¡Rábanos Radiactivos! ... es no. 2237

Written by Fred Patten, and intended for Apa L, 2237^th Distribution, LASFS Meeting No. 3685, March 27, 2008.
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's LASFS meeting, to which my sister Sherrill brought me, was very crowded. I did not find out if it was because of the auction or because of the death of Arthur C. Clarke. CLJII prepared a mini-display of his works from the club library, as well as giving a more-meaningful-than-usual Special Order eulogy for him. Many attendees spoke on what Clarke's s-f had meant to them. Marc Schirmeister had found one of my earliest fanzines, Salamander #3, July-Aug. 1962, and brought it to refresh my memory of it. It had art by one of the "mystery" artists whose name I had forgotten when I gave my old fan art files to Marty Cantor a couple of weeks ago, so the credits in Salamander told who she was. Schirm commented on the cover being by Bĵo Trimble, but it was by Karen Anderson who was at the meeting. She asked to borrow it to make a photocopy of it (the whole fanzine, over fifty pages, not just the cover, with fiction by Bruce Pelz and multicolor mimeographed art). Several others asked for photocopies as well; Karen had better charge for them. (Bĵo did do the cover for Salamander #1.) A project to photograph the LASFS was started, with someone taking group photos of the meeting in progress and individual photos of members separately in the Apa L Room (to the annoyance of Marty Cantor who was in the midst of collating the weekly dist'n). Matthew Tepper gave out several flavors of hamataschen pastry to celebrate Purim; I took a prune one. Someone else was giving out port-flavored cheese squares; I don't know whether for Purim or some other occasion. Neither I nor Sherry was interested in buying anything in the super-auction (I have no room in my cramped hospital room to put anything), so we left early, about 8:45 p.m.

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¡ZANAHORIAS ELECTRóNICAS!

-- Comments on Last Week's Distribution:

Cover - (Jackson) Are the leprechauns flying toward, or away from, Capistrano? Considering that they were originally part of the pagan folklore that St. Patrick preached against, if they are flying toward the mission it might be on a bombing raid.

I Nidify Eyries - (Gold) Sue Haseltine's name has been corrected in the list of Evans-Freehafer Award honorees that I am maintaining. ## I have been checking The Big Meow website off and on for over a year to see if it has been completed. It does seem to have stalled at Chapter 6 of 10, with Chapter 7 promised in mid-July 2007. It is certainly anthropomorphic, but it remains to be seen whether it is any more of a "cat detective" novel than the first two in the trilogy, The Book of Night With Moon and On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service. They are fantasy adventure novels but I would not call them detective novels. There are other definite cat detective novels, such as The Big Catnap (also Sam the Cat, Detective and The Maltese Kitten), by Linda Stewart, and The Big Scratch (and its sequel, Der Fluch der Weißen Katze), by Christopher Reed, and Sue Slate, Private Eye (who is a lesbian cat), by Lee Lynch, and the six German Felidae novels by Akif Pirinçci, and ... ## I should Google myself? That sounds so ... perverted. ## I vaguely recall that Harlan Ellison has declined to join the LASFS even though he has attended several meetings. If Norman Spinrad is a member and was an active member while he was selling his first stories, then yes, he should be added to the list of LASFen who were also pros. Can we verify this before I add his name to the LASFS history?

De Jueves #1575 - (Moffatts) Ralph E. Hayes, Jr. would certainly disagree with you about not all liberals being idiots. Also commiesymp atheists and Francophiles, if I interpret his current diatribes in his comic strips correctly. They remind me of those late 1940s and 1950s political thrillers that were not called s-f that described the nations of the world becoming Nazi or Commie dictatorships until only the U.S. was left as a beleaguered bastion of democracy. ## I bet Archimedes never said, "Give us a place to stand, And a place to grow, And call this land Ontario! A place to stand! A place to grow! Onta-ri-ari-ar-i-o!" That was Ontario's answer to Disney's "It's a Small World, After All" at Canada's Expo '67 in Montréal, not to be forgotten by anyone who entered the Province of Ontario pavilion. ## This is from the official Pogo website. It does not mention Oxydol; apparently the figures came with several Proctor & Gamble detergents:

Where can I find those cute little plastic figures of the Pogo cast?

Jeepers. Where can't you find them? They came with various brands of Proctor & Gamble detergent in 1969 as part of a tie-in to promote The Pogo Birthday Special, which aired on NBC that year. Rumor has it Mr. Kelly wound up being a lot happier with the plastic figures than the special. He personally sculpted the originals of the six: Pogo, Albert, Churchy, Howland, Porkypine and Beauregard. You can see Beauregard at right, horrifyingly shrink-wrapped to a box of Biz. There are washerwomen who've had nightmares about finding themselves in the same predicament. Anyway, they turn up all the time on eBay and in antique toy catalogues, so don't go paying a lot for them. (One of the guys who maintains this site found his Pogo lying on the ground in the parking lot of his bank. You might try looking around the parking lot at yours.)

Where can we find those cute little non-plastic figures of Pogo and Albert?

Ah, those are nice. Stop looking around the parking lot of your bank for the plastic ones and order these from someone like Bud Plant. They're part of the Dark Horse's "Classic Comic Characters" series which issues fine, if small, statuary of the superstars of the funny pages. Pogo is statue #24 while his pal Albert Alligator is #25. The little figures were sculpted by Yoe! Studios working from sketches by (and under the quality control of) Carolyn Kelly and each comes in a decorative tin box and includes a pinback button and a biography of Walt Kelly. If you want one, you'd better hurry since they were a limited set of 600 and there aren't many left.

Godzilla Verses #183 - (DeChancie) You had better not stand under a durian tree, then. They are very like Schirm's picture and weigh two to seven pounds, except that the fat durian fruits are covered with sharp thorns. A Filipino nurse at my hospital says that the fruit is very tasty but smells horrible. They have durian ice cream in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and neighboring countries.