ront cover: From Cheer! I, aspinoff webcomic from TheWotch II; Jo (with the wand)

and Alex are two of four cheer-leaders who used to be reallyannoying sexist jocks.

They were changed intocheerleaders when they messed witha temporar-ily autono-

mous personality fragment of AnneOnymous (the Wotch) - her anger -who zapped them into cheerleaders.

And nobody, including them,I http://tinyurl.com/q7z97p5II http://tinyurl.com/o5ruwoj

remembers that they were ever any-thing elseIII.

You may recall Alex, trans-formed into a minotaur a bit later inthe story, from the cover of my earlierzine, Improvised Weaponry.

Both The Wotch and Cheer! havestopped updating (though i note thatauthor Tselsebar has updated theCheer! copyright notice to say "2015")- but both have deep archives thatyou can spend some enjoyable timebinging on. (The links for bothcomics lead to the first page.)There is Much Silliness waiting instore if you do.

And so this is the first zinein quite a while without a songbased title; i linked to the page onthe front of the zine in an online

forum discussing the webcomicMagick ChicksIV, in which the

(more-or-less) Good MagicalGirlV and her Evil Counterparthave exhausted their magic ina duel and are reduced to

punching each other...III Well, Jo remembers - but life is better for

the others, and not so bad for her, too,so she doesn't say anything.

IV http://tinyurl.com/pywj2yhV ...who has a wand she inherited from one

of her mothers.

Left to right:

Sam, Alex, Lita and Jo

http://tinyurl.com/q7z97p5http://tinyurl.com/q7z97p5http://tinyurl.com/o5ruwojhttp://tinyurl.com/o5ruwojhttp://tinyurl.com/pywj2yhhttp://tinyurl.com/pywj2yhhttp://tinyurl.com/nveces7http://tinyurl.com/nveces7

ContentsOur Cover....................................................1Disemvoweling Days...................................2George Washington and Buzz Aldrin - a

Study in Financial Contrasts................4Oh What a Brilliant Businessman The

Donald Is.............................................5Say It Ain't So, Josephine!.........................5I guess i was due after forty years...........6Undt Zo, the Hugos Survive Again.............8Further Mailing News................................10I am now officially ready to spit..............12MCS on Mailing 306 Begin.......................16

The New Port News 282.................16The Typo King 33.............................18Spartacus...............................................20Jewels and Binoculars 26.................20Spiritus Mundi 268.............................22

Wot?.........................................................23Our Friend................................................24Back to MCs............................................27

Peter, Pan and Merry 122.................27Twygdrasil & Tree-

house Gazette 153......................................31

And the hits just keep oncomin'.....................40Variations on a Theme

106..............................41Velociraptor-Free

Workplace................43Sporadic 32...............45

Online PDF Version.......46Revenant 88...............46

aSFPAzine

from

mike weber655 old lakeview rd

gainesville ga

eird. I just spentten minutes ormore trying to

post a comment to an articleon The Daily Beast.I

The article was a piece on whatthe writer considers to be the death of(meaningful) satire.

So i remembered a lovely quoteand tried to post it as a comment:

"Satire is what closes on Satur-day night." -

, 1937

I used exactly that wording.

It automatically went into mod-eration.I http://tinyurl.com/nveces7

http://tinyurl.com/q7z97p5http://tinyurl.com/q7z97p5http://tinyurl.com/o5ruwojhttp://tinyurl.com/o5ruwojhttp://tinyurl.com/pywj2yhhttp://tinyurl.com/pywj2yhhttp://tinyurl.com/nveces7http://tinyurl.com/nveces7

A fair amount of fiddling -which may, eventually, result in aboutfive slightly different versions of thecomment appearing - finally led to aversion thatsuccessfully got throughwithout going into moderation hell.

First, i wondered if Kaufman'sname was, for some reason, anath-ema, so i disemvoweled it:

"Satire is what closes on Satur-day night." -

, 1937But no.Then i tried just the quote, with

no attribution.But no.Then i tried a post that just said

"test", in case therewas some problemon the site, or TDBhad suddenly takena grudge againstpeople postingunder the screen-name "Fairport-fan".

But no.So just on a

hunch, though icouldn't/can'tthink of any reasonit should be theproblem, i tried"Satire is whatcloses onS*t*rday night."-

, 1937And that went through.Wot?I wonder why "Saturday" is a

potential no-no?(Referring to a mixed drink as a

"cocktail" will get you tossed into"pending" status, too ... but "Satur-day"?)

ince i wrote this, it has beensuggested on an online forum

where i also posted it that perhapsthe problem is that the over-enthu-siastic board auto-censor softwaredoesn't like "turd" in the middle of"Saturday"

http://amzn.to/1P52eqahttp://amzn.to/1P52eqahttp://electronictiger.net/buzz/2.jpghttp://electronictiger.net/buzz/1.jpg

ave you ever encoun-tered the book GeorgeWashington's ExpenseAccount?I Washington

nobly declined to accept asalary, if Congress wouldagree to pay his expenses asCommander in Chief duringthe Revolution.

A general's pay was$166/year. Washington's itemisedexpenses came to just shy of half amillion dollars.

Talk about doing well bydoing good.

(When he was elected Presi-dent, he made the same noble offer,and Congress said "Uh, no, we'll...uh... just pay you a salary,George...")

Well, Buzz Aldrin has nowpublished his travel voucher for thetrip to the Moon.

Buzz didn't do as well asGeorge.I http://amzn.to/1P52eqa

Larger views:http://electronictiger.net/buzz/2.jpghttp://electronictiger.net/buzz/1.jpg

http://amzn.to/1P52eqahttp://amzn.to/1P52eqahttp://electronictiger.net/buzz/2.jpghttp://electronictiger.net/buzz/1.jpg

And the astro-nauts had to fill out aCustoms declarationon the Moon rocksthey brought back...

Larger

ommentto anarticle at

The Daily BeastIabout Trumpmilking juryduty for public-ity. (And announcing hewould never eat Oreosagain):

"Entprof" said:

hat's hilarious is that'great' businessman The

Donald would be richertoday if he'd just put hismoney in index funds in'74 when he inherited it.That's right folks $50 mil-lion, a low estimate of his

I http://tinyurl.com/qbnan4g

inheritance,invested in amarket indexwould beworth $4.5billion at leasta few billionmore then he'scurrentlyworth.

The Daily Beast

girls' Little Leagueteam from Washing-

ton was accused ofthrowing a World Seriesgame after it lost 8-0 onMonday. The undefeatedSouth Snohomish, Wash-ington team was no-hitby a North Carolinateam, which meant itwould not go on to playan otherwise-undefeatedIowa team it had previ-

I http://tinyurl.com/o2g2ak7

http://electronictiger.net/buzz/3.jpghttp://tinyurl.com/o2g2ak7http://tinyurl.com/o2g2ak7http://tinyurl.com/o9vc8q3

ously beaten. Inresponse to the apparenttanking, Little LeagueInternational orderedthe Washington team toplay the Iowa team in aspecial playoff game todetermine who would goto the semifinals.On Tuesday, theIowa team beatthe Washingtonteam 3-2 andadvanced.8-0 seems a bit less

than subtle.That 3-2 score they

lost the game to Iowa bywould have been a bitmore plausible.

Apparently the LittleLeague World Series is runas a round-robin double-elim-ination (i assume) formatbecause there are so many teams.

So losing one to avoid a teamthat's kinda hard to beat sort ofmakes sense.

But, you know, 8-0?Say it ain't so, Josephine!

The original story was at theDes Moines Register:

http://tinyurl.com/o9vc8q3

404 page

n September 1975, as wellas leaving Atlanta to moveback in with my parents

temporarily in Greenville SC,

i sent in my firstSFPA contribu-tion as a member.

As the years have passed, i'veseen other members reporting mail-ings lost by the PO (and had one zinedelivered to the OE after the deadline,

http://electronictiger.net/buzz/3.jpghttp://tinyurl.com/o2g2ak7http://tinyurl.com/o2g2ak7http://tinyurl.com/o9vc8q3

even though it wassent Express MailI)- but i've never hada mailing lost inthe mail.

Until thefinal mailing of myfortieth year, thatis.

About the12th or 13th ofAUgust, i began toget a little nervous,and i contactedGuy, Jeff and Nedto see if they'dgotten their mail-ings yet. Guy saidhe had justrecently, so idecided to wait a while longer.

After a few more days, still nomailing - so i contacted Joe. He saidthe mailings went out on the sixth,and supplied me with the trackingnumber for mine.

Checking that, i found that thebundle had apparently fallen into ablack hole between his PO and theBirmingham sorting facility and hadnot been logged in or out anywheresince the sixth.Luckily, there was one left, which he hathmailéd unto me ... and i expect it possibly

I ...which, of course is the one time i've sentsomething Express Mail or UPS andlost the receipt...

tomorrow (well, later today - it's 013 EDTon 21 August as i type), or Saturday -Monday for sure!

Well, just got back from themailbox (Friday, 21 August). Not

here yet.

One of the regulars on themessage board for Wapsi Square hada .sig file that said:F5 * Is the page up yet? * F5 * Is the page upyet? * F5 * Is the page up yet? * F5 * Is the

page up yet? *

The notion of supernatural phenomena is afalse construct. Everything in the cosmosis essentially natural - except for certainforms of fast food - of course, and possi-

bly some aspects of Los AngelesLaura Resnick,

See next page for how DanShive handled this in El

Goonish Shive

o, the Sad Puppies(who i count assincere but

misguided/under a wrongimpression) and the RabidPuppies (who should only beput down by Animal Con-trol) have failed in theirattempts to influence/rig theHugo Ballot.

The Sad Puppies (well, a lot of

them; see next paragraph), in myopinion, simply failed to comprehendhow the Hugos work - they seem tothink the Hugos are intended as amore-or-less objective indicator ofquality. Which they aren't - they'reintended as exactly what they are, anindex of how much the members ofthe WorldCon liked particular works -a liking which may or may not corre-late with quality on some objectivescale, but which also inevitably willinclude political bias, personallike/dislike of the creatorI, worldevents at or around the time themember votes, earlier or later worksby the creator, and whether the voteris part of another fandom whose inter-ests overlap with the Hugo catego-

riesII.The Rabid

PuppiesIII, OTOH,though the groupssurely overlap,were strictly in it toI Hello, Scott CardII Dr Who, comics,Buffy, horror movies,Star Wars/Trek, etc.,etc., ad infinitun etnauseum.III Under the Svengali-like direction of "VoxDay"

i-don't-remem-ber-the-

date

http://tinyurl.com/pesdl66http://tinyurl.com/pesdl66

I anticipate that my Disqus feedwill be ... interesting ... for a while,because i have posted a number ofcomments to the NPR articleIV thatgot things wrong by, among otherthings, blaming the whole thing onthe Sad Puppies, rather than pointinga finger at Venereal DiseaseV and hisRabid Puppies...

I've already gotten some, evenwhile i was still goingdown the list andmaking a few morecomments.IV

http://tinyurl.com/pesdl66V Doncha just love it whensomeone you dislikechooses a pseudonym thathas an abbreviation that'srepulsive?

stir up political shit and scatter it aswidely as possible. Their (his) wholepurpose, obviously, was to disruptand (in their own eyes and those ofhis followers/sycophants) discreditthe process.

And why?

Because fandom in generalknows (and says, loudly) what a gen-erally-disgusting bit of human fecalmatter "Vox Day" is.

Well, guess what,guys?

Didn't work.

Yes, the Hugostook a hit, and i'm sure"Vox Day" will be backagain next year, runninghis hate campaignagain.

With luck, a fewfewer people will betaken in by his bullshit,and at least some of his slate won't getnominated, and works that actualhuman beings with normally -func-tional minds will like will have achance to get on the ballot.

And, if it happens that way,Hugo voters will actually be able tovote for the works that they like again,rather than having to vote "NoAward" to prevent the mad dogs fromkneeing us in the groin.

As a writer of satire inmy spare time, Texas is

very frustrating.Nothing I come up with is

as good as what theloons in Texas spout.

he mailing arrivedWednesday, 26 August2015. This is the

second one Joe mailed me -the first is apparently still lostin a space/time warp some-where in Birmingham.

The interesting part is that,

http://tinyurl.com/pesdl66http://tinyurl.com/pesdl66

Clay Bennett, Chattanooga TimesFree Press, 28 August 15

when i checked the tracking numberfor this package on Tuesday, it saidthat delivery had been attempted thatafternoon (at 4:12 PM, much laterthan our mail normally arrives), andthat a notice had been left in the box.

What made this particularlyinteresting is that i had been either at my computer

- ten feet from the door - or inthe kitchen - six feet furtheraway - virtually the whole after-noon and nobody had come tothe door, and i had sent Maggie and Natalie

down to the mailbox to checkthe mail a little earlier than that,and there wasmail, but nonotice.

So,Wednesday,when i antici-pated beingout runningerrands allafternoon, iplanned tostop by the"carrierannex" withthe notice, andpick it up.

Except,when i checked thebox ... there was no notice.

So i figured to head over to theannex with a printout of the mailing

receipt that Joe had scanned and e-mailed me ... but i couldn't find it, so idecided to drop by home (after drop-ping back at the office at 2PM, printanother copy, and head over.

Except that when i got homeand checked the box ... there was themailing.

This was not the only ludicrousrun-around i got that day, but theother is not related to SFPA.

http://tinyurl.com/optqgtshttp://tinyurl.com/optqgts

Non Sequitur,23 August 15

Continued nextpage

mean - is this hypocrisy,obliviousness or just plainstupidity? The man is cer-

tainly capable of any or allof them at any givenmoment.

The Daily Beast

eorge W. Bush praisedNew Orleans for its resil-

ience during a visit to thecity on the 10th anniver-sary of HurricaneKatrina. Speaking atWarren Easton CharterHigh School, he empha-sized that the city’s schoolsystem is now the “beaconfor school reform.”

“You’ve achieved a lot over thelast 10 years, and with beliefand success and a faith inGod, New Orleans willachieve even more,” Bushsaid. “The darkness from adecade ago has lifted, the

I http://tinyurl.com/optqgts

If more of our so-called leaders wouldwalk the same streets as the people whovoted them in, live in the same buildings,

eat the same food instead of hidingbehind glass and steel and bodyguards,maybe we'd get better leadership and a

little more concern for the future. -

http://tinyurl.com/optqgtshttp://tinyurl.com/optqgts

Crescent City has risenagain, and its best days lieahead.”

“New Orleans will always beyour home,” Mayor MitchLandrieu told him.

A longer Daily Beast pieceIIincludes this:

ush’s visit was far morelow-key than PresidentObama’s stop here onThursday, with a fractionof media and only one pro-tester, who had shown upat 7:45 in the morning,outside.

“I’m standing here to bearwitness to the fact that a lotof people still remember hisincompetence,” AaronGrant, 35, told me whileholding a sign of Bushlooking out the window ofAir Force One—that reads,YOU’RE EARLY COMEBACK IN A WEEK.

“The suffering is impossible toquantify. The emotions arevery alive and very raw. Alot of people just want thisweek to be over.”

When I first found out Bushwas coming here this week, Istarted asking everyone Icame into contact with

II http://tinyurl.com/o3rxg47

whether they were awarethat the 43rd president wasreturning to the city it tookhim three weeks to visitback in 2005.

The overwhelming responsewas utter disbelief. Andthere is arguably no greaterdisconnect than Bushreturning here, to a city that

http://tinyurl.com/o3rxg47http://tinyurl.com/o3rxg47

never acknowledged his ownrole in the response.Instead, he praised the resil-iency of the people and theschool, that later re-openedwith all of its studentsessentially homeless. And hepraised the controversialcharter school system— 91

percent ofschools hereare chartered—that criticshave said isdecimatingpoor communi-ties.“Isn’t it amaz-ing,” Bush toldthe packedauditoriumafter receivinga polite ova-tion. “Thestorm nearlydestroys NewOrleans andyet NewOrleans is thebeacon forschool reform.”

And:The people, the natives, the vic-

tims, the ones who were inthe water, in the dome, onthe levees, or those whoseloved ones were—and stillare- the people who are most

generally loathes him, witha sign outside a charterschool that reads “WelcomeBack President George W.Bush and Mrs. Bush NoChild Left Behind.”

“It’s outrageous that this NoChild Left Behind sign ishere,” said Serena Sebring,

38, a protestor who arrivedat some point during Bush’sspeech and who stoodoutside the school. “GeorgeBush left all of New Orleansbehind that day.”

Inside the building, Bushaddressed the pain but

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likely at home, riding thisout, waiting for #Katrina10to pass.

They are the ones this week onthe sidelines, watchingeveryone else remind them-selves of how this city hascome thundering back,while narratives of redemp-tion and hope are spun so

often that any other coun-terpoint to that gets lost.

“I’ll be so glad when this weekis over; I don’t want to seeanother Katrina memory fora long time,” said Joe Gilyot,assistant principal ofWarren Easton High School.Back then - when things were

starting to shake out and it looked likerecovery efforts that actually meantsomething were on the horizon, i wasafraid (as were many others) thatNOLa was going to get the TimesSquare Disneyfication treatment.

What i've been reading in thelast few days seems to suggest that it'sat least partly true - with peopleunable to afford homes in the now-

gentrifying areas wherethey used to live, and thegentrifiers complainingabout the very thingsthat make New Orleansthe funky, multicultural,just-plain-cool NewOrleans that attractedthem.

Complaints aboutnoise. Complaints aboutpeople out in the streethaving a good time.

Street-cornermusicians and bandsgetting hassled.

And now themayor wants to teardown parts of New

Orleans' heritage.Yes, i know they're monuments

to the Confederacy. Yes, i know allthat. But i perceive the statue ofRobert E Lee and other such monu-ments rather differently than i per-ceive the "Heritage Not Hate" typeswith their malformed Battle Flags thatthey think is the "Confederate Flag".

20 Aug 15

One is part of the history, theculture and the aura of the city, long-standing and established; the other isa recent phenomenon, taken up spe-cifically for racial/political reasons byyahoos who have no idea what "heri-tage" means, who wouldn't recogniseit if it bit them on the ass.

I won't say for sure it will fallout this way - but i wouldn't be sur-prised if many black citizens are asopposed to Landrieu's plan as well aswhites.

29 August 2015

THE NEW PORT NEWS282

NBrooks

don't know if that cater-pillar ought be courtingthat ladybug - ladybugs eat

other insectsI."There wasn't much winter

here this year"?

Our three-day power outagebegs to differ.

Dan Mannix, in his memoirStep Right Up (most recently re-pub-lished under its UK title, Memoirs of a

I ...and the invasive Japanese ladybugs bitepeople, too.

Sword-Swallower),once described aroutine that KrinkoII, owner of theten-in-one where Mannix ate fire andswallowed swords did.

Krinko would drive a nail intohis right eye with a hammer. Hewould grimace and distort his face ...and then press on his left cheek, andthe nail, having passed from one eyeto the other, would pop out.

What Krinko knew that themarks in the crowd didn't was that itis possible to slide a thin metal rod(the size of a small nail) into the tearduct with no problem. So he pre-loaded his left eye with a nail, andthen faked "driving" the nail into hisright eye, where it slid in easily...

II Krinko was a genuine fakir from India

Rhone Glacier

June 2007

SPEED OF GLACIER RETREAT WORLDWIDE

Your thing about chapbookscovered in the hide of unborn uni-corns reminds me of a humourouspiece in one of the auto magazinesforty-plus years ago - the author wasdescribing his experiences as a first-time purchaser of a fictional (butobviously Jaguar) sports car.

He said that the servicemanager recommended that he useonly a specific, high-end polish on the

coachwork - of which the dealership'sparts department conveniently turnedout to be the sole supplier in town.When he looked at the price, hedemanded to know what was in thestuff - unicorns' earwax?

No - this is what a TigerMoth looks like.

You may be assuming toomuch when you ask why a writerwould give his book an alreadyoverused title. I quote Napoleon:"Never ascribe to auctorial stupid-

ity that which may be adequatelyexplained by editorial meddling."

The Germanwings pilot hadbeen instructed by his doctors to notfly, but he concealed this from hisemployer. This, i'd say, is an indica-tor of premeditated suicide.

Oh, certainly triac chopperdimmer switches probably couldexisted in 1975 - if something is inter-

think. I hope.

THE TYPOKING 33

RJennings

he marking they hadme put on my rightknee to make sure

they did the right one wasdone using iodine, whicheasily washed off.

'HISTORICALLY UNPRECEDENTED'

fering with AM radio reception, i'mpretty sure it has some sort of activecomponents, as opposed to a rheostat,which is passive.

Susan and i bought a SilverReed daisywheel printer to cut stencilswith our first computer. Basically oneof their typewriters without the key-board.

I'll get back to Challenger later, i

Rhone Glacier

June 2014

http://tinyurl.com/nlbrobc

Given that surgeons these daysoperate on an almost assembly-linebasis, and have to depend on others tocollect and collate the background foreach patient, i'm mildly surprised wedon't hear more stories of healthy gallbladders removed, or wrong legamputated.

Out of course, i've come to suspectthat that knee had some cartilage

problems as far back as when i wasthirteen or so.

If the "midget-mobile" wasVery Small, with a Very Small engine,and the weather was Very Cold, itmay well have taken the coolant awhile to come up to a warm enoughtemperature to make the heater effec-tive.

I know the heater in my '69Spridget took a while to get warm.(After which i had to intermittentlyshut it off because it was over-enthusi-

concentrated brine the process pro-duces.

I really doubt the story aboutthe ISP that hijacked people's comput-ers - there was no way (at that time)that the ISP could possibly turn on acomputer that was off.

And since the connectionwould have almost certainly beendial-up, people would have noticedthat their phones were in use a lotmore than they should have beenIII.

Now, Dave Minch pointed outthat The Source (in the days longbefore the internet), a company thatoffered pretty much what is known as"cloud storage" these days - in mega-bytes, not gigabytes or terabytes, astoday - was headquartered in Langley,Virginia.

"Hmm," quothee, "what islocated in Langley Virginia that mighthave excess computer capacity tosell?"

Themonster EasterBunny was foundonline; i forgetwhere. I find a lotof such stuff atIII And the bandwidthover dial-up wouldhave been way toolow to allow thescheme to actuallywork.

astic.I have never picked up Astro

City in a store, but i read one or twotrade collections in the library. Prettygood, but the nearest comic shop istwenty-some miles away, so i haven'tbeen picking up any comics for years.

Speaking of women in earlyfandom/prodom - i have the impres-sion that many of the women whoparticipated when fandom was mostlypostal either used initials or non-gen-der-specific versions of their names.

(This, of course, is the sort ofthing that Heinlein plays on as a storyelement in Tunnel in the Sky.)

Gas prices spiked briefly inmid-summer and are now falling; ianticipate we'll see sub-two-dollarprices by DSC. (It's currently $2.199at Kroger - down from $2.40-some-thing a month or so ago.)

A major expense in desaliniza-tion is getting rid of the poisonously-

http://tinyurl.com/otdw96w

odd moments, that i (a true denizen ofthe internet) reshare with othersIV.

As to being able to watch TheBlack & White Minstrel Show - this URL -http://tinyurl.com/otdw96w - will takeyou to a YouTube search page with lotsof clips and such.

IV Including SFPA

SPARTACUSghliii

lad to see we agree onLandrieu's plan to dese-crate NOLa history.

One reason i plan to get to DSCthis year (even though we really can't

afford it) is to get photos of somelandmarks before he tears themdown.

Didn't go to Ex Machina -may watch on DVD - the trailerseemed to imply a basic misunder-standing of the Turing Test on thepart of the filmmakers - or else tosignal an Amazing Plot Twist.

JEWELS ANDBINOCULARS 26

TMcGovern

ow - whosebasement is thaton your cover?

He's got a hellof a modelrailroadlayout!

Well, it'snot so much a"reboot" at theArchie line, as it'sa parallel line,with a comic thatwas divided intotwo running sto-rylines - onewhere Archiemarried Betty, andone where hemarried Veronica -which turned out,in fact, to be paral-lel universes

http://tinyurl.com/otdw96w

Forty years ago (if the internet hadexisted then) i would have figured

this was a ad satire.

In 2015, it's a real ad.

which could be traveledbetween.

And then there arethe current horror title.

But the mainArchie line continues, aswell.

I wanted the alter-native cover to oneArchie title in the rela-tively recent past - the issue in whicheveryone got gender-swapped,because that cover was done by one ofmy favourite webcomic artistsI, but imissed it. (She's also done an alter-nate cover for #3 of Archie Meets thePredator - which i figure i've missed aswell.)

If that's your philosophy aboutsnow, i'm afraid you live in the wrongpart of the country.

About click-bait:

...what you get when you click tosee what it was that happened is

often unremarkable.

More than that - at least someof them will take you to Bad Placeswhich will try to install malware onyour computer.I Who pretty much used one of her existing

character designs for the male versionof Betty.

Actually, if the Saudi over-pro-duction is to mess with any other pro-ducer, it's to undercut thatcompetition.

If Iran manages to start sellingoil openly again, expect prices to fallagain/some more.

Clay Bennett21 July 15

SPIRITUS MUNDI 268ghliii

nteresting (if somewhat creepy)cover. Almost puts me in mind of

the SailorSun.org pic i used for acover a while back (bottom of pre-vious page).

Paul McGann only appearedonce as the 8th DoctorI - in a TVmovie intendedas a pilotfor a US-producedseries,which wasnot well-re-ceived andsank without atrace.

That's notone of mygranddaughterswith the EvilBunny - that's apicture i found online.

Speaking of Trump -apparently Trump's people said thatDavid Duke had endorsed him, andDuke responded by saying he hadn'tand wouldn't because Trump supportsIsrael.

Don talked about the wholeIguanaCon/Ellison thing here.

I Well, twice - the second time very brieflyin one of the teasers for the 50thanniversary special,

Do you remember Rally!, thesemi-satire/semi-news zine he pub-lished? The way i remember it, heincluded a line something like "Elli-son talks talk - Will he walk walk?"

I'm not even sure he includedanything beyond that line.

Harlan found out and he wentballistic. He called Don (late at night)and screamed at him. After Don

hung up on him, hisphone would ring

three or fourtimes everyfifteenminutes forthe rest of

the night.As i

recall, Mark-stein was indeedHead of Publica-tions for Iggy -which was appar-ently a kindaragtime operation

ingeneral -

and he got booted. Youcould look back throughpast mailings from around then andfind he version of the story.

Personally, i have no problemwith what Don said - but Harlan'sincredible ego and need to prove thathe has the biggest dick around madethe situation a lot touchier than itneeded to be or should have been.

Have you heard the story ofwhat happened when Marvel wastrying to start up a weird/horrorfiction digest?

They ran a story by Ellison inthe second issue; somehow the pageorder got screwed up.

Harlan waited until midnightL.A time to call Roy Thomas in NewYork.

And then, as i had the story atthe time, he insisted that they run thestory AGAIN - and PAY him for itagain.

The third issue was the last.Brilliant writer, egotistical jerk

and caring humanitarian.Best to admire from afar, out of

range of the flying poo that always

seems to turn up in hisvicinity, sooner of later.

I bought a 12-packof the "made with realsugar" Dr Pepper acouple years back - itwas HORRIBLE.

The Daily Beast

ext year, Illinoiswill become the

first U.S. state toput locking deviceson some prescrip-

tion painkillers to discour-age abuse of the drugs.

The pilot program—proposed ina bill signed into law thisweek by Gov. Bruce Raun-er—will use numerical lockson painkillers that containhydrocodone (aka Vicodin orNorco).

“Too many Illinoisans becomeaddicted to these powerfulmedications,” state Sen. IrisMartinez, a sponsor of thebill. “This legislation willhelp prevent individualswho haven’t obtained awritten prescription fromusing hydrocodone, a dan-gerous drug when used

http://tinyurl.com/ottoecdhttp://tinyurl.com/ottoecdhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062153/combined

without a doctor’s supervi-sion.”I repeat: Wot?I will now sound like an NRA

shill:

People will just use hammers orsaws to commit their addictions.

I have heard some truly ludi-crous ideas coming out of state legisla-tures, but this one maybe the most ludicrousistever.

Come to think ofit - could this be a CleverPloy by the NRA toallow them to makesome sort of anti-guncontrol argument bycomparing it to triggerlock and gun-safe laws?

Original story atthe AP:

http://tinyurl.com/ottoecd

've been stallingon writing this - sort of if,as long as i didn't write

about it for SFPA, itwouldn't be true.

But it is.As near as i can recall, i can say

that i (more or less) knew Ned Brooks

longer than anyone else in my lifewho isn't part of my family. My firstcontact with Ned was back in 1969,when i was in Crypto School atNorfolk Navy Shipyard.

I came back to the barracks oneday, and i had a phone message -"Call Operator 29" (or whatever num-ber).

Worried that it might be a

family emergency, i embarked on afrustrating five or ten minutes ofdealing with the minions of TPCI,finally getting connected to a totalstranger - somebody named "NedBrooks".

Ned was, as i was, a member ofI This was, after all, a year or so after the

release of The President's Analyst.

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the N3F in those days, and had seen aCoA for me in the N3F bulletin, anddecided to call (he was, as we allknow, working at the Langley windtunnel and living in Virginia)II.

After i went to and came backfrom Viet Nam, the first weekend ofmy leave before i went to Sicily hap-pened to be the weekend before LaborDay ... so, more-or-less on the spur ofthe moment, i decided to attend DSC.

Forty-five years later, i don'tdefinitely recall if Ned was there - butif i didn't meet him face-to-face there,i'm sure i did at DSC in Atlanta in1972.

We'd run into each other atDSCs and other cons - Kubla, River-Con and so on.

I got on the SFPAwaitlist, of course - iforget when - but Nedwas (of course) there.

In September 0f1975, i joined the roster.

And Ned wasthere.

And forty yearsII Between the last footnote

and now is another houror so of stalling, lookingup the movie to get itsdate and then clicking onall sorts of random-associated links that ledto. I really do not wantto be writing this.

passed.I met Susan at the first River-

Con. In '76 we moved in together. In'77 we got married.

We went to a lot of cons, and,as likely as not, Ned was there.

Susan and i were in SFPAtogether for a long time.

And Ned was there.After fourteen years together,

Susan and i split. I kept on with mylife as well as i could - and i keptgoing to cons, i tried to hang on.

And Ned was there.Twenty-five more years passed.I stayed in SFPA.And Ned was there.Along the way, Hank Rein-

GInzer, Hank, Markstein, Dolbear...Ned.

I've never gotten drunk. I hatethe sensations even beginning to beaffected by alcohol gives me.

I won't get drunk now.But i wish there was something

i could do to forget that Ned's notthere any more.

I hope to be at DSC.If i can get to Ned's memorial

service, i will.I will see my friends and we'll

remember.That so many of you are still

there.And i'm still here.

Incidentally - "Our Friend" was thecaption that Road &

Track ran under the pic-tures (that were gener-

ally not of Henry NManney III) ran withHenry N Manney III's

monthly columns,which were some of the

wittiest writing on aregular basis that i ever

encountered.While there wasn't a lotof resemblance between

HNMIII and CuylerWarnell Brooks, there

was a certain common-ality of dry wit and

deadpan understate-ment.

hardt, who i'd known almost as longas i'd known Ned, died, and the tribegathered for his funeral.

And Ned was there.And i met Kate along the way,

and she went to some cons with me -and we got married in Hunstsville andthen went on to Constellation.

And Ned was there.Just a week or so ago, i got my

SFPA mailing, and i opened it, andNed was there.

And then i got an e-mail acouple days ago, and i read it.

And Ned ... wasn't there anymore.

So many things we think willgo on forever- and so many ... don't.

MFIII, Karl Wagner, Khen,

've been having a a hardtime getting back to SFPA;the news about Ned kinda

threw me off.

PETER, PAN ANDMERRY 122

DSchlosser

he various Arabnations had a big handin creating the Pales-

tinian Problem - possibly forpolitical reasons - when theyrefused to accept the Pales-tinians displaced by the for-

mation of Israeland forced theminto permanentrefugee camps.

Nobody's handsare clean over there.

The kosher catererpork/shellfish question issimple; as opposed to thebaker/gay wedding cakeone - the baker normallyand routinely makeswedding cakes for publicsale, therefore cannotclaim religion as a basisfor refusal.

Whereas the kosher catererdoesn't handle shellfish or pork foranybody, so cannot be required to as aspecial thing.

Why the double-spaced sectionon page 2?

I always thought it was theThunderbolt Grease-Lapper Special.

Political comments - i just ranacross an online piece whose title (icouldn't get the article to display prop-erly) is ... eye-catching:

think a lot about theDepartment of Energy,because energy is mybaby: oil and gas and min-

http://tinyurl.com/nvtxx7nhttp://tinyurl.com/nvtxx7n

erals, thosethings that Godhas dumped onthis part of theEarth for man-kind's useinstead of usrelying onunfriendlyforeign nations,"she told CNN'sJake Tapper inan interview thataired Sunday on"State of theUnion."

But Palin, the GOP's 2008 vicepresidential nominee, mightbe the first potential cabinetmember to openly speakabout dissolving their office.

"I'd get rid of (the EnergyDepartment)..."I

Being a half-term Governorwas so much fun; being a half-termSecretary of Energy must be evenmore fun!

Another reason to hope thatTrump is just a bad joke God isplaying and the GOP base just hasn'tseen it yet.

(Yes, i was eventually able toread it.)

I http://tinyurl.com/nvtxx7n

Better yet - if all the Republicancandidates stood on each other'sshoulders (in pool number order),could Trump shake hands with a cos-monaut as the ISS went by?

ISIS is defending the TrueIslam against MINOs who have beencorrupted by the West. Especially theones who've never had any contact atall with the West.

The top ranks of the military -those who haven't seen combat inyears (if at all) - are willing to goalong when the political "leadership"(read, chickenhawks who never evensaw service, or deserted, or usedDaddy's influence to get yanked out ofa combat regiment on its way toKorea and re-assigned as O Clubliquor officer in Seoul) when they startbeating the drums for a new war

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The "media mail" classificationis a judgement call, and subject tobeing made at every stage of the pack-age's transit.

And the Benghazi Four are alsomuch more important than the hun-dreds that died in embassy attacks andmilitary barracks attacks on Republi-can watches, too.

Of course, somehow the Beng-hazi Inquisition Investigating Com-mittee's remit has expanded to includeall of Hillary's e-mails, sort of like theWhitewater Witch-Hunter General'sSpecial Counsel's somehow includedwhether Bill Got SomeIII.

Talking about "title/inspiredby" movies - for anyone here who'sfamiliar with Arthur Ransome's"Swallows & Amazons" seriesIV -

there's a new film of thefirst book that should be

III I'll say it again - the factthat not one real indictmentcame out of that circus afterthe completely free handFoster was given and theamount of money he spent isproof he was totallyincompetent.Given the agenda he wasobviously working from,any even half-competentprosecutor should havegotten at least oneindictment.IV http://amzn.to/1VFSkPe

against some new bunch of wogs. Imean, if they didn't, how could theyget to play with their wonderful toys -especially those thousands of toy sol-diersII they have in their toyboxes?

I think Prometheus just did it tostir up ... stuff. I mean, he just soundslike the sort who did things just to seewhat would happen.

Well, the BSA changed therules to allow gay Scout leaders, andthat's stirred up even more flyingsmelly brown stuff.

I think that, in at least someaircraft, you literally need to pull afuse/breaker to shut down the tran-sponder.II That are so realistic and bleed real-

looking blood when they get blown upby a toy IED.;

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Having been desig-nated a magic user

by the game system,Alex was expectedto summon an "abys-sal elemental" familiar.

just about done filming in the LakeDistrict and Yorkshire - and they'veadded a plot about a Russian spytracking down Uncle Jim/"CaptainFlint", who had been a spy for MI5 inRussia. (There are a couple of otherchanges, both sort of understandable -a major character called "Titty" justwon't fly...)

{Which, actually, wouldn't beso far off the mark if it were a filmabout how Ransome was inspired towrite the first book by his associationwithy the Altounyan children -Captain Flint is based pretty clearlyon Ransome himself, who was anagent for MI5 in Russia... Or perhapsa double agentV - his second wife wasTrotsky's personal secretary, andapparently smuggled 2 million poundsworth of diamonds andpearls to Paris for theComintern on her way toEngland.}

Speaking of reli-gious symbol stand-ins ina cartoon, i've got onesomewhere i have toremember to run in afuture zine.

The nephew scamis a short-con variationon the long con called"The Spanish Prisoner".And i heard aboutsomeone working a vari-V http://tinyurl.com/qg5pxlkhttp://tinyurl.com/q42z2fe

ation of that one not all that long ago.Wish i could remember when, whereand what they told the mark to sethim up.

Brooke McEldowney's 9 Chick-weed Lane usually has a running sto-ryline these days ... except for the lastmonth or so where he's been playingwith meta fiction and negative space.

And, of course, there are anumber of running-story webcomics,some of which might as well be news-paper comics, based on format.

As to the Czar's cousin-mon-archs coming to hisaid if the Revolutionstarted earlier -neither the Kaisernor the King ofEngland seems to

http://amzn.to/1VFSkPehttp://amzn.to/1VFSkPehttp://tinyurl.com/qg5pxlkhttp://tinyurl.com/q42z2fe

Protectorate" and therelated "FinishingSchool" series.

Hmmm. The firstdirigibles (basic experi-mental craft) in our worlddate to the 1870s, andCount Zeppelin was pro-ducing early rigid airshipsby 1900. So i'd expectcommercial dirigibles in aworld like this book bythe 1880s/90s. (Maybeearlier, since apparently

Europeans have easy access to helium- which they didn't in our world, sincethe main early sources were in theUSII, and her dirigibles have steamengines, as opposed to IC engines.)

Ornithopters are still pretty-much impossible - a power source thatcan supply the power needed but besmall/light enough is still beyond us.

(Fusion. That'll do it. Nextyear, for sure.)

Boilers that look like Ganesha?Heck the Corbetite Monks style

their locomotives as seriously impres-

II The company tried to get helium for theHindenberg and its sister ships, but thatthe US classified helium as "warmateriel" and banned it export toGermany.

Alex is prone to what TVTropes calls"Suspiciously Specific Denial":

"I have no idea how that moose got inthe dance team's dressing room."

have had any real hesitation or uncer-tainty about attacking his cousin.

TWYGDRASIL &TREEHOUSE GAZETTE

153RDengrove

f the Outlander series holdscloser to the original booksby Diana GabaldonI than

True Blood did to CharlaineHarris's books, the history inis it probably pretty sound,from what i recall.

I need to hunt up that new Car-riger book. I enjoyed the "Parasol

I http://amzn.to/1FryDBB

http://amzn.to/1FryDBBhttp://amzn.to/1FryDBB

sive monsters - an exam-ple, the Limerick Wyrm:

You know, theneedle gun fight betweenJerry Cornelius and hiscousin(?) that kills the sister they bothlove is basically the same fight -except with enchanted swords - as inthe first Elric novel.

Moses as an Apache - well,there are those who claim the Ameri-can Indians are descended from theLost Tribes of Israel.

You just need the right fontwith Cyrillic characters included, likeNautilius Pompilius... (and maybe useCharacter Map).

Many small nations contracttheir postage stamp (and money)printing out to other countries or evenprivate corporations. There's a"Saint" storyIII in which Simon

III The Million Pound Day

Templar gets involved in a schemerevolving around the Bank of Englandprinting currency for, i think, Italy.Somebody arranges to have a lot ofextra printed up and diverted.

And then Simon Templar getsinvolved and interested.

About factions inside Disneysabotaging the release of John Carter -that may or may not have happened,but it's pretty sure that's part of whythe Disney film Return to Oz flopped.Bookings were cut short, advancepublicity was pulled, no special news-paper ads were bought, a merchandis-ing campaign tie-in with Macy's wasslashed.

In the case, it was the last filmgreenlighted by the studio brass prior

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to their being fired and replaced byEisner and Iger, and would be all thatwould be out before anything theyplanned could come out - if it didgood and their first films didn't, itwould look bad.

Discussing dancing/notdancing in agony after ingesting aminute amount of Dave's InsanitySauce reminds me of the article irecently read about the TarantulaHawk, a large waspIV. It quoted anentomologist who specialises in wasps

as saying that if you're ever stung byIV like Godzilla is a large monster.

one, the only thing to do is lie on theground and scream for three minutes.

The blog post i got that picturefrom is about being stung by one:

ou may have seen themlazily floating around yourgarden, and hastilyavoided them - as these2-inch black and orangewasps command quite apresence. But, luckily,

they are quite docile as faras wasps go, and are rela-tively reluctant to sting.

The reason they can be sodocile is because nothingwill come anywhere nearthem, on the off chance ofwhat happened to me hap-pening to them. Within halfa second of being stung, thepain begun, and I droppedstraight to the ground andstarted screaming my head

why they had been called tocare for a man who was per-fectly fine. I told them I hadbeen tending my gardenwhen a big black and orangething came at me, and thenI was, for all intents andpurposes, in another plane

of existence for 5minutes. Afterthe EMTs hadleft, I looked up"black and orangething with a stinglike death" onGoogle, and thefirst result was

Tarantula Hawk(Google, you are good

at this), so I did someresearch. And now it's

present day, when I'mtyping this.And by the way, theauthor of the insect

stingpainindex (aguy

named JustinShmidt) said a

Tarantula Hawk sting is"…immediate, excruciatingpain that simply shuts downone's ability to do anything,except, perhaps, scream.Mental discipline simplydoes not work in these situa-tions." That is shockingly

Clay Bennet/1 Sep-tember 2015

off (I wish I had beenrecording - it'd make a goodWasted gif, I bet). It wasexcruciating, all-encompass-ing - I lost the ability tothink about anything elsebut the brutal, blinding painwracking my body. I hon-estly thought thisthing had killed me.The pain lasted forabout 5 minutes(though it felt likeeternity), for theduration of which Idid nothing but liein the fetal positionandscream/wail/moan. It'shard do describe thepain - I've never feltanything anywhere nearthe level these thingsdish out - but if I had to,I'd say it was like havingall your blood sud-denly turn tohydrofluoricacid acidwhile beingelectrocuted. Butafter the 5 minutes of hellwas over, it hardly hurt atall - now it's just slightly redand tender.

By this point, my family hadcalled 911. By the time theambulance came, though,the pain had subsided, and Ihad to explain to the EMTs

accurate, I must say.Actually, the diseases that the

vaccines the ant-vaxxers don't wantare against are rapidly becomingmenaces again, in large part due tothe anti-vaxxers' efforts.

Actually, considering the "RioGrande" (which, as we know, means"Big River" or some similar thing),even those crossing it would gener-ally not be "wetbacks" - "wet knees",maybe.

Your analysis of Castro'sgoing all the way Communist is logi-cal, however, he did proclaim that hewas a Marxist-Leninist not long afterthe Revolution. The same thing hasbeen said of Ho Chi Minh and theViet Minh.

As to tire spped ratings - if thecar can go that fast, in general in theEU it must come with tires that canstand it:

n many countries, the lawrequires that tires mustbe specified, and fitted,to exceed the maximumspeed of the vehicle theyare mounted on, withregards to their speedrating code (except for"temporary-use" sparetires). In some parts ofthe European Union,tires that are not fit for acar's or motorcycle's par-

http://tinyurl.com/opqhtsshttp://tinyurl.com/opqhtss

ticular maximum speedare illegal to mount.Certainly there are racing tires

that could stand the gaff at thosespeeds; expensive, but if you canafford a "hypercar" that can go three

hundred MPH, you can afford thetires.

And afford to replace themevery few thousand miles, becauseracing tires are not intended for highmileage use. High speed, yes. Highmileage, no.

Anyway, it's seldom tire failurethat takes hypercars out - it's driverstupidityV. (Or lack of skill, whichamounts to the same thing at thoselevels.)

It's not the Sad Puppies peopleare up in arms about - or, rather onlyas a side-effect of Rabid Puppies. Asusually happens when some extremisthijacks a fairly-reasonable cause, theoriginal people got splashed withmud, too.

Which is not to say i thinkthey're right - just that they're notcompletely raving-dingleberry crazy.

Actually, i think that badgeringand browbeating witnesses was fairlycommon in courts in the Fifties andmaybe on into the Sixties - though isuspect Hamilton Burger would havebeen ore likely to get away with itV Like this one: http://tinyurl.com/opqhtssThe idiot in the passenger seat (he's an idiot

because he got in that car with thatidiot) gets shots of the speedometerreading over 330 KPH (over 200 MPH)before the crash at about 310 KPH.

Both idiots survived. The logo at thebottom of the video is the Hungarianpolice (where it happened).

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than Perry Mason in the real world ofthe time, since the judge and prosecu-tor were more or less regarded as ateam, and the defense as the "otherside".

Personally, i'm afraid of peacefulmicrowave-beamed-power-from-spacesetups. Think about who'd be operat-ing those things - remember Gus Gris-som's comment about "thelowest competitive bidder""?

Actually, the charac-ters in Rick O'Shay were orig-inally kids playing "WesternMovie" in a ghost town.Then it evolved into adultsand then it was set back ahundred years...

Consideringthat the German-wings co-pilotcovered up themedical certificatesaying heshouldn't fly, i'mfairly sure there wassome earlier intent;certainly, he exe-cuted a careful planVIas soon as he had thechance.

I can't recall the title of the

VI Setting the aircraft in straight and levelflight below the height of the peaksahead worked well - there are built-insafeguards against an all-out powerdive.

recent movie where the protagonistbegins hearing a voice in his head nar-rating his ife, and realises he is (or hasbecome) the protagonist of the latestnovel by a popular writer who's noto-rious for killing off her protagonists inevery book.

If i saw that rabbit i'd callAnimal Control.

Hmmm. If SherlockHolmes and Watson areassumed to be in their mid-twenties when they meet inA Study in Scarlet, pub-

lished in 1887, andwe assume it wasset contemporane-ously - yeah,they'd be in theirmid hundred-fif-

ties this year.(Holmes would

have been just about ahundred when Solo andKuryakin met him in TheRainbow Affair.)

The Battle Flag(NOT the "ConfederateFlag") has pretty much

been a symbol of racism andrepression since it came into generaluse during the Civil Rights era.

The MAD Magazine bit aboutrewrites looked at the "folk process",following a song from the MiddleAges up to the present day, showingall the (ridiculous) changes at eachstep ... until it was finally recorded by

some hippies, who desecrated thatfine old song ... which was exactly thesame as it had started out centuriesago.

Well, Trump[ looks more andmore like a clown - sort of the Joker inflesh-coloured makeup - but nobodyon the right seems to have noticed yet,based on the polls.

Apparently The Shadow Maga-zine #1 was basicallyan ashcan issue - pub-lished mostly tosecure copyrightsand trademark ona character.

A similar sit-uation in the 1960swas when WarrenPublications waspublishing Creepy (amagazine-sizeB&W horrorcomic, if it doesn'tring a bell) bi-monthly, and theydecided to publish asecond bi-monthly in alternatemonths that they decided to callEerieVII.

Somebody else - Waldman,maybe? - suddenly announced that

VII Eerie and Creepy were essentially thesame magazine - same editor/chiefwriter, same artists, same format. Butby alternating two bi-monthly titles,both could stay on the stands longer.

they were going to do a B&W horrorcomic called Eerie, and publish beforeWarren planned to, apparently tryingto trade on whatever publicity Warrenhad managed to generate.

So Warren rushed out anashcan, printed just enough copies tolock down copyright/trademarkrights, and the real run for Eerie beganwith issue #2. (All of the stories in

Eerie #1 were eventually reprintedin the real magazine.)

Actually, Archie isone of the consistently

best-selling comics lines.You don't see digest-

size Marvel or DCcomics in thecheckout lanes ofevery supermarketalong side People

and the like.They are also

one of the moreinnovative.

I don't generallybuy their stuff, at leastpartly for moral reasons,

after the whole thing with DandeCarlo. (Gary could exp-lain it moreclearly that i, i think, if you're inter-ested.)

But they do, on occasion,employ one of my favourite webcomicartists, Gisele leGace, and i try to buythose issues.

I remember citing Wikipedia ina discussion with you and being told it

was not a reputable reference. Per-sonally, i decided that Pavane was setin a world completely divorced fromour own, in a manner different fromwhat i consider "alternate history".But if that's what you prefer to call it, iwon't argue, because it's as good aterm as any.

There had hardly been any pro-ductions of Threepenny Opera in theUS prior to the Theatre deLys Blitz-stein version. It had played Broadwaybriefly, in - lemme see:

dapted intoEnglish by

Gifford Cochran andJerrold Krimsky andstaged by Francesco VonMendelssohn, featuredRobert Chisholm asMacheath. It opened onBroadway at the EmpireTheatre, on April 13,1933, and closed after 12

performances. The brevityof the run has been attrib-uted to the stylistic gapbetween the Weill-Brechtwork and the typicalBroadway musical duringa busy and vintage periodin Broadway history....although i believe Broadway

runs in general were shorter than theyare today in the early Thirties.

It really isn't a play that i would

expect to appeal to theUSAian bourgeoisie at any time.

My dad was involved in thefirst post-World War 2 production inthe US by the Theatre Guild at Uni-versity of Illinois. They were unableto get scripts or sheet music, so theydid their own translation from aprompter's script, and basically tran-scribed the music from two partialrecord albums, neither of which hadall the songs - one was in Spanish andthe other in German.

Non Sequitur, 21July 15

It just occured to me - i thinkMartin Landau was at UofI at thesame time my dad was - wouldn't

he have made a hell of a Macheath?

Current gas prices heraroundare $2.099 to (at one station) $2.599; ianticipate it may be below $2/gallonby DSC. (and it's lower yet right nowin the NOLa area, so...)

I'd like to have seen Floyd live.That's one of the things i'd do if

i invented a time machine.The first thing i'd do is go back

to February 1975 with HD ideo equip-ment and get a good-quality recordingof the multimedia show version of theKinks' A Soap Opera that was the firstlive Kinks show i ever saw...

Kyle Becker/Independednt Journal

oor KimDavis. Notonly did the

anti-gay marriagecrusader go to jailin defense of whatshe believes to be a

fight for religious liberty (shemight want to bone up onher James Madison), butnow she’s being attacked byone of the most vile pseudo-religious organizations everto spawn.

The Westboro Baptist“Church.”

Indeed.The gaggle of spiteful hatemon-

gers flocked to the Kentucky clerk’spolarizing story like starving,demented geese on a cheese nip. Yetdid the douchey injustice warriorsrush to Kim Davis’ side with awfulmulti-hued signs in hand to take upthe fallen sister’s cause?

Nope. Westboro virtually blud-geoned her with them. Because shewas divorced and remarried.

Why didn’tAnonymous

Graffiti

anyone else thinkof that? An inter-esting hypothesis,bomb-throwingidiots.

Right, she’snot actuallymarried now,because herdivorce is ‘illegiti-mate’ in the eyesof God. And shemust leave herman-who-is-not-her-husband. Gotit.

And then,like the Columbosthey are, they fol-lowed the bread-crumbs to whythere is same sexmarriage to beginwith.

Sometimes, politics makestrange bedfellows. But in this case,some of the bedfellows have a screwloose.

http://tinyurl.com/qfp7baj

VARIATIONS ON A

THEME 106RLynch

eah.Starscan

only get toIron 56 andthen theynova and thatprocesscreatesheavier ele-ments, as iseem to recallthe processI.

I'd say that R&H were defi-nitely sending a message there -"You've Got to be Carefully Taught"is not a song written by people whoapprove of racism.

In "Loco Motive", the first ofthe Craig Rice/Stuart Palmer storiesfeaturing John J Malone and Hilde-garde Withers, set during the earlyrun of South Pacific,II Hildy mentionsseeing it and is a touch doubtful aboutI ...and i could easily be wrong.II Hmmm. There are a lot of soldiers and

sailors traveling on the train, so it mayhave been early Korean War.

The universe is run by the complexinterweaving of three elements. Energy,matter, and enlightened self-interest. -

G'Kar,Personally, i think GKar was wrong

about at least one of those.

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the language, but there's no mentionof the theme.

I went into a liquor store a fewyears ago, and asked if they had anyporters.

The guy pointed to the winesection.

Blish worked the question ofwhether the transporter destroys youand creates a perfect duplicate at theother end into the opening of one ofhis Star Trekadaptations, iseem to recall -McCoy and Kirk(i think) discussingitIII.

CBR andCBZ are electroniccomic book for-mats. Basically,they consist of acompressed con-tainer file witheach page inside itas a JPG - the dif-ference between the two is whether ituses ZIP or RAR compression.

Okay. Let me unpack what isaid about deCamp, Burke and so on.

DeCamp in no way - as i read itsecond-hand, relayed through mymother who knew nothing of the situ-ation or the personalities - accused

III Definitely McCoy, maybe Kirk. And itmay have actually already een in thatscript. Don't know.

Rusty of anything. All i said was thathe mentioned that there were two par-ticularly prominent people speakingout who were unhappy with the REHbiography. As i recall now - what -twenty years alter? - he actually didn'tmention Burke by name, but saidenough that i was able to recognisewho it must have been. I got noimplication (again, second-hand andfiltered) that he in any way accusedBurke of anything except not approv-

ing of the book.Pretty

much the same forthe guy who ranaround dressed asSolomon Kane,though there i gota bit of "What awacko!" comingthrough.

In mymother's account,he in no wayimplied that hethought either

Rusty Burke or the Kane guy werebehind the death threatsIV.

Not at all, and i did not meanto convey that impression. Hell -Burke is one of my friends and/oracquaintances i i'd be least likely toIV And, let's face it, if deCamp reported the

death threats - which i assume he did -those two would have been checked outfirst as basic police procedure, and,presumably cleared.

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imagine being behind adeath threat.

There are someothers...

The entire con-versation seems tohave been five or tenminutes at a "Meet theDistinguished GuestLecturer" breakfast, sodifferent things tend torun together, i guess.

Was it the PC orthe PC jr that the BocaRaton group did theoriginal R&D on? ithought i'd heard thatthe PC was done else-where and the PC jrwas handed to the BR group.

We have a cat who stops byperiodically to mooch - Helen callshim PK ("Pretty Kitty") and he is abeauty - and i'm sure he's some sort ofSiamese Cross. I took some picturesjust the other day - see previous page.

VELOCIRAPTOR-FREEWORKPLACE

JCopeland

tried to post a review ofKratman's first turd bookIon Amazon - it was

I Which Baen presented and promoted asSF, while it's basically just a pile of farright wank.

removed becausei "reviewed thepolitics of thebook, not thecontent" and

admitted i readabout a third andskimmed the rest.

(I got wordthrough a third partywho i'm inclined to

believe) that Kratman openly braggedabout gaming the Amazon reviewchallenge process, with particular ref-erence to my review.

So i wrote another.You can see my original

review, some comments on theremoval of the review and otherthings, and the replacement review athttp://tinyurl.com/ollytls.

I sincerely doubt that he hasimproved any in the interveningyears.

I can see why Vox Day wouldlove him, though.

Speaking of The Man fromUNCLE - ComicmixII informs us that

II http://tinyurl.com/qdk2k5r

So, you were up late, or you've got a hang-over, or just low blood sugar generally; youhaven't had your first shot of caffeine, and

you sit down at the breakfast table...

http://tinyurl.com/ollytlshttp://tinyurl.com/qdk2k5rhttp://tinyurl.com/qdk2k5r

we can now get all eight of the fea-ture-film versions of episodes (sevenof which we intended for overseas the-atrical release and running in the USas two-part episodes, one of which ispatched together from the originalpilot and additional footage) onAmazon digital or "print-on-demand"DVDs, and apparently the transfersare quite good.

Some of them are pretty good,and one, which was called "The FiveDaughters Affair" on TV, and TheKarate Killers in theatres, features quitea cast: Joan Crawford, Curd Jürgens,Herbert Lom, Telly Savalas, Terry-Thomas and Mrs David MCallum (atthe time), Jill Ireland.

Also a wonderfully staged fightin a disco while the dancers keep righton dancing to the music of EveryMother's Son playing their hit, "Comeon Down to My Boat".

(Oddly enough, LucianaPalluzi appears in basically the samerole in To Trap a Spy, theone patched up from thepilot ... and in Thunderball.

And meets basically the same end.)At one time, we had three

Netflix accounts here - Steve andHelen had a streaming-only account,Kate had another one, and i had atwo-disks-out mail account.

Delenn's announcement is,indeed, my favourite B5 line - thoughIvanova's explanation to some badguys exactly who she is and why it's abad idea to get on her bad side isRight Up There.

But i have to go to anotherpage to read your art credits. Simplerjust to ask and find out several monthslater. I may even remember what itwas i was asking about.

Well, at one time, WhenPyramid had all the "Skylark" booksin print, they listed Skylark Three asthe third book in the series.

Which must have confused hellout of people who read it for the firsttime after reading Skylark of Valeron,which Pyramid had listed second.

11 August2015

http://tinyurl.com/ollytlshttp://tinyurl.com/qdk2k5rhttp://tinyurl.com/qdk2k5r

SPORADIC 32BPlott

ardstown Road hasalways been a neatplace to just wander

and window shop.I don't know if Ear X-Tacy, one

of the best new/used record stores ihave ever shoppedI, is still there, butit's worth a look-in if you're into col-lecting records/CDs or looking for

I When i first met Kate and Helen, i hadthree stickers on my truck's tailgate - aDarwin Fish, a Cowboy Mouth sticker,and an Ear X-Tacy sticker dead center.

Kate and Bill, her ex, had joint custody;Helen spent her weekends with Bill andGail, and the school week with us.

One weekend, when Bill brought her back,he stopped behind my truck in thedrive, and asked Helen if i was intodrugs.

interesting non-mainstream music, ifit is.

Since Susan was from Louis-ville, and we used to visit her fatherand her aunt, i became fairly familiarwith the town (but i've only been backonce in the last twenty-some years, forRiverCon in 2000). I never particu-larly took to Hot Brown - maybe i justnever had a good one ... but i did haveNative Guides.

Is Kevin Cannon the artist whodid the Cartoon Guide to History, orwhatever it was called?

Perhaps Pulp Tales Presentsselects its reprints by whether they arein Public Domain or not?

No, actually the zines in lastmailing were mailed. What i hand-delivered was Waterloo Sunset, first inthis mailing.

I quite enjoyed the OctoberDaye books; i couldn't finish the firstInCryptid - i think it's because i sin-

2/3 of a faerie ring on aGainesville church lawn.

http://tinyurl.com/pubks3shttp://tinyurl.com/p9sevzk

As soon as this zine is finalised, i'll be puttinga PDF of it online at

http://tinyurl.com/pubks3sNote that the links in the text (including that one) will

be live in the PDF so you can click them to follow them.

cerely disliked the protagonist.The film of Damn Yankees was

pretty good, but i didn't like the han-dling of Applegate's "Good Old Days"number. The stage version (at least asthe Greenville Little Theatre pre-sented it, lo these many years agone)does it as a soft-shoe, not the staticstaging of the film.

At one time the Foster's oilcansi saw hereII stated that it was brewedin Alabama - i confused Gadsden(which we don't pass through on ourway to Hartford) with Dothan, whichwe do. Doesn't MillerCoors have abrewery in Dothan?II Specifically some years ago when i

needed less than a sixpack ofinoffensive beer for a recipe.

REVENANT 88SStrickland

ow did you get toCarnegie Hall,Sheila?" "Practise,

practise, practise."NYC is trying to get the painted

ladies and knock-off characters out ofTimes Square.

I shall have tocheck out the twobooks you mention -how recent are they?

If either Puppieswere planning a "NoAward" result to claim

victory, that would the Rabids.See my comments regarding

Kratman in my MC to Jeff.Don wasn't a committee

member, so far as i know, he was sortof a contractor.

Back-to-back i get corrected forknowing one thing and then typinganother and you say you did it and icaught you.

Oh, i definitely include thehabañero seeds - i mince everythingbut the stem Very Finely.

http://tinyurl.com/pubks3shttp://tinyurl.com/p9sevzk

THESUMMONING

OF BREE

The thingto remem-ber here isthat Alexhas never

doneMMORPG

gamingbefore -

she has noidea that

what she'sdoing is

impossible.

Llita,OTOH,has andknows.

By golly - isaid a max offorty-eightpages and i

did it.

Comment onnext

mailing, proba-bly.