# 2238

Written by Fred Patten, and intended for Apa L, 2238^th Distribution, LASFS Meeting No. 3686, April 3, 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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My sister Sherrill brought me to last week's LASFS meeting. Marc Schirmeister had found another of my old fanzines, Heavy Water #46, May 1970, with a cover by Vaughn Bodé left over from the year before when Bodé was trying to win the Fan Artist Hugo by sending free art to every fanzine publisher he could find. My proposal to approve the previous week's minutes, announcing the death of Arthur C. Clarke, as the Giant Rat of Sri Lanka was approved. This meeting was dominated by news of old & new technology. Matthew Tepper started a discussion of the discovery of an 1860 French ten-second sound recording of a fragment of "Au Claire de la Lune" by inventor Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (actually a "phonautograph" intended to translate sounds into writing; technicians at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab back-engineered it into sound again). George Van Wagner next demonstrated the brand-new $300 paperback-sized handheld Sony Reader, the latest electronic toy "that will make books obsolete" that George felt was the first that might actually do so. Samples of beer-flavored cheese were given out.

I just Googled, not on my name but on the Ursa Major Awards. In the first 30 results of 99,500, 23 are about our awards (one in Czech). Five of the other seven are about the constellation, or about local school honor organizations called Ursa Major. There is a URSA Major Award that was started in 2007 for "teddy bear and soft sculpture artists from around the world", and an Ursa Major Award presented by the Alpha Phi Fraternity that dates back to 1974. Gulp. I am glad that we did not know about the latter in 2001 when we were choosing a name, or we might have continued looking and settled on something really awful. (Or agreed to Darrel Exline's insistence that we call them the Golden Bear Awards, no matter how many other Golden Bear Awards there already were, including the Berlin International Film Festival's famous statuettes.)

Anyhow, if nobody else has pointed out by now that another award with the same name predates ours, and if 23 of 30 results lead to our Award, we do not seem to have to worry. The press release that I sent out two weeks ago is printed in its entirety on websites that I did not know about, such as http://furryne.ws/ "a social news website for the furry fandom", or the Czech Neviditelny Pes. Also on the online http://file770.com which I do know about.

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¡ZANAHORIAS ELECTRóNICAS!

-- Comments on Last Week's Distribution:

De Jueves #1576 - (Moffatts) Earthlink sounds better than Verizon as far as e.mail goes. Is Verizon better in any other ways? ## I have been buying the new LASFS Directorys for years instead of asking for free copies as a Patron Saint. I wonder how much the club would owe me in refunds if I were to ask for them? ## The legless frog cartoon is widely enough known to be by Sam Gross from The New Yorker that any other versions are probably plagiarisms. The Cartoon Brew website regularly has readers send in photos of plagiarisms and swipes of cartoons used as decorations on restaurants, shop windows, newspaper advertisements, etc. Copies from Preston Blair's Animation: Learn How to Draw Animated Cartoons book, popular since the 1940s, are especially common, and badly-copied Disney characters on ice cream wagons; plus apparently-legitimate odd things like a Donald Duck Taverne in Montréal with licensed Disney art, and a Mr. Magoo's Pizza & Subs in Baltimore or a Mr. Magoo Bar & Fast Food in Paranaïba, Brazil (with a weblink to an animated TV commercial in Portuguese). And we all know about the Felix the Cat automotive dealership near USC, don't we? ## There are a few newspaper comic strips that http://www.belfry.com/comics/ does not carry like Mandrake the Magician, and others that are misfiled. Annie is still listed under its older and better-known title of Little Orphan Annie. And it may be hard to find a strip under Belfry.com's filing system if you do not know if it appears daily, semi-weekly, weekly, monthly, or sporadically. But in general, Belfry.com seems to be the best one-stop site to find any comic strip. ## My sister Sherry has a full-sized cardboard cutout of a cat that ought to be suitable for a Loscon production of DeChancie's play, if something more than a box that is never opened is needed. ## My grandmother used to claim that after the Union Army occupied New Orleans, the former household slaves remained with her family out of loyalty. I suspect they did so more for the free room and board and security than loyalty, at least until other jobs in New Orleans materialized. ## Not to belittle Len's poem, but Robert E. Howard said it more succinctly in his suicide note: "All fled - all done, so lift me on the pyre; The feast is over and the lamps expire."

Sometimes I Think My Mother Should Have Thrown Me Away And Kept The Stork - (Cantor) Thanks for the correction about Worth1000.com. I could spend hours looking through this website. ## I went the opposite route, starting out with s-f books from the public and school libraries and expanding to the newsstand s-f magazines three or four years later around 1954. That was where I first learned about s-f fandom. It clarified what Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe had been about. When I entered UCLA in 1958, I spent all my free time in the library stacks reading (among other things) their bound volumes of the Street & Smith Astoundings from 1933 on, mostly for all the early s-f stories that were not reprinted in books but I also discovered the Staple Wars and other fannish events as they happened. Reading this gave me a lot of background for when I joined the LASFS & fandom in 1960, fortunately while Forry Ackerman was still active in the club.

Vanamonde #774 - (Hertz) Gosh, I am so old that I remember when the newspapers accused all s-f fans of thinking that they were Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon characters instead of Star Trek characters.

Godzilla Verses #184 - (DeChancie) I am used to seeing "the triumvirate" as Asimov, Bradbury, & Clarke. Heinlein was apart from them because they wrote Literature, while Heinlein "only" wrote very good adventure novels, his breaking into the Saturday Evening Post notwithstanding. Bradbury will probably not be with us much longer, either. ## No, there are no Ursa Minor Awards, although there is an Ursa Minor Arts + Media "fellowship of artists and media professionals" in San Rafael, Calif. whose personnel have individually won various awards. The Ursa Major Awards recently got their Wikipedia entry restored, I am pleased to report.

I Obliterate Fenachrones - (Gold) It almost sounds like having a LASFS website is more trouble than it is worth. Almost. Thanks to you and Barry and appropriate others for putting up with it. ## My LASFS history is only "fairly accurate"? Agghh! What needs to be corrected?

Oh, All Right!!! - (Lembke) Avocado honey? That sounds yummy! But I have been leery of mixing two of my favorite tastes ever since I tasted cherry date ice cream and thought the combination was horrible.