(1) GALAKTIKA UP TO ITS OLD TRICKS. Bence Pintér of Mandiner.sci-fi checked with the authors of translated short stories in the latest issue of Galaktika, the Hungarian prozine caught publishing overseas authors without payment. Pinter discovered —
They [Galaktika] went on with publishing short stories without the authors’ permission, in this case the victims were Indra Das and Colin P. Davies. Davies knew nothing about this translation; but they asked Das for permission, but never got back to him with contract or the royalty. He did not know his story was published. Here is my article in Hungarian.
(2) CINEMA DENIERS. New Statesman’s Amelia Tait, in “The Movie That Doesn’t Exist and the Redditors Who Think It Does”, reports there is an intense discussion on Reddit about people who say that they saw a movie called Shazaam in the mid-1990s with Sinbad as a genie, even though there is no evidence that this movie was ever made and Sinbad himself tweeted that “only people who were kids in the mid-90s” claim to have seen it. Tait says these redditors are probably mis-remembering Kazaam, a movie with Shaquille O’Neal as a genie from the mid-1990s.
“I remember thinking Shaq’s Kazaam was a rip-off or a revamp of a failed first run, like how the 1991 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer bombed but the late Nineties TV reboot was a sensation,” says Meredith, who is one of many who claim to remember both Shazaam and Kazaam. Don remembers ordering two copies of the former and only one of the latter for the store, while Carl says: “I am one of several people who specifically never saw Kazaam because it looked ridiculous to rip off Shazaam just a few years after it had been released.” When Carl first realised there was no evidence of the Sinbad movie existing, he texted his sister to ask if she remembered the film.
“Her response [was] ‘Of course.’ I told her, ‘Try and look it up, it doesn’t exist’. She tried and texted back with only: ‘What was it called?’ – there was never a question of if it existed, only not remembering the title.”
(3) ALL HE’S CRACKED UP TO BE. Another work of art from “Hugo Nominated Author” Chuck Tingle.
please enjoy PHILOSOPHICAL AUDIOBOOK TINGLER name of Schrodinger's Butt you will learn nature of observed butts https://t.co/Uw68LxDOEt pic.twitter.com/BPMK1eAOqt
— Chuck Tingle (@ChuckTingle) January 6, 2017
(4) THE NEXT STEP. “Where do you get your ideas,” is an oft-mocked interview question, but how one writer develops his ideas is captured in Joshua Rothman’s profile “Ted Chiang’s soulful Science Fiction” in The New Yorker.
Chiang’s stories conjure a celestial feeling of atemporality. “Hell Is the Absence of God” is set in a version of the present in which Old Testament religion is tangible, rather than imaginary: Hell is visible through cracks in the ground, angels appear amid lightning storms, and the souls of the good are plainly visible as they ascend to Heaven. Neil, the protagonist, had a wife who was killed during an angelic visitation—a curtain of flame surrounding the angel Nathanael shattered a café window, showering her with glass. (Other, luckier bystanders were cured of cancer or inspired by God’s love.) Attending a support group for people who have lost loved ones in similar circumstances, he finds that, although they are all angry at God, some still yearn to love him so that they can join their dead spouses and children in Heaven. To write this retelling of the Book of Job, in which one might predict an angel’s movements using a kind of meteorology, Chiang immersed himself in the literature of angels and the problem of innocent suffering; he read C. S. Lewis and the evangelical author Joni Eareckson Tada. Since the story was published, in 2001, readers have argued about the meaning of Chiang’s vision of a world without faith, in which the certain and proven existence of God is troubling, rather than reassuring.
(5) BIG RAY GUN. The UK Ministry of Defence has awarded a ?30M contract to produce a prototype laser weapon.
The aim is to see whether “directed energy” technology could benefit the armed forces, and is to culminate in a demonstration of the system in 2019.
The contract was picked up by a consortium of European defence firms.
The prototype will be assessed on how it picks up and tracks targets at different distances and in varied weather conditions over land and water.
(6) CHOW DOWN. Episode 26 of Scott Edelman’s Eating the Fantastic podcast brings Edelman together with James Morrow at an Uzbek restaurant.
James Morrow
We discussed his first novel (written when he was only seven years old!), why he feels more connected to the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke than that of Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, his many paths not taken, including that of filmmaker, the ethical conundrum which occurred after Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. autographed a book “for Jim Morrow, who writes just like me,” how Charles Darwin “confiscated our passports,” and much more.
Edelman has launched an Eating the Fantastic Patreon.
In order to make Eating the Fantastic even better, I’d like to pick up the pace, post episodes more often than biweekly, make day trips to capture writers whom I never get a chance to see on the con circuit, and maybe even upgrade to more advanced recording equipment.
(7) AUTOGRAPH THE PETITION. Brad Johnson of Covina, CA has started a Change.org petition calling for California lawmakers to repeal the troublesome new standards for dealers in autographed items.
Nearly everyone in California is impacted by AB 1570, California’s new autograph bill, because it affects everyone with a signed item in their possession, whether it’s a painting passed down through generations, an autographed baseball, or a treasured book obtained at an author’s book signing. Under the new law, when a California consumer sells an autographed item worth $5 or more, the consumer’s name and address must be included on a Certificate of Authenticity. This requirement applies to anyone reselling the item as authentic, be it a bookseller, auction house, comic book dealer, antiques dealer, autograph dealer, art dealer, an estate sales company, or even a charity.
AB 1570 is fatally flawed and must be repealed with immediate effect. It is rife with unintended consequences that harm both consumers and small businesses. It has been condemned by newspaper editorial boards and the American Civil Liberties Union.
“This bill never should have passed. The Legislature must fix or repeal it immediately when it resumes business.” – Los Angeles Times Editorial Board
(8) THERE IS A SILVER BULLET FOR THIS PROBLEM. Kate Beckinsale, star of Underworld: Blood Wars, joins Stephen Colbert to deliver an important werewolf-related public service announcement.
(9) A STRANGE DEVICE. Seattle’s Museum of Popular Culture hosts “The Art of Rube Goldberg” beginning February 11.
From self-opening umbrellas to automated back scratchers, if you can dream it, Rube Goldberg invented it.
For more than 70 years, cartoonist Rube Goldberg drew unique worlds filled with inventive technology and political commentary. Equal parts clever satirist and zany designer, the Pulitzer Prizing-winning artist is best known for his invention drawings—complex chain-reaction machines designed to perform simple tasks.
From iconic board games like Mouse Trap to thrilling music videos such as OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass,” Goldberg has influenced some of the most indelible moments in pop culture. His name is so synonymous with his creations that it was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as an adjective that describes the act of complicating a simple task. The tireless creator is thought to have drawn 50,000 cartoons over his long career.
Today, Goldberg’s ideas live on through the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. This annual international competition challenges teams of students to compete in building the most elaborate Rube Goldberg Machine.
The Art of Rube Goldberg is the first comprehensive retrospective of Goldberg’s 72-year career since 1970. With more than 90 objects on display ranging from original drawings and animations to 3D puzzles, these incredible artifacts are paired with MoPOP’s signature interactive style to bring Goldberg’s imagination to life.
(10) EIGHTIES VERTLIEB. Matt Suzaka at Chuck Norris Ate My Baby rediscovered an old video of Steve Vertlieb being interviewed on Philadelphia TV:
While wandering the crowded halls of YouTube recently, I came across this enjoyable Halloween special that aired sometime in the early 1980s (maybe ‘81 or ‘82). The show in question, People Are Talking, was hosted by Richard Bey, and this particular episode features a genuinely interesting interview with film journalist and historian Steve Vertlieb.
One thing that I enjoy about this special, specifically the interview with Vertlieb, is the fact that horror films aren’t being chastised, something of which was very common for this type of show during the time period. Instead, this interview and the special as a whole is more of a celebration of what makes horror enjoyable for people of all ages. There is some discussion about how horror evolves to reflect modern society as well as how horror films can be a positive escape for some people.
(11) SPECIAL SNOWFLAKES. Anthony Herrera Designs has many patterns for science fictional paper snowflakes. The link takes you to the 2016 Star Wars set, and on the same page are links to Guardians of the Galaxy, Frozen, and Harry Potter designs.
New characters! New vehicles! 50% more beards! It’s time for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. These characters look just awesome and they make great snowflakes too. Here is the Star Wars snowflake collection for 2016. Featuring Rogue One characters and a few additional ones I just needed to throw in there. Download, cut and decorate with these snowflakes and most of all REBEL! This is an rebellion isn’t it? Unless your office coworkers will be annoyed. In that case be cool. Don’t be that guy. As always I recommend using scissors, a sharp x-acto knife and patience. Have fun!
(11) THE SHAPE OF SHADES TO COME. Several File 770 readers have said they will be chasing the eclipse next summer. Here’s the latest information on where it can be viewed — “NASA Moon Data Provides More Accurate 2017 Eclipse Path”.
On Monday, Aug. 21, 2017, millions in the U.S. will have their eyes to the sky as they witness a total solar eclipse. The moon’s shadow will race across the United States, from Oregon to South Carolina. The path of this shadow, also known as the path of totality, is where observers will see the moon completely cover the sun. And thanks to elevation data of the moon from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, coupled with detailed NASA topography data of Earth, we have the most accurate maps of the path of totality for any eclipse to date.
(12) MOON PICTURE. Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica says “Hidden Figures is the perfect space race movie”. Does the review live up to the wordplay of the headline? You decide!
Hidden Figures is the perfect title for this film, based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s exhaustively researched book of the same name. It deals with an aspect of spaceflight that is generally ignored, namely all the calculations that allow us to shoot objects into orbit and bring them back again. But it’s also about the people who are typically offscreen in sweeping tales of the white men who ran the space race. What Hidden Figures reveals, for the first time in Hollywood history, is that John Glenn would never have made it to space without the brilliant mathematical insights of a black woman named Katherine Johnson (played with what can only be called regal geekiness by Taraji Henson from Empire and Person of Interest).
Johnson was part of a group of “colored computers” at Langley Research Center in Atlanta, black women mathematicians who were segregated into their own number-crunching group. They worked on NASA’s Project Mercury and Apollo 11, and Johnson was just one of several women in the group whose careers made history.
Though Johnson is the main character, we also follow the stories of her friends as Langley pushes its engineers to catch up to the Soviets in the space race. Mary Jackson (a terrific Janelle Monae) wants to become an engineer, and eventually gets a special court order so she can attend classes at an all-white school. Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) becomes the first African-American woman to lead a department at the space agency, by teaching herself FORTRAN and learning to program Langley’s new IBM mainframe. One of my favorite scenes is when Vaughan debugs the computer for a bunch of white guys who have no idea what’s going on. As they splutter in confusion, she pats the giant, humming mainframe and says, “Good girl.”
(13) OCTAVIA BUTLER’S KINDRED NOW GRAPHIC NOVEL. Via Tor.com’s Leah Schnelbach we learn:
If you’re in New York City on January 13th and 14th, illustrator and Visual Studies professor John Jennings will be debuting the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred at the 2017 Black Comic Fest at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture! Jennings collaborated with writer Damian Duffy on the project, and you can read a preview here.
(14) SHINING GEEKS. Also at Tor.com is Schnelbach’s post “Adam Savage Tours a Weta Workshop Sculptor’s Mini Labyrinth Maze!”
Is there anything more joyful than watching someone explain their passion to an appreciative audience? In the video below, Johnny Fraser-Allen walks Adam Savage through his gorgeously detailed model of the Labyrinth from, er, Labyrinth. Fraser-Allen began work at Weta Workshop straight out of high school, after being inspired to go into film by repeated viewing of Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. Now he’s been commissioned by River Horse Games to create figures and illustrations for their Labyrinth tabletop game, and he gleefully shares his work with fellow maze-enthusiast Adam Savage, whose model of The Shining‘s iconic hedge maze is currently touring the country with the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition.
See her post for the Youtube video about the Labyrinth maze.
Meantime, here’s another video about Savage’s own Overlook Hotel Maze. The video is cued to when it’s all complete for about an 8-minute run, but people who want all the details on how it was designed and built can watch from the very beginning (24:21 total).
(15) PROFESSIONAL ADVICE. Alex Acks tweets
https://twitter.com/katsudonburi/status/817375521034137600
https://twitter.com/katsudonburi/status/817376625180418048
(16) AWESOMENESS. Patrick Wynne, renowned mythopoeic artist, was thrilled with a gift he received from Carl F. Hostetter, one of his colleagues in the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship. It’s amazing what happens when your friends really know you.
I think I might just have gotten my favorite Procasmas present EVER—a huge fleece throw with the infamous friendship portrait of Amy Farrah Fowler and Penny from “The Big Bang Theory”! Thank you, Carl F. Hostetter, it’s wonderful!
(17) INTERPLANETARY LOVE. The Space Between Us trailer #3 is out.
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Mark-kitteh, Soon Lee, Michael J. Walsh, Steve Vertlieb, Andrew Porter. and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Dawn Incognito.]
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For that alternate reality thing, there’s also the strange case of the folk who are convinced that the word is spelled DILEMNA… http://dilemna.info
If you like Goldberg, you might also like Storm P
Invention
To build off of Kip’s comment:
My old man’s a pixel scroller
What do you think about that?
He wears a pixel scroller’s collar,
He wears a pixel scroller’s hat.
He wears a pixel scroller’s raincoat,
He wears a pixel scroller’s shoes.
And every Saturday morning,
He reads the File 770 News.
And someday, if I can,
I’m gonna be a pixel scroller just like my old man.
@Arifel
Pamela Zoline, whose story “The Heat-Death of the Universe” was a widely-anthologised icon of the 60s New Wave and precursor of the feminist SF of the 70s, but who published very little else that I’m aware of.
@airboy
I thought the point of his tweets was precisely that he’s not a successful author. What’s telling (or so it seems to me) is that you didn’t respond by trying to argue that the various puppy nominees were nothing like this guy. If you treat their alt-Right publications as equivalent to fanzines, I think only Larry ends up looking like a serious writer.
Ghostbird on January 7, 2017 at 8:19 am said: Pamela Zoline, whose story “The Heat-Death of the Universe” was a widely-anthologised icon of the 60s New Wave and precursor of the feminist SF of the 70s, but who published very little else that I’m aware of.
She published enough stories to make up a collection, Busy About the Tree of Life (1988). And (sob) sold a substantial piece to The Last Dangerous Visions, which does not alas count as publishing …
A few scrolls ago, we were talking about a post from someone who was saying that the Thieves World stories might be reprinted, “If SFWA would allow it.” Or something to that effect. We all wondered what the heck that could be about. A few people alluded to the involvement of a publisher who’d had some troubles, but I don’t remember seeing anything detailed.
Then I saw an item on Reddit today about a judgment in the Peter S. Beagle lawsuit. It essentially says that a con man stole (and is still stealing) much of the revenue from Beagle’s “Last Unicorn” and that the same con man is trying to steal the Thieves World books. If one believes the article (and, I have to say, it’s pretty one-sided) then it really does look pretty bad.
So where would SFWA come in? SFWA has a grievance committee that helps authors who feel their work is being stolen or just not paid for. My guess is that some of the authors who wrote for Thieves World have asked for that sort of help–probably because they’re sure they’d never get paid.
This may all be old news to most people, but it took me by surprise.
Greg: Well, if we are thinking of Puppy nominees, as opposed to actual participants in the movement, quite a lot have been successful, and so serious by this criterion, e.g. Butcher, Anderson, Brown. (Not counting those who are better seen as ‘hostages’, like Stephenson or Bujold.) And indeed Wright has been a fairly successful author, though I’m not sure his recent and more explicitly puppyish stuff has had the same impact as his earlier works.
One problem is that there are two versions of the Puppy narrative; on one there is lots of work that is massively popular but is ignored by the Hugos; on the other (revealed in the recent anthology, among other places) there is a conspiracy of censorship which makes it hard for decent SF even to get published. Acks’s remarks seem a fair response to the second, but perhaps not so much to the first.
But Greg, they are all Dragon nominees (now or in the future)! And they just published an incredible popular anthology of personal insults! That surely counts for something?
(As I read more puppy comments, I become convinced, that the “good old times” they want to have back, must have been mainly about Sf-writers, slagging each other off. Like the Heinlein book about the meteorite called Asimov that had sex with Philip Jose Farmer. Or the famous Sillverberg anthology “23 short stories on how much I hate EE Smith”)
Jack Lint
I like that! It also prompts me to go public with a notion that I keep shelving because the reference is maybe obscure, based on a song I only heard on a blues album by Charlie Burrell, “Man on First Bass” (Burrell’s day job was leading the basses in the Denver Symphony Orchestra), and the only copy I ever had access to went up in flames when a friend’s house burned down. I check the web from time to time hoping to find an upload or a CD reissue of the low-down off-color blues tunes (blue blues) sung by an unknown woman. For all I know, though, these could be hugely well known to everybody but me. Anyway:
“You are not the pixel scroller
You are the pixel scroller’s son
But you can fill my file up
Till the pixel scroller comes…”
I’d also like to filek (it’s as awkward to say as it is to type) the line “I’m a one-hour momma, and a one-minute poppa don’t mean [snap!] to me,” but so far the results are unsatisfactory. Maybe “I’m a two-fifths momma, and a one-fifth poppa…” works, but it’s still kind of obscure. Not that that ever stops me for long.
WARNING: I SCROLL FOR PIXELS
@Greg Hullender
Original post
Clarification from Cat Rambo
Yes, the putative publisher for Thieves World is the same person who’s had many accusations made about his work with/for Beagle (I’d thought that was clear when we discussed it b/c I recognised the name, but re-reading the exchange I see it wasn’t explicitly mentioned). Based on what Cat Rambo said, it sounds like authors with works in TW had SFWA work on their behalf to preemptively protect their positions regarding any re-releases.
@Greg – thanks for the cogent explanation.
@JJ – You are working hard to demonstrate your “special skills.” Thanks! Makes me smile!
On an even happier note, my wife and I got the edition one of the complete Buck Rogers daily newspaper strips from 1929 – 1930.
https://www.amazon.com/Buck-Rogers-25th-Century-Newspaper/dp/1932563199/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1483809619&sr=8-12&keywords=buck+rogers+comic+strip
We had read a coffee table book as kids, but the strips follow for a while then end and cut to another story line. This book is on acid free paper and reproduces the complete run of the strips. We will FINALLY get to read the entire story.
I have one of the original Buck Rogers Disintegrator Pistols given to me by my father-in-law who got it as a child in the 1930s. We also have a framed print of multiple Buck Rogers rocket ships in our library. So getting this book is a real plus.
Okay, you are saying that Heinlein wrote a book about…an asteroid…that was named “Asimov”…and this asteroid…had sex with Philip Jose Farmer?
I bet it was CENSORED!!
@Darren Garrison
Nonono, it was the book that did the deed, Chuck Tingle style.
@Mark: Reading my comment again, I think you are right!
@Darren: At least in the universe, that I remem… huhm….. I mean, the universe I see before my minds eye, when I read puppy posts. Their idea of a good story seem to consist of slagging of other authors. And they claim that they want to write like the SF masters of olde… So, I guess Heinlein must have written that book. 🙂
@Hampus: Yes, it was. Because it didnt challenge their ideals. Or it did. Cant remember which one. But he DARED to write it.
I have to admit, Im making up more and more alternative universe fiction now….
One of my reviews for SFBC had the line “Charles Platt dies in a vindictiveness-related incident” but that was only about a decade ago.
(but it was not in a David Drake novel, which is where I expect Platt to come to a bad end)
Amnazing.
@Jack Lint:
Your filk rang a bell for me, and I was trying to figure out where I knew it from. I initially substituted “fireman” and was starting to get the tune. Suddenly it clicked and Tommy Smothers was in my head singing about his old man the refrigerator repairman. Turns out my folks had Golden Hits of the Smothers Brothers, Vol. 2 on vinyl. 😀
@David Brain – Whaaaa? I’ve been spelling it dilemna my whole life.
@kathodus:
Always been a double-M for me. My hangup is that I keep wanting to spell it with two Ls. I know it’s wrong, but tell that to my fingers! 😉
On this whole “but I could swear…” topic, I do have a story of my own. About 30 years ago, after my grandfather died, my mother and I moved into his house. One benefit of this, especially since I had neither car nor license, was the presence of a used-book store a mile up the road – which, for me at the time, was still walking distance. There was a fast-food joint about another quarter-mile down, and when I started working there, I’d walk to the bookstore, take a break for a few minutes and check out the new stock, then head on in to work.
Anyway, one morning I headed over to the bookstore a little earlier than usual, getting there a little after the 9am opening time… and the store was closed. This threw me for a loop, especially when the owner said she’d always opened at ten and this wasn’t (as I thought) a recent change. Well, this was a store that gave away contact-info bookmarks with every purchase, so when I got home, I went through my shelves to find some old ones and prove myself right.
Every one clearly showed a 10am opening time.
I don’t know where I got the 9am idea from, but I was utterly convinced of it. For a little while, I entertained the “parallel universe slippage” theory, but not seriously. That’s just an SF idea I’ve always liked… but I do know that eerie feeling of being completely certain about a “fact” that was never true.
@Rev. Bob – I have those universe-slips frequently. I’m either barely moored to this universe, or I have a terrible memory.
When I was a kid, my mom would send me off to do some task or other, and find me playing quietly in my room half an hour later. She’d ask me if I’d done the task, and I’d look blank and confused and say “Yes?” Then she’d ask what it was she’d told me to do. I’d cycle through likely chores until she stopped me. At first, I was told to stand in the corner (standard punishment then) until I “remembered” what I was supposed to do. She assumed I knew. I really didn’t. I’m still that way. And I swear, I never smoked pot back when I was 6 years old!
Folks who missed the $00.00 book sale the other week – I’ve been getting ereaderIQ updates saying various of those books by the couple of those authors I watch (Hand and Simak) are going for $0.99 today.
Eclipse memories:
– the summer-1963 one that was so noised that it was a week’s gag in Peanuts even though totality was in Canada — and it got clouded/rained out almost everywhere in the US, giving Charlie Brown another disappointment.
– March 1970, when maximum was ~1.5 hours into the afternoon session of the SATs; the test start was postponed but not long enough, as several people brought pinhole rigs into the gym that served as a test hall. (I had watched in water in a dissection tray — clearer, but not very portable.) This is closest I’ve been to totality, which passed ~100 miles away, as featured in Jane Langton’s mystery Dark Nantucket Noon.
@Greg: the news about Cochran has been dismaying, not just because Beagle deserves better but because Cochran has a history as an interesting fannish oddball (aka Freff) in the 1970’s and 1980’s; from what I heard at the time he wasn’t necessarily reliable but was a long way from being a crook. (Not just my judgment; this came up in Making Light over a decade ago, when people were first wondering what had happened to their book orders.) I also wonder who else is involved and what their roles are; the circus-barker type who introduced the movie when it came through here wasn’t Cochran unless he’s taken to dying his hair black (and radically changed personality). But I can see why SFWA would have stepped in.
Although I know 98% of the people who claim to take this “Berenstein Bears alternate universe” stuff seriously are just kidding/trolling, and 1% may have some kind of psychotic disorder which the 98% really shouldn’t be egging on, there might also be some people who think it’s a plausible thing from an SF point of view.
I blame that dumb TV show Sliders for this. On a weekly basis they kept coming up with alternate universes where, say, red and green traffic lights were reversed or cats were really dogs, but everything else was completely unchanged. It never occurred to the characters that this made no sense, any more than it makes sense for something as large as even the crappiest Hollywood production to be replaced by a different one involving different people without affecting a single other thing that the putative universe-traveler might notice. The premise that the “Mandela Effect” is named for is even worse in that regard: these people think (or claim to think) that they remember a world in which Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s instead of Steven Biko, and yet apparently no other events in world history were affected by this. (Maybe they assume that they just weren’t paying any attention to world events, but in that case they’d have no reason to be so confident about their memory of that one “fact”.)
In the case of the Kazaam/Shazam thing as well as Mandela/Biko, it’s really hard not to suspect that the energy some people are putting into this nonsense is directly proportional to how much they do not want to admit that they might have a tendency to perceive different Black men as being the same.
@Eli,
are you familiar with The Bielefeld Conspiracy?
I mean of course I understand not wanting to believe you could be wrong. Spelling has always been my thing, I’m somewhat hyperlexic, so I was one of those who definitely noticed that the Berenstains spelled their name with an A because that went against my expectations of how names work… whereas most people aren’t so hyper-aware of that kind of thing and no doubt reflexively “corrected” the name to Berenstein without giving it a second thought (till someone started messing with them on the Internet). And yet— even though I was also the kind of weirdo who read about politics and court cases in the newspaper all the time as a teenager— for many years I was absolutely sure that “arraigned” and “harangued” were the same word (spelled like the latter), and it was so freaky to realize I was wrong.
@Eli – I got most of my vocabulary as a child from reading. For a long time I thought there were two words – misled (my zuld) and mislead (mis led) – that both meant basically “led astray.”
@Christian: I wasn’t. That’s pretty funny, although it’s still depressing to me how little difference there is between jokes like that and stuff that people get seriously into.
At some point in high school (pre-Internet) I got very briefly interested in the idea of trying to convince people of absurd “facts” just to amuse myself at their expense. I tried it exactly once: on meeting a friend of a friend who worked in a deli, I told her in my best deadpan that the kind of styrofoam cup they used there, and in fact all styrofoam, was actually an animal product made in some inhumane way out of (I think) cute little lizards. It seemed to work, she got a little upset about this disturbing knowledge, and I felt clever for about five seconds… then I realized I was just being an asshole for no reason, and I apologized and never did anything like that again. If we’d had the Internet back then and I hadn’t had to look her in the eye, I probably would’ve kept that shit up for a while and by now it would be an ineradicable urban legend.
@kathodus: I always got a kick out of the running gag in Disch’s Camp Concentration that the super-genius autodidact is constantly mispronouncing everything. Also Homer Simpson’s belief that “pothead” is pronounced “poe-theed”, which is totally a mistake I could’ve made if I’d led a more sheltered life.
Back in the early 1970s, I saw the word MOLESTINGS in a newspaper headline and asked my mother if moles could actually sting.
On Sinbad, I suspect that they are confusing a 1994 t.v. movie Sinbad did called Aliens for Breakfast in which he played an alien toy that came to life from a cereal box and then the toy took the kid on some adventures, and then got the presumed name from the 1970’s t.v. show based on the DC Comics character Shazaam! The Sinbad movie starred Ben Savage as the kid and Alfre Woodard was in it. So people remember Sinbad popping out of a bowl of cereal (with alien horns,) and mis-remember it as a genie.
@ Arifel
Austin Tappan Wright, whose book Islandia was only published after his death. I would never have heard of Wright if Ursula K. LeGuin hadn’t touted Islandia in an essay. I was amazed and delighted to be able to buy a 1940s copy at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, one of my proudest possessions.
Thanks to the other Zoline fans! I loved Heat Death and read her collection.
In re. Alex Acks
When I encounter people I haven’t heard of in the scroll, I tend to assume that’s due to my ignorance, not their insignificance. I hadn’t heard of any of the leading puppies before the kerfuffles, for example, but I would have said that was due to focusing my reading in specific areas and not being involved in fandom, (except for being a fan).
(12) Yippee! Can’t wait to see this movie!
It looks like the center of the path of totality is going to go right over where my wife lived in Oregon (and where I spent much time, but never formally lived) until we bought the house in Fernley NV the day after the 2011 Worldcon in Reno. But given the weather in that part of Oregon, it probably will be too cloudy to see it that day anyway. (And those grapes were probably sour, too.)
(6) CHOW DOWN. Episode 26 of Scott Edelman’s Eating the Fantastic podcast brings Edelman together with James Morrow at an Uzbek restaurant.
Wow, finally some evidence that the Capclave Restaurant Guide that Nicki and I do every year influenced a dining decision!
@KatG: “and then got the presumed name from the 1970’s t.v. show based on the DC Comics character Shazaam” — that right there should’ve been a big clue, to anyone who gave the matter five seconds’ thought, that no such movie existed. Even though Shazam (actually Captain Marvel— “Shazam” was his magic word, although DC avoided mentioning the original name due to Marvel Comics’s litigiousness, and eventually just changed the guy’s name to Shazam in 2011) wasn’t a very popular character any more by the ’70s, and other unrelated things had been named Shazam, there’s no way DC would have been cool with someone using even a misspelled version of that name for a movie about a dude with mythology-related magic powers.
There was also a genie of some sort on Saturday Morning TV (I have an impression it was on ABC, because I ‘see’ one of their Super Saturday ads that ran in comic books, where the character would have been drawn by Neal Adams, looking better than he ever did on TV) called SHAZZAN.
That’s not to say the character wasn’t well designed! I just looked it up, and he seems to have run in ’76, and was designed by Alex Toth, who did much better design work for the cartoons than they ever deserved. Adams once drew an issue of a comic book spinoff of one of Toth’s shows. I can’t bring the name to mind, but somewhere along an axis between Scooby-Doo and Wacky Races. Adams never drew a bad issue of anything back then, and despite the juvenile nature of the title, it was a thing of beauty.
@Chip Hitchcock: “the circus-barker type who introduced the movie when it came through here wasn’t Cochran unless he’s taken to dying his hair black (and radically changed personality)”
I wonder who that was. I saw it when the tour hit San Francisco, and it was just Beagle, Cochran, and a couple of people silently working the merch table.
I wasn’t aware of most of this stuff at the time, and didn’t know anything about Cochran other than the general notion, which Cochran of course encouraged, that he was Peter Beagle’s best friend in the whole world. But I have to say, the impression I got from seeing him in person was… off. He was so hyper-positive about everything, and his high-speed polished spiels were in such contrast to Beagle’s soft-spokenness (which seemed to test his patience, so he had very little actual dialogue with Beagle), that while I didn’t think “this is a dishonest person” I definitely thought “this is a person I could not stand to work with in any capacity ever, unless he behaves very differently outside of a public setting.” But I’ve felt the same about plenty of people I actually did have to work for too, who weren’t crooks (as far as I know), so it was easy for me to assume that maybe it just takes a weird personality like that to be a promoter.
I’ve also known people who fit your description of “wasn’t necessarily reliable but was a long way from being a crook”, who I thought could still absolutely become crooks if they found themselves overseeing larger amounts of money than the little amateur projects they were used to.
@eli thanks for the addition to my TBR mountain range.
Just got back from seeing Hidden Figures which is now at the top of my Hugo noms list (hey, if the APOLLO 13 film could be nominated, this can be too), and bought the book.
And Newitz’s review is right on.
The rules were changed after Apollo 13 to explicitly allow dramatic presentations such as Apollo 13 (or Hidden Figures), rather than them being an edge case.
3.3.7: Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Any theatrical feature or other production, with a complete running time of more than 90 minutes, in any medium of dramatized science fiction, fantasy or related subjects that has been publicly presented for the first time in its present dramatic form during the previous calendar year.
@John: Awesome!
Thank you!
@Christian Brunschen
A friend of mine studied at the University of Bielefeld in the 1990s and sent me a lot of postcards from there. So unless she was in on the conspiracy, it exists.
kathodus: I got most of my vocabulary as a child from reading. For a long time I thought there were two words – misled (my zuld) and mislead (mis led) – that both meant basically “led astray.”
You are aware that there really are two words, though, right? (This is a misspelling I see all the time, which drives me crazy, along with choose/chose, breath/breathe, and lead/led.)
mislead – (miss-leed) to lead someone astray
misled – (miss-ledd) having led someone astray
@JJ:
Don’t forget:
missiled – having fired an ICBM at someone
Mark, Lis, Steve, Ghostbird, msb et al: Ooo some really interesting names for the tbr list here (and by defintion not authors with big intimidating backlists)! Thanks. Realised after I posted that Mary Shelley also deserves a mention though she predates sff as such…
Miss Lead: unofficial mascot of the Mr Men’s abandoned foray into the periodic table, which caused immense controversy at the time due to an alleged drug use scene in Mr Iodine, but has since become a cult favourite among long term fans of the series…
Nonono, it was the book that did the deed, Chuck Tingle style.
“Pounded in the Butt Either By A Heinlein Novel or a More Vivid Acid Trip Than Usual”, a novel by Philip Jose Tingle.
@ Rev Bob, @JJ:
And “missidled” – to have attempted but failed to walk in a furtive, unobtrusive, or timid manner
@Eli “Even though Shazam [Captain Marvel] . . . wasn’t a very popular character any more by the ’70s,”
The Captain Marvel revival comic SHAZAM! was published from 1973 to 1978, and the Saturday morning TV show adaptation ran from 1974 to 1977.
@Kip Williams “Adams once drew an issue of a comic book spinoff of one of Toth’s shows.”
Are you thinking of Hot Wheels? Toth did the first five issues, and Adams did the final sixth issue.
“misssled”
When you jump for a toboggan and aim wrong.
misisled: when your boat docks at the wrong island
@Mark: I can see what you mean, and BTW “Calved” didn’t do much for me, either.
@KatG: Thanks; your explanation makes a lot more sense than “lots of people are idiots,” which is what I’d been thinking. ::blush:: Well, and sorta related to what @Eli said – I was thinking about people not want to admit they were confusing two famous black men.
@Various “mis(s)” People: LOL!