44 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/26/20 Strange Scrolls Lying In Ponds Distributing Pixels Is No Basis For A System Of Filing”

1. (1) I vaguely recall that The Stainless Steel Rat for President was nominated for this prize (though apparently it did not win).

2. Re (1): The title “Classical Antiquity in Heavy Metal Music” actually makes a certain amount of sense to me. Deep Purple was one of the early heavy-metal bands, and conservatory-trained keyboardist Jon Lord frequently inserted passages from Beethoven and other composers into the songs he wrote or arranged.

3. (7) Anthony Rapp was in a different Sky High (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100634/characters/nm0710829) than I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_High_(2005_film)

4. Clickity

5. (9) I had a back-up plan to that review which was to recount the whole of the plot of the book using the theme tune to Spongebob Squarepants:
   “Whoooo lives in a big house over the sea?
   Pi-ra-nay-see”
   but I couldn’t come up with the next line and it felt a bit too direspectful even though the central character does have a Spongebobyness about them (in a good way).

   I also forgot to say that I listened to the audiobook version which was read by Chiwetel Ejiofor who was also quite brilliant.

6. (10) I have to say that a huge solar flare headed straight for Earth would have been a pretty unsurprising addition to the way things have been going in 2020! The fact that it’s going to miss us almost makes me question my faith in Murphy!

7. 4) [Sherlock Holmes] observed, “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”
   — “A Study in Scarlet”

8. 11) For further information there’s https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0006333/

9. Andrew (not Werdna)

   (7) Anthony Rapp was in a different Sky High….random 1990 “Sky High” movie..link removed by me.. than I was thinking of ..link removed by me.. Disney 2005 “Sky High”

   I was thinking the same actually and missed the birth year of 1970, which would have made him 35 years old oif he debuted in the Disney ” Sky High” movie , which i have watched multiple times because of my then teenage nephews always watching it. (A young Danielle Panabaker of tv’s CW Flash series appears in it, which i think was mentioned in her birthday scroll.)

10. (7) Bob Hoskins starred in the original BBC version of Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven, which contains many fantasy sequences but — like Potter’s later serial The Singing Detective — is at most borderline genre.

11. 7) The Orville is just like Shakespeare: 50% character drama, 20% action, 10% heavy ideas, and 20% dick jokes.

    10) Shades of http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ .

12. @ Jeanne – and Spinal Tap hilariously skewers rock guitarists who use classical melodies in their solos. And then there’s Yngwie Malmsteen who practically invented the neo -classical sub genre. But I assume the phrase ‘classical antiquity’ refers to Ancient Greece and Rome.

13. Thinking about it, Deep Purple’s Richie Blackmore also like to use a lot more classical-style melodies than his more blues-based contemporaries.

14. 11) Not that rediscovered. I have a videotape of this that was commercially released in 1991.

    2) Whenever I see what appears to be an acronym starting with FI…, I can’t help but try to interpret it as “Fandom is…”. So FIYAH must be “Fandom is yet another hobby”.

15. 1: There’s a description at the link which should be definite: “US-based academics Fletcher and Umurhan edit a collection that looks at the close connection between the ancient Greek and Roman world and heavy metal. It is the “first attempt to break new ground by marrying Classics with metal music studies,” noted the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, to the astonishment of no one. ”

    The ancients don’t have as many mentions in the genre as some of the more obvious topics (“Tolkien”), but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. Just off the top of my head, Virgin Steele had an entire three album release based on the Oresteia, Blind Guardian has ‘And Then Where Was Silence’, Iron Maiden’s ‘Alexander the Great’ (some dude that was rightly jealous of Diogenes).

16. David Shallcrossm says Whenever I see what appears to be an acronym starting with FI…, I can’t help but try to interpret it as “Fandom is…”. So FIYAH must be “Fandom is yet another hobby”.

    It’s slang for fire. You can see that by looking at their logo which depicts a flame. Oddly enough that’s the way fire is pronounced in Downeast Maine by the older residents who were born there.

    Now playing: Jay Ungar & Molly Mason’s “The Farmer’s Set”

17. It isn’t just slang for fire. It’s also how people from the Deep South say “fire” normally–it’s how Jim Morrison sang “fire.” He grew up in Florida, and retained his accent all his life. He certainly displayed it well when I saw him live in Phoenix in 1968.

18. The discussion of classical melodies in heavy metal reminded me of the quasi-reversal of this idea in Langdon Jones’ “Biographical Note on Ludwig Van Beethoven II” (in Best SF Stories from New Worlds 5; thanks, isfdb), wherein musical examples are given that I can’t reproduce here; one theme in a Beethoven II piece turns out to be the french-horn interlude in the Beatles’ “For No One” (among other sly quotations).

19. Jeanne (Sourdough) Jackson says It isn’t just slang for fire. It’s also how people from the Deep South say “fire” normally–it’s how Jim Morrison sang “fire.” He grew up in Florida, and retained his accent all his life. He certainly displayed it well when I saw him live in Phoenix in 1968.

    You’re right. I should’ve said said that it’s one way of pronouncing that word. My bad.

    Cat who’s freshly showered as the home health aide was just here. Getting in and and out of a bathtub with that knee without someone to help just doesn’t occur.

    Now listening to: Elizabeth Bear’s In The House of Aryaman: A Lonely Signal Burns

20. On the subject of Murderbot, this Youtube video is absolutely awesome (as Martha Wells noted):

    https://youtu.be/yDMSHgQY5rM

21. @Jeanne (Sourdough)

    It’s also how people from the Deep South say “fire” normally–

    Well, it’s how some people from the Deep South say it. There are multiple southern accents. My family from SE Tennessee says it “far”. As in my uncle, who played with matches as a child, and was forever known as “farbug”. (“Firebug”).

22. @Bill

    I know there are lots of variations in those places. My Aunt Betty Lou, a Texan, once told me her husband was “retard.” She meant “retired,” Uncle Buddy was not feeble-minded.

23. When my aunt moved to Texas from the East Coast, she asked a neighbor for a recipe, and was quite befuddled by the instruction to start by “balling” some water.

24. I was rereading “Ten Thousand Doors of January” recently and was wondering if we are intended to think that Wnahnel Fpnyyre’f erbcravat bs inevbhf Qbbef yrq gb gur qrfgehpgvba bs Rzcverf ol pnhfvat JJV naq JJVV?

25. @Andrew
    I remember being befuddled, shortly after moving to west Texas, when I was asked for my “nyme”.

26. @P J Evans: Heh!

27. @Cat
    Collected the mail this morning and found the expected paperwork for my next quarterly appt with the chemo people, and also a lab request for the port removal, which will be sometime in the next week, because PTT test. So that labwork is done, even if it was a special trip to the lab. (Dropped my ballot off two weeks ago, so it’s in and verified, and I don’t have to deal with it.)

28. @bill —

    Well, it’s how some people from the Deep South say it. There are multiple southern accents. My family from SE Tennessee says it “far”.

    Just to pick a nit — TN is not “Deep South”. It’s mid-South.

    Also — That makes at least four 770ers from TN. Sounds like your family was close to Chip (Chattanooga). I grew up in Nashville, though I wasn’t born there. I bet I’ve spent more time in TN than either of you, though — about 45 years total.

    But as for Southern accents varying — absolutely true, and sometimes they can vary significantly within a very small area. We used to make fun of Belle Meade accents (the old money part of Nashville), which were noticeably different from the the poor side of town. A Belle Meade resident would have said “fiyah”, because one of their distinguishing features was to cram as many syllables as possible into any word. We used to joke about how they’d say “Stahwuh Wahwuhs”. 😉

    (And just to throw in another anecdote — when I was in third grade in Nashville, we were learning syllables. My teacher, in front of the class, told me I was wrong when I said the word “lion” had two syllables. The correct way to pronounce it, of course, was “laahn”. And that’s how I learned to question authority. ;-D )

29. P J Evans says to me Collected the mail this morning and found the expected paperwork for my next quarterly appt with the chemo people, and also a lab request for the port removal, which will be sometime in the next week, because PTT test. So that labwork is done, even if it was a special trip to the lab. (Dropped my ballot off two weeks ago, so it’s in and verified, and I don’t have to deal with it.)

    Good luck on that. I had a neurological follow-up for the black-outs that was scheduled tentatively scheduled as an in-office visit in early November that I just requested be done via Zoom.

    My ballot was posted two weeks ago and the state website confirmed it was accepted. It looks like eighty percent of Mainers are likely to cast an absentee ballot this time.

30. @Contrarius — Geographically, you are correct. But I’d say that attitude-wise, Tennessee is closer to the Deep South than Texas. Texas is at least as much West as it is South.

    Sounds like your family was close to Chip (Chattanooga).

    Mom was from Whitwell, as were her parents and grandparents. Her dad was a coal miner, killed when she was a child when a cart got loose underground and crashed into him. Whitwell is less than 20 miles from Chattanooga as the crow flies, but Walden’s Ridge/Signal Mountain is between them, and for someone of Mom’s socioeconomic status in the 1940s/1950s, Chattanooga was another world.
    Dad was from Bedford County (grew up in Murfreesboro), as were his people (farmers). His earliest memory was riding with his dad with a wagon load of corn to the Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg.
    I grew up in Nashville, went to college in Knoxville, and moved to Huntsville AL in 1985 when I graduated. But I’ve been back to Nashville at least 10 times a year since then. And practically speaking, there is not much difference between North Alabama and Middle Tennessee.

    But as for Southern accents varying — absolutely true, and sometimes they can vary significantly within a very small area. We used to make fun of Belle Meade accents

    From high school to late twenties, Dad worked for Kroger in various stores around the area. He had a pretty good ear, and in the early sixties (back before Nashville decided it wanted to be Atlanta or Austin and so many people moved in), he could talk to a customer for a few minutes and usually could tell what neighborhood in Nashville they were from. (To tickle memories of years and people gone by, Dick Fulton once bounced a check on him).

    (Is it too personal to ask where you went to high school? Myself, McGavock, class of 1980.)

31. @Bill–Your dad sounds like he was a regular ‘Enry ‘Iggins.

32. (1) The Slaughter of Farmed Animals: Practical Ways to Enhance Animal Welfare by Temple Grandin and Michael Cockram doesn’t strike me as a particularly strange title, either. Temple Grandin is well known for her writings on animal welfare. (There was even an HBO movie about her starring Claire Danes a few years back.)

33. Joshua K. That’s a good point. (And the movie was pretty inspiring.)

34. @bill —

    Damn, Bill, we even graduated the same year. We probably crossed paths at the Green Hills Mall or somewhere without realizing it!

    You will know exactly how to pigeonhole me when I tell you what school I went to — University School of Nashville/Peabody Demonstration School, from second grade through high school graduation. Then Vanderbilt. Then UTK. Then work for a few years. Then UTK again. ;-D

    And Texas isn’t South, no matter what anyone says. It’s West!

35. Texas is so big that it is both South and West (and may have a New England section too for all I know).

36. Texas is South and Southwest. (West is coastal.) Also Texas is weird. (Dang, I miss real DQs. In CA, you can’t get “Dudes” (chicken-fried steak in a bun), just cold stuff.)

37. @PJ —

    Texas is South and Southwest. (West is coastal.)

    I’ll give you Southwest. But West isn’t just coastal — Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico are all West too!

38. @Jeanne (Sourdough) Jackson

    @Bill–Your dad sounds like he was a regular ‘Enry ‘Iggins.

    Nothing so grand. And he would have had sense enough not to keep Audrey Hepburn at arm’s length for so long.

    @Contrarius
    University School? You wouldn’t have happend to have been on their Quiz Bowl team, would you? If so, we would have met 40 years ago. I remember playing against y’all in the city tournament and in scrimmage.
    And I was at UTK from 1980-1985. Lived in Hess, N. Carrick and Reese.

    And FWIW, I worked at the Great Escape (comic book/record store) a couple blocks (20th Ave and Broadway) away from University School during high school years. Maybe I sold you something. In fact, I found out two years ago that SF writer Allen Steele and I knew each other in passing from there, way back when. He was a regular customer.

39. @Contrarius – I’m actually a Tennessean by birth, born in Oak Ridge, so I come by my glowing personality naturally. My parents were from Indiana and Ohio; they tried to keep us from picking up the local accent too heavily. We moved away shortly before I turned 9.

40. @ Contrarius – I had a similar learning experience when my teacher corrected my spelling of ‘laser’ to ‘laser’.

41. Cliff: I had a similar learning experience when my teacher corrected my spelling of ‘laser’ to ‘laser’.

    Is… this a trick question? Invisible font? Invisible characters? 🤨

42. Doh – I’m blaming it on autocorrect: should have been laser to lazer.

43. @Bill —

    And FWIW, I worked at the Great Escape (comic book/record store) a couple blocks (20th Ave and Broadway)

    Ha! You may well have sold me something, but you almost definitely sold my brother something. If you happen to remember a 6’9″ giant in your store at any point, that was him. It was one of his frequent haunts.

    No quiz bowl, though, sorry. I don’t remember who was on that team when I was there!

    But I didn’t get to UTK til ’85, so I missed you there. And I never lived on campus — I was in a house at the very western edge of Fort Sanders. I stayed in that house from ’85 through 2008, with a five year break in the middle when I was living in Utah. I still miss the hills and greenness of East TN!

    @Anne — Another Tennessean! You probably already know that Katherine Addison/Sarah Monette is from Oak Ridge. I drove to OR every week for several years, for Oak Ridge Kennel Club training sessions. 🙂

44. @Cat
    They’ve scheduled it for Monday after next (I have to be there by 7am), and next week there will be a virus test – they’ll be calling me about that.

Comments are closed.