Here are 7 developments of interest to fans.

(1) NASA is looking for participants to lie in bed for 70 days at its Flight Analogs Research Unit to help researchers understand the effectiveness of exercise on loss of muscle, bone and cardiovascular function. Subjects will only get out of bed to do specified exercises.

While in bed, you can read, watch TV and even use the internet. However, the catch is that you can’t stand up to stretch your muscles — not even to go to the bathroom. NASA developed a special gurney for that while you’re lying down.

By using a machine called the Horizontal Exercise Fixture, participants will help NASA understand if that same exercise program will be useful for astronauts in the future.

I’m waiting for the sit-70-days-in-front-of-a-computer study. Of course, I expect there will be a lot of competition from the rest of you to get into that study.

(2) Digitized libraries of old books and newspapers make it possible do extraordinary research from home. Awhile ago I wrote about the author who had unseated the Wright Brothers as the first to fly. Another author has been hard at work to fathom the hidden ancestry of baseball. But there are certain things to keep in mind when using a computer to search PDFs.

Eighteenth-century Britons sometimes used the long s, which OCR tends to read as an f. So you might only find baseball by searching the word bafeball. It was a real pain in the afs.

Also —

In the “B” section, after base-born (“born out of wedlock”) and base-minded (“mean spirited”), Block found an entry for baseball. It was defined as, “A rural game in which the person striking the ball must run to his base or goal.” The first dictionary definition of baseball.

I saw that and privately complained, isn’t this just as much a description of cricket? But I relented when the author trotted out this 1799 quote from Jane Austen’s cousin —

“Ah!” says he, “no more cricket, no more base-ball, they are sending me to Geneva.”

The cousin obviously knew base-ball was a game unto itself.

(3) The original Delorean auto company went broke in 1982 after producing only 9,000 of the famous cars with the gull-wing doors. A Southern California entrepreneur revived the brand name in the 1990s for his business of remanufacturing Deloreans from an inventory of parts he bought from an Ohio company. One of the company’s sidelines is making copies of Dr. Emmett Brown’s time-traveling car from Back To The Future. They’ve made 6 so far.

The pseudo time machines are outfitted with a gaggle of “time circuits” allowing users to happily punch in a “destination time,” just like Fox, or McFly, did in the movie, as well as a lever that activates the all-important mock “flux capacitor,” which, if not capable of generating an actual 1.21 gigawatts of electricity, does, in fact, glow with flashing lights.

…The refitted DeLoreans cost about $45,000, and utilize a whole range of motley parts – like a military surplus jet engine cooler – as well as a Krups coffee grinder that subs as the machine’s “nuclear reactor.”

(4) H.P. Lovecraft as a hard science author? The Lovecraftian Science blog exists to make the argument —

At the convention, I gave a talk on the biology of some of the Old Ones and I received some positive input from the participates. I would like to continue to investigate Lovecraftian Science as a whole (biology, astronomy, chemistry, etc.) and I thought doing it through a blog would be the best means.

I will be talking about Lovecraft’s love for science, how he incorporated a wide variety of scientific theories into his fiction and pose questions on how science would operate in Lovecraft’s world. Based on existing text and essays, I will also identify how Lovecraft was a strong advocate and defender of science. Finally, I will also compare Lovecraft’s attribute toward science to more contemporary scientists and writers.

(5) If you’re interested in football I recommend this 2007 Los Angeles Magazine profile of Coach Pete Carroll. If not, humorous writing may still be worth your time —

On two separate occasions, though I aim the tape recorder at Carroll’s mouth, I later discover nothing on the tape but sibilant mumbles. I hear his voice, then a rustling, then silence, then garble garble—it’s spooky. The tape recorder is brand-new. It was the most expensive one they had at Radio Shack. It picks up my voice fine. When Carroll speaks, the recording sounds like an articulate man gagged and locked in the trunk of a car.

(6) Here’s a link to the Planetary Society’s diagram showing the status of dozens of NASA space probes carrying out missions in the Solar System.

(7) James H. Burns sends a link to a YouTube rarity.

In a clip that was rare and new, to me, at least, Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster suddenly pops up at a 1965 beach, a ‘typical’ mid-60s Shin-Dig scene. The description at Youtube says this was shot on location for a Murray the K TV special, and gets even odder, when it morphs into a Public Service Announcement of sorts!   (And, for the uninitiated, and those too young (!), Murray the K was a top DJ of the era). The first half, anyway, I think, is good fun (and it totals about five minutes).

[Thanks for these stories goes out to Andrew Porter, James Hay, John King Tarpinian, David Klaus, James H. Burns and The Chronicles of the Dawn Patrol.]

Here are 11 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Did you know R2-D2 appeared in Star Trek: Into Darkness? For about a split second. And other films, too – even Raiders of the Lost Ark! See the screen caps here.

Stemming from a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure, the term “Easter egg” in media now refers to a concealed joke or message in a game, TV show, or movie. As with any good Easter egg hunt, these hidden treasures are tough to find.

(2) King of Thrones, a six-part series about expensive bathroom makeovers, launched September 10 on Discovery’s “Destination America” channel.

Preparations are underway should “Thrones” reign.  “A lot of folks in the retail space, home improvement departments stores are very interested in it. A lot of other bathroom products are interested in it,” Hahn said. All that remains to be seen is whether “King of Thrones” proves successful with viewers or gets flushed away if it stinks up the joint.

And if they announce a “Blackwater” episode, look out.

(3) Are you absolutely sure you know those famous sf and fantasy movie quotes as well as you suppose?

So many fans, even those who’ve seen “The Empire Strikes Back” innumerable times, get that line wrong. It’s just so much fun to coo “Luuuuuuke” before launching in to the dramatic revelation. And it sounds dumb to just say “I am your father,” but if you sneak the “Luke” in, everyone knows you’re quoting the second “Star Wars” movie, and the joke works as well as a repeated-to-the-point-of-nausea line from a 35-year-old movie can.

(4) Here’s a link to a collection of stunning paintings by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag:

Welcome to rural Sweden, sometime in the late ’80s. Citizens go about their mundane lives and children explore the countryside. But something isn’t quite right. Robots and hovercrafts are commonplace, and decaying science facilities sprout from the harsh Scandinavian landscape. There’s even a rumor circulating that dinosaurs have returned from the dead after some failed experiment.

This is the world that exists in artist Simon Stålenhag’s mind, and it’s only accessible through his paintings. The alternate universe he’s created is inspired by the sci-fi movies he watched as a kid growing up in the rural areas around Stockholm. As he explains to The Verge, “The only difference in the world of my art and our world is that … ever since the early 20th century, attitudes and budgets were much more in favor of science and technology.”

(5) European researchers are developing exosekeltons for factory workers —

The goal of the Robo-mate project, with $6 million in EU funding, is a machine that could reduce the number of workplace injuries, researchers said.

Twelve research institutions are taking part in the quest for a wearable robot suit that will help human workers take on manufacturing tasks that, because of the complexity of the choices involved, are difficult to fully automate.

If the model in this article had a helmet, you could easily see it evolving someday into the gear worn by Star Wars’ Storm Troopers.

(6) Who keeps Big Bang Theory’s science humor on track? Eric Kaplan, one of the show’s executive producers and script writers, answered that question for the New York Times:

Your stories have a lot of insider jokes; there was a hilarious episode that included references to Schrödinger’s cat. How does your team know what’s funny in science?

I went to grad school in analytic philosophy, which is culturally very much like science. We talk to our science adviser, David Saltzberg, a physics professor at U.C.L.A. We visit various schools and labs.

Once we went to the control station for the Mars rover. That was the source of a number of stories for Howard.

We talked with a NASA astronaut, Mike Massimino. He told us about his Italian relatives who were unimpressed that he’d gone into space. There was one relative who was, “We usually make the new guy clean the garbage truck. You shouldn’t have to go out to the space station if you’re the senior guy.” So that became the story line for Howard. He goes into space, and no one in his daily life is impressed.

(7) Those of you who like to hum “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” will want to look over Abebooks selection of post-apocalyptic-fiction, and read the introduction by Richard Davies –

The method of worldwide destruction varies. Readers could encounter a plague, global nuclear war, biological weaponry, a comet collision, or a blinding meteor shower followed by flesh-eating plants. Many authors don’t explain in detail the nature of their book’s catastrophe but, in many ways, it’s unimportant – the thoughts and actions of the survivors are what counts.

(8) In the middle of ESPN’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column Gregg Easterbrook inexplicably veered into a lengthy critique of NASA of which this is only the beginning —

What’s up in outer space? Not as much as expected. In the 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” by the year 2001, there are colonies on the moon, commercial flights to orbit, and NASA has built a giant ship bearing a crew to Jupiter. In this spring’s Tom Cruise flick “Oblivion,” by 2017, NASA has built a giant ship bearing a crew even farther, to Saturn. Nothing remotely like this is on anyone’s drawing board, let alone funded.

The space station continues to circle the globe, accomplishing — ahem, we’ll have to get back to you on that. This most expensive boondoggle ever is now serviced by Russian rockets at American expense.

And he goes on.

(9) Could he have been channeling former Apollo flight director Chris Kraft? Kraft cut loose with his own complaints in this interview by the Houston Chronicle:

I talked to Neil Armstrong an awful lot near the end of this life. Too bad he’s gone, because he was an important spokesman for being adverse to what the political part of NASA says we’re going to do. Bolden, let’s face it, he doesn’t know what it takes to do a major project. He doesn’t have experience with that. He’s a flier, a Marine general. He’s never known what it takes to do a massive program. He keeps talking about going to Mars in the 2030s, but that’s pure, unadulterated, BS. And what have you got if you get there? Who wants to operate something that’s 40 minutes, by voice, from the Earth. Why would you want to do that? As an operator, damned if I like that. If I’m on the moon, I’ve got a 3 second turnaround. Everything I go to do on Mars I’ve got to prepare to do in an automatic mode. That’s not very smart. Pretty much everything we need to do on Mars can be done robotically. We’ve already got robots there. By the time we get the capability to send humans to Mars, it might be that robots are smarter than humans anyway. I’m serious.

(10) One of many differences between Worldcon and Burning Man —

There was a rumor that if you safely parachuted in, you didn’t have to pay for a ticket. I also heard that not only was that not true, once they land there’s a mad dash to take off the parachute and run away before getting caught.

(11) Here is the Marty Gear tribute video shown at LoneStarCon 3.

[Thanks for these stories goes out to John King Tarpinian, James H. Burns, Michael J. Walsh and Andrew Porter.]

Here are 8 developments of interest to fans..

(1) Once upon a time there was a gigantic boil on the Earth’s butt.

Now accorded honors as the planet’s biggest volcano, Tamu Massif is at the bottom of the ocean 1,000 miles east of Japan.

How large is “largest”? According to a paper published in Nature Geoscience, the “immense shield volcano” spans about 120,000 square miles, making it equal in size to the British Isles – which, for you stateside readers who may be unfamiliar with that geographical designation, encompasses both Great Britain and Ireland.

Its summit is 6,500 feet below the surface and parts of its base go four miles down. Tamu Massif is estimated to be 145 million years old, and has not been active for eons.

(2) NASA has handed out $100,000 grants to applicants pursuing a dozen imaginative tech concepts — including suspended animation.

The “Torpor Inducing Habitat for Human Stasis To Mars” proposal reads in part —

The idea of suspended animation for interstellar human spaceflight has often been posited as a promising far-term solution for long-duration spaceflight. A means for full cryo-preservation and restoration remains a long way off still. However, recent medical progress is quickly advancing our ability to induce deep sleep states (i.e. torpor) with significantly reduced metabolic rates for humans over extended periods of time. NASA should leverage these advancements for spaceflight as they can potentially eliminate a number of very challenging technical hurdles, reduce the IMLEO for the system, and ultimately enable feasible and sustainable missions to Mars.

SpaceWorks proposes the design of a torpor-inducing Mars transfer habitat and an architectural-level assessment to fully characterize the impact to Mars exploration.

To learn about all of the 2013 Phase 1 selections, go to this NIAC Web page.

(3) What makes American agriculture distinctive? How about that 4-H missile program?

BEFORE growing up to become farmers, a startling number of America’s rural kids are taught how to build rockets. Every year rural skies fill with mini-missiles built by children. The largest fly hundreds of feet, carrying altimeters, parachutes and payloads of eggs. Baseball diamonds are popular launch sites, as are alfalfa fields: the latter tend to be large and, compared with other crops, alfalfa tolerates a fair bit of trampling. All this tinkering and swooshing explains a lot about American farms.

One youth organisation lies behind many thousands of rural rocket launches: the 4-H club (it’s an acronym, derived from a pledge involving head, heart, hands and health).

(4) Enroll in Jack Kirby 101 at AV Club to learn about the King of Comics —

As surely as Elvis Presley is the King Of Rock ’N’ Roll and Michael Jackson is the King Of Pop, Jack Kirby is the King Of Comics. Not that he ever aspired to such lofty heights. In fact, the notion that comics could be anything noble was an alien idea when the late Kirby (who would have turned 96 on August 28) broke into the nascent medium in the ’30s, brimming with energy and imagination. Any normal artist would have had those qualities beaten out of him by the grueling, low-paying, glory-free grind of the industry back then. Instead, Kirby flourished. Prolific and profoundly innovate, he fought through setbacks, market upheavals, and an egregious dearth of creators’ rights, yet emerged by the end of the century as the undisputed figurehead of a medium that had made billions off his work—and continues to do so with the successful franchising of his most popular co-creations: The Avengers, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, and the character that put Kirby on the map, Captain America.

(5) Pip R. Lagenta has posted a cartoon by Linda Mayfield, signed with her penname “Cody”.

(6) Bruce Schneier and Karen Cooper were Hugo nominees in 2000 in Best Related Book category for their Minicon 34 Restaurant Guide. But Schneier is rather more widely known as a privacy expert and was recently interviewed by the Minneapolis Post for its Five More Questions feature —

4. Can you imagine a technological situation where it would be possible for the average citizen to easily access all the known information about him or her and see who has had possession of it and how it has been traded?

Schneier: It’s likely to be more legal than technical. Look at Europe, where the movement of personal data is more restricted. In the United States, it’s a free-for-all. If a company collects personal data about you, they can use it. They can sell it. They do whatever the hell they want. In Europe, it is not like that. Data tends to be restricted to the purpose for which it was collected. Secondary uses are much more restricted.

Google is actually pretty good about letting you see what interests they’ve tagged you on, for the purpose of feeding you ads. Facebook is much less transparent. But it is reasonable to be able to see your FBI file, your NSA data. These are not difficult things.

The corporate side, though, is much more difficult. You being able to see your raw data is much easier than being able to see your processed data, because companies will see that as their proprietary information. For example, you can see your credit report, but you cannot see how that score is calculated. Because that is their secret sauce.

(7) Seeing Fred Pohl’s obituary in the NY Times prompted Andrew Porter to write a tribute of his own —

I’ve known Fred Pohl for longer than I’ve been in SF fandom. I first heard him when I was barely 10, on The Long John Knebel Show on WOR Radio in New York City in the mid-1950s, where he was a regular guest, along with Lester del Rey and The Amazing Randi. Later, I met him at my earliest SF conventions at the beginning of the 60s. I reprinted a chapter from his The Way The Future Was in my Algol in the mid-1970s. From that sprang his original column, Pohlemic, which survived the death of Algol/Starship, appearing in my Science Fiction Chronicle until the end of the 20th century. I have a vast collection of his novels, collections and short stories in my bookcase, and the original Richard Powers artwork for his Star Science Fiction No. 6 on my wall.

Though I hadn’t seen him in person for several years, I often spoke to Fred on the phone, and sent him e-mails about his youth in Brooklyn. Fred told me he was being considered for inclusion in the Walk of Fame at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Once, long ago, Fred told me that he wondered if he could touch the bottom of the pool while diving at the swimming pool in the Hotel St. George, here in Brooklyn Heights, across the street from where I live—and when he surfaced, he discovered his two front teeth were missing.

Word of his death came for me in San Antonio, just after the closing ceremonies for this year’s World SF Convention.

I’m really going to miss Fred.

(8) The Guardian asks The Hugo Awards: ‘beauty contest’ or prize of the people? Jonathan McCalmont, Justin Landon, Cheryl Morgan and Charles Stross all take a hack at the answer.

Here’s your instant trivia quiz – Match each of the preceding names with his or her description of the Hugo.

(A) Twaddle. (B) Shouldn’t be taken too seriously. (C) Continues to get it wrong all too often. (D) None of the above.

Thank goodness The Guardian loves sf fandom! Imagine if they didn’t. [Makes gagging sign…]

 [Thanks for these links to David Klaus, Petréa Mitchell, John King Tarpinian, Dan Goodman and Andrew Porter.]

Here are 11 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Attendees at the Kendal Calling festival in Cumbria, UK, set the record for the largest gathering of people dressed as Superman, according to the BBC. Although the headline reads “Superman World Record Set: 867 Wear Man Of Steel Costumes At Same Time” it should be — “333 Costumes Stolen Under Superman’s Nose.”

The costumers actually handed out 1,200 Superman suits in all shapes and sizes, but only 867 people showed up for the final count, WorldRecordAcademy.com reported.

David Klaus makes a more charitable assumption about no-shows. “Those mentioned in the story who couldn’t find a telephone booth in which to change undoubtedly forgot that there is still a traditional police telephone box at the Earls Grove tube station (also suitable for traditional Doctor Who fan photos as well, of course).”

The UK gathering smashed a record of 556 people in Superman costumes set at Sears Headquarters in Chicago just a few weeks ago.

(2) Syfy reaped a publicity bonanza with Sharknado. Now they’re throwing more sharks at the wall and hoping they stick. Look forward — or any direction you think best — to Ghost Shark on August 22 starring Mackenzie Rosman (7th Heaven’s Ruthie Camden).

A great white shark is tortured and killed by a fisherman, then returns from the dead, exacting vengeance on all humans.

(3) Nine states still can’t find their souvenir Apollo 11 moon rocks despite a search that has lasted more than a decade. The fate of moon rocks NASA gifted to Alabama, Louisiana, New York, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin are still unknown.

Hawaii’s was rediscovered after it was stored in a cabinet in the executive chambers of the state capitol building. Minnesota’s moon rocks had been put away with military artifacts before being found and transferred to the state’s historical society last year. Nebraska’s display was lost in the governor’s mansion until building renovations resulted in the moon rocks resurfacing.

And then there was the case of Alaska’s Apollo 11 lunar sample display, which disappeared in 1973 after a fire tore though the museum where they were on exhibit. In 2010, they re-emerged in the possession of a reality TV star, who tried to sue the state to gain legal title to the moon rocks. He ultimately surrendered them.

(4) “Who won Comic-Con?” asks Comicbook.com. Out of seven contenders for the title, the editors ultimately crowned a practically unheard-of Marvel Studios production as the winner —

The Guardians Of The Galaxy footage was stunning, action packed, and filled with humor. With some brief Comic-Con footage, Guardians Of The Galaxy went from that Marvel property that no one had ever heard of to being one of their most anticipated feature films. In fact, it could be argued that no one won bigger at Comic-Con than Guardians Of The Galaxy director James Gunn, because Guardians Of The Galaxy probably had the least buzz going in, but the most buzz coming out.

(5) The Famous Monsters of Filmland booth ranked #10 on JoBlo’s list of coolest booths at Comic-Con.

The site has a vast amount of Comic-Con coverage

(6) And Famous Monsters of Filmland founder Jim Warren recently gave an interview to Philly.com. He remembered when Forry Ackerman first showed him a French monster mag —

“I thought this could work in America if done right,” Warren said. Warren borrowed $2,000 to publish what became Famous Monsters of Filmland and even posed on the cover of the first issue in a Frankenstein mask because he could not afford more than one model. Famous Monsters sold out in three weeks and soon began inspiring young readers such as Roy Thomas, a former editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics.

“We found out we weren’t alone. There were other people out there that cared about monster movies,” said Thomas, 72, who wrote series that included the X-Men. “It made us all want to go out and be filmmakers and write monster comics.”

(7) Can this be the end for Bazooka Joe? James H. Burns says it might be so in “Bazooka Joe Bites the Dust, Almost” for the Long Island Press:

Sixty years ago Bazooka Joe—the iconic character created by a Long Islander—debuted in a little strip wrapped around pieces of Bazooka Bubble Gum. Last November, Bazooka Candy Brands—a division of Topps (the company behind so many sports and other trading cards)—announced that they would no longer include Bazooka Joe inserts with their bubblegum, citing decreasing sales.

(8) A very short Wookiee photobombed Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher AJ Burnett  during an on-field interview July 31.

(9) Anne Serling, author of a recently published book about her father, Rod Serling, creator of Twilight Zone, is interviewed by The Twilight Zone Podcast.

(10) Cockeys vs. Zombies got a favorable review in the NY Times:

There’s not much difference between regular English soccer fans and the undead variety in “Cockneys vs. Zombies”: Even when expired, they’re still ready to rumble with anyone wearing the colors of a rival team.

And that’s pretty much the point of this spirit-of-the-Blitz comedy from Matthias Hoene. Filled with East End grit and “EastEnders” escapees, the ragtag story is merely an excuse to remind us, all too emphatically, that Londoners won’t lie down. So when a zombie horde is loosed from a 17th-century vault by two startled construction workers, its chomping progress is less terrifying to residents than galvanizing.

It is a putrid idea. In the good sense of the word. However, my curiosity was fully satisfied by the trailer…

(11) Comic-Con’s Hall H was in a frenzy after the surprise X-Men: Days of Future Past cast unveiling with actors from both the first X-Men trilogy and First Class prequel. Two Professor Xs, two Magnetos.. On stage were —

[W]riter/co-producer Simon Kinberg, producer Lauren Shuler Donner, producer Hutch Parker, and actors Omar Sy, Ellen Page, Shawn Ashmore, Anna Paquin, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicolas Hoult, Peter Dinklage, and Evan Peters.

[Thanks for these links goes out to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, James Burns and David Klaus.]

Here are 10 developments of interest to fans.

(1) For his author profile “Harlan Ellison Isnt Dead Yet” Jaime Lowe was allowed to page through Harlan’s scrapbooks — 

There was a newspaper clipping of his arrest for violating a weapons law when police found brass knuckles, a loaded revolver, a dagger, and a switch-blade knife in his apartment, all left over from his participatory account of hanging out with the Red Hook Brooklyn Barons street gang (republished last year in a Kicks Books anthology). There were clippings documenting feminist outrage at the movie version of Ellison’s short story “A Boy and His Dog,” starring Don Johnson. Pictures of young handsome Ellison, almost always in mid-proclamation and dressed in outfits that would make Stevie Wonder blush, were in no short supply. And, of course, the artifacts of rage past: red sticker dots blotting out the face of the author Forrest Ackerman for indeterminate grievances; a Western Union Telegram from October 16, 1967, reading, “May 10,000 Mongrel Dragons rip from your opulent structure that niggardly portion which is your heart and feed upon its rock hard substance while stamping your accursed soul to dust. Luv, Bunny.”

(2) Manifest Destiny, a comic book by Chris Dingness coming in November, imagines Lewis and Clark’s journey going a lot differently. Explains Dingness: “The reason we got the Louisiana Purchase for so cheap from Napoleon was because the land west of the Mississippi was full of dangerous creatures and monsters.”

Q: Are you such a history buff you zeroed in on these two guys immediately?
I was on vacation with friends, I was drinking and complaining about how there’s this new trend in pop culture of taking historical figures — real ones like Abraham Lincoln or fake ones like the characters in Sense & Sensibility or Pride & Prejudice — and throwing them into this monster-killing fictional universe. I was like, “God, you can just take anything. You could just take Lewis and Clark, and instead of exploring America, they were really killing monsters!” And then suddenly, I was like, “Wait that could actually be fun.” I stopped complaining about it and started trying to find a way to make money off of it, like any good American.

(3) In the early 1960s NASA leaders debated how to answer women who wanted to be astronauts. The idea of female astronauts was not acceptable to (then) Vice President Lyndon Johnson, as scholars have now documented.

It was a draft letter written by President Johnson’s assistant Liz Carpenter in response to the increasing media attention devoted to women like Jackie Cochran, Jerrie Cobb, and the other so-called “Mercury 13.” For over a year, those women had been publicly speaking and agitating about the issue, and two of them were about to meet with Johnson. In advance of his meeting with the women, Carpenter drafted a letter for Johnson that asked NASA administrator James Webb to look into the issue… 

Johnson chose not to send the letter. Instead, in large script he wrote at the bottom “Lets stop this now! File” Liz Carpenter duly filed the letter and it remained unknown for four decades, until Ms. Weitekamp unearthed it.

A copy of the letter is posted at The Space Review.

(4) Bruce Arthurs argues ”Reporting Convention Harassment Protects Everyone”  —

So, goddamn, ladies, REPORT, REPORT, REPORT! Because not only does it make it possible to have real consequences for harassers and to deter other harassers, it allows someone who’s been misidentified or falsely accused to try and clear their name.

(5) Did anyone like the ending of the latest Superman movie? The way people talk about the movie it should have ended with a refund! But help is on the way. The animators at How It Should Have Ended show how Superman could have been saved. 

HISHE has “improved” endings for a lot of other sf movies, as well.

(6) Jade Falcon’s how-to article about podcasting is one of the highlights of Geek Girl Crafts Podzine #4 [PDF file].

There’s a misconception that podcasting is rather difficult (as in complex). When, in fact, with the plethora of today’s technology, podcasting is actually rather simple.

The “difficulty” in podcasting lies in the fact that there is work that does need to happen, and to get a good quality podcast, there are extra steps that need to happen, such as editing. And of course, there’s also the hard part of actually planning and scheduling your podcast times

That work thing sure gets in the way of a lot of fanac….

(7) Steve Fahnestalk’s autobiographical Fan History Part 3 at the Amazing Stories blog comes with a superb photo of Larry Niven wielding a light saber.

(8) Gary Farber’s discussion of genocide as an accepted science fiction story resolution has been picked up by James Davis Nicoll and his readers in The … Gomphothere Book of Genocide:

Over on FB, Gary Farber said:
It occurs to me that a list of genocide-was-the-only-solution-let’s-not-worry stories in sf could be interesting. Certainly finding another way wasn’t a concern of E. E. Smith, who wiped out evil races with a sun ray here and a smashing planet there.

A hundred comments prove this is a game every fan can play.

(9) Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal blog at the New York Times posted his photo of Laurie Penny, Tony Cunningham, Ken MacLeod, Andrew J. Wilson, Charlie Stross in “Single Malts and Science Fiction.”

(10) The Motely Fool’s “5 important tips for success from Scrooge McDuck”, says David Klaus, is “Good financial advice via someone whose cash reserves alone (out of his much vaster total fortune) comprise three cubic acres of money in a giant bin the size of the Vehicular Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral.”

Work harder (but smarter) than everyone else, and keep an eye out for con men
In “The Last of the Clan McDuck,” 10-year-old Scrooge is an unsuccessful shoeshine boy on the streets of Glasgow until his father contrives a trick. The elder McDuck sends a filthy ditch-digger to his son with an American dime — Scrooge’s Number-One Dime — which Scrooge receives after half an hour of exhausting shoeshine work. Scrooge feels cheated by the useless foreign coin, but he also learned two lessons: “Life is filled with tough jobs, and there’ll always be sharpies to cheat me … well, I’ll be tougher than the toughies and sharper than the sharpies, and I’ll make my money square!”

More wisdom from the commenter who pointed to this 30-second video: “I think it’s important that one learns from Scrooge that when diving into your vault of gold, you need to go head first. Then keep swimming. And bring a spare set of clothes.”

[Thanks for these links go out to David Klaus, Martin Morse Wooster and John King Tarpinian.]

Here are 8 developments of interest to fans.

(1) “Darcy and Elizabeth Go To Summer Camp” in The Paris Review shows that when Austen scholars and fans got together for a weekend conference at the University of North Carolina, they were quite faanish in their own waistcoated way…

11:15 A.M. Following little sleep and generous helpings of fruit, I chair the panel on “Jane Austen and Romance,” with excellent papers from Sarah Frantz, Kumaraini Silva, and Emma Calabrese. (At the current rate, Colin Firth will set a record for most appearances in Microsoft PowerPoint before the weekend is up.) My task is to introduce each panelist and then drag her from the lectern as gently as possible once her time is up. Professor Inger Brody has provided me with three large laminated signs: “FIVE MINUTES”; “TIME TO STOP”; and my favorite, “YOU’VE DELIGHTED US LONG ENOUGH,” a quotation from that uncomfortable scene in which Mr. Bennet must separate his bespectacled, strident-singing daughter Mary from the piano forte.

(2) On another historical note – while humorist Alexandra Petri of the WashingtonPost was in Gettysburg for the 150th anniversary she ordered the Pickett’s Charge Challenge at the Blue and Gray Grill.

The thing about large, ill-advised sandwiches occurs to you a few bites in: namely, they wouldn’t be $25 challenge sandwiches if they actually tasted good. What you are paying for is the privilege of not finishing the sandwich. You know where you stand.

A clever as well as funny piece.

(3) Doctor Who is one of the few TV series that’s survived a change in the lead actor – something it’s done time and again. But you don’t hear producer Steven Moffat saying, “What, me worry?”

Last month, the BBC announced that Doctor Who star Matt Smith had decided to leave the 50-year-old British science fiction show after this year’s special Christmas episode. So how goes the search for the next Doctor? “Well, it’s always just terrifying,” says Doctor Who executive producer Steven Moffat, who recruited Smith to replace his predecessor, David Tennant, back in late 2008. “If you’re a Doctor Who fan, as I have been all my life, you’ve been doing fantasy casting for this part for as long as you can remember. But when you’re suddenly faced with the reality that you are going to sit there and you are going to make that decision it does feel absolutely chilling. There’s a very big range of people who could play it and different ways you could go with it. We must get this right. One false move and the show’s over.”

(4) Google has mapped the Diagon Alley movie set at Warner Bros. Studios in London, England for its Street View program.

It’s no Marauder’s Map, but Google now lets you explore the set of Diagon Alley from the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in London. In Street View mode, you can see 360-degree images of Ollivanders Wand Shop, Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes joke shop and Mr. Mulpepper’s Apothecary.

(5) Your money’s no good here, if you’re a difficult person Jane Frank doesn’t want as a customer anymore. From the latest installment of “The Artful Collector” at Amazing Stories:

But then, in 1991, I started up Worlds of Wonder – with the idea of helping artists sell the kind of original illustrative art (and even 3-D art) I collected – and practically overnight I found myself acting on a much larger stage, having to play multiple parts, sometimes simultaneously.   And where I previously had exposure to only one or two “high maintenance” collectors, and only sporadically, I now found myself a major conduit for horror stories and gossip among artists, collectors and other dealers, relating to “collectors from hell.”

And I can attest: they are out there.  In fact, YOU COULD BE ONE OF THEM.

(6) Mark Plummer devotes his latest Strange Horizons column to wishing he had a better name for that thing we do —

And so I unhelpfully stick with “fandom,” sometimes justifying the unadorned usage by invoking comparisons with the reason the UK is the only country that doesn’t feel obliged to explicitly proclaim itself on its stamps. But that really requires a milieu where fandom and its various component features—fanzines, conventions, clubs, and meetings and whatever—remain damonknightishly “what we point to when we say it.” That’s fine when we can be reasonably confident that we’ll all be pointing at the same thing—amongst the attendees of an event such as Corflu, say—but once you look to something like the British Eastercon or especially the Worldcon, the reality is that tasking three random fans with pointing at fandom will likely end up with them pointing at book-ends, pumice stone, and West Germany.

(7) We’re one step away from The Terminator now that 3-D printers can make things with liquid metal.

(8) Ron Chaney, the great-grandson of Lon Chaney Sr., the Phantom of the Opera, and grandson of Lon Chaney Jr., the Wolf Man, would like you to listen to his pitch about supporting the makers of the Clash of the Monsters video game with a Kickstarter donation. Who better to put the bite on you?

[Thanks for these links goes out to David Klaus, Taral, Martin Morse Wooster and John King Tarpinian.]

Here are 9 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Turner Classic Movies will air Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man on Sunday, July 7 at 8:00 p.m. EDT. It was his first screenplay.

According to the writer in an interview with Tom Weaver (for Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes, McFarland Classics), he first had to restructure the narrative: “They couldn’t do Last Year in Marienbad [1961] back then; the story had to be in chronological order, to begin at the beginning and progress from there…I wrote it that way in my novel originally but it got tedious, so I decided I would structure it the way I had structured I Am Legend [the basis for both The Last Man on Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (1971)]: start smack-dab in the middle and then, in flashbacks, bring the story up to date.” Matheson, however, was forced to write the screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man as a linear narrative and scenarist Richard Alan Simmons was later brought in for rewrites.

The article also explains why 100 gross of condoms were needed for a special effects scene.

(2) James H. Burns’ fine tribute “Ray Harryhausen And The Place Past Fear: The New York Legacy Of A Filmmaking Legend” appears on the CBS New York blog.

“There’s some neat, generally overlooked info about Harryhausen,” says Burns, “including his World War II days (with Dr. Seuss!), and particularly that he wanted to do a comedy (!), and had things gone just a little differently, he wouldn’t have retired after Clash of the Titans. That, in fact, plans were in motion to still have a ‘Harryhausen movie,’ every four years or so…”

(3) Frank N Furter’s castle in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is up for sale. To be precise, Oakley Court in Bray, a gothic country house in Berkshire that also was used as a set for Hammer Horror films.

The house was built in 1859 for Sir Richard Hall Say, who became the High Sheriff of Berkshire in 1864.

Although built in the Victorian period, its gothic architecture made it a popular film set for the Hammer Horror films, which were produced at Bray Studios near Maidenhead.

The main entrance became the entrance to Castle Meinster in The Brides of Dracula in 1960, it became Hamilton Manor in The Plague of the Zombies in 1966 and as a school for girls in Nightmare in 1962-3.

(4) The author of “11 Harsh Realities About the World of Harry Potter” is fairly convincing in her arguments that there’s not that much difference between the NSA and the Ministry of Magic….

The Ministry of Magic would more accurately be called the Ministry of WATCHING ALWAYS WATCHING. From the banks (via bureaucracy in the Goblin Liaison Office) to the schools to law enforcement and journalism, the Ministry controls every aspect of wizarding life in obvious and subtle ways. With no free press or free market, wizards and witches have to trust their benevolent ministry is playing fair.

(5) The Dutch, on the other hand, are far more jolly about their surveillance culture:

On Tuesday, surveillance cameras in the center of the city of Utrecht were decorated with colorful party hats to celebrate the 110th birthday of George Orwell.

(6) A local Los Angeles tv show, “City at Night,” broadcast live from the set of Destination Moon. A kinescope of the 1950 program with director George Pal, writer Robert Heinlein and artist Chesley Bonestell has been posted on Discovery Enterprise.

(7) During Neil Gaiman’s appearance the other night in Glendale the author talked about his Babylon 5 episode “Day of the Dead” in which Penn & Teller play two characters named Rebo and Zooty. Consistent with Teller’s silent character, Zooty speaks via a small handheld device – and the voice is Harlan Ellison’s.

(8) Kristine Kathryn Rusch is releasing her series of novels starring a black detective through her own company, explaining to The Guardian that ”racism in the publishing industry prevented their earlier publication.”

Rusch says she was told by her agent at the time that “there’s a rule in traditional publishing that white people (white women?) can’t write about black people (black men?) at least from a first-person point of view”. But “once the agent established that I was not planning to hire a black actor to play me in public … she marketed the book to all the big publishers”, says Rusch, and although publishers made “at least three” six-figure offers for the first book in the series, they were withdrawn when they learned she was a white woman.

“Initially, when the publishers read the book, they thought I was a black man who had participated in the Civil Rights movement and walked with Dr King. So they set up a marketing plan based (from what I can guess) on putting this imaginary Civil Rights pioneer on Oprah and talking with her about the new mystery novel. Honestly, if the Oprah Book Club hadn’t existed, I doubt I would have received those six-figure offers at all,” Rusch told the Guardian. “When the publishers realised that I was not black, too young to be in the Civil Rights movement, and had no ‘marketability’ or ‘platform’, they withdrew the offers. The book was worth nothing to them if I couldn’t tour ‘with legitimacy’.”

The Smokey Dalton book was eventually acquired by St Martin’s, where Rusch worked with an editor she still praises today. The book was nominated for an Edgar award, but, according to Rusch, was not supported by the publisher’s sales force.  Although St. Martin’s published several more books in the series, but ineffectively, and as Rusch says on her blog “I watched as this publisher destroyed a series that could have been popular, if the publisher actually acted like it wanted to sell books.”

(9) I highly recommend to fans of the movie Casablanca this linked article pulled from the archives of the American Film Institute.

[Thanks for these links go out to Michael J. Walsh, Andrew Porter, Willard Stone, Gregory Benford and John King Tarpinian.]

Here are 10 developments of interest to fans.

(1) The telegraph figures prominently in American history. It made the Pony Express obsolete. And what Lincoln movie is complete without a scene of tallies from the 1860 election coming over the wires, or of the President slumped in a lamplit War Department office listening to the rapidly clacking Morse code?

But did you know that telegraph service in the United States ended seven years ago? And the very last telegraph message in history will be sent on July 14 in India, the date it plans to abandon the technology.

“We were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because SMS and smartphones have rendered this service redundant,” said Shamim Akhtar, general manager of BSNL’s telegraph services. The agency did not say what the contents of the final message would be.

The telegram industry was not always so bleak; at its peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were exchanged across 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, employing 998 people, down from 12,500 telegram employees in better years.

(2) It’s remarkably easy to recut Disney’s original trailer to make Mary Poppins look like a horror movie — see Scary Mary [YouTube].

(3) Animal Planet’s mockumentary “Mermaids: The New Evidence” was watched by 3.6 million people. Twitter traffic following the broadcast suggests some viewers were convinced that mermaids really exist – despite a disclaimer in closing credits. Or they decided it would be funny to claim they were. With the internet it’s hard to tell.

(4) And internet anonymity isn’t what it once was. Now the government knows if you’re a dog.

(5) Roger Corman has started a pay YouTube channel, Corman’s Drive-in, to cash in on his vast catalog of movies — Ron Howard in Grand Theft Auto, The Battle Beyond the Stars, Tommy Lee Jones, Sandra Bullock, Joe Dante’s Pirhana, Death Race 2000 with David Carradine, Little Shop of Horrors 2000, etc.

(6) The screen rights to C.J. Cherryh’s fantasy quartet “The Morgaine Stories” has been optioned by producer Aard Magnani with Peter Arneson adapting.

Set in a distant medieval world, the series tells the epic story of an outcast warrior forced to serve a mysterious time-traveling heroine. Legend says she is evil, but he eventually learns her mission is to save the universe.

Arneson has already penned the screenplay for the first novel, “The Gates of Morgaine: Ivrel,” which Magnani has also optioned. He will produce through his Water Bear-Aaron Magnani Prods., alongside Duck Kolenik.

(7) The original model of the Enterprise used to shoot effects scenes is in the National Air and Space Museum. At first it was suspended from the ceiling, which kept it out of reach of tourists but also limited the view to the starship’s underside.

A 2009 blog article traces the history of Enterprise display.

After considerable discussion, museum staff decided not to hang the starship any more. Instead, a special case was built for it, and it now rests upon two stanchions specially built to hold it. The case protects the ship from dust, grime and fingerprints, while at the same time, presents the model at eye-level, so that the serious (and the merely curious) viewer can study it closely, and from all sides.

There are also X-ray photos that reveal the model’s electronics.

(8) Iain Banks’ bucket list included a book of his collected poetry.

The Scottish author revealed in his final interview before his death from cancer last week that he had hoped to secure a publisher for an anthology of 50 poems as part of a “bucket list” of things he wanted to do before he died.

Banks, who had 29 books published in his lifetime, last had a standalone poem printed 30 years ago, in the first edition of New Writing Scotland, an annual anthology of poetry created by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. It was his first published work.

The poem – entitled 041 in reference to the old Glasgow telephone code and detailing a phone call with his faraway “lady” – nestles in the anthology alongside poems written by other now-well known Scots authors such as Robert Crawford.

The only poetry Banks has published since 1983 begins and ends his novel Use Of Weapons.

(9) A Tacoma park may be named for Dune author Frank Herbert.

A new park taking shape on a former slag heap on the Tacoma waterfront could be named for science fiction author Frank Herbert… Herbert was a Tacoma native who explored Puget Sound.

His son and biographer, Brian Herbert, says the environment theme in “Dune” emerged from living in Tacoma in the 1950s when the city was polluted by the Asarco smelter.

Workers are now covering smelter slag with clean dirt at what Metro Parks Tacoma informally calls Peninsula Park.

(10) No matter what you thought, Queen Elizabeth is related to Richard III. ‘Tis as clear as is the summer’s sun.

 [Thanks for these stories go out to Chronicles of the Dawn Patrol, Francis Hamit, Andrew Porter, David Klaus and John King Tarpinian.]