¡Rábanos Radiactivos! #2209

Written by Fred Patten, and intended for Apa L, 2209^th Distribution, LASFS Meeting No. 3657, September 13,2007.
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 Thursday, my sister Sherrill brought me to the LASFS meeting. It was relatively uneventful once again. Marty Cantor showed me his draft of the "Keep the Forry Award True!" flyer for which he is collecting the names of supporters to add before he publishes it. Charlie Jackson tried to relate Luciano Pavarotti's death to fantasy; surely he must have appeared in some fantasy operas during his career. (He was eaten by a tyrannosaur in The Book of Night With Moon; does that count?) The turmoil over Joe Zeff's threatened resignation as Scribe had calmed down, and it was announced that Susan Gleason was out of the hospital and we could count on her recovery. There were several announcements of the Hugo Awards and other news from Nippon 2007. Dino Andrade was a guest again and made an even bigger presentation than the previous week for his Soul Geek website. There was a long auction, as usual. The meeting ran long enough that we did not have time to stay for the "What Have You Read Lately?" program. For the record, I have lately read Coyote Season, by Michael Bergey (Advance Reading Copy; it will not be published until November); In At the Death, by Harry Turtledove; The Penguin Who Knew Too Much, by Donna Andrews; Anthro #13, September - October 2007; the first three issues of Renard's Menagerie, January, April, & July 2007; and Tales of the Tai-Pan Universe #43, August 2007; all of which I enjoyed.

Last Saturday the hospital okayed my going out for a whole afternoon & evening. Sherry took me to her apartment where I caught up on a lot of mail. I was going to watch Victoria Meng's Afro Samurai DVD, but Sherry had trouble programming her 42" TV to play DVDs instead of TV, so we watched a couple of old movies on TV instead; Murder on the Blackboard (1934) and Shadow of the Thin Man (1941). Sherry finally got her TV switched over to DVD mode, but with only enough time to watch the half-hour Animusic computer graphics music video.

A "Lost" Archaeological S-f Novel That Loscon 34 Will Probably Not Be Interested In

In 2002, Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull) began to write The Ferret Chronicles, a series of novels (Rescue Ferrets at Sea, Air Ferrets Aloft, Rancher Ferrets on the Range, etc.) about the ferret civilization of a parallel Earth. Only five were published before Simon & Shuster discontinued the series in late 2003 because of poor sales.

In an in-depth interview in Ferrets, July-August 2002, pages 20-23, Bach enthusiastically revealed that he was not writing these stories as much as channeling dictation from the ferret world. "It's true that, at the moment, most humans haven't seen the parallel world of the ferrets, existing on a dimension close alongside our own," he said in Ferrets. "[...] day by day I saw farther into the ferret culture, as though some sunlit fog was lifting, as I watched, from over their land. [...] Ferret society, I was shown, is ancient and far-flung, long predating our own civilization, born in a different galaxy from ours. Ferret values captivated me: their love of action and adventure, their choice to decline the idea of evil, to live each of them to their highest sense of right, without malice or crime or war. [...] The ferrets who have crossed over from their world to ours, the ones who chose to be born on Earth and become friends to us, are extraordinary brave animals. They are just as courageous as we would be, choosing to share our lives with a world of creatures who have not yet renounced violence and anger and cruelty. [...]"

Bach may have planned to spend the rest of his life chronicling the ferrets' stories, because he claimed that he had the titles for well over fifty novels already chosen, and listed about a dozen of them. The next two would apparently have been Teacher Ferrets in the Classroom and Archaeologist Ferrets at the Dig. The latter would have been the biography of Alla Ferret who "found the lost city of Pheretima". Did Bach complete the novel before the series was cancelled? I don't suppose Loscon 34 would be interested in subsidizing its publication. (I was waiting for Billionaire Ferrets in the Boardroom, which sounded the most intriguing.)

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ˇZANAHORIAS ELECTRóNICAS!

-- Comments on Last Week's Distribution:

Godzilla Verses #155 -- (DeChancie) White Castle hamburgers! I will echo your commendation of them. Jim Groat introduced me to them during some convention back East during the 1980s, and I looked forward to stopping at a White Castle fast food stand every time I went East thereafter. I might not have idolized them so much if I had the opportunity to eat them more than about once a year, but I had about a half dozen at a time when I did find them. Contrariwise, I guess that I do not like them enough to have tried the frozen packages of White Castle hamburgers that are reportedly carried by the Albertson's, Ralphs' and Von's markets in the L.A. area. According to the official White Castle website, there are not any White Castle restaurants in either California or Pennsylvania. ## KMZT often plays classical music by three generations of Mozarts; Leopold, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Franz Xavier. About 95% Wolfgang, 4% Leopold, and 1% Franz. ## The Internet Speculative Database is in the process of indexing Science Fiction Review now, and I am keeping an eye on it to find out which issues I have reviews in. It is only up to the May 1980 issue, however. The reviews of Starrigger and Red Limit Freeway in 1984 and 1985 issues could be mine. I have asked the Eaton Collection at the UCRiverside Library to send me photocopies of those reviews and of my review of Seeds of Change from Delap's F&SF Review. I should have them by next week to reprint the Monteleone review, and maybe the two of your novels.

De Jueves #1547 - (Moffatts) YOU DON'T LIKE DOUGHNUTS?!?!? (Ref. the pilot episode of the anime TV series Trigun, in which the hulking, thuggish killer Descartes is casually forgiven for sadistically slaughtering whole towns, raping women and children, etc., but when he says that he doesn't like doughnuts (and the box shown is Krispy Kreme's, or a recognizable pastiche thereof), the reaction is a horrified, "YOU DON'T LIKE DOUGHNUTS?!?! My God!! What kind of inhuman monster is he!?" Actually, the Trigun 26-episode space-Western TV cartoon series, set on the planet Gunsmoke, evolves from slapstick-funny in the first episode to slit-your-wrists-depressing by the last. A fan favorite.) ## Li'l Abner with or without the Classics is an example of a comic strip that is not carried on the Belfry website.

Oh, All Right!!! - (Lembke) Thank you for printing the news about Dr. Susan Gleason's medical crisis here. It has been announced verbally at the club, and on the Internet on APA-LASFS and on the LASFS website; but as I have said several times, I do not consider the Internet to be a reliable long-term source for information. Apa L has a permanency that the others lack. ## That telephone experience happened to me, in a way. In one of the few comic book stories that I wrote, in 1994, I described a character making a call from an outdoor phone booth; artist Terrie Smith drew him calling on his cell phone. ## Right; if I brought any take-out food back to the hospital, I would risk having it confiscated and thrown out if one of the more hard-nosed nurses caught me. ## During World War II, one of W. C. Fields' routines was to be highly indignant that the local government of Des Moines, Iowa (or was it Boise, Idaho?) was totally unprepared for any U-boat attacks.

S.F.F.A.M. #501 - (Merrigan) I have never been to the L.A. Public Library's gift shop in the downtown Central branch, so I do not know if it sells those glass pens. The ones that I remember seeing were being pushed at the checkout counters at Office Depot.

I Mimeograph Daphne* -- (Gold) If all 2,209 issues of ˇRR! are posted on my website, that is going to be one crowded website. ## As I have said, I have never been to a filking convention, and the only reason I planned to go to ConChord 20 was because my sister Sherry told me that she was going to take me. When we tried to find information about it on the Internet, we were shocked by how uninformative its website was compared to those of s-f, anime, furry, or other cons. If the con consisted almost entirely of filk-singing groups getting together informally when they felt like it, and there was no dealers' room, that would explain it. I felt a bit guilty about not delivering the Eaton Collection brochures, but not enough to make a trip to ConChord for just that purpose, or to wander around hoping to meet Tanya Huff who did not appear to have any programmed schedule before 9:00 p.m. by when I would have had to be on my way back to the Golden State Hospital. ## The printer connected to my computer at Sherry's apartment is a fancy brand-new one, not the cheap one that I had bought just before my stroke. Sherry must have decided that I needed the latest model. ## The PLEASE LET ME SEE YOUR FACE sign sounds more practical than the periscope. ## I do not know exactly how the Internet works and how long discontinued web magazines may stay up on it. As far as I know, Quentin Long does not plan to remove Anthro even if he is forced to stop adding new issues; but there are many sites that have suddenly disappeared four or five years after their last updates. Yes, please do archive my Anthro writings. I have already done this myself, but the more widespread my reviews are, the better. I do not like the idea of having them only on my own computer. ## The URL of Anthro's downloadable filksong by Tom Smith is under the Music link on the general website. ## The big gold & black butterflies could have been either monarchs or gulf fritillaries. Or viceroys; the main difference between the monarchs and the viceroys was that the viceroys were supposed to be smaller, but how much smaller I did not know; and I was never sure which was which. The big yellow & black butterflies were tiger swallowtails. The black-winged butterflies with a light yellow edging certainly sound like mourning cloaks. The little yellow-brown butterflies were probably fiery skippers (popularly called skippys) that are (or used to be) very common throughout Southern California. The only other butterflies that were common were the medium-sized cabbage butterfly, white with two large black dots. Rarer and very pretty butterflies were the painted lady, the buckeye, the red admiral, and the small, silvery blue. ## Banks are the most commonly closed businesses on weekends, although with ATMs this no longer matters as much as it used to for the average public. I vaguely remember a pre-ATM Donald Duck comic-book story where Donald desperately needed money for some reason I forget. He couldn't withdraw it from his bank account because the bank was always closed, for weekends and for increasingly ridiculous holidays like Chester A. Arthur's Mother-in-Law's Birthday. My landlord in Culver City used to urge the tenants to avoid all plumbing repairs on weekends if possible, because the plumbers "were all 'closed on the weekends' but would gladly come out and charge horrendous 'emergency' fees for Saturday & Sunday repairs".