolve or fall apart without an “x factor” of dark matter. Even so, dark matter doesn’t disrupt the particles we do see and “feel,” meaning it must have other special properties as well….
…Could dimension-traveling fermions explain at least some of the dark matter scientists have so far not been able to observe? “We know that there is no viable [dark matter] candidate in the [standard model of physics],” the scientists say, “so already this fact asks for the presence of new physics.”…
Wishing you a holiday season full of light and laughter as we flip over into the new year!
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mark Roth-Whitworth, John A Arkansawyer, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]
By Daniel Dern: For (us) constant, curious readers, one of the values of brick’n’mortar public libraries (and bookstores, particularly used bookstores), is the opportunistic proximal adjacency — seeing books that you aren’t looking for, because they’re in your field of vision while you’re looking something else. (Or, at least for me, on the “Returns to be filed” cart, etc.)
(Cliff Stoll talked about a similar thing in (I believe) his book Silicon Snake Oil, in espousing that virtue of (physical) card catalogs.)
Although I still am a regular IRL public library patron borrowing physical books’n’such, I’m also a regular e-library user. And although I’ve been using the apps for nearly as long as they’ve been available, I keep finding new features/tricks…either because they’ve been added, or I only finally noticed/tried ’em.
Earlier this week, for example: I discovered/noticed an amusing/interesting feature on
Unlike Hoopla (hoopladigital.com), which lets cardholders from (participating) libraries get (free-to-cardholder) access to Hoopla’s digital holdings (including lots of digital comic books!) — i.e., as far as I know, all Hoopla users see the same choices (although each library decides how many Hoopla borrows-per-month its cardholders get, among other things), Libby provides access to (your) library’s own digital holdings.
(Note, both Hoopla and Libby are available both as web pages and as Android/iOS mobile apps.)
A few days ago, I noticed that there’s a “RANDOM” button on the main Libby page. [Click for larger image.]
Which, when you (well, I) click on it, yields a, well, random view, first indicating how many titles are in the catalog [for my library, just now, 156,111, it says], followed by:
“All the titles in our catalog, randomized for serendipitous discovery.”
For example: [Click for larger image.]
Interestingly, on my first experiment, the first screen (on my iPad) included Volume 7 of the Long List Anthology (of Worldcon Hugo nominations — in this specific volume, 24 stories, 400 pages), along with Lev Grossman’s Codex (which preceded his Magicians trilogy and, at least so far in my reading — only a few dozen pages — isn’t connected to said trilogy).
FYI, the randomization order is “persistent” within the session: “The randomized order of titles in this list will be remembered for the rest of your session. This is a defining filter of the list you’re viewing. It cannot be toggled on or off for this list.”
I.e., you’ll see this randomization until you close the session — letting you scroll a bunch on a given randomization.
ASIFA-Hollywood has announced the nominations for its 2025 Annie Awards for animation.
Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot leads the field with 10 nominations, followed by Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and Aardman and Netflix’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, each with seven.
The Annie Awards will be presented on February 8.
The winners of the following special awards have also been announced.
The Winsor McCay Awardin recognition of lifetime or career contributions
Disney Supervising Animator/Director and educator Aaron Blaise
National Film Board of Canada (NFB) writer, director, producer and Academy Award influencer Eunice Macaulay (posthumous)
NFB composer and sound designer Normand Roger
The June Foray Awardfor significant and benevolent impact
To the global non-profit Women In Animation, advocating for gender equity and inclusion in animation, VFX, and gaming.
The Ub Iwerks Awardfor technical advancement affecting the animation industry
To visual effects, animation and gaming pioneer Alberto Menache
The Special Achievement Awardfor unique and outstanding achievement
Directing at Disney: The Original Directors of Walt’s Animated Films, the historically important new book by Pete Docter and Don Peri
The complete list of Annie Award nominees follows the jump.
(1) IS THIS MISSING, OR JUST HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT? Ross Douthat tells New York Times readers “We Need a Great American Fantasy” (link bypasses the paywall.)
Any cultural critic can complain, as I did in last weekend’s column, about the lack of creativity in American popular culture right now and the unmet “hunger for a certain kind of popular art” amid so much institutionalized unoriginality. It’s a bit harder to give writers or filmmakers specific marching orders. What exact kind of popular art are we missing? What specificachievement should American creators be aiming for?…
…If I were giving out assignments for would-be invigorators of our stuck culture, I would suggest new experiments in the national fantastic and a quest for the Great American Fantasy story….
… Just as political thinkers like Louis Hartz have argued that America lacks a true conservative tradition, being a liberal nation from the get-go, someone could argue that the Great American Fantasy is actually an impossibility, since the fantasy genre is concerned with the transition from the premodern to the modern, the enchanted to the disenchanted, and America has been disenchanted and commercial and capitalist from Day 1….
… Greer commends the musical “Hadestown” (which I have not seen) for trying to work in this terrain, and there are plenty of other examples of attempts at the American fantastic. I mentioned “Wicked” earlier because L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” is probably the most enduringly influential work of American subcreation, but a longer list would encompass pulp magazines and “Weird Tales” and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “John Carter of Mars” books and then work its way forward to Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series, Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” (an Englishman writing American fantasy) and, of course, Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” saga, with special nods to H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury for working in zones where fantasy blurs into horror or science fiction. (You could also argue that space opera, from “Flash Gordon” to “Star Wars,” is actually the key American contribution to the fantasy genre, but that would take a separate essay to unpack; you could argue that superheroes are the American form of fantasy, but you’d be wrong.)…
The Writers Guild of America has prohibited its members from working with Village Roadshow for the time being after the company refused to pay numerous writers.
“It has come to the Guild’s attention that over the last few months, Village Roadshow hasn’t paid writers on numerous projects,” the WGAW wrote in a statement on Saturday. “Village Roadshow owes writers compensation, interest and benefit contributions but has refused to pay. As such, the Guild has determined that Village Roadshow is not reliable or financially responsible and requires the posting of a bond to protect writers. Village Roadshow has, to date, refused to do so.”
As a result, the company is on the guild’s strike list until further notice.
“It is crucial that Village Roadshow be prevented from undercutting writers’ standards and conditions,” the statement continued. “Village Roadshow cannot be allowed to benefit from writing services provided by WGA members.”…
(3) ORC REAPPRAISAL. Robin Anne Reid links to “Orcs are People!” at Writing from Ithilien.
A list of sources that show how readers’ perceptions of Orcs have changed over time: first, from The Silmarillion Writers Guild: Orcs are People! The SWG does a fantastic job not only of archiving fanworks (all media), but inspiring them (through prompts and challenges), and curating Themed Collections (which are always acknowledged to be incomplete and request that readers provide additional items to add to the collection.
This collection by Curathol shows how some fans have challenged the all too common stereotypes of Orcs as “instruments of evil,” a view that Tolkien’s own writing challenges:
“Whatever Tolkien’s final thoughts, his works depict Orcs with an undeniable humanity—they sing songs, chafe against Big Bosses, and even seek vengeance for deaths of family or comrades. Whether by intent or no, they were people beyond being mere pawns driven by a Dark Lord’s will.
“Though within Tolkien’s world ‘Evil cannot create,’ it would do to remember that Morgoth was not wholly evil in his beginning. If they exist beyond Morgoth’s will, then by some measure they must also be Children of Eru. Even Finrod argued against the power of Morgoth to so wholly alter The One’s design. While the deepest philosophical questions of Orcs may remain unanswered by the Professor, his fans may, if not restore a lost humanity, firmly bestow one upon them….”
The live-action introduction to the new DC Universe got off to a massive start, according to James Gunn. The filmmaker announced on his social media platforms Friday that the “Superman” teaser trailer was viewed over 250 million times in its first day.
“Krypto really did take us home: With over 250 million views and a million social posts, ‘Superman’ is officially the most viewed and the most talked about trailer in the history of both DC and Warner Bros,” Gunn wrote. “This is because of all of you: thank you! We’re incredibly grateful and, most of all, excited to share this movie with you in July. Happy Holidays!”
According to Gunn, the Superman teaser views blew many of this year’s studio tentpoles out of the water. The first “Joker: Folie à Deux” trailer launched with 167 million views in its first 24 hours, for instance, while “Inside Out 2,” the highest-grossing movie of the year with $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office, launched its trailer to 157 million views. Marvel’s “Deadpool and Wolverine” trailer still holds the record for biggest trailer launch of all time with 365 million views….
Heavens! Oh, it’s you, Doctor Blathery: forgive me, you gave me an awful fright. You see it’s the queerest thing: this little stone statue I inherited with the cottage when I moved to this sleepy village from London (where everybody hates me because I’m from London), well, it seems to me … Oh, you shall call me half-mad! It seems to be moving around from room to room when I’m not looking. I swear it to you: last night, while I was reading by the fire and holding a handkerchief – which I do every night because it’s Victorian times and they haven’t invented telly yet – it was over on the dressing table, and now … why, it’s on the dining room chair! Doctor, you look shaken. Take a seat, I shall fetch you some brandy. Doctor: what happened to the charming young couple who lived here afore me all those years ago? You … you knew her, didn’t you?
Sorry, sorry. I slip into “Victorian voice” a lot at Christmas. Christmas, as you know, is the best time of the year – Coke adverts! Quality Street! One binbag for the recyclable wrapping paper and another, much plumper bag for the glossy stuff! – but it’s also a weirdly spooky one, and is arguably a better time to consume a ghost story than Halloween is. Thankfully. the BBC knows this, and so has been on-and-off commissioning a ghost story to marken the yule – no, I’ve gone Victorian again. Anyway, they started in 1971, did it until 1978, stopped until 2005, have been doing it sporadically since then, and a few years ago someone had the good sense to just hand the whole thing over to Mark Gatiss and go: “Mark, please Gatiss this as hard as you possibly can.” This is his seventh year doing just that.’…
After a five-year voyage alongside the resurgence of the Star Trek universe, Wil Wheaton’s tenure as host of The Ready Room has come to an end. The Star Trek aftershow, which premiered alongside Star Trek: Picard in early 2020, seemingly aired its final episode today, coinciding with the finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks. According to a report from Trek Core.
The 16-minute concluding episode focused on the animated series’ final chapter, featuring interviews with series leads Tawny Newsome (Mariner), Jack Quaid (Boimler), Noel Wells (Tendi), and Eugene Cordero (Rutherford). The cast reflected on the finale and the overall legacy of Lower Decks….
(8) AI REPLACING HUMANS IN MUSIC. [Item by John A Arkansawyer.] You get two free articles from Harper’s, and this one is worth using one of those. I hadn’t realized things were this far advanced. I feel like I should have guessed: “The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly”. “Spotify’s plot against musicians.”
…Before the year [2017] was out, the music writer David Turner had used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video content.
For years, I referred to the names that would pop up on these playlists simply as “mystery viral artists.” Such artists often had millions of streams on Spotify and pride of place on the company’s own mood-themed playlists, which were compiled by a team of in-house curators. And they often had Spotify’s verified-artist badge. But they were clearly fake. Their “labels” were frequently listed as stock-music companies like Epidemic, and their profiles included generic, possibly AI-generated imagery, often with no artist biographies or links to websites. Google searches came up empty….
… Then, in 2022, an investigation by the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter revived the allegations. By comparing streaming data against documents retrieved from the Swedish copyright collection society STIM, the newspaper revealed that around twenty songwriters were behind the work of more than five hundred “artists,” and that thousands of their tracks were on Spotify and had been streamed millions of times.
Around this time, I decided to dig into the story of Spotify’s ghost artists in earnest, and the following summer, I made a visit to the DN offices in Sweden. The paper’s technology editor, Linus Larsson, showed me the Spotify page of an artist called Ekfat. Since 2019, a handful of tracks had been released under this moniker, mostly via the stock-music company Firefly Entertainment, and appeared on official Spotify playlists like “Lo-Fi House” and “Chill Instrumental Beats.” One of the tracks had more than three million streams; at the time of this writing, the number has surpassed four million. Larsson was amused by the elaborate artist bio, which he read aloud. It described Ekfat as a classically trained Icelandic beat maker who graduated from the “Reykjavik music conservatory,” joined the “legendary Smekkleysa Lo-Fi Rockers crew” in 2017, and released music only on limited-edition cassettes until 2019. “Completely made up,” Larsson said. “This is probably the most absurd example, because they really tried to make him into the coolest music producer that you can find.”
Besides the journalists at DN, no one in Sweden wanted to talk about the fake artists….
(9) GEORGE ZEBROWSKI (1945-2024). Writer and editor George Zebrowski died December 20. His partner, Pamela Sargent, wrote on Facebook:
“On December 20, 2024, George Zebrowski, my beloved companion of almost sixty years, died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 78. George had been ailing for a while. On the day before his death, I visited him for the last time at the nursing home where he had been since late August, never imagining that it would be for the last time. Right now I have no more words.”
His first three published sff stories appeared in 1970, two co-authored with Jack Dann. His first published novel, Omega Point, came out in 1972. His book Brutal Orbits won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1999.
Three of his short stories, “Heathen God,” “The Eichmann Variations,” and “Wound the Wind,” were Nebula Award nominees.
He and Pamela Sargent produced three books in the Star Trek:TOS universe, and two books in the Star Trek:TNG universe.
His work as an anthology editor included three volumes of SFWA’s Nebula Awards series, and five volumes of Synergy: New Science Fiction.
He served on the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award jury from 2005-2013.
He was a past editor of the SFWA Bulletin. Zebrowski and Pamela Sargent jointly won the Service to SFWA Award in 2000.
(10) JENNIFER STEVENSON’S STAY HOME EGG NOG FLUFF. [Item by Jennifer Stevenson.] This eggnog was introduced to my Irish friends in a modest way, sort of, I know we’re only Yanks and so we’re amateur drinkers at best, and here you are trapped in Ohio for the holidays, so why not enjoy an American tradition? This was me, setting them up for the one-two punch. Here was punch number one:
1 fifth high-quality dark rum
1 fifth high-quality bourbon 1 dozen eggs, separated 1 to 2 quarts whipping cream 1 lb powdered sugar Nugmeg, cinnamon, star anise, and allspice to taste
Beat the sugar into the egg yolks. Add the alcohol slowly, then add the spices and mix thoroughly. Refrigerate at least an hour to “cure.” Two to five hours isn’t a bad thing.
When you’re half an hour from serving, pour the nog into a giant serving bowl.
Beat the whipping cream to stiff peaks. Fold the whipped cream into the nog.
Beat the egg whites until they’re stiff and fluffy. Fold them into the whipped cream + nog.
Serve in small cups and offer spoons. Garnish with a sprinkle of nutmeg.
You sort of eat this nog, rather than drink it. Stir it throughout your party to keep the nog mixed with the fluffy stuff.
If you have leftovers, i.e., if your friends are not hardened drunks who aren’t used to sticky Starbucks beverages, you can use the leftover nog (beaten well) as the egg+milk+sugar portion of a crepe recipe to feed any survivors in the morning.
We did this for our Irish friends, who got us up at an unconscionable hour on New Year’s Day to attend Mass. Seriously? So I gave them the hair of the dog, in the form of highly alcoholic crepes wrapped around hunks of ham. Worked pretty well.
[Reprinted from the archives of Sleeping Hedgehog. Jennifer Stevenson’sTrash Home Sex was shortlisted for the Locus First Fantasy Novel Award and longlisted for the Nebula two years running. Try her romantic fantasy series Hinky Chicago, which is up to five novels, her paranormal romances Slacker Demons, which are about retired deities who find work as incubi, or her paranormal women’s fiction series Coed Demon Sluts, about women solving life’s ordinary problems by becoming succubi. She has published more than 20 short stories.]
…Some of the best Far Side holiday strips reflected Gary Larson’s poignant and irreverent attitudes toward the traditions surrounding the holidays….
The list begins with Thanksgiving.
10. A Blacksmith Puts Olives on His Fingers During the First Thanksgiving
Comedian Zach Mander said in a viral TikTok that Jerry Seinfeld’s observational humor wouldn’t work today because anyone can quickly Google the answer to his questions, causing the joke to fall apart. The opposite can sometimes be true for the absurdist humor of The Far Side. While explaining a joke can often make it less funny, if what’s being described is background information you didn’t have or forgot about, Googling something after reading a Far Side comic strip can make it funnier on the second reading.
That said, sometimes a Far Side gag is exactly what it seems, and no Googling is needed, like in this Thanksgiving strip. There’s no hidden meaning behind blacksmith Thomas Sullivan putting five olives on the tips of his fingers. It’s a silly act that jokesters do in everyday life. It stands to reason that someone might’ve done it during a historical event that’s looked upon with reverence centuries later. While this is one of the better Far Side holiday strips, it’s lower tier among the best. Several other strips are sharper in their commentary and more amusing in their imagery.
A Ukrainian national guard brigade just orchestrated an all-robot combined-arms operation, mixing crawling and flying drones for an assault on Russian positions in Kharkiv Oblast in northern Ukraine.
“We are talking about dozens of units of robotic and unmanned equipment simultaneously on a small section of the front,” a spokesperson for the 13th National Guard Brigade explained.
It was an impressive technological feat—and a worrying sign of weakness on the part of overstretched Ukrainian forces. Unmanned ground vehicles in particular suffer profound limitations, and still can’t fully replace human infantry.
That the 13th National Guard Brigade even needed to replace all of the human beings in a ground assault speaks to how few people the brigade has compared to the Russian units it’s fighting. The 13th National Guard Brigade defends a five-mile stretch of the front line around the town of Hlyboke, just south of the Ukraine-Russia border. It’s holding back a force of no fewer than four Russian regiments.
That’s no more than 2,000 Ukrainians versus 6,000 or so Russians. The manpower ratio is roughly the same all along the 800-mile front line of Russia’s 34-month wider war on Ukraine. Russian troops still greatly outnumber Ukrainian troops, despite the Russians suffering around twice as many casualties as the Ukrainians since February 2022….
… In what amounted to a smaller-scale proof of concept for the recent combined-arms robot assault, a Ukrainian ground robot cleared a Russian trench in Kursk Oblast in western Russian back in September. Russia has attempted small-scale ground ’bot assaults of its own, but less successfully.
The problem, of course, is that while robots are adept at surveilling and attacking, they’re terrible at holding. To hold ground, armies put infantry in trenches. They sit, watch, wait and call for reinforcements when the enemy attacks. It’s tedious, taxing duty that requires constant vigilance.
Constant vigilance is difficult when a human operator is remotely observing the battlefield through the sensors of a maintenance-hungry ground robot.
Machines break down. And their radio datalinks are highly susceptible to enemy jamming, as the California think-tank RAND discovered when it gamed out a clash between hypothetical U.S. (“Blue”) and Russian (“Red”) army battalions partially equipped with armed ground drones. “Blue’s ability to operate was degraded significantly by Red’s jammers,” RAND concluded….
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Apparently “Hanging with Doctor Z” is a thing. Here’s an example with the word Christmas in the title, but not in the dialog, which is mainly sexual innuendo. (Yeah, tell me you won’t be able to click on it fast enough…)
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Jennifer Stevenson, John A Arkansawyer, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
