(1) NAZIS, I HATE THOSE GUYS. The BBC, while reporting on somebody who wants to fly on Mars, made sure we didn’t miss out on any Nazi clickbait. Honestly….
The flying wing isn’t a new idea. The first practical design was developed by engineers in Nazi Germany in the final months of World War Two. The reason we are still whizzing around the globe in aluminum tubes with tails bolted to the back is that flying-wing aircraft have had a tendency to fall out of the sky.
Not anymore. Bowers’ team has spent the last few years developing and successfully testing models of flying wing aircraft. But, as befits the world’s foremost air and space organisation, Bowers is not only looking at terrestrial applications. He aims to become the first person to fly an aircraft across the surface of Mars.
(2) ANOTHER TEA LOVER. Elizabeth Fitzgerald of Earl Grey Editing Services reports on the most interesting parts of Australia’ Conflux 12, held at the beginning of October.
There were some great panels throughout the convention. Fanning the Sacred Flame discussed religion in SFF. Panel members came from atheist, Anglican, Buddhist and Jewish backgrounds. Despite being an atheist, K.J. Taylor said she finds it weird when religion or superstition is never mentioned in fantastical societies because it is something that exists in every real culture. She also spoke about her experiences with writing religious characters and stressed the importance of not being patronising or making the characters look like idiots by following their beliefs. Rivqa Rafael discussed ignorance as a writer’s worst enemy. Often writers don’t know what they are evoking when they borrow elements from religions they’re not a part of, with the results being beyond offensive and into hurtful. She gave the example of the Jewish golem. C.S. Lewis’ Narnia was mentioned many times, with the consensus being that the story worked best when its parable elements were subtle. Rivqa also cited Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy as an example of religion done well, pointing out that conflicts between religions rarely happen on a level playing field, historically speaking. There are often major cultural and colonial elements at play.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. At the closing ceremony, Sean Williams demonstrated the last of his Sci Chi. There’s an excellent video of Sean and Alan Baxter, if you’re interested in learning the moves (or just being mightily entertained).
Conflux 12 took place at the beginning of the month and I reported on it in two parts. The Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild have a round-up of convention reports from other members. However, they missed a few, including one from Guest of Honour Alan Baxter. Master of Ceremonies Sean Williams was in Canberra for a month leading up to the convention and has shared some of his experiences of that time. Rivqa Rafael has also storyfied her comprehensive tweets of the convention.
However, even Conflux can be a problematic favourite. No Award offers some criticism on aspects of this year’s convention.
Regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of Juliet Marillier and loved her latest book, Den of Wolves. If you’re also a fan and live in the US, you may be interested to know she’ll be appearing at a few conventions over the next few weeks.
(3) STONY END. Yes, he may be the finest idolator idolizing today. “Why I am a Milodator” by John C. Wright.
Many of my Christian friends wonder why I have erected a nine-story tall idol made out of of radioactive protactinium atop Mount Erebus in Antarctica to my hero Milo Yiannopoulos, to which each dark of the moon I sacrifice thirteen lesbians and journalists and randy Ethiopian bisexuals, thereby violating four of the Ten Commandments and two amendments of the Bill of Rights….
(4) INVISIBLE PLANETS WORTH A LOOK. Reviewer Ardi Alspach of B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog says “Invisible Planets Is a Singular Anthology of Chinese Science Fiction”.
Ken Liu has made his name as both a translator and novelist. His translated edition of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (two of Cixin Liu’s stories appear here) is the first work of translated fiction to win a Hugo Award, and he’s been nominated for—and won—many awards for his own fiction. The stories he’s chosen for this anthology are representative of the expansive breadth of styles and ideas Chinese science fiction has to offer. I’ve highlighted some of my favorites below, but the bottom line is, this is a well-balanced, thoughtfully assembled collection, essential for any reader who wants to expand their understanding of the genre on a global scale.
(5) IRAQI SF. Sean McLachlan puts the anthology Iraq +100 on everyone’s radar in his Black Gate post “The Future of Iraq, According to the Country’s Science Fiction Authors”.
With all the grim news coming out of Iraq, it’s easy to think the country has no future. That’s wrong, of course, because being one of the oldest countries in the world, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
But what will that future look like? To answer that question, UK publisher Comma Press has released Iraq +100, an anthology of Iraqi writers imagining the future of their nation.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
- November 2, 2000 — Cookie Monster (character on Sesame Street) was born.
(7) BEHIND COSPLAY. Mindy Weisberg fathoms “The psychology behind cosplay” for Huffington Post.
Certain costumes offer some people a way of working through personal difficulties, Rosenberg said. Batman, for example, can be an especially meaningful cosplay choice for someone coping with trauma. The dark superhero faced devastating trauma when he was a child — witnessing the brutal murder of his parents — which he overcame to become a hero.
“When people are dressed as Batman, many talk about having [experienced] their own traumatic experiences,” Rosenberg said. “He survived and found meaning and purpose from his experience, and that is inspiring to them.”
(8) COSPLAY IN L.A. Here is a photo gallery of the best Marvel cosplay from Stan Lee’s L.A. Comic Con 2016.
(9) PLAY FOR PAY IN L.A. Yahoo! celebrates one of the “MVPs of Horror: The Woman Behind Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, on Her 35th Year as the Bodacious Horror Hostess”.
Elvira was born, so to speak, during an era when independent TV stations like KHJ-TV kind of operated like the Wild West. Did it help being able to workshop the character in that kind of environment?
When I first appeared on local television as Elvira, I was allowed a lot more leeway than I expected. After I got the job, my friend made a sketch of what my dress should look like. I said, “There’s no way I can wear this on TV,” and they were like, “Just make the slit on the leg higher and it’ll be great.” Local TV stations didn’t really worry about standards and practices, so I made it pretty edgy. The station manager would come in just about every other week and say, “We’ve got a complaint again about your dress being so low-cut. You have to fix that.” I’d go, “OK, I’ll have them make the neckline higher.” And then I wouldn’t do anything at all, and he’d come back a couple weeks later and go, “We got a complaint.” It just kept going on like that. I never changed it!
(10) MOVIE CULTISTS. The October 28 Washington City Paper has a profile by Matt Cohen of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society, which has been screening weirdo films, many fantasy and sf, since 1989. Cohen discusses how the group manages to keep going, even though they get bounced from bar to bar, in part for showing such fare as the “infamous 1974 Belgian art film VASE DE NOCES,” which has many scenes of happy pigs makin’ bacon. — “For Nearly 30 Years, the Washington Psychotronic Film Society Has Been Home for D.C.’s Underground Flick Fanatics”
For horror aficionados, Halloween is a 31-day celebration. It’s an excuse to spend the month of October cramming in as many spine-chilling movies as time allows. But for Carl Cephas, October is just another month. It doesn’t matter what time of year it is, every single Monday evening, Cephas dons a white lab coat, carries a stately meerschaum pipe, and becomes his alter ego: The Incorrigible Dr. Schlock.
It’s a role he’s been playing for 27 years as the president of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society—a club that has been meeting almost weekly to screen weird movies since 1989. “We’ve always shown underground, B-, student, experimental, underrated, non-Academy, anime, avant-garde, guerilla filmmaking, but people kept saying, ‘Oh, you guys just sit around watching bad movies,’” Cephas says. “And I would go, ‘No, they are not bad movies! They are films of a peculiar interest!’”
(11) BEYOND PRICE. Gabriel Ricard at Culture Vultures shows his appreciation for a horror movie legend in “Make the Case: Five Essential Vincent Price Movies”.
To be honest, I don’t think Vincent Price has ever actually scared me. Yet there is something about the multifaceted, unforgettable approach he brought to villainy that will probably stay with me for the rest of my life. The great actors and actresses of the horror genre do not have to actually be scary, in order to make a connection to the audience. They simply have to bring something to the material that makes it almost impossible to imagine that material without them.
A good example of the above thought with Price would be the numerous Edgar Allan Poe movies he worked on. Yeah, there have been a ton of Poe film adaptations through the years, but I really don’t care about the vast majority of the movies that didn’t feature Price. He was the perfect actor to play characters like Roderick Usher or Nicholas Medina. While he was not overtly scary in those roles, he did set the bar for the kind of bad guy who could still capture your attention. He frequently transcended the notion of merely being scary. In the best Vincent Price films and worst Vincent Price films, he was rarely boring. The horror films of Vincent Price could establish tension and atmosphere on their own terms. Price would then bring his singular presence to the proceedings. He enhanced the tension and atmosphere through performances that were so unique, they didn’t have to be outright scary. They were an approach to evil, sympathetic or not, that were essential to the appeal of the movie.
(12) GHASTLY ACTING. Gizmodo declares its candidates for “The 30 Weirdest Horror Movies of the 1970s”. How about this one with two servings of ham, Shatner and Travolta?
9) The Devil’s Rain (1975)
Robert Fuest, director of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, returns to this list with this Satanic delight about a family cursed by a devoted servant of the Dark Lord. William Shatner plays the hero and Ernest Borgnine plays the red-robed villain, while John Travolta makes his film debut in a very small role. Other than Borgnine, the most memorable part of this cheese-fest is when the title event manifests onscreen, and everybody’s face melts. It’s spectacularly nuts.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]
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Ticky Ticky Tavvi
Who’s on First? I’m on First!
Hard to believe I would ever think less of Wright and yet here we are.
[1] There’s a flying wing at the Army Transportation Museum at Fort Eustis, near Newport News, Virginia. It’s a great museum, albeit underfunded. There’s a jet pack, and hovercrafts, and some kind of walker (olive drab, of course!), and a one-man platform with handlebars on top of an eight-foot propellor that somebody actually volunteered to stand on and see if it worked or if it merely cut him to ribbons. It also has some fanhistory, as Steve Stiles was stationed there around 1970, and used to cool it in one or the other of the locomotives in his off moments (and every weekend, Ned Brooks came and took him away from the Army, saving his sanity).
[10] The Psychotronic Book Store, located in, I think, Cape May (Maryland, right?), a ferry terminus on the Eastern Shore, is run by Michael J. Weldon, the author of the original Psychotronic book that gave the genre its name. My friend Mike and I journeyed up there one time, and the store wasn’t open, but we asked at another used book store, and they knew where Weldon was, and he kindly came and opened his store to us. It was wonderful. I recommend it, if it’s still there.
Tickety-boo.
(though apparently I was too ticked off to tick)
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
Much like Oscar the Grouch’s birthday, this is patently untrue unless Cookie has been taking the DeLorean out for a spin. I mean he lost his cookie at the disco for Pete’s sake!
(3) STONY END.
I’m not sure why we needed to know this. It doesn’t seem genre-relevant. And I’d rather not give unnecessary bandwidth to a person who believes horrible things and behaves in horrible ways. 😐
My days of not considering Wright to be a serious or even slightly moral person are certainly coming to a middle.
Cape May is in New Jersey and there is a ferry from there to Lewis, Delaware. But neither Cape May nor Lewis is on the “eastern shore”. Maryland has an Eastern Shore and Viriginia, too. But the Atlantic coast of Delaware is just Delaware.
Trolls are a common figure in fantasy, though I find that regardless of how fictitious the description of the troll religion in this post it is a terribly written info dump and the details are so dumb that it breaks any suspension of disbelief. Which is typical of the author really.
The BBC flying wing piece was written by an historical ignoramus. Jack Northrop’s contributions to flying wing aircraft predate and are much more significant than Horten’s.
Sesame Workshop does have canonical birthdays for their characters, but as far as I know does not specify a year. (Which makes sense, since a lot of the character’s ages are effectively frozen, so a fixed year would throw that off.)
Sesame Workshop does list November 2 as Cookie Monster’s birthday: http://www.sesameworkshop.org/season45/behind-the-scenes/muppet-bios/cookie-monster/
Cookie Monster made his Sesame Street debut in the first episode, which aired November 10, 1969: http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Episode_0001 So by that measure he’s turning 47 this month.
(1)
Planes of Fame in Chino, CA, is having a show of their flying wing on the 5th – it actually does fly.
Ultragotha
It was a while back. We drove up the Eastern Shore and caught the ferry. The book store is probably gone. Thanks for the painstaking refutation.
C is for chronal flux
That’s good enough for me
C is for chronal gate
That’s good enough for me
C is for chronal knot
That’s good enough for me
Oh, chronal travel backward start with C!
(11) My favourite Vincent Price role was in a Citibank credit card commercial. His wife praises the card for saving them enough money to get “something for Vincent.” It turns out to be a bug zapper, and his evil chuckling as mosquitos meet their electric end is just wonderful.
(3) I read John C. Wright’s blog entry. It left me wondering if they make really big bug zappers. Really big.
@Kevin Harkness: I remember that commercial! (Although I couldn’t have told you what it was an ad for.) It was hilarious.
My favourite Vincent Price role was in a Citibank credit card commercial. His wife praises the card for saving them enough money to get “something for Vincent.” It turns out to be a bug zapper, and his evil chuckling as mosquitos meet their electric end is just wonderful.
Why, yes, it is wonderful.
ticky
THE CUBS WIN!
That was quite a baseball game.
Scroll Cubs scroll, scroll Cubs scroll. Hey Chicago what do you say, the Cubs are gonna tick today.
(3) It’s mighty white of Johnny to restrain his natural impulse to beat Milo to death with a tire iron.
We’re now officially in an alternate universe. Cubs’ victory parade will involve zeppelins*. Also a high possibility of goatees.
@Kurt: Here, have this internet.
@Kevin: I’d completely forgotten about that ad till you mentioned it and it came rushing back clearly.
*(But they will be neither spicy nor “Oriental”. They’ll be deep-dish.)
(10) MOVIE CULTISTS.
I remember I bought the Encyclopedia of Psychotronic Films some time almost 30 years ago now. Did some kind of work on it for school. It was really a great help to find the obscure movies.
(11) BEYOND PRICE.
My favourite Vincent Price is the wine tasting scene from Tales of Terror. He and Peter Lorre are fantastic together. I have no idea how many times I have seen that scene.
Well,. the Cubs have won the World Series. We truly are living in a Science Fiction present.
I’ve always thought of Vincent Price as the epitome of camp horror. He never had, say, Peter Cushing’s intensity or Christopher Lee’s gravitas, but he was always the quintessential hissable villain… sinister, but not scary.
I think it’s because of this that he was at his best in productions that allowed him to go completely over the top. I loved him as Doctor Phibes, with the frozen immobile face, talking through a tube in his neck… and in Theatre of Blood, as noted in the article.
And he made a lovely Despard Murgatroyd in Ruddigore….
Of course you can mix today’s scroll title and Vincent Price
John C. Wright really is the kind of Christian who puts “Judge not, let you be judged” to the test.
3: an interesting variation on that old arab canard ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.
I watched (part of) Milo’s interview including his rant about political correctness in speech. Someone using an offensive word is exercising free speech; someone objecting to the offense is exercising free speech. But your offensive speech is somehow privileged and should never be called into question because, exactly why?
I listen to this guy and all I hear is a demand that society must tolerate assholes being assholes because they’re assholes.
Expression of free speech versus bagpipes.
@Steve Wright: when was Price \Despard/? I have real trouble seeing Price as a repentant sinner trying desperately for utterly boring normality. Maybe I’ve missed whatever films he wasn’t out of bounds in? Or did you mean Roderick?
A matter dear to many old fen’s hearts: the quality of beer. tl;dr version: the German purity law is coming up against novel brewing ideas.
I just read the entire Wikipedia entry on Cookie Monster and still have no idea how he could get dated to Y2K.
Cookie Monster is like the legendary Phoenix. Every few years, he bursts into flames, leaving only a cookie behind. This cookie is carefully incubated in a heap of junk food wrappers provided by Oscar the Grouch (as repayment for some unspecified service in the past that Oscar won’t talk about) and after seven days, the cookie hatches and Cookie Monster is born anew from the crumbs.
Clearly the last rebirth cycle was in 2000. That’s all.
If “lost his cookie at the disco” isn’t a euphemism for something, it should be.
@Chip Hitchcock: 1982 TV production, opposite Keith Michell – I found a sample here, though I’m afraid the picture quality’s pretty lousy.
@Steve Wright: \very/ camp (or very crazy — sometimes with Price it’s hard to tell, and camp is one way to do Ruddigore). This is a little better, but it’s still act 1; I may have to buy the DVD just to see what he does in act 2. (Or I may not; the one IMDB review says that someone seeing this as their first G&S would never want to see another one.)
UltraGotha: the part of Delaware that is the Atlantic portion is Sussex County. New Castle County and Kent county are fronted by New Jersey, and are considered part of Delaware Bay. Lewis is the point where the ocean front begins.
(3) Sigh…..sorry Cora. My turn for the asbestos underoos……again.
Without endorsing everything he said, or everything that people will imply based on what he said (or has said elsewhere), I rather enjoyed Milo’s interview. Particularly the parts about some folks not being able to recognize humour and the push-back against the “Have you stopped beating your wife, Mr. Jones” question.
There are more sedate treatments of the free speech issue, for those that find Milo’s existence offensive….
Regards,
Dann
dang it….
forgot the c4c, again.
I think Vincent Price was very good in his role in CHAMPAGNE FOR CAESAR, where he played a millionaire who sold soap. The film is quite good. Caesar is a parrot who drinks too much.
If the cubs won – will Biff Tanner be elected next week?
That would be too much to hope.
@Chip Hitchcock: I didn’t think it was that bad; it’s very studio-bound, and the production values are a bit, well, basic. But it still managed some nice moments, I thought. Price is still clearly enjoying himself in Act II, though he doesn’t quite have enough wind to get through the patter song without pausing for breath. (Keith Michell comes to life a bit more in Act II, too, and Mad Margaret has some good moments.)
Dann: There are more sedate treatments of the free speech issue, for those that find Milo’s existence offensive
Has it occurred to you that it’s Milo’s behavior that a lot of people find offensive, rather than his existence?
The way you’ve worded it sounds like a really snotty dismissal of people’s very valid objections to his horrible behavior. Come on, Dann, you can be (and usually are) better than that.
It’s certainly mine since I have a friend who has received death threats because of him.
Of course, maybe death threats are simply Milo and his friends exercising their right to free speech.
I’m not sure I’d call Price ‘scary’ so much as ‘captivating’ most of the time. He definitely had a certain presence.
(I’m suddenly reminded of a parody script reading of the first X-Men movie I heard once, where somebody doing a fairly decent Patrick Stewart impression said, “I’m Charles Xavier, and my superpower is the ability to say these lines without sounding stupid.”)
Of course, as noted above with the credit card ad and the bug zapper, Price was also quite fond of making fun of his usual characters. See also The Hilarious House of Frightenstein.
(3) Stony End –
I watched a few minutes of the video. So that’s Milo Yiannopoulos?
Mostly, I feel relieved that he’s British. I had no idea! We have so many homegrown dirtbags here, it’s nice to be able to blame this one on the Brits.
I’m also surprised that Wright and so many other LGBTQ-hating far-right extremists admire him, given how camp he is. Not as camp as Trump, but still very obviously so.
Hopefully not, but not literally impossible.
Anyone who missed out on the Longlist Anthology 2 Kickstarter can still back it and receive rewards through BackerKit for another week or two. Note that editor David Steffen and Skyboat Media have worked out a deal to add the audiobook of 6 stories to the project, despite the audiobook stretch goal not being reached.
So if you’re having non-backer’s remorse, you can still get in on the anthology.
@RedWombat on November 3, 2016 at 8:29 am said:
I’m just going to sit here and savor this. Like a tasty, tasty cookie.
@Hampus Eckerman – that wine tasting scene is easily the best comedy scene ever to appear in a non-comedy movie.