¡Rábanos Radiactivos! #2212

Written by Fred Patten, and intended for Apa L, 2212^th Distribution, LASFS Meeting No. 3660, October 4,2007.
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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My sister Sherrill brought me to last Thursday's LASFS meeting. Karl Lembke provided a really delicious birthday cake, chocolate with mocha frosting; he also brought me new books from the L.A. County Library. George van Wagner gave me a CD with several dozen issues of my ˇRR! that Vanessa had formatted for me for publication in Apa L; it was good to get them with all the added extras that she put onto them. The Forry Award voting went much more quickly & smoothly than I had been afraid that it would; I had time to cast my votes before we had to return to the hospital. I was a bit disappointed that C. J. Cherryh did not win (again), but David Gerrold is an equally appropriate choice. When I got back to the hospital, I added Gerrold's name to the list of Forry Award recipients and sent the completed LASFS/Loscon History update to Tony Benoun for the Loscon 34 Program Book.

On Sunday, Sherry brought me to her apartment again. In addition to working on my computer, we watched The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), Animusic 2, and two episodes of Azumanga Daioh!.

A couple of weeks ago during a money gouge auction, Ed Green was auctioning a Japanese plastic model kit (in Japanese) of the giant robot Mobile Suit Gundam, which he insisted on pronouncing Godamn. I objected that Godamn was a completely different giant robot TV show. It turns out that its opening credits, showing Godamn looking like a giant robot on steroids with a pelican's head, is on You Tube so you can see it for yourselves. It was made around the same time as such other TV cartoons as Guyslugger, a giant robot who slugged bad guys, and Acrobunch, a giant robot operated by a bunch of circus acrobats. One suspects that their animators were (a) showing off their knowledge of English, and (b) tired of making yet another stereotypical giant robot show. Interestingly, these were all made in the late 1970s or early 1980s, before the Tokyo animation studios had any idea that their TV cartoons were becoming popular in America on bootleg videos.

John Hertz sent me a brief note that he met Sean J. Leonard "at Nippon 2007, where he was interpreting." I had mentioned Leonard in ˇRR! #2207 as the author of the 2003 M.I.T. thesis and the 2005 legal paper on the popularization of Japanese animation in America through illegal fan copying of anime on video, which seemed to give me most of the credit for founding anime fandom (leading to a $100,000,000,000+-per-year industry and arguably the salvation of the whole Japanese economy) in America. Leonard is, according to his stationery that Hertz forwards, currently a law student at the University of Chicago Law School and a member of the legal firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP in San Francisco (which includes both a San Francisco and a Tokyo address in its letterhead). "Sean J. Leonard, J.D. Class of 2008, John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, the University of Chicago Legal Forum Staff Member". The paper in the Spring 2005 UCLA Entertainment Law Review, v.12 #2, was published as "Celebrating Two Decades of Unlawful Progress: Fan Distribution, Proselytization Commons, and the Explosive Growth of Japanese Animation", pages 189 to 266. I wonder if Leonard was attending the 2007 Worldcon from America, or if he is working in Japan at M&F's Tokyo office?

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ˇZANAHORIAS ELECTRóNICAS!

-- Comments on Last Week's Distribution:

Cover - (DeChancie) Is this all DeChancie? No Rotsler at all? It is an excellent counterfeit; it had me fooled at first.

De Jueves #1550 - (Moffatts) If tobacco would grow in Southern California, I imagine that it would have been grown here by now. Contrariwise, I do not know why it could not be grown here. I understand that tobacco is botanically closely related to the tomato, which grows easily in Southern California. I will defer to Marty Cantor for knowledgeable information. ## Real Men Beat Their Wives. Yes, and I remember a Victorian novel (1881 publication date) about a cute little boy whose play included throwing rocks at dogs and trying to set fire to the cat's tail. Adults saw this as okay because cats breed like crazy; it is easy and cheap to replace them. ## Wiley Post in a 1935 movie? It must have been made very shortly before his death that year. ## Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall: May 1924. Mary Pickford, Anders Randolf, Marc McDermott, Carrie Daumery, Allen Forrest, and others, none of whom besides Pickford I have ever heard of. This is assuming you can believe the Internet Movie Database, which I have been skeptical of ever since it listed a movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as released in 1938. ## Speaking of old movies (and I guess this question should be addressed to Charlie Jackson), should the 1931 one-reel comedy Taxi Tangle with Jack Benny be considered as s-f or fantasy? During a stop at a traffic light in what looks like New York City, Benny in a taxi cab and the girl in the cab next to him have a romance, get married, and have their marriage annulled before the traffic light changes. The entire ten-minute featurette can be seen on YouTube.

Flaccid Penis - (Cantor) It has been many years - presumably 35, since I read it when it had just been published in 1972 - since I read Foster's The Tar-Aiym Krang, and around a year since I read the most recent book in the Pip & Flinx series. As I said, I expect to have my memory refreshed on the details about The Blight when the LAPL sends me the new novel that will be published at the end of this month. ## My only quibble with this year's Hugo Award trophy is that it shows both Ultraman and the Hugo rocket ship as over twice as tall as Mount Fuji. Ultraman has been specified for decades as 40 meters tall (130 feet), while Mount Fuji is 3,776 meters (12,388 feet) high.

Vanamonde #748 - (Hertz) Speaking of comparative mass, Ultraman weighs 35,000 tons. How much does the Hugo rocket weigh?

Godzilla Verses #158 -- (DeChancie) If Thomas Monteleone has been specializing in horror writing, that would explain why he has dropped out of sight in the s-f field while becoming an award-winning writer. I am nostalgic for the days when the Worldcon encompassed s-f, fantasy, and horror, each of which have their own conventions these days. Does he attend horror conventions? Come to think of it, how many horror conventions are there besides the World Horror Convention? ## Minutes corrections: Bĵo Trimble saved the LASFS from folding up in the late 1950s, not the early 1970s. The filmmaker is Mike Jittlov, not Bill. The opportunity to make corrections is why the Minutes should be presented to the club before being published. There are some Minutes under Jack Harness' Scribeship that report my nonexistent brother visiting the club.

I Organize Fuglemen - (Gold) I suppose you could say that most fans are jullixes. We generally share similar tastes for s-f, we recognize the same ingroup jokes, we are tolerant of each other's flaws. ## Sherry & I did not realize the ConChord is so small and unstructured. We were looking mainly for the time that events started, when the dealers' room opened, and what events Tanya Huff was on to know when & where we could find her. We could not find any events scheduled before a Friday night reception with no time specified (which might have been so late that I could not attend) and a wedding on Saturday (again with no time listed), no mention of a dealers' room at all, and no mention of Tanya Huff scheduled for anything. It did not seem worth going all the way to Woodland Hills and buying two memberships just to wander around a hotel hoping to find something happening.

Toony Loons #60 - (Zeff) Reportedly Tex Avery was raised by relatives who taught him that Judge Roy Bean was an embarrassment to the family name; little better than a petty tyrant who took advantage of being the only permanent resident of his Texas "town" (saloon) to appoint himself mayor and sheriff and make up laws on the spot to his own advantage. According to the IMDb, "Tex Avery was a descendant of Judge Roy Bean and Daniel Boone, but all his grandma ever told him about it was 'Don't ever mention you are kin to Roy Bean. He's a no good skunk!!'" I think that Joe Adamson's biography, Tex Avery: King of Cartoons, published in 1975 (five years before Avery's death), mentions Avery's dislike of the relationship in more detail. I suppose it would be the equivalent of being distantly related to Adolf Hitler; you would not want (unless you are Donna Barr) to have people constantly pointing out the relationship. Avery was equally related to Roy Bean's slightly more respectable brother Joshua, the first Anglo mayor of San Diego, California. (From Joshua Bean's Wikipedia entry: "Bean was the first U.S. mayor of San Diego and served from 1850 until 1851. While mayor, he illegally "sold" City Hall and city pueblo lands to himself and his drinking buddy, Cave Couts (the City Hall was recovered). In 1851 he moved to Los Angeles, where he kept a store. He was ambushed and killed in 1852 during an argument over a woman.") ## Yes, the covers to all the Laser Books were very formulaic by editorial order. But since they were all by Kelly Freas, they were all attractive. ## NIAGARA FALLS! There is a very succinct history of this classic burlesque routine, with a film clip of my favorite version (with the Three Stooges; the routine seems especially appropriate to their style of knockabout humor), on the Internet at http://www.dlmweb.com/news69.html