Pixel Scroll 5/5/17 Precog Ergo Sum

(1) AND THEY’RE OFF. Fictional horses, ranked by their chances. Emily Temple handicaps the field in “Who Will Win The Literary Kentucky Derby?”  at LitHub. Finishing at the back of the field….

The Skin Horse, of The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams

“The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces.”

Adding the fact that toy horses are generally smaller than normal horses, not to mention fantasy horses, it seems unlikely that such a creature could beat any of the others listed here in a race. At least he’s wise, though. Not to mention Real. Imagine him, all Real and worn and loved, his little legs all seamy, limping across the finish line in the dimming afternoon, long after everyone else has gone home…no, you’re crying.

(2) STICKING TO IT. Canada will be issuing another new set of Star Trek stamps this year, featuring the five captains with their ships. Available from Canada post’s website here.

The five legendary leaders of Starfleet stand as the paragons of excellence: Kirk (William Shatner), Picard (Patrick Stewart), Sisko (Avery Brooks), Archer (Scott Bakula) and Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) are featured on this collectible pane of 5 stamps.

But a hero is nothing without an obstacle, a threat or an antagonist. No villain has tested our protagonists as much as their infamous counterparts: Khan, Locutus of Borg, Dukat, Dolim and the Borg Queen, who shadow the heroes on the stamps.

This pane pits each legendary hero against their nemesis on a stylized background containing their respective starships navigating the cold and dark expanse of Federation space. The wormhole from Deep Space Nine also makes a looming appearance.

The only thing more stunning than this mini-poster is a phaser.

(3) GEEK GENESIS. Patrick Read Johnson’s long-awaited Biopic about being the first Star Wars Geek! Opening 5-25-17 everywhere!!!

(4) SIX EASY SLICES. Cat amanuensis Camestros Felapton finds inspiration in the kitchen: “Timothy the Talking Cat Presents: How to cook a frozen pizza the Hugo way”.

Frozen pizza: the forbidden food. Yet these instructions defeat me. Yes, I, a cat who can field strip an AR-15 in the dark and without the aid of opposable thumbs, am incapable of reading these tiny instructions or operating the big heaty kitchen box thingy.

Time to turn to wiser heads. Who better than the six nominated writers for the Hugo 2017 Best Writey Book Prize!

If it worked for Bret Harte, why not Timothy?

Box’s End: The Three Pizza Problem

Yun Tianming listened to the radio from his hospital bed. The United Nations had jointly formed a resolution to condemn the doctrine known as ‘not being arsed to cook anything nutritious’. With the Trisolans a hundred years away from Earth, humanity had, in despair, stopped making an effort to cook anything decent….

(5) WE’RE GOING TO THE VOLCANO TO BLOW UP ROBOTS. National Geographic has changed a lot since I was a kid: “Robot vs. Volcano: ‘Sometimes It’s Just Fun to Blow Stuff Up’”.

“Sharkcano.” It’s not the title of some campy summer blockbuster, but rather a real-world phenomenon that went viral in 2015, when scientists on a National Geographic expedition found sharks living inside one of the most active underwater volcanoes on Earth. Not surprisingly, the team was eager to go back and learn more, but how do you explore an environment that could easily kill you? You send in robots, of course.

(6) ALL’S WELLS. Martians meet The Mudlark. “BBC is making a Victorian-era War of the Worlds TV series” says The Verge.

Earlier today, the BBC announced a number of new shows, including a three-part series based on H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. The show is scheduled to go into production next spring, and it appears that, unlike most modern adaptations, it will be set in the Victorian era.

The series will be written by screenwriter Peter Hartness, who adapted Susanna Clarke’s Victorian-era fantasy novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell for the network, as well as a handful of Doctor Who episodes.

(7) DYING FOR DUMPLINGS. Scott Edelman dines on dumplings and discusses writing with Brenda Clough in Episode 36 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

During last year’s Capclave in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Brenda Clough tantalized me with tales of JDS Shanghai Famous Food, telling me they made some of the best soup dumplings in the D.C. area. So when it was time for her appearance on Eating the Fantastic, how could we go anywhere else?

Brenda has published short fiction in Analog, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, my own Science Fiction Age, and many others, and was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for her novella “May Be Some Time.” She’s also written many novels across multiple series, and teaches writing workshops at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

 

Brenda Clough

Scott also says the future holds good things in store: “Check out the five guests I managed to record with during StokerCon!”

If you’re hungry for more, come back in two weeks when my guest will be Cynthia Felice, who’ll be followed by five episodes recorded during the recent StokerCon: William F. Nolan, Elizabeth Hand, Dennis Etchison, Nancy Holder, and George R. R. Martin.

(8) FONDLY REMEMBERED. This video was presented at Costume-Con 35 to recognize members of the community lost in the previous year. Other memorial videos posted on the International Costumers Guild site in the past few months include tributes to the late Robin Schindler, Toni Lay, and Adrienne Martine-Barnes.

(9) HOWARD FRANK OBIT. SF Site News reports Howard Frank (1941-2017) died on May 1. Husband of Jane Frank, a Chicon 7 GoH in 2012, he co-authored two books with his wife based on their collection. He won First Fandom’s Sam Moskowitz Archive Award in 2013.

(10) TODAY’S DAYS

  • Revenge of the Fifth

Not had enough Star Wars on May the 4th? Thinking of stepping over to the Dark Side? Think you’d be a great Sith? Well keep swinging those light sabers, Revenge of the fifth is here to keep the force going with another Star Wars-themed observance!

  • International Space Day

On the first Friday of each May, space boffins and science fans alike celebrate space with a dedicated day of observance to everything in the great beyond. Because there’s so much out there in space, you can be sure that there’s always going to be enough to celebrate on this day as every year comes! The History of International Space Day International Space Day started out as plain and simple Space Day in 1997. The day was created to observe the many wonders of the unknown space that our planet floats in, and encourage children to have more of an interest in the scientific field. In 2001, Senator John Glenn, himself a former astronaut, changed the day to International Space Day to widen its scope of celebration across the world.

  • Cartoonist’s Day – May 5

The History of Cartoonist’s Day In 1895 a man named Richard F. Outcault introduced a small bald kid in a yellow nightshirt [The Yellow Kid] to the world in an incredibly popular publication in the big apple at the time, the New York World. While the paper itself was looked upon with a sort of disdain by ‘real’ journalists of the time, the yellow kid was embraced by people everywhere. Little did Richard know that when he first created this character, it would lead to a revolution in how stories were told and presented in sequential art pieces (That’s comics kids), but would in fact create a new standard piece of content for newspapers everywhere. Cartoonists’ day was created to celebrate this man and his accomplishments, and all the good he brought to the world as a result. Everything from our Sunday Comics to animation can be linked back to him and his creation. Just a simple bald kid in a yellow nightshirt.

(11) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • May 5, 1961 — From Cape Canaveral, Florida, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, was a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

(12) PUZZLE WRAPPED IN AN ENIGMA. Well, now that you mention it….

(12.5) FARGO. That rocket-shaped award continues to be of interest to those unraveling the mysteries of Fargo. Warning: The Bustle’s episode recap contains SPOILERS.

One of the weirder, seemingly superfluous details of Fargo Season 3 comes to the forefront in the spectacularly odd May 3 episode, which focuses on the backstory of Ennis Stussy, née Thaddeus Mobley, and his adventures in science-fiction writing. But is The Planet Wyh a real book? And what about the bizarre events that transpired around the book’s success?

The pulpy paperback is first discovered by Gloria Burgle after her stepfather is murdered, hidden in a box under the floorboards of his house. Viewers see the book again — along with a newspaper clipping about Mobley winning an award, and a trove of other books with bizarro titles like The Plague Monkeys, Space Elephants Never Forget, and Organ Fish Of Kleus-9 — in the second episode. And in “The Law Of Non-Contradiction,” Gloria travels to the City Of Angels to do some digging into her stepfather’s secret past.

It turns out that, in 1975, Mobley traveled to Los Angeles to accept the prestigious Singularity Award for Best Science-Fiction Novel at the Golden Planet Awards. A producer named Howard Zimmerman quickly approached the naïve author about turning the book into a movie; but as Mobley wrote check after check and no progress seemed to be forthcoming, it eventually became clear that the whole thing was a scam to fund the lavish lifestyles of Zimmerman and his actress girlfriend. Enraged, Mobley assaulted Zimmerman and practically left him a vegetable, fled California, and changed his name to Ennis Stussy — inspired by the brand name of his hotel room toilet.

(13) THE WEED OF CRIME. Lou Antonelli ends his feghoot “Calling Grendel Briarton” with a really awful, no good, very bad pun – I liked it.

One day, while I was a teenager in Massachusetts, a group of high school students volunteered to help with a beach clean-up. It was an uncommon spill, but not unheard of – illicit drugs had washed up on a beach in the Cape Code National Seashore…

(14) THE SOUND OF WIKI. I just discovered WikiWikiup, a YouTube channel dedicated to making Wikipedia available to people with limited vision. Is this voiced by a robot?

(15) WHAT’S THE NEWS ACROSS THE NATION?  I also discovered this Puppyish satire about the fate of Castalia House’s The Corroding Empire, masquerading as a report on a daily sf news channel.

(16) OH, THE INHUMANITY! The first teaser trailer for Marvel’s Inhumans.

(17) STAY UP LATE OR GET UP EARLY. I believe the writer is referring to Eastern time zone: “Eta Aquarid Meteor Shower, Crumbs of Halley’s Comet, Peaks This Weekend: What to Expect”.

The annual, week-long Eta Aquarid meteor shower is predicted to reach its maximum on Saturday morning (May 6). The bright moon will be a few days past first quarter (a waxing gibbous, 81 percent illuminated), and it will set just prior to 4 a.m. local daylight time, leaving only about an hour of reasonably dark sky for early morning observations of this shower before the increasingly bright dawn twilight becomes too restrictive.

(18) WHO KNOWS? “Why Don’t People Return Their Shopping Carts?” in Scientific American.

The world will likely not end because we aren’t returning our shopping carts — that would be an amazing butterfly effect — but it’s an example of a quality of life issue we can control. That guy who didn’t return his cart may not be a complete jerk. He may just be using the example set by others so he can get home a little more quickly. But if everyone does that, then we’re shifting the balance of what is acceptable, which may have greater ramifications to the social order. We have a greater influence over seemingly mundane situations than we realize.

Cat Eldridge sent the link with a comment, “My hypermarket, Hannaford’s, embeds a RFID in theirs that locks the front wheels if one of ether goes beyond the parking lot.”

(19) CUTENESS CONQUERS. The Life of Death on Vimeo is a video by Marsha Onderstijn about what happens when Death encounters an adorably cute animal!

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Scott Edelman, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, and bookworm1398 for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

53 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/5/17 Precog Ergo Sum

  1. Robots! Sharks! Volcanoes! Undersea!

    What could I add to that? Frickin’ lasers! Magnets! Pixels!!

  2. 18
    Someone parked a shopping cart down the street from me. Padlocked to a utility pole guy-wire. (The padlock looks new, too.) It should encourage more of the wheel-locking setups.

  3. (5) WE’RE GOING TO THE VOLANO TO BLOW UP ROBOTS

    You may want to appertain a C in that Volano of yours. 😉

    ETA: Waves at quick-draw JohnFromGR

  4. I’m just here to raise a fifth on the Fifth with the fifth comment. Don’t mind me.

    BTW, I think tomorrow’s Weasel Stomping Day. Stands to reason that it’d be right after Sinkful of Mayo Day, right?

  5. Rev. Bob on May 5, 2017 at 6:17 pm said:

    It’s a good thing that the water in the mug didn’t get swallowed before I read your comment. It would have been very messy otherwise.

  6. (4) Timothy’s wisdom once again causes my jaw to drop.

    Especially since my cat has been working on the first book in the Twilight series for the last several years.

    Bravo, Timothy! I liked the TLTL one the best.

  7. 12) From what Aliette said on twitter, they aren’t even flatmates in her version, so why Watson puts up with Holmes’ company is another question entirely.

    Aliette’s not even the only SFF writer I know working on a SFnal Sherlock. In a rare case of an Alpha read, I got to see another writer’s efforts in that direction. I do hope those efforts bear publication fruit someday, I liked it a lot.

  8. 18) In most European countries, you know have to insert a coin or chip into a shopping cart before you can use it. Once you return it, you get the coin or chip back. These measures have drastically reduced the number of errant shopping carts.

  9. Aldi (German grocery chain now in the U.S.) has the same quarter for a shopping cart return.

  10. Cora on May 5, 2017 at 7:06 pm said:
    You see that in some places in the US, also. Usually airports and train stations, in my experience, for baggage carts.

  11. Chapter five has already taken revenge on Fargo by defeating its chapter in a duel and leaving it stranded.

  12. @18 (re Cat’s comment): the carts that leave the lot aren’t nearly as much of a problem as the carts left in random places \in/ the lot. And then there are the lots where the boundary is poorly drawn; at our usual store you can’t get a cart all the way to the shaded parking spots. (I can see where the lazy so-and-so’s buried the marker in a saw cut in the asphalt instead of digging up the ground just beyond the curb.)
    The article itself is a lot of verbiage to describe what police theorists call the broken-window phenomenon — which may be true but tends to lead to … overactive … policing.
    On a backstage tour of Disney World, we were told that a study had shown the average park attendee would carry a piece of trash no more than 11 steps — which was why we were in a hangar-size building devoted to theme-painting enough trash cans that they could have one every 10 steps. I wish the testers had investigated what happened when more cart corrals were installed, instead of assuming (AFAICT) that other aspects of broken-window applied here.

    @13: that’s a pretty poor pun for all that buildup. OTOH, maybe not bad if he came up with that on the spot.

  13. (18) Local supermarket chain Market Basket pays people to collect the carts–ideally from the corrals, but they are active enough that it’s fairly common to have a polite young person offering to take your cart as you’re finishing up with it. They’ll help load stuff into your car, too.

    I find this makes for a more pleasant shopping experience than carts equipped with tech that prevents you from getting them all the way to your car.

    But, this is the chain where the workers and the customers went on strike together in support of the CEO that the board was trying to oust, so…

  14. (12.5) @Hampus Eckerman: Fargo’s just too unusual to be numbered.

    (14) THE SOUND OF WIKI. It sounds like a British robot.

    (15) WHAT’S THE NEWS ACROSS THE NATION? I’ll skip giving whoever clicks.

    (16) OH, THE INHUMANITY! Wait, there wasn’t any footage from the show. ;-(

    (19) CUTENESS CONQUERS. Cute and, unsurprisingly, depressing.

  15. (13) groooaaaaan!

    But still pretty funny. It would be better if we knew it was an ISYN story.

  16. P J Evans says Someone parked a shopping cart down the street from me. Padlocked to a utility pole guy-wire. (The padlock looks new, too.) It should encourage more of the wheel-locking setups.

    It’s not a perfect solution as the wheel locking system can be beat by anyone with a screwdriver to pop the lock. I still see some homeless folk using the Hannaford carts downtown which is slightly over a mile from the closest Hannaford.

    Note that this store which is called the Zoo by many folk has enough petty crime that it has a room reserved for Portland police to use.

  17. (4)

    Thirty-minutes, twenty seconds, and one blistered finger later

    That can’t be right. Surely, in that universe, they wear their gloves while baking pizza.

  18. must be something wrong with me (duh!) as I always return the shopping cart…either in store return after taking my bags, or the parking lot return corrals. I take great pride in pushing it in there with just enough force for it to reach the back/last other cart in line…and walking away before the action is complete.
    If there were a sport like curling that used shopping carts, I’d qualify for the US Olympic squad.

  19. The local Aldi supermarket has a low-tech solution to parking cart drift. You have to insert a quarter to unlock a cart and take it into the store. When you return the cart and push it into the lock, a quarter comes out.

    So either you return your own cart or somebody else who wants a quarter does it.

  20. @steve davidson: I like to see if I can get the cart into the corral from a fair distance away. I almost never damage cars in the process.

    A bleg: A year or two ago, I saw a cartoon, a single long page reaching downward, about people who made happy stories floating up into pretty places. There was this one guy who made dark stories and a friend who couldn’t get why he did it. My google-fu has been weak on finding this.

    Can anyone point me to it? I would be very grateful if you would.

  21. Shopping trolley-curling is delightful when you get it right…and faintly embarrassing when you get it wrong.

  22. @steve/@John: that only works until the corral fills (3-5 carts IMO); then you need enough force to make at least one of the back panels lift so they nest rather than blocking the lane. Hooray for geeks!

  23. All this talk of shopping carts reminds me of the Cul de Sac comic strip and the cart herders.

    The cart deposit also played a part in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal.

  24. @Mark: It can be embarrassing, but it also amused my kid enough to make it worth it. Until it didn’t, which is when I knew I had a teenager. But I still do it.

  25. A pixel wrapped in a scroll inside a file.

    (16) Iwan Rheon is probably great for this role, but he may be typecast after that. He is able to play good guys as well… (see Misfits)

  26. @John A. Arkansawyer: I too remember that comic… and it would seem that my google-fu is stronger than yours. (It helped that on my first search, the correct link showed up in purple as one followed rather than a blue “unfollowed”!)

    eat shit and die #233.

  27. 18) & Cora: In the US, Aldi’s also uses that model. What don’t you see all over Aldi’s parking lot? Abandoned carts blocking parking spaces.

    I make a point of at least running my cart to the cart corral whenever possible; it’s the minimum expectation of civilized behavior in this arena. But I also try to be charitable in my assumptions unless I actually see what happened, because what’s easy for me might not be so easy for (e.g.) someone with mobility issues, or a single mother wrangling 3 kids.

  28. @Lee: I had a friend with a handicapped plate who people thought was selfish, because he looked young, which he was, and perfectly healthy, which he wasn’t. He had a degenerative bone disease that caused him damage every time he had to walk too far. I find it’s best to cut people some slack if you don’t know them.

    I wrote you a note in the other thread about something better to discuss one-to-one.

  29. In Helsinki now. Was wondering a a bit about all the naked people sitting and relaxing in a park. Turns out they were just cooling down a bit until the next pass in a nearby sauna.

  30. (18) WHO KNOWS?
    I found this video of people racing shopping carts. That might account for some of them. It looks kinda fun.

    Who Knew?

  31. @Lee

    18) & Cora: In the US, Aldi’s also uses that model. What don’t you see all over Aldi’s parking lot? Abandoned carts blocking parking spaces.

    I make a point of at least running my cart to the cart corral whenever possible; it’s the minimum expectation of civilized behavior in this arena. But I also try to be charitable in my assumptions unless I actually see what happened, because what’s easy for me might not be so easy for (e.g.) someone with mobility issues, or a single mother wrangling 3 kids.

    Well, Aldi is a German chain, so they imported the “insert a coin/chip” into the shopping cart system to cut down on shopping cart abandonment. And shopping carts at US Aldi stores are cheap, if you only have to insert a quarter. In most of Europe, you have to insert a one Euro coin, unless you have a chip. I always keep shopping cart chips in my car, wallet, coat pocket, etc…, so I always have one when I need it.

    @Peer

    (16) Iwan Rheon is probably great for this role, but he may be typecast after that. He is able to play good guys as well… (see Misfits)

    I first saw Iwan Rheon in Misfits and that’s still the role I associate him with. Yes, he’s good at playing villains, but I’d still hate to see him typecast, because he can do so much more.

  32. Regarding the fictional horses–I can understand why Tolkien fans might want Shadowfax to win, but I’ll still put my money on the Steel General’s horse from Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness. Horses that are limited to light-speed simply aren’t in the same league! 😀

  33. John A Arkansawyer: @David Goldfarb: Thank you so much! I have a purpose for that comic.

    Yegods, that’s a heartbreaker. Thank you both so much for sharing that.

  34. Peer & Cora: I’ve had the same thought about Iwan Rheon: he’s being cast now as the person everyone else in Misfits initially thought he was. I worry that he’s headed down the Alan Rickman route, where his roles get progressively less complex and interesting as his career goes on.

  35. Can someone help me ID this book for my friend:

    It’s about a guy who takes a bunch of tests and is determined, by those tests, to be an ethical standard. The galactic community apparently can see what a person is by their aura. When humans made first contact, the military realized this ability in aliens. They figured out a way to block the human aura, so everyone in the rest of the galaxy thinks we’re morons because we didn’t have an aura. In order to get a human representative they did a battery of tests instead. He goes out into the galactic community as the human representative. It was a pretty good story?

  36. @Lace: that’s definitely a Shirley Jackson gut-punch; too bad the people it should reach won’t see it, or won’t believe it if they do.

  37. Speaking of shopping carts, let me present this award winning title …. The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification. Winner of the 2006 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.

  38. PS: I just saw the remembering-Nimoy documentary referenced in a recent Scroll. An unexpected gut punch as it focuses mostly on his COPD — its causes and his long slow death. Especially unwelcome in my household after a recent family death; people with triggers should be warned.

  39. Tangentially related:

    I will not make it to Helsinki for World Con after all. Helsinki, however, came to me. Sort of. I mean, they came to The Big O roller derby tournament in Eugene, Oregon this weekend, and so did I. Today I watched the team from Helsinki play the team from Sydney, Australia. Helsinki won.

    (Tomorrow, my team plays Sydney.)

  40. About Shopping Cart :
    Moving from France to Canada, I was very surprised that in Québec, shopping carts were freely available, without having to insert a token or a coin, and that nonetheless, carts were not parked haphazardly everywhere.
    IMHO, it is a sign of a superior society. (or maybe a lot of underpaid elves ?)

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