¡Rábanos Radiactivos! #2196

Written by Fred Patten, and intended for Apa L, 2196^th Distribution, LASFS Meeting No. 3644, June 14, 2007.
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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Last week was spent in bed again.Michael Burlake brought me the June 2007 Locus from the LASFS Library, and I spent several hours Friday going over the lists of new books and making my own list of titles that I want to read and their release dates.I will either request review copies or get them from the Los Angeles Public Library when it does.Dinotopia: Voyage to Chandara, by James Gurney (Andrews McMeel Publishing, September), looks particularly attractive.My sister Sherrill visited me Friday and was intrigued by a couple of the dates on the Apa L Bacover calendar, so I Googled on “1st perfect baseball game, 1880” and “’Pine Tree Shilling’ mint established, 1652” so she could read about them.

I got the remainder of the contents of Delap’s F&SF Review entered into the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB).This gives me 205 reviews listed.I have not tried to total all of the reviews published in DF&SFR during its 2+-year existence, but there are 45 reviews in one average issue and the magazine lasted for thirty issues, so let’s say 1,330 reviews as a rough estimate.I think that we pretty thoroughly covered the s-f field for 1975 through 1977.All of my reviewing today is being done for Anthro and The Flipbook, and ”The ISFDB does not index online magazines, as the index information cannot be guaranteed to be stable.”Well, I have complained for years about the impermanency of data on the Internet (the recent comments in Apa L about the disappearance from the Internet of CNN’s earliest, exaggerated reports of the post-Katrina social breakdown in New Orleans are a good example), so I cannot object too strenuously to this.I wonder myself whether there will be any evidence thirty years from now that Anthro or The Flipbook ever existed and what was in its issues, whereas the thirty-year-old issues of DF&SFR are still in libraries and private s-f collections.

My sister Sherrill has been convinced by Lee Gold to attend ConChord 20 in Woodland Hills in mid-August, and she hopes to take me for at least one day.This would be my first ConChord.I am not that interested in filk singing, but one of its guests-of-honor is Tanya Huff, whose new The Heart of Valor I had just reserved from the Los Angeles Public Library.I had enjoyed Valor’s Choice and The Better Part of Valor, the first two novels in the series, before my stroke, so it will be nice to meet the author at a small convention.Tom Digby will be there, too.I had not expected to attend any more conventions before Loscon 34 in November, but ConChord 20 will be a pleasant surprise; assuming that my convalescent hospital decides that I am fit for a day-trip outing by August.

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¡ZANAHORIAS ELECTRóNICAS!

-- Comments on Last Week's Distribution:

Godzilla Verses # 143 -- (DeChancie) The subject of s-f/fantasy may or may not have been of secondary concern for most of the history of fanzines (it depended upon the fanzine), but fortunately the subject of fandom itself has been a primary concern, and it is well documented.## “Our Fair City” was omitted from Heinlein’s Off the Main Sequence because it was straight fantasy?Hmmm.You may be correct; but in that case, the collection is flawed as a repository of all of Heinlein’s stand-alone short stories for the fan that wants to read all of them.It would have been better to include “Our Fair City” and “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants”, two very good stories, than the three “stinkers” which were reprinted for the supposed purpose of making all of Heinlein’s s-f available for completists, who don’t care about whether a story may be technically science-fiction or straight fantasy.## Artistic scholars are merciless, too, including all those biographers of Walt Disney over the past forty years who emphasized what a tyrannical, talentless (only putting his name onto his employees’ work), paranoid, anti-Semitic, part-Spanish, Hollywood spy for the FBI he really was.In this case, leaving all his records and correspondence behind has finally helped the scholars who bothered/got the opportunity to read them to present a more accurate analysis.At the opposite extreme there are people like Paul Dukas, who was a famous musician for over forty years and must have written more than The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and The Peri, but we will never know what his other music was like because he destroyed most of his scores after their first or second performances because they were not “perfect”.

Fish Out of Water #226 – (Helgesen) I have already heard some people using LOL as a word, lol.These are people who sprinkle all computer abbreviations into their conversations, such as “im-ho” for IMHO.I have no idea if they are representative of the general public, though I hope not.

I Just Fell Into an Upholstery Machine But Now I Am Fully Recovered – (Cantor) My thanks to you and to the donor of paper on my behalf for making it possible for me to stay in Apa L.## I wonder how many British taxicabs, and ex-taxicabs, are in the U.S.?Probably not many, if they are so popular with the British public as personal cars.

W*O*N*D*E*R*L*US*T – (Frame-Gray) Frankly, Gardner’s Perry Mason stories bore me to tears, too.

De Jueves #1534 – (Moffatt) Nope; not unless turtledoves are green and have hard shells.And control giant robots.## British taxicabs aren’t exactly vans.They are hard to describe; you have to see them.## Cats are notorious for figuring out on their own how to operate simple door latches to get out of rooms that they have been closed in.## Ah, yes, blood pudding.Jim Groat & I found out about blood pudding at the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow.I ate his.## “Hawaiian” pizzas, with ham & pineapple, are common at “California”-style pizza restaurants like the California Kitchens, and I like them very much.I have no idea whether they’re common in Hawaii.At one point in our after-Aussiecon III travels through Australia in 1999, Kris Kreutzman & I got what was called either an Indiana or an Ohio pizza (does anyone want to look through my Aussiecon III trip report in Apa L dist’ns in late 1999 or 2000 to find out which it was?) that we bet nobody in either Indiana or Ohio would have recognized.(Not an Illinois pizza, because it wasn’t Chicago-style.)At least it wasn’t like the pizzas in Japan, with seaweed, octopus &/or squid, and various shellfish.Or the Aussie-style fast-food hamburgers, with a fried egg and a beet slice.

Oh, All Right!!! – (Lembke) I am fascinated by your explanation of what you do to make photocopies of faded old dittoed fanzines, and fanzines in one horrible ink color on a different horrible paper color, legible.How recent is this technology?Back during the 1960s & ‘70s when I was involved with printing lots of fanzines for the LASFS and various conventions, we occasionally had need to photocopy something from another fanzine which turned out to be impossible on any photocopier then available.## I never say anything in any fanzine that I would not want to be made public.The animation apa APATOONS was declared “Confidential” several years ago because some of the members got nervous about the possibility of their employers being shown some of their uncensored comments about working at their studios.“Good luck”, was my comment about trying to keep fanzines with a circulation of thirty copies “secret”.

Toony Loons #45 – (Zeff) I do not believe that I ever told about my experience as a juror many years ago, but it was a crime involving a theft from a store with plenty of witnesses and a security camera.The prosecution described the case making it obvious that the defendant was guilty; the defense lawyer described the same case making it obvious that the defendant was innocent; and we jurors were sent to arrive at a verdict with no evidence having been presented and only one witness, a security guard who thought he saw the defendant trying to steal something, testifying.We agreed that there was obviously something fishy going on on both sides, or both the prosecution and the defense would have called more witnesses, and introduced evidence such as the merchandise supposedly being stolen, and the sales receipt (or lack of one) to show whether the item had been paid for or not.But without being shown any actual evidence one way or the other, we felt that we had to declare the defendant not guilty.

Grok Talk [v.2 #3] – (Gallatin) Obviously you can say whatever you want here, but your arguments add up to little more than, “I can say SCI-FI and you can’t stop me; neener neener neener.”Are you even trying to convince anybody?