The Barmy Cats Adventures

It turns out to have been a mystery only to me, that nagging question I’ve been pondering for several weeks: Why did C*****s D*****s pen “A Corflu Carol” (The Drink Tank #158), lampooning Cheryl Morgan with such rich humor I was embarrassed to admit how hard I’d laughed? Mainly because I didn’t know who really threw this barb, or whether Cheryl would find it funny (it might remind her of blunt comments made by trufen in past years). Now that I’ve learned the full context, I expect she had no problem with it at all, if it turns out she didn’t write it herself (I haven’t stumbled across that answer yet).

“A Corflu Carol” soars from its opening lines:

Fanzine fandom was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. The register of its burial was signed by the costumers, the filkers, the conrunners, and the furries. Emcit Eljay signed it, and Emcit Eljay’s name was good for a fan Hugo. Fanzine fandom was as dead as a doornail.

Had I not (evidently) slept through January 3, I’d have already known this was either the answering salvo to, or perhaps a tangential development of, Cheryl’s comical new series of “Barmy Cats Adventures,” launched by the appearance of “The Clubhouse Affair” in The Drink Tank #157.

My encounter with “The Clubhouse Affair” waited ’til today when I caught up reading Cheryl’s personal blog. She explained the whole project on January 20, giving verbal snapshots of all the characters. Cheryl concluded, after reading the recent debates about Core Fandom, that it would be “quite funny to imagine a world in which the brave freedom fighters of Core Fandom really were engaged in a bitter struggle against the greedy capitalists of WSFS.” And in her hands, it is funny.