# 2128

Written by Fred Patten, and intended for Apa L, 2128^th Distribution, LASFS Meeting No. 3576, February 23, 2006.
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. We were lucky enough to get the handicapped parking spot again. There were lots of chocolate candies as bribes from the various Loscon 34 bidders. This was the third meeting in the series of authors reading one of their short stories. Todd McCaffrey read a story titled "Tribute", which has not been published yet. He said that Amazon.com has a prepublication announcement of the book, but it is listed under the cover artist's name. I was amused by this because Amazon.com has my anthology Furry! listed under all 25 of the authors of the stories in the book, but not my name despite the FRED PATTEN, EDITOR in large letters on the front cover and title page.

I was very surprised to see Bill Winckler at the meeting as a guest. The last time he attended was in 1980, when we had a presentation on giant robot anime by Jim Terry, who was then trying to sell his Force Five program to syndicated TV. I worked with Winckler for about a year during 1984, when we produced the Americanized Tekkaman, the Space Knight for TV. (Winckler was the Producer/Director; I was the head writer/adapter. We produced 13 episodes; I don't think it ever sold to more than a dozen cities.) I asked him what has been happening with Tekkaman since 1984; he said that his American rights expired long ago and reverted to the animation studio in Tokyo. He currently is producing/directing/writing/acting in his own low-budget direct-to-video horror films like Frankenstein Versus the Creature from Blood Cove (2005), made for the nostalgia market for pseudo-1950s bad horror movies. (Does CLJII know about these?) Come to think of it, I never found out what brought Winckler back to the LASFS after so long.

On Saturday Michael Burlake brought me to the February Cartoon/Fantasy Organization meeting. The program consisted of Eden's Bowy (Boy) ##1-4; Mai Hime ##9-12; Popotan #1; and King of Bandit Jing (Jing, the King of Bandits) ##1-5. The first and last are examples of "English" titles created by Japanese cartoonists who do not speak English as well as they think they do, which the American anime producers are contractually required to keep without changing. Admittedly, the Japanese originals incorporate artistically-fancy title-logos with the "Engrish" which would be difficult to change. The supporting villains, damsels in distress, etc. in the surrealistic Jing are named after alcoholic drinks: Cognac, Vodka, Grappa, Rosé, Sherry, Whisky, etc.

The meeting was small, presumably because of the weather. It was momentarily dry when we left the hospital in the afternoon, but raining when we left the C/FO meeting at night. Fortunately, we had come prepared with the flimsy plasic raincoat that Lee Gold had given me, and it kept me dry during the moves from Freehafer Hall to Burlake's van and from the van back into the hospital. This was the second time I have used the raincoat, which seems to be holding up well despite the fact that Burlake said it is commonly sold on a disposable-after-one-use basis. (That explains why the hospital's nurses had wanted to throw it away after the first time I wore it in December.) We agreed that I might as well get as much use out of it as possible, so Burlake hung it back up in my closet himself so I would not have to argue with my nurses again.

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ˇZANAHORIAS ELECTRóNICAS!

-- Comments on Last Week's Distribution:

De Jueves #1466 - (Moffatt) Avocados are large and presumably still hard enough when they fall off their trees that it would be dangerous to sit under them; although since the are not sweet, I do not suppose they would attract as many bees or other bugs. Figs are small and soft enough (overripe) by the time they fall off thir trees that they would not result in anything worse than a messy splat on your head - assuming that you could get close enough to the trees to sit under them, with all the wasps and bees and birds fighting over the sweet figs still rotting in the trees and those all over the ground under them. ## I do not know about gluten. The other night we had beef pot pie for dinner at the hospital, and I was able to eat the pie crust without any trouble. ## Yes, the postwar houses constructed on our block in my childhood did not have cellars. They began with wooden frameworks right on the ground, so they were ready for playing in from the time they started going up until their walls were completed and it was no longer possible to get into them. There were no dangerous cellar excavations. Some of my elementary school classmates lived in older houses with cellars. One, Hank (Hendryk Du Ruyter). lived in what may have been a mansion on West Boulevard about two blocks away, with the celllar turned into a wonderful gaming room with a pinball machine. ## Yes, mice may be small, but they are large enough that when one zooms unexpectedly across the floor right past you, it is momentarily quite scary. ## Supposedly all seven Narnian Chronicles are going to be filmed. The success of the first movie would seem to guarantee that at least two more will be completed before the box-office returns on the second are in. (I am reminded of a comic book - I think Mark Evanier's Crossfire - with a full page of a Hollywood party with multiple conversations, including a man saying, "I just got a three-picture deal - unless the first picture bombs, in which case I had a one-picture deal.") Come to think of it, theatrical box-office returns may not be the determining factor that they used to be, since video/DVD sales are becoming so important.

Vanamonde #666 - (Hertz) Thanks for documenting the title of the story that Harry Turtledove read to the LASFS. I had forgotten it by the time I wrote my Apa L comments, and I do not think the LASFS minutes included the title; just that he read one of his stories. ## I advise Loscon 33 to do a better job of making sure that each panel has a moderator, that each moderator knows in advance of the panel that he or she will be the moderator, and what the moderator is expected to do.

Godzillla Verses #75 - (DeChancie) Do any s-f publishers commonly contact authors on their own initiative to say, "We want to publish new editions of your out-of-print books from other publishers"? Isn't this one of the duties that a good agent undertakes on behalf of his/her authors? Locus has a standard column of "Books Resold" in its "People & Publishing" news section; to quote two entries in its February 2006 issue, "ROBERT A. HEINLEIN's Revolt in 2100 and Methuselah's Children resold to Baen via Eleanor Wood. ARTHUR C. CLARKE resold Tales from the White Hart to Peter Crowther at PS Publishing via David Higham Associates." I do not know how many of these resales are publisher-initiated and how many are author- or agent-initiated. Have you ever had a publisher contact you first to ask about reprinting one of your o.p. titles? Has your agent been shopping your o.p. works around for you? Probably Baen, Tor, or any of the major s-f publishers would be better markets than Wildside Press, but Wildside is likely to be better than nothing if all the better publishers have turned you down. ## There are 224 Google entries for "Silly Castora". I am not bothering to check them all, but among the first ten, six are on our Phil, one is on a Holly Castora, and there are one entry each in Italian, Spanish and Latin. ("...quaeris iter, dicam. uicinum Castora canae transibis Vestae uirgineamque domum; ...") ## It could probably be argued that any sex scenes in text rather than cartoon art or photographs are ipso facto not graphic. I do not intend to reprint any such parts of Volle or Pendant of Fortune in Apa L to illustrate the point, but I am reasonably sure that, if I did, you would agree that they are graphically explicit even if the characters are an anthropomorphic fox and an anthropomorphic wolf (or cougar or rat or squirrel). Also, I would have to quote far more than a brief passage to prove that such scenes are an important part of an imaginative plot, rather than just gratuitous. ## Most of the anthologies of s-f stories set in a single city have been published by Worldcon Committes (or commissioned by them for publication by NESFA Press) when the Worldcon is in that city. I am not sure that the sales appeal of a whole book of stories centered around one city has been considered sufficient for sales to the general public by any of the major commercial publishers.

Delusions of Adequacy - (Cantor) I got the last piece of that lemon cake, and there was still plenty of all the chocolate cakes left; so apparently we are not the only ones that prefer lemon to chocolate cakes. When they are average cakes, at least. I am still mightily impressed by that one chocolate cake a few weeks ago. And I do like regular chocolate cake ordinarily, if not as much as lemon cake. ## I also prefer Beethoven to Mozart. I prefer Tschaikovskii, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and a lot of the early Russian composers, too. Actually, I guess I prefer almost any of the 19^th-century composers of fully-orchestrated symphonies. Most of Mozart's works were for chamber groups, and the smaller orchestras of the 18^th century. I will also confess to being unable to tell the difference in quality between Mozart and Salieri, at least in the few works by Salieri that get played today - I suppose they are his best.

Luny Tunes #12 - (Castora) I remember Daisy Duck's three nieces April, May, and June, but I remember them from the Disney comic books that came out in the 1960s & '70s, not from those published in the early '40s. I thought they were an invention of the later Disney comic-book writers who tried to add to the canon by unimaginatively copying what Carl Barks accomplished. Barks gave Donald three nephews, so let's give Daisy three nieces. (Yes, I am aware that Donald was given his nephews in animated cartoons before Barks started writing the comic books, but it was Barks who named them and turned them into memorable characters with a personality.) Hmmm, I see from the Weirdspace website in Denmark that April, May & June were actually created by Barks, but as nameless background characters in a single story in 1953. It was not until 1960 that they became recurring characters with names in the Disney comic books. They have been most popular in the comic books produced in Denmark and the Netherlands for the European market, which are not sold in America. Okay. So how are they pertinent to the Walt Disney's Comics & Stories that we read during our childhood? ## You can't really make out much detail at all in the Inherit the Earth comic strip as reprinted on the LASFS mimeograph. The original comic strip on the Internet has lots of fine detail that the mimeo regrettably turns to solid black. That is one reason why I hope there will be a book collection of the strip when there are enough episodes of it to fill a book. In the meantime, look at the strip at http://www.inherittheearth.net/ to see the plastic box in full detail.

I Flexibly Vacillate - (Gold) The entire international movie industry may relocate to India, but if they want me to go there to attend their publicity screenings, they are going to have to pay my travel expenses. ## Please thank Barry for doing & submitting my tax returns. ## When I went to the public library during my elementary school years, children were allowed only in the children's department. We were not allowed in the adult fiction, and we were not allowed to take adult books into the children's department to read them there. The only time I could get adult s-f was when my father or mother were with me, and I could sneak an adult book and give it to them to check out before the librarians caught me with it. Later I learned to just note the author and title of any book that looked interesting, and ask my parent to get it for me. ## The only book my mother took away from me and refused to let me read was an unabridged The Count of Monte Cristo, which she said would ruin my eyes. That may have been her real reason, because it was set in what must have been six- or eight-point type, and it was about 1,000 pages. But I discoveed when I read it anyway that it did contain some adult material, such as a couple of blatantly Lesbian lovers. And one of the main reasons the Count had so many friends was that he got them hooked on hashish which he gave out liberally. I gather that hashish was not illegal in France when Dumas wrote the novel (1844-45); just awfully expensive/hard to get.