¡Rábanos Radiactivos! ... es no. 2202

Written by Fred Patten, and intended for Apa L, 2202^nd Distribution, LASFS Meeting No. 3650, July 26,2007.
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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Michael Burlake brought me to last week's LASFS meeting. The meeting began with a presentation of the minutes as a Japanese seppuku ceremony (in costume) in which Tadao Tomomatsu dispatched Scribe John DeChancie, then read his minutes in such an incomprehensible Scots brogue as to make the call for Additions & Corrections meaningless. The meeting then adjourned (or was "Rob Coled") to allow enough time for the program, a screening (on the movie screen) of the two-hour Pan's Labyrinth. I had thought I wanted to see this movie, but its very slow start plus its being in Spanish with English subtitles, and my position in the front row which meant that I had to hold my head up at a painful angle to see the screen, as well as knowing that I would have to return to the hospital when it was only half over, soon put me to sleep. I hope that the audience enjoyed it.

I spent Sunday afternoon at my sister Sherrill's apartment, reading some of the fanzines I was sent during the preceding months, and watching on Sherry's 42" TV the first four episodes of The Third - The Girl With the Blue Eye (one of my review anime DVDs; an interesting post-apocalypse s-f drama) and the video of the movie Suddenly (1954) that Lee Gold loaned me. I was shocked to read in the Australian fanzine South Fur Lands #44 (March 2007) that Michael Sherman, the head of the C/FO-Cleveland, one of the C/FO's first chapters and the only one besides Los Angeles to keep its name when the general club disintegrated in 1989, had died late last year. Sherman was still running the Cleveland club in 2004; I have had no news of it since then.

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ˇZANAHORIAS ELECTRóNICAS!

-- Comments on Last Week's Distribution:

De Jueves #1540 - (Moffatt) Sherry made me dinner at her apartment instead of taking me to Solly's Deli where I almost always order a Reuben's. I don't know whether Sherry doesn't know that a Reuben is made with corned beef instead of pastrami, or if she couldn't get corned beef. The pastrami & sauerkraut sandwich was delicious in any case. Of course, after six months of hospital food, anything may've tasted delicious. At the California Pizza Kitchen the next weekend I had Sedona tortilla soup and a Hawaiian pizza (pineapple & Canadian bacon). ## The Lackadaisy strips since the two that I reprinted here have shown the rival Lackadaisy bootleggers, who do not wear any boutonněeres. I recommend the comic strip (set in 1927, not the 1940s) highly, although since Marty Cantor complains that it is toner-intensive to print, people will have to follow it on the Internet if they want to see more of it. The entire strip is in the website's Archives. ## Yes, "When the World Screamed" was the final Professor Challenger story. In it he proves his "World Echidna" theory (at least as far as the Earth is concerned), that the planets are shells around huge living creatures. Few other s-f authors have written stories utilizing this theory, under the "World Echidna" name or any other.

W*O*N*D*E*R*L*US*T - (Frame-Gray) I remember Twinkies being banana-flavored, which I could not do if they have not been banana-flavored since 1941. They must have returned to the banana flavoring sometime after 1941. Hmmm; according to the Internet, "A banana shortage forced Hostess to switch to vanilla creme in the 1940s. Since then Hostess has brought back banana Twinkies, but only for limited periods of time," one of which was a promotion during the release of King Kong. I must have run across them during these limited periods of time. ## Kurt Vonnegut's books should be available in the L.A. City and County Libraries. ## All sources seem to agree that the ballpoint pen was first marketed by Laszlo Biro in Argentina in 1944 as the Birome stratopen, but none of them say what its price was. American businessmen visiting Argentina saw the pen and realized its sales potential in the U.S. The first ballpoint pen sold in America was the Reynolds Rocket which went on sale in October 1945 and cost $12.50, but due to leakiness resulting in inky fingers and ruined shirts they were unpopular and were soon withdrawn. In January 1954 Parker Pens introduced the improved Jotter at between $2.95 to $8.75. Ballpoints did not become really popular until the Bics. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Bic Company, "Ten years after the release of BIC pens in Europe [in 1950], the same BIC pens were introduced to the USA. Americans were wary of BIC pens at first. There were many other pens on the market at the time and people were hesitant to switch over. BIC's marketing share increased with its televised advertising campaign, with the slogan "Writes first time, every time." BIC sold the pens for 29 cents each and, within a year, prices dipped down to a mere 10 cents. Bic is famous mainly for cheap reliable pens." ## That photograph of me at the Eaton Collection was taken at least six months ago. If I recall correctly, the library worker was taking things out of a box of random unsorted items like the "Vote for Big-Hearted Howard" matchbook advertising Howard DeVore running for the NFFF Directorate, and I was identifying them one by one. A lot of it was promotional stuff from the freebie tables of various Worldcons, Westercons, Loscons, Comic-cons, etc., and I had no idea which items were from which conventions.

Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion - (Cantor) CLJII says in this dist'n that he and Marcia Minsky cut me off from announcing Sterling Lanier's death because they thought I was going to announce Rob Cole's instead. Considering that I was only going to announce that Lanier had died, which would have taken about 30 seconds, I saw no need to delay the announcement until the following week; but there was no point in trying to argue after the president had banged her gavel and everyone was leaving the room. ## I assume that the 1941 cartoon about building a skyscraper was Warner Bros.' Rhapsody in Rivets, directed by Friz Freleng. It was released on December 6, 1941 (not quite a day of infamy), so you may have seen it in early 1942.

Godzilla Verses # 149 -- (DeChancie) If you mean the thick The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century (1969), I was outraged that it reprinted months-long segments of the comic strip at random, leaving off the beginnings and endings of the sequences rather than reprinting complete stories. ## How did society evolve from the realistic statues and clean geometric figures (like the Washington Monument) of the 19th century to the twisted sculptures that look like junkyard trash of the 20th century? ## I reviewed Seeds of Change in the August 1975 Delap's F&SF Review. And I can't remember a thing about it, even an attack by several Oldsmobile hood ornaments against a domed city; although I do remember being proud that DF&SFR intended to review all the Laser Books (since many were by LASFen like Steve Goldin, Jerry Pournelle, and Kathleen Sky, or other fans like Ray Nelson and the Coulsons), giving some of them probably the only reviews that they got. Did I give Seeds of Change a good review?

I Hanker for Y-Adapters* -- (Gold) I think that practically every year during the first four decades of the 20th century was a crisis of some sort in Portugal. One that particularly interests me (naturally) was the National Flag Crisis of 1910-11, just after the 1910 revolution that overthrew the monarchy. http://www.fotw.net/flags/pt!1910.html#about shows some of the proposed designs for the new Portuguese flag that was required for the republican government, since the existing flag which featured a crown and the royal dynasty's coat-of-arms was no longer appropriate. ## See CLJII's zine for who told me to shut up. It was apparently a misunderstanding. ## The definition of Furry stories seems to be as imprecise as the definition of science-fiction. I consider a Furry story to be one featuring anthropomorphized animals written primarily for an adult readership. Others consider any story with talking animals to be Furry, including childrens' picture books. I consider the Oz novels, the Doctor Dolittle series, and Freddy the Pig to be too juvenile to qualify as Furry although I am aware that all three have their societies and conventions of adult fans. Quentin Long, my editor at Anthro magazine, does consider them Furry. Gulliver's last voyage, the Jungle Books, and The Abandoned are certainly Furry; I reviewed The Abandoned for Yarf! #13 in June 1991, which Anthro has reprinted. I would not consider the Billy Whiskers books Furry, or Howard Garis' Uncle Wiggily books, or Seymour Eaton's childrens' adventures of Teddy B and Teddy G, the Roosevelt Bears. Or Dr. Seuss' Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose, although Dr. Seuss has millions of adult fans.

S.F.F.A.M. #499 - (Merrigan) But both male and female cats bring half-dead animals to people and release them, and male cats have never shown any paternal instincts toward their kittens. ## I will remember to ask about Jarritos sodas if I am in any Mexican fast food restaurants. Michael Burlake says the Los Burritos restaurant at Lankershim & Burbank Boulevards is very good, but although we drive by it every week when we go to LASFS, we never have enough time to stop there.

Combat Acupuncture! - (Shapero) The description of the $33 million "Steel Cloud" intended to be built over the Hollywood Freeway in 1988 makes it sound more like a public cultural center with museums, parks, art galleries, cinemas, sculpture gardens, restaurants, libraries, aquariums, giant liquid crystal display screens, and a "musical forest", rather than a single piece of art itself. It also sounds like it could have been very distracting to the cars on the freeway driving through/under it. One key difference that I do not see mentioned between this Steel Cloud and the other famous civic monuments with which it is compared - the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Washington Monument, St. Louis' Gateway Arch, etc. -- is that they were more-or-less finished when they were completed. The Steel Cloud sounds like it would be an extremely high-maintenance "sculpture" to keep up. Was it supposed to be self-supporting through admissions, sales of souvenirs, etc., or was the city to bear the bills for keeping it running? Hmmm; one site says that the entire $33 million was to have been "raised through donations from the private sector", while another says it was never built due to "shifts" in the planned funding. What really happened? ## One of the results in The Alien Dark of the destruction of all trees on Earth was the raising of the global temperature through the greenhouse effect; the melting of the icecaps and the rising of sea levels, etc. That gets talked about a lot today just as a part of "normal" global warming.

Toony Loons #51 - (Zeff) Wikipedia seems to have complete information about the egg cream. "An egg cream is a classic New York City beverage consisting of chocolate syrup (Almost always Fox's U-bet chocolate syrup in New York), milk, and seltzer (soda water), probably dating from the late 19th century, and is especially associated with Brooklyn, home of its inventor, candy shop owner Louis Auster. It contains neither eggs nor cream. The essential components of a New York Egg Cream: Fox's U-Bet, Seltzer and Whole Milk. The origin of the name "egg cream" is constantly debated. Stanley Auster, the grandson of the inventor, has been quoted as saying that the origins of the name are lost in time." Read the complete Wikipedia entry for more details and illustrations. ## Extra mayo for Dan? I wonder what he would have thought of Belgian mayonnaise? During my visit there in 1970 (part of my Heicon trip), Belgian fan Danny DeLaet claimed that no other country knew how to make real mayonnaise. The Belgians ate it on everything, like Americans use ketchup. It was certainly much richer than American mayonnaise; probably a real artery-clogger. Wikipedia says: "In northern Europe mayonnaise is often served on chips (french fries), especially in the Low Countries and Germany [boy, is it ever!], as well as increasingly in the United Kingdom and France. It is also served with cold chicken or hard-boiled eggs in France and the UK. Guidelines issued in September 1991 by Europe's Federation of the Condiment Sauce Industries recommend that oil and liquid egg yolk levels in mayonnaise should be at least 70% and 5% respectively, although this is not legislated. Most available brands easily exceed this target."

Oh, All Right!!! - (Lembke) But are the butterflies carnivorous, like the cats in Stanley Weinbaum's "Proteus Island"? (Well, I guess that all cats are carnivorous anyway.) When I was a boy a mourning cloak butterfly (or maybe more than one; they all look alike) used to fly in my face and land on my hand in our back yard regularly. I thought this meant that mourning cloaks were friendlier than other butterflies, until I learned that it was more likely checking me out to see if I was a rival butterfly to kill me. Mourning cloaks are very aggressive. ## "... humans growing to a height of 12 feet, and coming into puberty at age 4." Oh, now there is a concept waiting for s-f authors to develop it if I ever saw one!