Random Jottings 11 This isn’t the fanzine you’re looking for.
Issue 11 Not the Fanzine You’re Looking For
Random Jottings 11, Not the Fanzine You’re Looking For, is an irregularly published magazine edited and published by Michael Dobson. It is available for customary fannish reasons or editorial whim, and can also be found as a free PDF at http://efanzines.com/RandomJottings/index.htm (along with most previous issues of Random Jottings), or in print from your favorite online book retailer at a modest price. Copyright © 2016 by Michael Dobson and Timespinner Press. All rights revert to the individual contributors. Letters of comment to [email protected] or to 8042 Park Overlook Drive, Bethesda, Maryland 20817-2724 USA.
Table of Contents (all by Michael Dobson unless noted)
This Isn’t the Fanzine You’re Looking For ...... 2 Where’s the Fire, Son? ...... 7 First Call, by James Dobson ...... 13 Friday Night, by James Dobson ...... 15 Boxing Lessons ...... 19 Seven Days in May ...... 31 Random Jottings on Random Jottings (letters) ...... 51 Credits ...... 56 Other Titles from Timespinner Press ...... 59 This Isn’t the Fanzine You’re Looking For This Isn’t the Fanzine You’re Looking For
UNTIL A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO, Random Jottings 11 was scheduled to be The Murder Issue. On April 13, 1975, on my way home from seeing Young Frankenstein, I heard what I thought was a backfire or maybe a firecracker, but what turned out to be gunshots. An unemployed Silver Spring carpenter was on a shooting spree in suburban Wheaton, Maryland. Not really comprehending what was going on, I drove right past the killer and one of his victims. The shooter was white; all the victims were black. Seven people in total were shot; two died and one was left in a wheelchair. The killer was gunned down by cops at the scene. The story was on the front page for a couple of days, but with no trial and only two dead, it was quickly forgotten by history — though not by those affected by it. In 2010, I did a post on my Sidewise Thinking blog called “Eyewitness to Murder.” (It and my other Wheaton Murders posts can be seen here: http://tinyurl.com/zpmqwbn.) As a result of the post, I got an email from Alta Sligh Ayers, daughter of the first two victims. (Her father was killed; her mother wounded.) We ended up having lunch on the anniversary of the shootings in 2011, and have met on the same day every year since. In subsequent years, I kept finding other people connected to the shootings, leading to additional blog posts. In the back of my mind, I thought one day I’d write the story as a long article or very short book, given that no one else was likely to do so. However, I’m not a journalist; those kinds of investigative skills are not something I have in abundance. That’s why I was happy to get an email last July from Washington Post reporter Mike Rosenwald. “Greetings,” he wrote. “Through a roundabout way — namely, George Pelecanos — I recently learned about the old shooting in Wheaton. I came across This Isn’t the Fanzine You’re Looking For | 3
What Is This Weird Publication, Anyway?
For those of you not “in with the in crowd,” amateur journalism (“ayjay”) is a venerable hobby that once upon a time included such people as Lewis Carroll, H. G. Wells, and H. P. Lovecraft, all of whom produced their own amateur magazines. For reasons not well understood, the ayjay hobby migrated into science fiction fandom starting in the 1930s, and amateur magazines became generally known as “fanzines” — even though few fanzines are “fans” of anything in particular. Instead, a fanzine is a reflection of the interests and enthusiasms of its editor, and takes on whatever shape the editor chooses. Because there’s no money in this (except for money being spent, of course), fanzine editors live high off Maslow’s hierarchy, doing it either for peer recognition or simply self-satisfaction. I first published fanzines while still in high school, stopped, and started up again in 2003. Since 2008, I’ve published an issue a year, timed to coincide with Corflu, a small convention (this year in Chicago) for people in this small hobby. (Corflu is short for correction fluid, a sticky substance used to cover up errors on a mimeograph stencil.) Previous issues of Random Jottings have been: 1. The Genzine Issue (1970) 2. The Name-Dropping Issue (2003) 3. The Not-So-Good Samaritan Issue (2008) 4. The Alternate History Issue (2009) 5. The Odell Dobson Memorial Issue (2010) 6. The Cognitive Biases Issues (2011) 7. The Sidewise Issue (2012) 8. The Watergate Issue (2013) 9. The My Brilliant Fannish Career Issue (2014) 10. The Improbable History Issue (2015) Issue 1 and issues 4-10 can be found as free downloadable PDFs at http://efanzines.com/RandomJottings/index.htm. I plan to add issues 2 and 3 Real Soon Now. Issues 8, 9, 10, and the one you’re holding in your hand were produced using the CreateSpace print- on-demand system and are available in print form from Amazon, complete with full wrap-around color covers, at a modest price. 4 | Random Jottings 11 your fascinating blog posts on the incident. I’m gonna do a big piece on what happened, which seems relevant and important given the horrific event in South Carolina. I’d very much love to speak with you. Interested in getting together?” Indeed I was. This led to two pieces that appeared in the Washington Post in December. The main piece, “The Haunting Link Between Two Mass Shootings,” covered the victims forty years after the fact (http://tinyurl.com/jojdc2c). The second, a sidebar titled “It Couldn’t Be Someone Shooting People in Downtown Wheaton” (http://tinyurl.com/o592bf3), was about my involvement. As good and as welcome as those newspaper articles are, they’re still ephemeral. These killings need a more permanent memorial, and my publishing imprint Timespinner Press is all about history. Last year, my anthology Improbable History did double duty as Random Jottings 10, so I figured I’d do it again. It took nearly three months (and a ridiculous $1,900) to acquire the book rights to the articles. I do have lots of other material on hand, but actually making this into a legitimate book, even a small one, would have taken more time than I had left. Enter Plan B.
Why is There a Flying Boat on the Back Cover?
This issue of Random Jottings is a miscellany (or perhaps a gallimaufry; I’m not sure) — not that there’s anything wrong with that. The first piece is about my son James, currently finishing his second year as a cadet at West Point, followed by two short pieces by James himself. The second piece is a bit outside the box —literally. It’s adapted from my day job as a management writer and speaker. When I started writing management books, my wife’s major critique was that I was really good about explaining theory, but I didn’t tell people exactly how to do the things I was recommending. When I’m working with paying customers, I have to watch my tendency to go off on obscure historical tangents before getting to the money shot, but given the audience here, I figured I could get as obscure as I wanted. Practical applications are provided, but left as an exercise for the reader. Finally, in honor of Corflu, I’ve provided a list of events, people, and holidays for each of the seven days bracketing the convention. This Isn’t the Fanzine You’re Looking For | 5 (Although Corflu is officially only three days long, most of the crowd comes early and stays late.) You can find the reason for the back cover by checking out May 16.
Dedication
I met both Ned Brooks and Anita Lapidus through this hobby of amateur journalism. Ned was one of the first people I knew in fandom, starting with my second convention (DeepSouthCon V, Atlanta 1966). Always cheerful, generous, and kind, Ned put me up (or should that be put up with me) in his Newport News home during my relocation from North Carolina to DC in the early 1970s. I remember his reassurance as he drove me to the restaurant where we were going to have dinner. “Don’t worry; I’ve never had a fatal accident with a fan in the car.” My last dealings with Ned came only days before his accidental death last year; he was the official editor for that month’s mailing of SLAN-apa, and I’d just reimbursed him through PayPal for the extra postage in sending RJ 10 through the apa. I had known Jerry Lapidus for a number of years before he married Anita, a fellow student at Syracuse University. The Lapidii, both theater majors, moved to New York City, and I was a frequent houseguest at their Upper West Side apartment. Anita also became a good friend, and we kept in touch after they moved to Florida. While recuperating from cancer surgery, Anita suffered a massive heart attack. Although the prognosis from her cancer was not good, she might still have had many months or even years left, time that has now been taken from her and her family. She said before her passing that she had two main regrets, not seeing her daughter Kim married and not being able to read the last two volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire. Granted, that last regret might have remained even if she’d lived another decade or three. I miss them both, and this issue of Random Jottings is dedicated to their memory. Cadet James Dobson (USMA Class of 2018) Where’s the Fire, Son? Where’s the Fire, Son?
“DAD, CAN I GO TO MILITARY SCHOOL?” I’ve always been agnostic about my son James’s career and life direction, but this came as a bit of a surprise. Although my father was a gunner on a B-24 in World War II and my brother was a Green Beret, military service was very much not my cup of tea. James was in 8th grade when he first decided that he wanted to go into the military. Both my wife Debbie and I have a background in career counseling, so we took each of his ambitions seriously—for as long as they lasted. He wanted to be a cartoon voice artist. (Me, too.) Then, after starring in his 6th grade production of Mulan, he was going to be an actor. Then he figured out average acting income and the cost of a New York City apartment, and that ambition bit the dust. For quite a while, he thought about following his maternal grandfather’s career and become a pastor. But this was new. “Why do you want to go to military school?” I asked. For a lot of kids, military school is a threat: “If you don’t straighten up, I’ll ship you off to military school!” But he was serious. “I want to be a soldier,” he said. Eventually, we agreed to let him go to Hargrave Military Academy (near my father’s home town of Danville, Virginia) for summer school. One way or another, I figured this would settle things. Either he’d hate it so much I’d never hear the word “soldier” again, or it would be clear this was something to take seriously — and that turned out to be the case. He loved it there, and wanted to go year-round, but we put our foot down. He could go summers if he wanted to, but the schools in Bethesda are really good (not to mention free). He did go the following summer, but after that, he found himself on a different path. One night, I was driving to Ted White’s house for Second Friday when I got a call from James that his mom was sick and he’d called an ambulance. He was around 14 at the time. I immediately turned around and started speeding toward the hospital. 7 8 | Random Jottings 11 Fortunately, what was going on with Debbie turned out not to be too serious, but there was a small side effect. The ambulance driver, not wanting to leave a 14 year old alone in the house, offered to let James ride along in the front seat, and to distract him started asking about what he wanted to do when he grew up. When James explained, he made a suggestion. “You know, in Maryland you can become a volunteer firefighter and EMT when you turn 16. That would sure look good on a West Point application.” James announced the next day that this was his plan. I had never heard of high school kids becoming EMTs, but sure enough, shortly after his 16th birthday, he went down to the fire station and applied to become a volunteer. Most high school kids who volunteer for this end up not doing much other than hanging around the firehouse, because even though he was a volunteer, you still had to have the training in order to actually go on calls. A few kids who were planning on med school got their EMT certificates and worked the ambulance. James, however, fell in love with it. The first stage in his training was to learn the location and use of all the equipment on the fire truck, the fire engine (fire engines carry water, fire trucks don’t), and the ambulance. Once he passed all that, he was given a red helmet and told he could ride along. On his first night, they got one of the worst calls in a while. His description of it follows this article. That summer, he went through six weeks of EMT training, and in September started firefighting school, going to the Fire Academy Wednesday nights and all day Saturdays until he graduated that December. Where’s the Fire, Son? | 9 Now that he was a real firefighter, he got to switch his red trainee helmet for a yellow one. While he could use a station-grade standard helmet, it turns out that real firefighters get their own. They aren’t cheap (good ones start at $500), but admittedly, they’re cool looking, especially when they’re properly tricked out. With some additional station-specific training, he was rated “minimum staffing.” A vehicle can’t leave the station unless it has a minimum crew aboard, but only some people count toward that number. This was now James’s passion, though there were numerous conflicts between the necessity of schoolwork and his sworn duty to protect the citizens of the county. “But Dad, if I don’t go to the fire station, they can’t put the engine in service, and someone might die!” It’s hard to respond to that with, “But your schoolwork comes first.” Firefighting did provide James with what is certainly a candidate for Best. School. Day. Ever. During his senior year, a fire sensor at his high school went off, and there was an unscheduled fire drill. He walked out with his class, then went over to his car to pull out his fire gear. (He never drove anywhere without it.) Shrugging his coat on, he walked into the school, checked the alarm system to find out where the problem was, marched up to his principal and the chief custodian and began issuing instructions. By the time the actual engine arrived, James explained that he’d taken care of the situation, and that was it. And, of course, as his junior year continued, the small matter of college applications got added to the mix. It turns out that applying to a military academy (he had long since decided West Point was his goal) is the equivalent to applying to three or four regular colleges. There’s the actual application, the applications to both senators and our member of Congress, the physical fitness test, the medical clearance process, and the security clearance process. Necessarily, James had to do the heavy lifting, but there was enough work for the whole family. West Point’s answer to the standard college question “It is better to make an okay grade in a challenging subject or make straight As in an easier one?” is “Both.” James took mostly AP and Honors courses while spending every Saturday night (and usually at least one evening a week) at the fire station. The fire station named him Rookie of the Year, and he did manage to keep his grades up. 10 | Random Jottings 11 There were numerous moments of panic as multiple deadlines clashed, but eventually, it all came together.1 He was home sick the day he discovered he’d been accepted. I had just walked down to the mailbox, and there was an envelope from West Point. The size of the envelope is usually a giveaway, and this one was of the Big Fat Envelope variety. Pleased, I turned back to the house to give James the good news. Then my cell phone rang. “I got in!” Turns out he’d checked his on-line candidate portal while I was getting the mail. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “I’ve got the envelope.” So much for being first the news. You’d think that would be the end of worst of the process, but you’d be wrong. The amount of additional paperwork was staggering. Getting proper shoes and boots (they wanted the new cadets to break them in a bit before arrival) was surprisingly (and frustratingly) complex. And don’t get me started on security clearance applications. (Seriously. I wouldn’t want to have to kill you.) He had to report on R-Day in early June for cadet basic training, which goes by the cheerful nickname “Beast Barracks.” We arrived early in the morning, got a quick orientation speech followed by the traditional 90 second final hug and goodbye before he and the other cadets marched out the door. We saw them at an afternoon parade, but that was it. James’s girlfriend did manage to catch a view of him before and after his initial processing and traditional buzz cut.
1 The details of the military service academy process are surely only of interest to those who have to go through it. I was shocked (shocked!) to discover that no real publisher had a book on how to do it. Debbie suggested I shouldn’t let all the experience go to waste, so I wroteHow to Get Into a Military Service Academy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.), available at your local high school library. (I have high hopes this will be one of the handful of books I’ve written that actually make money, but I won’t see sales figures until next year.) Where’s the Fire, Son? | 11 Beast Barracks ends with a leisurely overnight 20-mile march in full pack. We didn’t go up for “Walk-Back,” as it’s called, because we wouldn’t have been able to actually talk with James; that had to wait another week or so for Acceptance Day, complete with another parade and a really cool demonstration by the West Point Parachute Team. (The least experienced member has over 1,000 jumps.) Plebe (freshman) year for James evidently wasn’t the horror story it’s often made out to be, but he was still very happy when it was over. He was the mascot of his company intramural team (the “Icemen”—James front and center), got a concussion in boxing, and survived. The second summer at West Point is Cadet Field Training, involving slogging through swamps, practicing various military skills, and shooting artillery pieces. James loves shooting artillery pieces. He also went to Air Assault School and learned how to rappel out of a helicopter. He’s now nearly through his sophomore year (known as “Yearlings” or “Yuks”). He’s studying Arabic, international relations, and human geography and is chief of staff of the Civil-Military Operations Club. This summer it looks as if he’s going to Kuwait. Next year he’ll be a Cow (junior). Better, I presume, than having one. Obviously, I couldn’t be happier (or prouder). However, my biggest surprise about parenthood was discovering how little I had to do with who James was or who he has become. Sure, I can identify little traits that are like Debbie, or like me, or like my brother, or like her father, but basically, his personality and temperament were set from the beginning. I actually like that. I never had any interest in having a clone, so the fact that James is a very different person than I am is a good thing. We both have had to do some adjusting. I particularly love a piece he wrote for one of his West Point classes, in which he shared his view of me. 12 | Random Jottings 11 Growing up with a writer for a dad, writing has never been easy. Every time I went to my father with something I wrote that I thought was good, he’d tear it to pieces with his red pen. He’d tell me I had a confusing sentence here, spelling error there, lack of clarity, structure, purpose, and the most erroneous and egregious error of all, lack of thoughtfulness. My dad is also on the autism spectrum—he’s a very high functioning Asperger’s sufferer. He can stand up in front of an audience for a few days, but will need a week of being shut in a room to recover. It’s then when the writing makes all the difference. I wouldn’t have learned how to communicate with my father without writing. Sure, we’d connect over short car rides, watching TV in the evening, or through articles we’d read and share together, but we never threw a baseball, went camping, took trips abroad, etc. Where we did connect was through the process of good writing. Every time I’d have an essay, or a research paper, or something I wrote just for fun, I’d head down to my dad’s small home office and have him edit. I’d sit there and take harsh criticism, get into arguments about my proficiency, ask for help a second time, and end up producing something I was confident in. I wrote more and more just to connect with my dad. It’s become a habit, a perpetual need for structure and clarity in black ink on a white page. Perhaps we don’t connect so well by conventional measures, but it seems to work for us.In any event, I am frequently amazed at the man he is becoming. I don’t think I had that much to do with it, really, but I’m enormously happy to have been a part of it. His writing’s gotten better over the years, too — and unfortunately he’s right that I am not charitable in my critiques. Here are two pieces by my son James. Debbie, James and Michael at West Point, Acceptance Day 2014. — Michael Dobson First Call, by James Dobson First Call James Dobson
BEEEEEP. “A TTENTION ENGINE 710. Northbound entrance ramp to I-495. Personal Injury Collision with entrapment. Respond on 7 Bravo.” I open the bunk room door, and I see all of A-shift running to the engine bay. Firefighter Blair sees me standing there. “Beltway wreck. Get your gear and hop on the engine,” he orders me. I fumble putting on my bunker pants and coat, hop in the 4th seat, and we take off down the road, sirens blasting. The wreck isn’t far away, just a tenth of a mile down the road from the station on the entrance ramp that I pass every day on the way to school. Two victims are crumpled on the ground, bleeding everywhere, bystanders surrounding them. Blair started to treat one of the two people (whom I assumed to be already dead). I start my own treatment on the second victim as the ambulance pulls in behind us. A bystander is holding pressure on a wound I could not see on the second victim. The bystander tells me there was a crash and a rollover that ejected the two victims now lying on the ground. The driver is still trapped inside the car. The victim’s neck feels like Legos. The ambulance crew gets to me, and we backboard my victim. Blair’s victim was already packaged and shipped off. Our engine is blocking the entrance ramp from passing cars. People begin to sit on the grass on the side of the ramp and watch as we dip our hands in the blood of strangers. The cops arrive and start prancing around like they own the place, rounding up potential witnesses and such trivial things. They have it easy. They aren’t rookies like I am. Meanwhile, the driver is still trapped.
13 14 | Random Jottings 11 The truck crew cuts the car in two. The sounds of crunching metal and the whir of saws and generators fill my ears. The disoriented driver steps out and begins frantically walking around. We managed to get him into stopping all movement, and other firefighters perform a vertical takedown—in other words, lying the patient down from a standing position without having him move his head, neck or back. I get a cervical collar on him, but the patient fights and tries to pull it off. This guy doesn’t seem to speak English. I look through a wallet on the ground to see if I can find any identifications but all I find are singles and Mexico City strip club cards. In my limited Spanish, I tell him to calm down and that we’re here to help. He looks up at me as I hold his head in place. His eyes are pale and glossy. I can see my reflection in them. He is scared, his eyes tell me. “What are these people doing to me?” they ask. After that, I can’t remember much.
— James Dobson Friday Night, by James Dobson Friday Night James Dobson
IT’S A FRIGID FRIDAY NIGHT IN DECEMBER. I put on my favorite jeans, Nike shoes, and grey Underarmor sweatshirt. I slip my wallet and keys into my pockets, fitting into the worn creases they carved for themselves through constant use. I get into the car and speed the short trip to the firehouse, Station 10, where I spend a majority of my time. Having been a firefighter for about two years, every time I enter Station 10 I feel like a grown man, a cool guy. The familiar smell, the chipped paint on the walls, and the white and blue rigs make me feel at home. This, however, wasn’t where I wanted to spend my night. Earlier, I had received an invitation from my buddy Mike, a 28 year old firefighter lieutenant and Iraq War veteran who looked like he had steroids with every meal, to come train with him at his firehouse in a neighboring county. Boy, was I excited. Mike’s firehouse, Station 28, seemed to run fires every other day, car crashes by the hour, and look cool 24/7. I wanted to be one of those guys, riding around in beat up engines and trucks through the ghetto like we belonged there. So, I grabbed my gear from Station 10, and drove to Station 28 in Prince Georges County, Maryland. You could tell from the freeway that the neighborhoods were getting worse. You could see boarded up house after boarded up house, most of them charred and set ablaze in the past few months. I thought to myself, “This is cool,” and understood nothing about the place I was traveling through. I showed up at Station 28, a run-down dump of a firehouse. The doors were missing handles, the windows were broken, and the rigs were pieced together with duct tape and bubblegum. “This is cool,” I thought to myself, and understood nothing about the place I was standing in. It was about 10 PM when I arrived, and not thirty seconds after, I hear loud tones and a distinct Hispanic voice calling for “Engine
15 16 | Random Jottings 11 828 for the motor vehicle collision.” I am standing in the beat-up engine bay of Station 28 as Mike and his friends come rushing through, each of them with either a cigar, a cigarette, or a lip of chew in their mouth. Mike calls out to me “Hey, man, get on the rig.” So, I put on my gear with speed and ease and hop on the engine to travel deep into the ghetto for some guy who crashed his car. We show up to find a Black male, seemingly intoxicated, screaming at police officers, “N*GGA YOU AIN’T GOT NO WARRANT N*GGA GET YO HANDS OFFA ME.” The hood of his car was mangled into a jersey barrier, and from my vantage point, I could see a family in the back of the wrecked car. Thank God they were fine, but the driver had put his entire family in danger by driving drunk. The driver deserved to go to jail. But when the police officers started beating the driver, things changed. The driver had pushed a police officer, so the officer pulled out a baton and started beating at the driver’s knees. The driver fell, and the baton continued to fall. My buddy Mike joined in. So did the rest of the guys from Station 28. There were kicks to the gut and to the face, fists to the neck and groin. Small puddles of blood glistened different colors as the flashing lights of the fire trucks and the cop cars took turns illuminating the scene. The cops rolled the driver over onto his stomach, slapped handcuffs onto his already bruised wrists, and threw him into the back of a dirty medic unit that had just arrived. Literally threw. By now, the driver’s family was out of the car, screaming and hollering about what they were just witnesses to. No matter what the danger they were in, they didn’t deserve to see this kind of brutality. There were small children in the car, watching with tears forming but not shedding. A girl of no more than three, and a boy no more than six. They were just awakened to the harsh world they live in while I just stood there. “That’s how we do it in PG County, Dobson.” Mike said. I didn’t say a word.
— James Dobson Friday Night | 17
March Back, August 2014 “Christopher Columbus’s Egg Puzzle,” Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles (1914) Boxing Lessons Boxing Lessons
Egging Him On
IN HIS 1565 HISTORY OF THE NEW WORLD, Girolamo Benzoni told this story: Columbus was dining with many Spanish nobles when one of them said: “Sir Christopher, even if your lordship had not discovered the Indies, there would have been, here in Spain, which is a country abundant with great men knowledgeable in cosmography and literature, one who would have started a similar adventure with the same result.” Columbus did not respond to these words but asked for a whole egg to be brought to him. He placed it on the table and said: “My lords, I will lay a wager with any of you that you are unable to make this egg stand on its end like I will do without any kind of help or aid.” They all tried without success and when the egg returned to Columbus, he tapped it gently on the table breaking it slightly and, with this, the egg stood on its end. All those present were confounded and understood what he meant: that once the feat has been done, anyone knows how to do it. Although the same story was told about Brunelleschi, the smashed egg is generally known as Egg of Columbus— no relation to the Egg o’ Boo. It’s famous enough there’s even a statue of it in Ibiza. Puzzle creator and Chess hall of fame member Sam Loyd (Martin Gardner called him “America’s greatest puzzler,” though others used such terms as “huckster” and “fast-talking snake oil salesman”), evidently inspired by the story, created “Christopher Columbus’s Egg “The Discovery of America,” Puzzle” for the 1914 edition of his Ibiza, Spain (Photo: “Flups” Cyclopedia of Puzzles. CC BY-SA 3.0) I have no idea how that particular puzzle got the attention of management consultants, but sometime in the late 1960s, the puzzle began to be used in seminars on creativity and lateral thinking. The Walt Disney Organization is supposed to have used it in in-house 19 20 | Random Jottings 11 training, though British leadership theorist John Adair also claims responsibility for its introduction. Stripped of the egg, it became known simply as the “Nine Dots Puzzle,” and this puzzle, in turn, is the origin of the phrase “Think Outside the Box.” The Box that Isn’t
The puzzle is pretty straightforward. Take a 3x3 array of dots and link all nine using four or fewer straight lines, without lifting the pen, and without tracing the same line more than once. A five-line solution (top right) is trivially easy, but the four-line solution (bottom right) is something most people have trouble finding. Why? Because people generally see a box (middle) surrounding the nine dots—even though there isn’t actually a box at all. Except, of course, the imaginary one you create in your head. With the box present, the problem has no solution. When it vanishes, the problem’s relatively easy. In other words, it ain’t what you don’t know, but what you do know...that ain’t so.
Who Said It? As Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Don’t believe every quote attribution you read on the Internet.” Finding out the real origin is often harder than it looks. I first heard “It ain’t what you don’t know, but what you do know” attributed to Will Rogers, but a quick check shows that it’s also been attributed to Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and the aforementioned Abraham Lincoln. Quote Investigator (quoteinvestigator.com) traces it back to an 1874 book by Josh Billings, who wrote “I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain’t so.” (He affected this weird spelling throughout his writing, one reason his humor hasn’t held up so well compared to his contemporary Mark Twain.) However, I don’t like his phrasing (not to mention his spelling) as well as I do the version I first heard, so I’m not quite sure how to attribute it properly. I assume that no matter who said it first, plenty of other people said it later, often with different phrasing. So maybe it was Will Rogers after all. Then again, maybe not.
Illustrations by Mark Hill, originally published in my book Creative Project Management, co-authored with Ted Leemann (McGraw-Hill, 2010) Boxing Lessons | 21 22 | Random Jottings 11 Unboxing
I’ve been interested in the problems of practical creativity for a long time. Being consistently creative on time, on budget, and within parameters is a very useful skill. The occasional flash of genius is wonderful, but it’s the day to day grind of original thinking that takes work and skill. Can creativity be a craft skill? Efforts to teach people how to solve this problem (and other puzzles like it) have had mixed results. If you draw a square outside the nine dots when you hand the puzzle to someone, you’ll get better than average results. Coaching people aloud in a free association style works better—even if they’re only talking to themselves. My favorite technique is negative brainstorming, which is turning that Will Rogers/Josh Billings quote into a method. Negative brainstorming is just like regular brainstorming—only despair oriented. In regular brainstorming, you figure out what you are looking for, and start throwing out ideas. In negative brainstorming, you start with the proposition that you’re doomed and helpless, and there is no possible answer to your problem, and start listing all the ways in which that’s true. Just like regular brainstorming, you aren’t allowed to criticize suggestions until the session is over, and then you go back to analyze what you’ve got. Why can’t we connect these nine dots in fewer than five lines? Well, we have to connect all the dots; we can’t draw curving lines...and we can’t go outside those borders. If you’re going to find out what you “know that ain’t so,” you have to list all the things you supposedly know. It’s usually easier to find the ringers in the list. What if you wanted to solve the problem in three straight lines? What else do we “know that ain’t so”? Well, one thing that comes to mind is that lines have to be drawn through the center of the dots, either at 90° or 45° angles to the grid. If the dots are geometric points, that’s necessarily the case, but these aren’t geometric points, but rather blotches. Imagine we draw a slightly diagonal line touching the bottom of the top dot, skimming the middle one, and grazing the bottom, sort of like a knight’s move in chess. Play with that a little bit, and you’ve got a three line solution—a reverse Mark of Zorro. Boxing Lessons | 23 24 | Random Jottings 11 How about one line? What do you “know that ain’t so” that keeps it from being done in one line? There are multiple answers. First negative assumption: the line-drawing instrument has to be a pen or pencil, something with a comparatively narrow line. Second, the puzzle must be solved by line drawing, not by folding the paper. And third, the solution must be on a flat surface. Each negative assumption immediately suggests its corresponding solution. There are actually more solutions than these. See if you can find them. The Power of Negative Thinking In 1992, Judy Dean won Games Magazine’s “How Come” competition with the puzzle “The Elder Twin.” It goes like this: One day, Kerry celebrated her birthday. Two days later, her older twin brother Terry celebrated his birthday. How is this possible? In my experience, it’s easier to solve this problem by starting with the opposite proposition: why isn’t this possible? Well, there are lots of reasons. 1. Twins are usually born on the same day. 2. When twins are born on different days, they’re seldom more than one day apart. 3. Older twins celebrate their birthdays before younger twins. 4. People celebrate their birthday on their birthday. 5. Kerry and Terry are a single pair of twins. And so on. A couple of possible solutions are immediately obvious. Maybe the twins aren’t celebrating their birthdays on their actual birthdays. Maybe there are two sets of twins in the family. The official solution can be found right after the credits on page 57. Getting Annoyed for Fun and Profit
Another practical creativity technique is the constructive use of annoyance. A guy I knew in high school was not the sort of person anybody would think of as being creative—or for that matter, smart. He worked in a machine shop and dreamed of being a rock god. It annoyed him that the pegs on his guitar were stiff and hard to manipulate, and if he used pliers to pop them out in order to change strings, the pliers left marks. He hit upon the idea of sculpting a miniature crowbar out of resin to pull the pegs out without damage. Boxing Lessons | 25 26 | Random Jottings 11 He got a patent for it. The cost of the patent was much greater than the money he made from his invention, but he does have a patent framed above his fireplace. So much for not being creative or smart. He may still work in a machine shop, but he’s accomplished something I never have. Keep a list of things that annoy you. (That’s things, not people.) Even without trying, you’ll eventually stumble on potential solutions. The invention may not be worth a million dollars, and in fact it may be that somebody else already beat you to it (another friend of mine independently invented the sweater shaver), but you’ll still have invented something. My novel (with Doug Niles) Fox on the Rhine originated that way. I was on a seminar tour in Australia, doing a city a day. (Monday Sydney, Tuesday Melbourne, Wednesday Adelaide, Thursday Perth —I’ve seen a lot of Australia but can’t really claim to have experienced any of it.) I couldn’t pack enough books to keep me going for three weeks, so I was buying paperbacks in the airport and abandoning them on the plane when I finished. On the way from Adelaide to Perth, I picked up a novel by a military thriller writer who shall remain nameless. (His initials were Dale Brown.) It was so awful that I couldn’t finish it, but I still had a couple of hours in the air before I could buy a new book. To pass the time, I started thinking about exactly why I disliked the book so much, and ended up filling a couple of pages of legal pad paper with reasons. This led me to developing a set of principles that a good military thriller should follow, and by the weekend (Perth to Brisbane) I’d worked out the preliminary concept that eventually became Fox on the Rhine. Bad books, by the way, can teach you more about writing than good books. It’s hard to learn from a masterpiece. Is Shakespeare great because of his characterization, dialogue, plot, or what? If a terrible book turns into a best-seller, there must be a reason. Even if the terrible book is only doing one thing right, if you can figure out what it is, you’ve learned something very valuable. Boxing Lessons | 27 Paradoxes Can Be Paradoctored1 I was at the American International Toy Fair in New York one year, and my boss Jack Morrissey was taking me on a tour of showrooms. (At most trade shows, if you can get in, you can go look at all the exhibitors, but at Toy Fair most of the showrooms can be visited by appointment only. I’ve been to NSA headquarters, visited a number of nuclear propulsion laboratories, and brushed the edges of the Top Secret community, but nobody does security like a toy company.) This was the year that Cabbage Patch dolls were the rage, and we were visiting a showroom featuring cheap knock-offs when I saw an offering of “Broccoli Patch Kids.” I made a predictably sarcastic remark, but my boss had a different perspective. “Yes, it’s a dumb knock-off, but the problem is not that it’s a knock-off, but rather that it’s dumb. You have to understand that what a retailer wants are toys that are brand-new, completely original —and just like everything else.” The puzzled look on my face was pretty obvious. “This is a dumb knock-off, but there’s a brilliant Cabbage Patch knock-off at this show. See if you can find it.” For the rest of the show, I looked at every doll or piece of plush I could find, including five or six equally stupid variations on Cabbage Patch Kids. Finally, I gave up. “What’s the gimmick with Cabbage Patch?” my boss asked. “You pretend to adopt them.” He smiled. “What else do you adopt?” It didn’t take long for the light to finally dawn. “Pound Puppies!” “Right. Pound Puppies are exactly like Cabbage Patch Kids, only completely different.” It was an eye-opening moment, and gave me an entirely new perspective on creativity. Paradoxical requirements normally frustrate people, but they’re really opportunities if you can just figure out to how to resolve them. What’s a perfect test? Well, a perfect test is rigorous and thorough —and never fails anything. Clearly, if we’re going to go to the trouble and expense of testing, we need our tests to be meaningful. On the other hand, we really don’t want things to fail, because failure is expensive. What’s the answer?
1 Asimov, End of Eternity. 28 | Random Jottings 11 Well, it’s one of the basic tenets of formal quality systems like TQM (or Six Sigma, basically TQM with karate belts)—lots of inexpensive preliminary tests to verify components before you get to the actual formal test. Making changes in early stages is dramatically less expensive. For a requirements change that costs $1, making the same change in the design stage costs an estimated $10. If you don’t catch the problem until development, the average cost goes to $100. If you catch the problem following formal testing, it can cost $1000, and if it’s after general release, $10,000. (Your mileage may vary. These are software estimates, but the general cost curve is similar across industries.) Sidewise Stealing There’s a great T. S. Eliot quote (also attributed to many others, and usually only containing the first part): “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” You could think of the paradox approach as an ethically legitimate form of intellectual property theft. My Dragonlance boardgame is just like Milton Bradley’s old Dogfight, only completely different. (Dragons + 3-D movement). A twist or two on an existing idea is usually enough to claim it for your own. Another technique from formal quality is benchmarking. If you want to be #1, you need to study the current #1 to develop appropriate benchmarks. After all, being #1 simply requires being better than #2 (even if #2 tries harder). To stay #1, you need to keep your eyes on #2 and #3 in case they try to steal a march on you. But you can do more than that with benchmarking. I used to do a lot of teaching for the Weather Channel. Their constant challenge was to come up with new and innovative ways to provide weather data, and they regularly benchmarked against their competitors: the 10 o’clock local news, the color weather map in USA Today, various weather apps, etc. The problem is that their competition did the same thing. It’s hard for one source of weather to beat out other sources of weather, because there’s only so much you can do. What is weather, anyway? From a technical perspective, you could say it’s a data stream generated by government agencies and made available to interested parties. The data changes in real time; Boxing Lessons | 29 nobody wants all of it; just about everybody needs at least some of it. While the original data is normally in digital form, most of the time it’s presented visually. Sure, you can benchmark against competitors in the weather business, but try this instead: What other data streams behave like weather data? One that comes to mind almost immediately is financial data. To get a real jump on the competition, why not look at all the different ways financial data is portrayed and see if any of them are adaptable to weather? How about traffic data? Census information? Not only can you discover really interesting new techniques for your own field, you may also discover opportunities to take what you already know how to do and strike off in new directions. To go back to Cabbage Patch Kids and Pound Puppies, you can mix and match. Combine Pound Puppies with baseball cards (collect ‘em all) and you get Beanie Babies. Mix baseball cards with Dungeons & Dragons, and you get Magic: The Gathering. Note that both these “derivative” ideas made lots more money than their predecessors. Originality is overrated. How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, baby, practice. I taught a creativity seminar for Fred Pryor for a couple of years, and one of the exercises involved writing down three new ideas each day. I started trying to come up with three new book ideas each day and kept a log. By the time I quit, I had over 500 book ideas written down. Mind you, most of them are stupid, but that’s what happens in most creativity techniques. If you want some gold, you have to accumulate a whole lot of ore first. There’s a lot of good work on the topic of creativity. Best known, I think, is Edward De Bono. I’m very fond of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work. A particularly interesting lateral thinker is the late Eliyhu Goldratt. Here’s my favorite of his: If every worker on an assembly line is working at 100% efficiency and productivity, is the assembly line efficient or inefficient? The answer, of course, is inefficient. Seriously inefficient. Why? See next issue’s lettercolumn. — Michael Dobson From The Mysterious Stranger and Other Cartoons by John T. McCutcheon (1905) Seven Days in May Seven Days in May
BECAUSE THIS ISSUE is scheduled to premier at Corflu, the annual convention of people involved in this small, strange hobby, I thought I’d do a little something for attendees. The 2016 Corflu takes place in Chicago officially from May 13 through May 15, but most people come early and stay late. For the last few years, I’ve been working on a series of books, The Story of a Special Day (see “Other Titles from Timespinner Press” at the end of this issue). Ultimately, there’ll be 366 titles (45 done to date), one for each day of the year. The books are averaging 60-100 pages, covering holidays, events, births, deaths, and a section on the month itself (origins, signs, movable events), with 30-40 illustrations and photographs. I think of them as “birthday cards you won’t throw away,” and expect most will find their way into the bathroom alongside Uncle John’s Reader. (Again, not that there’s anything wrong with that.) As part of building a market, I do a daily “This Day in History” blog, “Dobson’s Improbable History,” source of the name of last issue. (I’d add the URL, but I’m just setting up a new website and it’s all moving in the next month or three.) It’s amazing how much happens each and every day. In honor of Corflu, here’s “This Day in History” for May 11 through May 17.
31 32 | Random Jottings 11 May 11
Quote of the Day “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.” — Salvador Dalí, painter, born May 11, 1904 On this day in history... • Fifty-four Knights Templar are burned at the stake as heretics (1310) • The US declares war on Mexico (1846) • Minnesota becomes a US state (1858) • Four thousand Pullman workers go on strike (1894) • The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is founded (1927) • Adolf Eichmann is captured by Mossad agents (1960) • Racist bombings take place in Birmingham, Alabama, destroying the Birmingham motel where Martin Luther King was staying and triggering riots in the city (1963) • Charges against Daniel Ellsberg for releasing the Pentagon Papers are dismissed because of government misconduct (1973) • The first heart-lung transplant takes place (1987) • Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov in chess (1997) Birthdays • Baron Münchhausen, storyteller (1720) • Chang and Eng Bunker, Siamese twins (1811) • Harriet Quimby, pilot (1875) • Irving Berlin, composer (1888) • Martha Graham, choreographer (1894) • Salvador Dalí, painter (1904) • Phil Silvers, comedian (1911) • Foster Brooks, drunk comedian (1912) Seven Days in May | 33 • Richard Feynman, raconteur (1918) • Denver Pyle, actor (1920) • Mort Sahl, comedian (1927) • Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam leader (1933) • Doug McClure, actor (1935) • Robert Jarvik, artificial heart developer (1946) • Martha Quinn, veejay (1959) • Natasha Richardson, actress (1963) • Laetitia Casta, supermodel (1978) Deaths • William Pitt the Elder, politician (1778) • John Cadbury, chocolatier (1889) • A. E. Becquerel, physicist (1891) • Karl Schwarzschild, limited astronomer (19196) • William Dean Howells, author (1920) • Juan Gris, painter and sculptor (1927) • Lex Barker, Tarzan (1973) • Lester Flatt, Scruggs partner (1979) • Bob Marley, shot the sheriff (1981) • Chester Gould, Joe Staton predecessor (1985) • Kim Philby, spy (1988) • Douglas Adams, hitchhiker (2001) • Bill Peet, animator (2002) • Floyd Patterson, boxer (2006) Holidays and Celebrations • Human Rights Day (Vietnam) • National Technology Day (India) • Nisga'a Day (Nisga'a Nation) • Statehood Day (Minnesota) Informal and made-up holidays include Eat What You Want Day, Hostess Cup Cake Day, Root Canal Appreciation Day, and Twilight Zone Day. 34 | Random Jottings 11 May 12 Quote of the Day
“If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there.” — Yogi Berra, baseball manager, born May 12, 1925
On this day in history...
• American Civil War: A Union assault during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House becomes known as the Bloody Angle as a result of 24 hours of hand-to-hand fighting (1864) • The airship Norge becomes the first vessel to fly over the North Pole (1926)
• George VI and Elizabeth ascend the British throne (1937) • The Soviet Union lifts its blockade of Berlin (1949) • Luna 5 crashes on the Moon (1965) • The Cambodian navy seizes the US merchant ship SS Mayagüez (1975) • Al Qaeda carries out the Riyadh compound bombings, killing 26. (My brother and his family were living in that compound, and had their windows blown out by the explosions.) (2003) Seven Days in May | 35 Birthdays • Edward Lear, nonsense poet (1812 — some sources say May 13) • Florence Nightingale, nurse (1820) • Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter and poet (1828) • Henry Cabot Lodge, politician (1850) • Lincoln Ellsworth, polar explorer (1880) • Joseph Rochefort, cryptanalyst (1900) • Wilfrid Hyde-White, actor (1903) • Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint (1907) • Katherine Hepburn, actress (1907) • Howard K. Smith, television journalist (1914) • Mary Kay Ash, cosmetics tycoon (1918) • Julius Rosenberg, spy (1918) • Yogi Berra, malapropist (1925) • Burt Bacharach, never could find San Jose (1928) • Johnny Bucyk, hockey player (1935) • Tom Snyder, television journalist (1936) • Frank Stella, Stanley Kowalski was a big fan (1936) • George Carlin, hippy-dippy weatherman (1937) • Ron Ziegler, no longer operative (1939) • Cat Yronwode, comics writer and illustrator (1947) • Steve Winwood, singer-songwriter (1948) • Bruce Boxleitner, actor (1950) • Gabriel Byrne, actor (1950) • Billy Squier, stroker(1950) • Ving Rhames, actor (1959) • Paul Begala, political adviser (1961) • Emilio Estevez, actor (1962) • Stephen Baldwin, actor (1966) • Tony Hawk, skateboarder (1968) • Jason Biggs, actor (1978) 36 | Random Jottings 11 Deaths • John Dryden, poet (1700) • J. E. B. Stuart, general (1864) • Max Brand, author (1944) • Erich von Stroheim, filmmaker (1957) • John Masefield, poet (1967) • Robert Reed, Brady dad (1992) • Perry Como, relaxed singer (2001) • Syd Hoff, illustrator (2004) • Robert Rauschenberg, painter (2008) Holidays and Celebrations • Day of the Finnish Identity (Finland) • International Nurses Day (worldwide) • International Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Awareness Day (worldwide) • Saint Andrea the First Day (Georgia) Informal and made-up holidays include Limerick Day, National Nutty Fudge Day, and Odometer Day. May 13 Quote of the Day “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” — Winston Churchill, prime minister, in a speech before the House of Commons, May 13, 1940.
On this day in history... • The “First Fleet” sets sail to establish a penal colony in Australia (1787) • Brazil abolishes slavery (1888) • The Afrika Korps surrenders (1943) Seven Days in May | 37 • Pope John Paul II is shot in an attempted assassination, but survives (1981) Birthdays • Arthur Sullivan, Gilbert partner (1842) • Daphne du Maurier, author (1907) • Joe Louis, boxer (1914) • Bea Arthur, actress (1922) • Jim Jones, Kool-Ade drinker (1931) • Roger Zelazny, call him Conrad (1937) • Harvey Keitel, actor (1939) • Senta Berger, actress (1941) • Ritchie Valens, singer-songwriter (1941) • Armistead Maupin, author (1944) • Marv Wolfman, teen titan (1946) • Stevie Wonder, superstitious (1950) • Dennis Rodman, basketball player (1961) • Stephen Colbert, hard-hitting news reporter (1964) • Sunny Leone, porn star (1981) Deaths • Cyrus McCormick, harvester (1884) • Sholem Aleichem, fiddler on the roof (1916) • Gary Cooper, got high at noon (1961) • Dan Blocker, actor (1972) • Gene Sarazen, golfer (1999) • Joyce Brothers, psychologist and Dungeons & Dragons consultant (2013) Holidays and Celebrations • Abbotsbury Garland Day (Dorset, UK) • Lemuralia (ancient Rome) Informal and made-up holidays include Frog Jumping Day, Leprechaun Day, and National Apple Pie Day. 38 | Random Jottings 11 May 14 Quote of the Day “They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.” — An instant message sent by Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, born May 14, 1984. On this day in history... • English settlers select the location for what will become Jamestown, Virginia (1607) • The Constitutional Convention convenes in Philadelphia (1787) • The first smallpox vaccination is administered (1796) • The Lewis and Clark Expedition begins (1804) • An independent State of Israel is declared (1948) • A Freedom Riders bus is fire-bombed near Anniston, Alabama, and the riders are beaten by a mob (1961) • Skylab is launched (1973) Birthdays • Thomas Gainsborough, blue boy (1727) • Rudolf Lipschitz, mathematician (1832) • Ed Walsh, baseball player (1881) • Otto Klemperer, Colonel Klink’s dad (1885) • Sidney Bechet, composer (1897 — born and died on the same day) • Earle Combs, baseball player and coach (1899) • Ayub Khan, deposed Humayun Mirza’s father as president of Pakistan (1907, also see Random Jottings 10) • Richard Deacon, family feuder (1921) • Franjo Tuđman, Croatian leader and convicted war criminal (1922) • Oona O'Neill, wife of Charlie Chaplin (1925) • Bobby Darin, bath-taker (1936) • Tony Pérez, baseball player and manager (1942) • Elizabeth Ray, couldn’t type, couldn’t file, couldn’t even answer the phone (1943) Seven Days in May | 39 • George Lucas, creator of Jar-Jar Binks (1944) • Tamara Dobson, Cleopatra Jones(1947) • Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl books (1965) • Tony Siragusa, football player and television host (1967) • Cate Blanchett, actress (1969) • Sofia Coppola, goddaughter(1971) • Frank Gore, football player (1983) • Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder (1984) • Miranda Cosgrove, actress (1993) Deaths • August Strindberg, playwright (1912) • James Gordon Bennett, Jr., publisher (1918) • Henry J. Heinz, all 57 varieties (1919) • H. Rider Haggard, obeyed she (1925) • Emma Goldman, activitist (1940) • Heinz Guderian, achtung panzer (1954) • Sidney Bechet, composer (1959, born and died on the same day) • Husband E. Kimmel, boss at Pearl Harbor (1968) • Billie Burke, good witch (1970) • Rita Hayworth, love goddess (1987) • (Jiang Qing), gang-banger (1991) • Harry Blackstone, Jr., magician (1997) • Frank Sinatra, ol’ blue eyes (1998) • Wendy Hiller, actress (2003) • Robert Stack, untouchable (2003) • Will Elder, Mad man (2008) Holidays and Celebrations • Hasting Banda's Birthday (Malawi) • National Unification Day (Liberia) • Izumo-taisha Shrine Grand Festival, first day (Izumo-taisha, Japan) Informal and made-up holidays include Dance Like a Chicken Day, National Chocolate Chip Day, Stars and Stripes Forever Day, and Underground America Day. 40 | Random Jottings 11 May 15
Quotes of the Day (sometimes you can’t just pick one)
“They have vilified me, they have crucified me; yes, they have even criticized me.” — Richard J. Daley, Chicago mayor, born May 15, 1902
“Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.” — Jerry Falwell, televangelist, died May 15, 2007
On this day in history...
• Pope Innocent IV authorizes torture of heretics in the Medieval Inquisition (1252) • Anne Boleyn goes on trial for treason, adultery, and incest (1536) • Johannes Kepler confirms the third law of planetary motion (1618) • The Treaty of Westphalia is signed (1648) • The War of the Spanish Succession begins (1701) • The first machine gun is patented (1718) • The National Woman Suffrage Association is founded (1869) • Las Vegas is founded (1905) • Standard Oil is declared a monopoly by the US Supreme Court (1911) • Mickey Mouse premiers in Plane Crazy (first test screening, 1928) • The Moscow Metro opens (1935) • The first McDonald's opens (1940) Seven Days in May | 41 • The first allied jet fighter, the Gloster E.28/39, has its maiden flight (1941) • The first Arab-Israeli War begins (1949) • Sputnik 3 (1958) and Sputnik 4 (1960) are launched • The final Mercury mission lifts off (1963) • The first female US Army generals are appointed (1970) • Alabama governor George Wallace is shot (1972) • The Soviets begin withdrawing from Afghanistan (1988) • At age 17, Jessica Watson becomes the youngest person to sail solo, non-stop and unassisted, around the world Birthdays
• ; (Sejong the Great), Korean monarch (1397) • Claudio Monteverdi, composer (1567 — baptismal date) • Klemens von Metternich, diplomat (1773) • !"#"$%!%&$'( )'*+& (Debendranath Tagore), philosopher and religious reformer (1817) • L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz (1856) • Pierre Curie, Marie’s husband (1859) • Katherine Anne Porter, author (1890) • Михаи́л Булга́ков (Mikhail Bulgakov), author (1891 — O.S. May 3*) • Prescott Bush, banker and politician, father of George H. W. Bush (1895) • Richard J. Daley, hizzonor (1902) • Clifton Fadiman, game show host and author (1904) • Joseph Cotten, actor (1905) • Abraham Zapruder, filmed the JFK assassination (1905) • James Mason, actor (1909) • Paul Samuelson, economist (1915) • Eddy Arnold, singer-songwriter (1918) • Richard Avedon, photographer (1923) • Jasper Johns, painter (1930) • Ken Venturi, golfer (1931) 42 | Random Jottings 11 • Anna Maria Alberghetti, actress and singer (1936) • Wavy Gravy, clown and activist (1936) • Ralph Steadman, feared and loathed illustrator (1936) • Paul Zindel, studied the effect of gamma rays on man-in-the- moon marigolds (1936) • Madeline Albright, former US Secretary of State (1937) • Trini Lopez, singer and guitarist (1937) • Roger Ailes, Fox News head (1940) • Lainie Kazan, actress and singer (1940) • Brian Eno, god (to some) (1948) • Chazz Palminteri, actor (1952) • George Brett, baseball player (1953) • Melle Mel, rapper (1961) • Emmitt Smith, football player (1969) • Josh Beckett, basketball player (1980) • Zara Phillips, royal granddaughter (1981) *O.S., or Old Style, refers to the fact that Russia did not convert from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar until 1918. Deaths • Valentinian II, Roman emperor (392) • Emily Dickinson, poet (1886) • Charles Williams, author (1945) • Edward Hopper, painter (1967) • Theodore H. White, journalist Either “The House by the Railroad” by Edward Hopper, (1986) or an early concept sketch from Psycho. • June Carter Cash, singer-songwriter (2003) Seven Days in May | 43 • Jerry Falwell, televangelist (2007) • Alexander Courage, wrote the original Star Trek theme (2008) • Wayman Tisdale, basketball player (2009) Holidays and Celebrations
• , Aoi Matsuri (Kyoto, Japan) • Army Day (Slovenia) • Constituent Assembly Day (Lithuania) • Independence Day (Paraguay) • International Day of Families (worldwide) • La Corsa dei Ceri (Gubbio) • Mercuralia (ancient Rome) • Nakba Day (Palestinian communities) • Peace Officers Memorial Day (United States) • Teacher's Day (Mexico, South Korea) Informal and made-up holidays include Hyperemis Gravidarum Awareness Day, National Chocolate Chip Day, National Tuberous Sclerosis Day, and Nylon Stockings Day. 44 | Random Jottings 11
May 16
Quote of the Day
“What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.” — Liberace, “Mr. Showmanship,” born May 16, 1919
On this day in history...
• Marie Antoinette gets married to the future Louis XVI (1770) • The first major wagon train heading for the Pacific Northwest sets out on the Oregon Trail (1843)
• Back Cover: The Curtiss NC-4, first airplane to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, departs from Newfoundland (1919) • Joan of Arc becomes a saint (1920) • The first Academy Awards are given (1929) • The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ends (1943) • The first optical laser becomes operational (1960) • The Soviet probe Venera 5 lands on Venus (1969) • The first woman reaches the summit of Mount Everest (1975) • Women gain the right to vote in Kuwait (2005) Seven Days in May | 45 Birthdays • William H. Seward, acquired Alaska for the US (1801) • Levi P. Morton, 22nd US Veep (1824—also died May 16) • Henry Fonda, Jane’s dad (1905) • Margret Rey, co-creator of Curious George (1906) • Studs Terkel, author (1912) • Woody Herman, saxophonist (1913) • Liberace, pianist and fashion icon (1919) • Yvonne Craig, Batgirl (1937) • Robert Fripp, crimson king (1946) • Christian Lacroix, fashion designer (1951) • Pierce Brosnan, Remington Bond (1953) • Olga Korbut, gymnast (1955) • Debra Winger, actress (1955) • Mare Winningham, actress (1959) • Janet Jackson, malfunctioning wardrobe (1966) • David Boreanaz, actor (1969) • Tucker Carlson, pundit (1969) • Tracey Gold, actress (1969) • Gabriela Sabatini, tennis player (1970) • Tori Spelling, actress (1973) • Megan Fox, actress (1986) • Grigor Dimitrov, tennis player (1991) Deaths • Joseph Fourier, transformer (1830) • Levi P. Morton, US Vice President (1920—also born May 16) • Mehmet VI, last Ottoman sultan (1926) 46 | Random Jottings 11 • Django Reinhardt, three-fingered hot clubber (1953) • James Agee, critic (1955) • H. B. Reese, peanut butter cup creator (1956) • Eliot Ness, FBI agent (1957) • Andy Kaufman, thank him veddy much (1984) • Irwin Shaw, author (1984) • Margaret Hamilton, wicked witch (1985) • Sammy Davis, Jr., Nixon hugger (1990) • Jim Henson, had his hand up a frog’s butt (1990) • Bodacious, “world's most dangerous bull” (2000) • Robert Mondavi, winemaker (2008) • Hank Jones, country musician (2010) Holidays and Celebrations Martyrs of Sudan Day (Episcopal Church USA) Mass Graves Day (Iraq) National Day (South Sudan) National Endangered Species Day (US) Teacher's Day (Malaysia) Informal and made-up holidays include Biographer's Day, Love a Tree Day, National Piercing Day, National Sea Monkey Day, Wear Purple for Peace Day.
May 17 Quote of the Day “There are two great rules of life: never tell everything at once.” — Ken Venturi, golfer, died May 17, 2013 On this day in history... • Henry VIII gets his marriage to Anne Boleyn annulled (1536) • The US Continental Congress bans trade with Quebec (1775) • The New York Stock Exchange is formed (1792) Seven Days in May | 47 • The US Supreme Court rules against segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) • Watergate Scandal: Televised hearings begin in the US Senate (1973)
• The first legal same-sex marriages in the US are performed (2004) Birthdays • Bartholomew Roberts, most successful pirate in the Golden Age of Piracy (1682) • Edward Jenner, "father of immunology" (1749) • Wilhelm Steinitz, chess champion (1836) • Erik Satie, composer (1866) • Horace Dodge, car maker (1868) • Dorothy Gibson, silent screen star and Titanic survivor (1889) • Cool Papa Bell, baseball player (1903) • Maureen O'Sullivan, she Jane (1911) • Archibald Cox, Watergate special prosecutor and US Solicitor General (1912) • Birgit Nilsson, soprano (1918) • Earl Morrall, football player (1934) 48 | Random Jottings 11 • Dennis Hopper, actor (1936) • Taj Mahal, singer-songwriter (1942) • Bill Paxton, actor (1955) • Sugar Ray Leonard, boxer (1956) • Bob Saget, home video announcer (1956) • Dave Sim, aardvark fancier (1956) • Enya, singer-songwriter (1961) • Craig Ferguson, talk show host (1962) • Trent Reznor, singer-songwriter (1965) • Thom Filicia, interior designer, Queer Eye cast member (1969) Deaths • John Jay, first US Chief Justice (1829) • Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, diplomat (1854) • John Deere, tractor maker (1886) • Lawrence Welk, champagne salesman (1992) • Johnny "Guitar" Watson, singer and guitarist (1996) • Dave Berg, looked on the lighter side (2002) • Tony Randall, actor (2004) • Frank Gorshin, riddler (2005) • Lloyd Alexander, fantasy author (2007) • Harmon Killebrew, baseball player (2011) • Donna Summer, disco queen (2012) • Ken Venturi, golfer (2013) Holidays and Celebrations • Birthday of the Raja (Perlis, Malaysia) • Constitution Day (Nauru) • Día das Letras Galegas (Galicia) Seven Days in May | 49 • Discover Day (Cayman Islands) • Feast of ‘Aẓamat (Bahá'í) • International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO) (worldwide) • Las Piedras Day (Uruguay) • Liberation Day (Democratic Republic of the Congo) • National Famine Memorial Day (Ireland) • Navy Day (Argentina) • Syttende Mai (Constitution Day) (Norway) • World Information Society Day (international) • World Telecommunications Day (United Nations)
Informal and made-up holidays include Babysitter Safety Day, I-Am- an-American Day, Kinds Helping Kids Day, National Cherry Cobbler Day, National Employee Health and Fitness Day, National Playday for Health, Pack Rat Day, World Hypertension Day, and World Neurofibromatosis Day.
— Michael Dobson
Random Jottings on Random Jottings (letters) Random Jottings on Random Jottings 10 (Letters)
Letters in alphabetical order; my comments in italics.
Earl Kemp
I finally got rid of my houseguests and, after pretending to do a little clean-up, I finally got into 10. Damn! You do too much to me. It is almost overwhelming in its magnificence, much too much, even the parts I never needed to know, but that's all your fault. Keep doing it to me. I went through the entire issue, slowly, page by page, looking for anything to kick off my submerged memories of those through-time happenings, with emphasis on the things that most affected me as I grew up. First and foremost was the MacArthur stuff. Having been born and raised in Arkansas I felt close to him...too close...because I thought he was a real fuckup, but I was just a kid, what did I know? I knew that he wanted to be christened Emperor of Japan, but I suspect he wasn't alone in that...having the U.S. support and maintain him in a position of absolute power that he, in his sick mind, thought he deserved. And...I was moved a bit closer to The Great Man when I was about 14 or 15...I was in the high school band...a large marching and concerting band. There was a huge, splashy, major film on the life of the General with a world premiere showing scheduled to take place in Little Rock and our band was invited to participate in that "spectacular." We were loaded into a big yellow bus, with our uniforms and instruments, and taken to Little Rock. We were housed in some cheap flea-bag hotel, four to a room, for a couple of days (and nights spent fucked up on apricot brandy...none of us had yet discovered blessed weed then). There was a huge parade through downtown ending at the theater where the premiere was taking place. Of course, as always, as our band marched we were behind the horseback section and, 51 52 | Random Jottings 11 constantly, dodging the horseshit and piss along the streets. The worst thing we had to endure during those days and it happened in every parade we participated in. Much to our disappointment, the premiere itself wasn't significant enough to bring out the big boys...only Signe Haso (spelling doubtful), the female lead, appeared in person. Recovering from our customary hangovers, we nodded off all the way back home. The second event to command my attention was the 1962 Cuban crisis...this mostly because that year had me totally consumed with Chicon III. For all my life I wanted to go to Cuba, but never made it, but that was mostly because of the US federal edict forbidding same. Nevertheless, I spent a number of years trying to figure out a way to get there anyway. I had acquired at least three good friend Cubans and we would get together at Frankfurt Book Fairs and party appropriately while I would tell them of my heavy desire to go there, pretend to be a straight Hemingway and soak up all that music that meant so very much to me then and now. It was them, my Cuban friends, who finally convinced me to NOT do the down and dirty and go to Cuba in defiance of stupid US edicts. I still want to go there but, obviously will never make that delicious trip. [email protected] MacArthur is a fascinating character. Yes, he was a fuckup in some ways, and an absolute genius in others — nothing about him is normal. I sometimes think he’s the closest thing to a Shakespearean character America has ever produced. As far as Cuba goes, my great-great uncle told me several stories about flying down to Cuba to party with my great-grandfather, who made a pile of money building a chemical company and selling it to DuPont. I’m quite envious of the trips, which seem to have been quite wild.
John Nielsen-Hall
I wasn't clear whether Humayun Mirza is a descendent of Mir Jaffar. I couldn't help thinking that his account of the Battle of Plassey was an apologia for the poor performance of the Nawab Nazim's forces in that battle. I think the popular Indian view that Mir Jaffar's betrayed the Nawab and thereby lost the battle on purpose, perhaps does simplify things a bit too much. But I have always understood the British view was that Mir Jaffar was always hesitant Random Jottings on Random Jottings (letters) | 53 about committing himself and his forces- he was concerned to be on the winning side. I dont think Humayun Mirza's story actually contradicts that. Indian historians were always going to take a very dim view of Mir Jaffar, as a consequence. [email protected] Yes, Humayun is the last direct eldest male descendant in Mir Jafar’s line, making him heir to the nonexistent throne. You’re right that Mir Jafar was not eager to fight in that battle, which I think Humayun mentions, and his view of the general incompetence of Siraj-ud-doula’s forces parallels yours. His big objective was to repudiate the idea the Mir Jafar was an active traitor, but I think he makes clear that at worst, Mir Jafar was an opportunist.
Lloyd Penney
I never would have thought that the next issue of Random Jottings would be big enough to be a trade paperback, but there it is. So, here’s the latest challenge, to loc a 320-page book. History may be written by the victors, but it really should be written by the objective observer, who was smart enough to not get on the battlefield in the first place. The fact that any given event in history could have been changed on the different turn of any given insignificant event certainly explains the interest in alternate history books. Pontius Pilate makes a cameo in the Bible in his actions with Christ, but afterwards, he disappears. Looks like he mostly disappears from the face of recorded history, too. He played his part, and then was consigned to oblivion. Is there more about Pilate, or is this the sum total? In Heidi Feickert’s article, I have always liked how English is elastic enough cook up just the right term to reflect more modern concepts, like administrivia, and listicle. I do like history, and never knew the complete story of the Tower of Pisa. Here in Canada, our government recently shut down a small space and aviation museum in Toronto in order to give the space the museum took up to an ice-skating organization here. They even took the name away in order to give the federal air & space museum in Ottawa a better name. There’s a lot of aviation history here, including the legendary A.V. Roe Company, from which the Avro Arrow in the 60s came about. There’s some great stories right there. 54 | Random Jottings 11 Once the federal government shut down the Avro Arrow programme, many of the scientists there, many of them Canadian, were snapped up by the US government, and went to work for NASA in order to put a man on the moon. For those who are into gaming, which doesn’t include me…I recently participated in shooting a commercial ad for Assassins Creed: Syndicate, the new version of the video game coming out shortly. I was in full steampunk costume, and we were at a reproduction of a wooden-fencing fighting pit. We were urging a bunch of muscular wrestlers to massacre a group of spindly gamers, with the cameras going, and then we’d show them the new video game. Great fun, and we even got paid for being there. [email protected] Pontius Pilate’s historicity was established by the “Pilate stone,” a contemporary inscription carved into limestone. In addition to the New Testament references, he’s mentioned in works by Josephus, Tacitus, and Philo of Alexandria. The story of his firing because of his attacks on Samaritans is from Josephus. The thought of air and space history giving way to ice skating gives me the shivers, but museums do cost a surprising amount of money to operate.
Milt Stevens
There are many words that could be used to describe Random Jottings #10. Big. Very Big, Gigantic. Impressive, Overwhelming. Mind Boggling. Then there is the subject matter. Non-fans frequently ask what fanzines are about. That’s sort of hard to say. They can be about absolutely anything. I’ve read fanzine articles on how far it is to Tipperary and on watching paint dry. However, I hadn’t read a fanzine on Themistocles and the battle of Salamis before. I was a child when I first learned about the Greek struggle against the Persians. I was given the impression that the Greeks were the good guys and the Persians were the bad guys. The Greek good guys won just like on television. Later, I realized this was an unsophisticated view of things. I did notice that the desire to fight makes a difference in a battle. As in the Six Day War a smaller force can beat a larger force many times their size. In the cases of the Finns against the Russians and the Boers against the British, the Random Jottings on Random Jottings (letters) | 55 smaller force may not win, but they can do much better than anyone would have expected. Heidi Feickert’s article made me think of earlier examples of the road side attraction. I think they may have gone all the way back to the beginning of humans being humans. I can imagine descriptions of the came at Lascaux spreading over a wide region. If you were migrating anyway, why not drop by and take a look. I can also imagine Stone Henge as the site of a really big swap meet. In Greg Benford’s article, Einstein was seeing the reality of things even if it wasn’t what would have been apparent to most people. That was what he did in general. You might say that Big Adolf really wanted him in the worst way. I’m reminded of Charlie Chaplin’s interpretation in The Great Dictator of what might happen to a microphone when Hitler mentioned the Jews. As to other material for your publishing activities, Dale Speirs has done a number of interesting series on various aspects of science fiction and fantasy. In particular, he has done a series on the Diskworld. That should interest a lot of people. If it isn’t long enough for a book by itself, some of Speirs’ other series could be included. Niekas and Fantasy Commentator would be two other sources for possible reprint material.
[email protected] Hopefully, the contents of Random Jottings 10 compared favorably with watching paint dry. In general, larger forces defeat smaller ones, but there are qualifications. First, only forces actually able to join battle count. At the beginning of World War II, the French had more and better tanks than the Germans. However, the French decided to spread their tanks along the Maginot line while the Germans massed theirs. Most of the places where there was a French tank, there were no Germans at all, but where there was one German tank, there were lots and lots of them. I’m sure Dale Speirs’s work would indeed make a good book. While my Timespinner imprint is focusing on history, the great thing about this new technology is how absolutely easy and inexpensive it is to publish on your own. Advent showed there was a market for science fiction criticism; now it’s easier than ever. And I very much like the image of Stonehenge as a swap meet, with all the people wandering around in woad. 56 | Random Jottings 11 We Also Heard From...
Richard Berg—Neato Bandito!!! William Breiding—I've already read all of your introductory writing and am half way through Andy's “History of Hispaniola.” I'd read Andy's grocery list if he'd let me (that actually might be fascinating!), that's how good I think Andy is. Mark Davis—I will tout this book to the heavens. Bruce Gillespie—Amazing! Astounding! Tracy Hickman—I just received our Random Jottings 10 today … and I could not go to bed before telling you how excited I am to read this. Ted Leemann—Nice new work and interesting concept Steve Sullivan—I enjoy getting these now and again. Bruce Townley—By thunder, what a whopper.
Credits Credits
Most of the art and photos in this issue (except, obviously, the family photos) are drawn from Wikimedia Commons, and in several cases the credit information is contained in the caption. Most are in the public domain.
• Unfortunately, the name of the artist who did the cover is unknown, but the image is in the public domain because it dates from 1912. • The screenshot from “Plane Crazy,” the screenshot from Oregon Trail, the self-portrait of Dave Berg, and the “self portrait” of Will Elder are used here under “free use” provisions. The illustrations are small and of much lower quality than the original, serve to illustrate a significant historical event, and no free equivalent is available. • The photo of Chang and Eng Bunker originally appeared in National Geographic. • The “Norge” photo is from the collection of the National Library of Norway. • The picture of Churchill was taken by the US federal government, and is part of the Library of Congress collection. Random Jottings on Random Jottings (letters) | 57 • The Edward Hopper painting is in the public domain, and it was indeed an inspiration for the Psycho house. • The celestial sphere is from Scenography of the Ptolemaic Cosmography, by Johannes van Loon, based on Andreas Cellarius’s Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1660. • The publicity photo of Batman and Batgirl is in the public domain, as are most publicity shots, and the Watergate hearing photo was taken by a US federal employee. • The US Navy photo of the NC-4 on the back cover is part of the National Archives, and is also public domain. • The Charles Atlas advertisement first appeared in Slave Girl Comics #2, March 1949 issue. It is in the public domain because it was first published in the US between 1923 and 1963, and although it was originally copyright for a period of 27 years, the copyright was not renewed.
The Elder Twin Official Solution At the time she went into labor, the mother of the twins was on a ship, about to cross the International Date Line (or any date line) going east to west close to midnight. The older twin, Terry, is born first early on March 1st. The boat then crosses the International Date line and Kerry, the younger twin, was born on February the 28th. In a leap year the younger twin celebrates her birthday two days before her older brother.
Other Titles from Timespinner Press Other Titles from Timespinner Press
All titles available online, or by visiting www.timespinnerpress.com. For information or special orders, contact [email protected].
The Story of a Special Day Michael Dobson A series of (eventually) 366 volumes covering everything that happened on your special day! Events, births, deaths, quotes, holidays, and much more. It’s like a birthday card they’ll never throw away! US$7.95 print/US$2.99 ebook.
Improbable History: The Weird, the Obscure, and the Strangely Important edited by Michael Dobson From the birth of Western civilization to the rescue of Apollo 13, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to Florence's Duomo, history has often turned on small, improbable details. Whatever happened to the ancient Samaritan people? Why did a fortuitous rainstorm allow the British to conquer India? How did an air raid in Italy lead to the development of chemotherapy? What happened when Albert Einstein met Adolf Hitler on the streets of Berlin? How did the Japanese manage to attack the US mainland using balloons? A cast of award- winning writers tackle some of the strangest tales in history! US$19.95 print
59 60 | Random Jottings 11 From Plassey to Pakistan Humayun Mirza The history of British Colonial India and the formation of Pakistan from the unique perspective of the son of Pakistan’s first president and last of the royal line of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa! US$27.95 print
A Whole New Navy: America’s War in the Pacific Miles Durr The most comprehensive and detailed description of America's naval war in the Pacific ever—every battle, every ship, every task force and every task group from Pearl Harbor through the Japanese surrender! US$29.95 print Watergate Considered as an Org Chart of Semi-Precious Stones Michael Dobson Watergate was never like this! How good was G. Gordon Liddy at project management? What happened to the cop who caught the Watergate burglars? What would happen if Spider-Man got involved in Watergate? Features “My Nixon Dream” by Steve Stiles! US$9.95 print US$3.99 ebook
COMING SOON! The Letters of William Philip Schwartz edited by John Schwartz The remarkable true story of frontiersman, soldier, and adventurer William Philip Schwartz, as told in his own words in a series of letters written from 1842 to 1855. Exiled from his wife and family, he fought in the Indian Wars and the Mexican- American War, deserted and went to the Gold Rush, smuggled and traded in the Pacific and South America, and finally became Sergeant of Marines aboard the USS Constellation, now in Baltimore Harbor. An amazing, one of kind historical document —unforgettable reading! US$18.95 print