# 2126

Written by Fred Patten, and intended for Apa L, 2126^th Distribution, LASFS Meeting No. 3574, February 9, 2006.
Golden State Colonial Convalescent Hospital, 10830 Oxnard Street, North Hollywood, California 91606-5098.
Telephone: hospital(818) 763-8247; personal (818) 506-3159 * eMail:fredpatten@earthlink.net

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Rob Powell brought me to last week's LASFS meeting. Its highlight was without doubt Harry Turtledove's reading of one of his stories. It was a good story, but did I understand that it appeared in Asimov's SF magazine? Is a parallel universe story that turns out at the end to have been a dream really s-f? It could be argued that dreams are by their basic nature all s-f or fantasies (any which are not show the dreamer to be extremely unimaginative), but "he awoke and it was all a dream" has always seemed to me to be a copout for a s-f/fantasy story (including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). But I suppose that the parallel-world setting would make it inappropriate for a mainstream fiction magazine (are there any left?) unless it had a "this is all a dream" disclaimer at the beginning. Which would give away the ending. Oh, well.

A couple of weeks ago, in my report of the C/FO's January meeting, I said of Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle that: "It is up for both the Oscar and the Annie awards for best animated theatrical feature of 2005, I believe, and while I agree that it is the best animated feature of the year (with Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit second), ..." ASIFA-Hollywood held its Annie Awards presentations last Saturday (I did not attend), and Wallace & Gromit won the Award. Awards. In ten categories, every one it was nominated in. If you are interested in the complete list of winners, go to http://www.animated-news.com/archives/00004518.html. This probably makes Wallace & Gromit the favorite for the Oscar trophy, where it is up against only Howl and Corpse Bride. We will see soon enough.

I could not get to ASIFA's Annie Awards banquet last Saturday ($55.00 a ticket and tuxedo dress strongly urged), but I do plan to be at the Disney publicity screening of Bambi II for ASIFA members last Tuesday. Due to needing to get ˇRR! finished by Monday to get it to Vanessa Van Wagner in time to get it into Apa L, I will have to defer my report on Bambi II until next week.

If I was not going to see Bambi II, I could have gone to the TV Korea Showcase 2006 on the same day, thanks to an e.mailed invitation from the Korean Broadcasting Commission. Guess where this was being held? If you guessed Mumbai, India again, you were right: the Sangam Ballroom, JWMarriott Hotel, Mumbai, India. What is it about Mumbai that has made it so popular suddenly? See http://www.indiantelevision.com/advt/special/tvkorea/y2k6/mailer/6feb_tvkorea.htm for the illustrated invitation.

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ˇZANAHORIAS ELECTRóNICAS!

-- Comments on Last Week's Distribution:

De Jueves #1464 - (Moffatt) Howl's Moving Castle (the anime) has not been released on DVD in the U.S. yet. It is scheduled for March 7^th. The DVD shown at the C/FO meeting was the Disney/Buena Vista Japanese release, which includes high-quality English subtitles among its options. The C/FO shows all its anime in Japanese with English subtitles, if possible. ## My family had a 30-foot fig tree instead of an avocado tree, in our back yard when I was growing up. It was equally impossible for us to harvest the figs at the top of the tree, so they got overripe and rotted on the tree; and since figs are sweet, they attracted every bird, bee and wasp for miles around. We could not pick the figs from the lower branches that we could reach without risking getting stung or pecked by angry mockingbirds. (The other birds just threatened, but the mockingbirds attacked.) I would rather have had avocados. ## Considering the particular nurse who threw out my Turkish Delight, it probably did go into the wastebasket. The nurses' taking patients' food to eat themselves would be illegal. Any cake is probably not on my diet since soft bread clogs up in my throat, and I often get a different dessert like jello or melon slices at meals when the other patients get cake. I seem to be able to eat cake safely; I do not know what the significant difference between the two is. It would probably be a bad idea to send a whole cake to the hospital for me in any case. I am satisfied with the slices that I get at LASFS meetings. ## What is now Canada did have Native Americans living in it before it was settled by Europeans. I do not know how far north the tribes lived. Minnesota is an Indian word ("the land of sky-blue waters/1,000 lakes" - or am I thinking of Gitchee-Gummee?) but I do not know which tribal language (Chippewa?).

Godzillla Verses #73 - (DeChancie) There are no Wildside Press editors reading Apa L that I know of. If you are seriously interested in having Wildside reprint your Skyway Trilogy in one volume, you should probably ask your agent to propose it to them. It would be informative to get the opinion of a professional literary agent like Richard Curtis on Wildside Press, in any case. ## You should warn readers that you need to google on "Silly Castora" to get the links (there are several) to Phil right away. Googling on "Silly" alone will get you 73,400,000 links, which will take a looooong time to go through looking for those pertinent to Phil. ## Sofawolf Press has recently published two hard-core Furry homoerotic (they don't call it gay pornography) spy/murder mystery novels (or one novel and its sequel), in which the nonhuman aspects of the graphic sex scenes are key plot elements. I will admit to being favorably impressed by the author's imagination and literary skill even though the plot is not to my tastes. Significant literary value, indeed. ## Congratulations for coming through on the Space Cadet story. I am still disappointed that L.A.con II in 1984 would not support my idea for an anthology of s-f stories with a Los Angeles theme, although I had proposd a reprint anthology (Heinlein's "And He Built a Crooked House", Niven's "Inconstant Moon", Matheson's "A Touch of Grapefruit", a Bloch horror fantasy about Hollywood, etc.) rather than an original anthology.

Fumdiddle - (Cantor) My parents encouraged me to read during my childhood in the 1940s by getting me a subscription to Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, letting me read anything in our house (Time, Life, Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, their murder mysteries and Civil War histories), and encouraging me to get books from the public library. (They did not care what kind, but the library would not let children read anything except children's books; I had Asimov's Foundation books and Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles taken away from me by the librarian as "too difficult for me to read".) My parents did not buy me any children's books, and the library refused to get any "series" books like the Tarzan books, the Oz books, Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, etc., so I never got to see Uncle Wiggily in any form except the comic-book adaptations in Animal Comics. ## Regarding the build-up of Los Angeles, my house was practically alone on a block of vacant lots for the first 5 or 6 years of my life. Starting around 1947, and for about the next ten years, there was always a new house under construction to play in somewhere on the block, until it was completely built up. ## Presumably the History Channel has a lot of programming about WWII because that war was well-documented photographically and cinematically. I remember seeing a TV documentary (I do not know whether it was on the History Channel) about the California Gold Rush of 1849 into the 1850s that I considered very phony because I recognized many of the photos from books on history as being from the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, the homesteading of the Great Plains after the Civil War, etc. - photographs taken later than the 1840s/1850s.

I Dosido While Trapezoid Dancing - (Gold) Many "authentic" Asiatic words/names turn out to be what the Russians call them. In my foreign paper money collection I had some "Mongolian rubles" that were clearly labeled (in Cyrillic) 1 tugrug, 5 tugrugs, etc. I have already noted here that many of the newspaper reports about the war between the Russian Army and the separatists in Chechenia include photographs of Chechen signs, political posters, etc. that clearly say "Chechenistan"; and on the Ukrainian spelling of Kiev since Ukraine separated from the Soviet Union (Kyiv) which is generally ignored in America in favor of the Russian spelling. ## I did resign my C/FO Secretaryship at the first meeting I was able to attend after my stroke. The club has not found anyone else willing to accept the obligations of the post yet. ## I could ask the hospital staff if avocados are on my approved diet, but it is an academic question. I could not peel & eat an avocado one-handed if someone sent one to me; the nurses will not provide that degree of personal service to individual patients; and the kitchen has already promised to add avocados to meals (probably in salads) if I can provide enough for all the patients. ## Leonard Wibberley acknowledged often that he got the idea for The Mouse That Roared (deliberately losing a war with the U.S. to collect big on the foreign aid the U.S. sends to every country it defeats) when he was an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1950s and was assigned to write an editorial on the peace treaties and their aftermaths that the U.S. had imposed on Germany and Japan after WWII. Possibly the main reason that this "doesn't work" any longer is that the U.S. has hardly been in any wars since WWII. I am not sure what our conflicts in Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, etc. have been officially called, but they have not been wars requiring peace treaties. ## I would think that a "terrorist" is someone who uses terror to try to force the government or a population to adopt a policy that it would not otherwise. Robin Hood may have been a patriotic Anglo-Saxon thief, but he was no more than a thief until the 1800s and 1900s when revisionist dramas turned him into a freedom fighter against the Normans. Someone (I wish I knew whom to credit) wrote an analysis of the Robin Hood legend pointing out that for the first few hundred years, it was just about Robin Hood outwitting the Sheriff of Nottingham locally around Lincolnshire. It was not until the 19^th century that the tales began to match Robin against the Sheriff's superior, Sir Guy of Ghisbourne; and not until the 20^th century that Robin was promoted to facing off against Prince John himself. Medieval mercenaries wanted tough reputations because it increased their chances of getting hired; I do not recall that they used their reputations often as a negotiating point in urging enemies to surrender. Guy Fawkes was an assassin, nor a terrorist; his (or his gang's, of which he was not the leader) goals apparently did not go beyond blowing up Parliament. Genghis Khan or Vlad Dracula might be considered terrorists, since both killed their enemies as horrifically as they could think of as object lessons to persuade future enemies to submit as quickly as possible.

Luny Tunes #10 - (Castora) Presumably there was a microphone right next to the harpsichord when "This Old House" and other songs were recorded. I understand that one of the disadvantages of harpsichords compared to pianos is that they are not as good a large concert-hall instrument; their sound is more suitable to smaller chamber ensembles. A modern sound recording studio would be small enough. ## Duh! I do not know whether I have a choice about taking Coumadin or not. I am basically trusting my doctors to know their business when they tell me what drugs they are giving me. ## I have eaten deep-fried (tempura-fried?) ice cream in Japan; vanilla ice cream wth a doughy crust. I consider it more clever than tasty; not worth the novelty value to make. It is likely not what Howard Garis had in mind when he wrote about Uncle Wiggily eating fried ice cream. ## I apparently had a noticeable Southern accent as a child, doubtlessly picked up from being raised by my grandmother from New Orleans &/or my mother who was born in New Orleans and raised (or at least spent many years) in Mobile. ## The J in Jay Ward apparently stood for the same thing that the S in Harry S Truman's name stood for. According to The Moose That Roared, the 'J Troplong Ward" that Ward originally signed himself as in 1948 when he & Alex Anderson incorporated their studio to produce Crusader Rabbit was his full legal name. ## It should not be too difficult to find a commercial recording of those pieces that Mozart composed for Franklin's glass harmonica that were recorded with a real glass harmonica instead of the rescored version, since the classical music radio stations play at least one of them fairly often. To quote from one website: "Composers were also struck by the haunting sounds produced by Franklin's instrument. Mozart wrote two pieces for the armonica, including "Adagio and Rondo 617," and in 1815, Beethoven wrote a short melodrama where a narrator told a story while accompanied by armonica." The armonica is the proper name for the glass harmonica.

Oh, All Right!!! - (Lembke) I do not know what budget the Con Suite at Anime Los Angeles 2 had, but it seemed to be a big success as far as its attendees were concerned. ## Maybe the anime aspects of the Loscon should have been emphasized in promoting Loscon 33 memberships at Anime L.A. 2. It was probably hopeless to promote L.A.con IV to non-fans considering the price of its memberships now. ## Thanks for the Unshelved strip reprint. Librarians rule! (even if Conservatives are frothing about their Demanding the Right to give Islamic Terrorists instructions on how to Make Bombs) Reportedly so many people have discovered that checking out videos and DVDs from the library and paying overdue fines "would still be cheaper than Blockbuster" that Blockbuster is seriously losing money today