E-DITTO 12 **************************************************************************** E-DITTO #12 Aug, 2011. A perszine from Eric Mayer [email protected] Cover: Eric Logo & stamp: Dave Burton. Illos: Brad Foster p.1 Alicia Souza p.2, 5, 12 Taral p.3 Lee Hoffman p.6, 7 Eric p.10, 13 Andy Reiss p. 19 **************************************************************************** E-DITTORIAL Dave Locke reckoned that E-Ditto was getting a little too thick for a single staple. But it isn't that easy to find electronic staples. (I guess we know who won the staple wars...) Finally I borrowed a couple from Lee Hoffman's Quandry #2 over at Fanac.org. So these pages are held together with genuine Golden Age staples.
Since I stole her staples I figured I'd do a review of Lee's zine which you'll find later on. I got a shock when I read the Quandry Quiz. I never realized the nickname for Grotesque was Groggy! I can't find any useful information about Grotesque, however, online.
As for current news at Casa Maywrite, like Brad's dog, Mary and I have kept busy drinking water. We've had day after day of 90 degree temperatures -- unusual in the northeast -- topped by consecutive days of 96 and 98, officially, but over 100 in our neck of the woods,if WeatherBug is to be believed. We have no air conditioner -- only fans -- which saves us money in the summer and isn't a problem
1 most years. However, the theme for this year seems to be that anything bad that can happen will. Maybe things will improve when I complete E-Ditto's run in December. It could be that Fate heard about me publishing and figured I needed some material injected into my boring life. Yeah, Fate is my co-editor.
THE SEVENTIES The seventies were my Golden Age of Fandom. Not surprisingly since I discovered fandom around 1972. It seemed a more welcoming place back then. I recall being blown away at my first glimpse of Bill Bower's OUTWORLDS. But as soon as I locced, Bill made me feel like a full fledged member of the club and before long I even got to contribute. I'm not even sure that seeing my name on the cover of the first novel Mary and I had published matched the sheer blast of egoboo I got when Bill ran my "Excoriator" faanfiction (based on the Exorcist) and my name appeared along with Bob Tucker's on the cover of OUTWORLDS.
Another faned I recall fondly was Ed Cagle. His KWALHIOQUA was such an amazing zine I even remember how to spell it. No one before or since has written like Ed. His humor was outrageous, warped, rude, but never cruel. He found weird perspectives on things. I recall him talking about the "sail cats" and "sail possums" he'd see who hadn't quite made it across the highway and had been flattened.
KWALHIQUA was, I guess, a perszine. They thrived during the seventies. They were half the reason I stuck around fandom. There was Jackie Frank's DILEMMA, followed by Jackie Causgrove's RESOLUTION. Probably more personal than KWAL. And at the other end of the spectrum Denis Quane's NOTES FROM THE CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT which was practically a sercon perszine. And every one of those folks sadly, prematurely gone.
I doubt Ed would want any teary eulogies. I remember him recounting his reaction to finding out he had very high blood pressure: "From scared shitless to don't give a shit." t The seventies was also the decade when I was reading James Churchward's Mu nonsense, and books about UFOs and Atlantis not to mention Edgar Cayce's prophesies. Taral sent me an article about failed Rapture predictor Harold Camping who would've fit right in back then.
2 Tell me if you’d ever heard of Harold Camping before his much publicized prediction that the end of the world would arrive on May 21st, this year? Unless you listen to a lot of evangelical radio, the odds are remarkably good that you hadn’t. I certainly never heard of him. But, why would any sane person – with better things to do than listen to frequently self-educated, self-anointed media preachers – ever hear of Harold Camping? There are hundreds, if not thousands, of soft-bodied creatures just like him, as plentiful as leeches in the Alabam’ and Georgia swamps.
It goes without saying that they fulfill much the same role in human ecology as nature’s bloodsuckers. This particular segmented worm did well for himself. By his own admission, he or his organization is worth over $106,00. He made this money by selling God over the radio as though he were ballyhooing a brand of shampoo, without so much as a single degree from some dubious divinity college, any formal study of the bible that is on record, nor the remotest assurance from a traditional church that he teaches an interpretation of Christianity that they endorse. Camping goes on the radio and says whatever damn fool thing he pleases. Then, thousands or tens-of-thousands of people, who ought to know better, send him their wages and savings. Remember that next time you cash a paycheck that you worked for all week. As Harold Camping has found out, there are more lucrative ways to make a living than an honest job.
But, we would never have heard of this particular leech unless he wasn’t a bit more dotty than most. Harold Camping made a verifiable prediction. Verifiable predictions, verifiable facts of any kind, are exactly what all peddlers of the Holy Word must avoid. Because if it is not verified, he shows to the entire world that he is full of shit. Harold Camping said the world would end on the 21st of May, 2011, and nothing whatever happened. Ergo, Harold Camping is full of shit. The logic is airtight.
3 This is not even the first time he has revealed to us the astonishing capacity he has for bovine fecal matter. Camping’s first prediction was that the world would end May 21st, 1988. When nothing happened, he announced that the real date of the world’s destruction would be September 7th 1994. As I recall, nothing noteworthy happened on that day, either.
Then, offering no explanation of his last failure, Camping warned us that 2011 was the year all Earthly affairs would come to a close. The end was nigh. Prepare our souls and kiss our asses good bye.
Guess what?
Yeah. The world ended, and we were all translated to Heaven where, apparently, everything is exactly the same, including my unpaid phone bill and broken teeth.
Not in the least bit apologetic, Harold Camping informs us that we were only “spiritually evaluated” this time, and the actual end is coming for certain on October 21st. Oh, good. I get to celebrate my birthday first! Maybe I should spruce up my apartment a bit, too?
So what happens when a man makes $106,000,000 by talking 100% verifiable, weapons-grade bullshit on the radio? Apparently, nothing. Yet, if I went on the radio and claimed the Martians were coming to enslave the Human Race – send me money so I can offer them a bribe to invade Venus instead – I’d go to prison. If you printed in the newspaper that the United States was going to abolish paper currency, and you were authorized to exchange bills for the new microchip money, you’d go to prison. But if you say God is speaking through you, and wants people to send money, that’s alright. It doesn’t matter what total foolishness you’re selling, if God is the brand, it has the constitutional seal of approval from the Better Business Bureau. Far from go to prison as you’d deserve, you might even be invited to shake the President’s hand or appear on The Tonight Show .
Let’s suppose someone on television claimed to speak for God, and told you that God didn’t want His people to treat cancer, or strokes, when He calls them. Suppose that your father or your wife died because you believed that God had told you this. Is no- one to blame… except you, for being stupid? Unfortunately, whatever claims are made in the name of God’s are protected as
4 fundamental rights. Neither God nor His Prophets are responsible for what He says, right or wrong, as long as the bottom line on Form 1040 adds up.
Obviously, nobody with half a brain thinks “God said so” to crying fire in a crowded theatre makes up for the people trampled to death in the ensuing panic. Sensible people who believe in God also believe in a responsible God, who doesn’t do such irresponsible shit.
If God is responsible, then I see no reason why Harold Camping shouldn’t to be held to the same standard, and made accountable for his latest prediction. Let him put up a bond! If he really believes the world will end on October 21st, then he knows that he has no need of money after that date anyway. Let him stake all $106,000,000 on it on his unshakable belief in the Word of God! What has he got to lose? Why should he hesitate? Does he believe the world will end 148 days from now or not?
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Lloyd Penney mentioned in the last loccol that Harold Camping had gone into a nursing home. Camping suffered a stroke on June 9 and is now going through rehabilitation. So I guess now he needs the money even more. Nursing homes are expensive!]
8
FANAC AS WORK In an obscure way this issue of E-Ditto is helping Mary and me get started on our next Byzantine mystery. I've found that I have a hard time plotting a book out, inventing characters and so on if I attack the chore directly. Staring at a monitor and ordering myself to CREATE just doesn't seem to work. But if I keep the general idea for the book in the back of my mind and occupy myself with some other creative task, ideas seem to pop up of their own accord.
I need a creative diversion, like piecing together a fanzine. Doing legal work all day turns off whatever part of my brain I use for writing anything interesting.
So, you see, I am not wasting time on a fanzine when I should be working. Or at least that's my excuse.
5 QUANDRY #2, September, 1950
Edited by Lee Hoffman
Having used the staples, I figured I'd better read this second issue of a fanzine that went on to become legendary. Since I know very little about fanhistory I read and reacted to this issue much as I would to any zine I downloaded from Bill Burns' eFanzines, even though it came out the year I was born.
My main impression was that at this early stage at least, Quandry resembled the humorous, unpretentious, playful zines I enjoyed in the seventies. The general atmosphere was more important than the actual contents. It was fun rather than art.
Speaking of art, the cover, by Lee, employs a clever design, effective in its simplicity. Inside are many little flourishes and illos. There are two contrasting, full-page stencil drawings, a nicely shaded spaceman by Walt Kessel and an impressively detailed line drawing of a fan reading Quandry in his room, by QAZ. There is also a colophon with penguin by Lee. A pretty good display of different ways one could use a mimeo stencil. It's hard to remember how difficult it used to be to reproduce fanzine art.
Lee's editorial and "After Thots" are strictly traditional in subject matter: publication schedule, repro difficulties, requests for contributions, and apologies for shortcomings. "Hope you'llforgive all the errors that are sprinkled generously throughout the zine. I've got two good excuses for them (1) I can't type and (2) I'M ignorant. That explains that ..."
That's the attitude I like in faneds -- damn the typoes, full speed ahead!
Most of the material runs less than a page. Walt Kessel writes about Savannah Fandom. "As for me," he says, "all I can do is sit back in my old rocking chair and reminiss (hell, you spell it, Hoffman) ((Hah!)) about by gone days." Ha, indeed. I've never
6 managed to learn to spell...uh...that word...
Very short stories by Steffn Samlan and Kirby, with twist endings, might pass for flash fiction on the Internet. The longest piece is another story, "A Martian Oddity" by Stanley Wiedbottom and Joe Kennedy. Having never read the famous story of a similar name I have no idea whether this fanzine piece is just a bit of silliness or a bit of silliness that bears some relationship to Weinbaum's work. It's illustrated with a nice Martian by Warth
The loccol, sad to report, is straight out of an ezine -- two measly letters and a longer third letter that might well be contrived. (I don't know enough about fan personalities of the day to be sure) Like any ezine editor Lee begs for locs.
Quandry 2 might have been much nearer the norm then than it would be now. A zine like this today would almost certainly receive a withering, discouraging, reception. Dreadfully printed, littered with misspelling, the contents mostly short nonsense. Nevertheless, Lee manages to be all over the zine, giving it a light, welcoming, purely-for-the-joy-of-it feeling, something I often don't sense in modern publications. I'm not surprised she attracted readers and went on to greater things. Heck, while she was trying to duplicate the issue at school she had the college president helping her search for a fuse box!
Read Quandry http://fanac.org/fanzines/Quandry/index.html? and other vintage fanzines at Fanac.org http://fanac.org/index.html?
[I hope my use of the cover and illo can be considered "fair use."]
7 TITLE
[This article, in slightly different form, first appeared in Sticky Quarters 4, May 1983, edited by Brian Earl Brown. It's on the web but since this seems to have turned into a faanish issue I figured I'd reprint it, yet again.]
Back in my own "Golden Age," Fandom was simpler. It arrived without fail the first week of each month, stapled between goldenrod covers and postmarked St. Louis. It was called TITLE.
Considering how large Donn Brazier's fanzine loomed in my life for several years, I find it hard to believe that the whole run would fit easily into a smallish cardboard box. The fifty odd issues I received aren't impressive to look at either. Leafing through their inelegant pages, cluttered with fragmentary quotes and bad artwork, the uninitiated might decide that nothing much had happened during Donn's six years of publishing. But Golden Ages never actually happen. They are only remembered. And memory tells me that TITLE managed to be, at the same time, unique and the essence of fannishness.
Not that TITLE was "fannish" in the normally accepted sense. It didn't draw upon the styles and preoccupations of fans who'd gone before, even though plenty of fans who'd gone before were included in the editorial mix. Rather, it drew upon the primordial soup of eofandom - the enthusiasm, naive curiosity, and sense of community - out of which emerged the Tuckers, Willises and Carrs.
Donn had lived Fandom's past, publishing with hecto ribbons and boxes of orange jello back in the forties when Fandom was still being invented. He gafiated before Jophan went in search of "The Enchanted Duplicator" and spent the next quarter century raising a family. When he reemerged, to edit TITLE, he was Director of the St. Louis Museum of Natural History. Whether he kept up with Fandom during his years away, I don't know. He had a way of turning politely cryptic when asked about his personal affairs.
My impression is that when he returned he just took up where he left off, unencumbered by the decades of fan history he'd missed. My first encounter with Donn occurred outside his own pages, when I took exception to something he said in the letter column of
8 a fanzine whose name I've forgotten. I hate to admit it, but I went overboard. Donn's reaction, after my diatribe appeared in print, was typical of him - not a public counterattack, but a private postcard, smoothing the whole thing over.
To Donn, what mattered was communication, not confrontation, and that theme ran through every issue of TITLE, for the first, where readers were asked what three people they would invite to a dinner party, to the last, which presented "The Kindred Spirit Poll," an "attempt to apply the formula for connectivity, p(p-1)-p+1, to the reader/fan circle in an attempt to discover something about the links between fans."
The poll was vintage TITLE. In searching out areas of common interest, it recalled the era when fans were glad enough of each other's company to tolerate mundane differences of opinion which might not go unremarked today. And the somewhat wacky nature of the experiment was a reminder that fans could still look at the world in ways that really were askew.
TITLE's vital statistics are easy to list. Born April 1972. Died April 1978. 73 monthly issues appeared, running around 24 pages in length, with a circulation which ranged from 98 to 150 but hovered for the most part between 115 and 125.
TITLE's contents are much more difficult to describe. While most editors are content with a blue pencil, Donn used scissors. Literally. He chopped letters into trenchant shreds which he routed via a complicated filing system to various departments - Vectors, Hooked, Qwikquotz, Rambling in the SF Patch...To this collection of comment hooks Donn added a few short articles and editorial ramblings. The result, according to which critic you chose to listen to, was "taut and economical" or "amazingly sloppy, incoherent and flaccid." In actuality, it was whatever "Titlers" as Donn's readers called themselves, chose to make of it.
One reader called TITLE a mail order cocktail party and that might be the best description. Donn compiled an intriguing guest list. Top notch fanwriters like Mike Glicksohn and Ed Cagle rubbed shoulders with pros like Gene Wolfe, There were overseas fans - Mae Strelkov, Dave Rowe, Terry Jeeves. Donn kept things lively by including plenty of new fans - I was one - but First Fandom was amply represented both by oldtimers who had remained active in mainstream Fandom - Harry Warner and Bob Tucker - and others, like Claire Beck, who hadn't. Donn's guests ranged in age from 14 year-old C.D. Doyle to 76 year-old Frederick Wertham.
9 Doctor Wertham was famous for his campaign against violent comic books (and, some would say, free expression) in the fifties. It was to Donn's credit, I think, that he published one of the few, if not the only, fanzine in which Dr. Wertham could participate without being reviled. Donn had a soft spot for certifiable oddballs. There was Bill Bliss who invented things in the back of his radio repair shop, and Dero driven Richard Shaver who saw faces, and alien messages, in rocks...grainy photocopied images of which duly appeared in TITLE.
Donn wasn't judgmental. Maybe he figured the mundane world is judgmental enough. Or maybe he just wanted to see how many clashing personalities he could mix together in solution without precipitating anyone.
I prized TITLE's heterogeneity and the good-natured tolerance Donn's readers displayed towards one another - or that they appeared to display when Donn was done with his scissors. I didn't feel entirely at home in some of the bigger, self-proclaimed "focal point" fanzines. I thought they protested their faanishness a bit too much and some of their contributors took Fandom too seriously.
TITLE was a fannish version of James White's sunken Gulf Trader in "The Watch Below" - a closed environment, a zine full of fans which had sunk in 1949. The society that evolved after the sinking bore similarities to the Fandom of the 1970s but was not the same. For instance, TITLE, like Fandom, was rich in myth. But who, outside TITLE, was familiar with the Wilde Pickle mythos? Donn probably had a better perspective on Fandom than most of us. He never seemed to feel the need to prove a point. He was a teacher at heart - he'd hosted a local "Mr. Science" type TV show at one time during his career - and he strove to get his readers excited not about his ideas but about their own.
10 Although TITLE was never what anyone would call a "focal point" fanzine for Fandom as a whole, it was a focal point for its readers. TITLE often finished high in both the FAAN and the Locus polls, despite its low circulation. More importantly, in its six years, TITLE attracted more than 6,000 LOCs, the lifeblood of fanpubbing. Donn regularly received 80 or 90 replies to the 115 copies he mailed out. One issue, mailed to 145 readers, garnered 140 replies. Titlers loved TITLE. Their loyalty to their fanzine must have been one of the most intense Fandom has ever seen.
The philosopher Nietzsche said that we invent those with whom we associate. This is certainly true of faneditors who, by selecting a mailing list, culling LOCS, and choosing certain types of material, shape the sort of responses they receive. Because of its style, frequency, and the terrific volume of mail it generated, this evolutionary process was especially noticeable in TITLE.
Like many fan editors, Donn, I suspect, chose to create an audience resembling himself, willing to discuss topics that interested him and sharing the same turn of mind. Since he was able to print such a small portion of the responses he received, and did so largely within categories of his own invention, it might be said that TITLE was a personalzine written in the selected words of other people.
This may have been, as some pointed out, an egotistical approach, but Donn never chose to invent adversaries to vanquish or acolytes to fawn over him. While discovering what he had in common with his readers, he revealed to them what they had in common with each other.
Donn had a knack for making his readers look good and I, for one, was perfectly delighted with the Brazierized Mayer who appeared in TITLE. Out of college, but jobless, I was going through a distressing period. TITLE seemed to hold the promise that the creativity, curiosity and enthusiasm of childhood, of so little use to me at the employment agency, might yet find some meaningful place in my future.
TITLE was faulted for not publishing fanwriting that will stand the test of time. The criticism was misplaced because TITLE was a live performance. Donn himself advised readers to discard their copies like old newspapers.
Although I could never do that, Donn was right. The fanzines in the box in my basement might have "Title" stenciled on their
11 covers, but the TITLE experience can't be recaptured by reading them any more than a baseball fan's experience of a team's championship season could be recaptured by reading the daily box scores in a pile of yellowed newspapers.
I learned a few things from TITLE. I believe that the highest achievement to which a fanzine can aspire isn't to take Fandom by the scruff of the neck and shake it, but to please its own readers. I think that anyone who decides to participate in Fandom, no matter how fuggheaded they might at first appear, should be presumed to have something to offer and should be treated better than they'd be treated outside our hobby.
Most importantly, I think that the fan who has put his neohood behind has lost what is most important in Fandom. Fandom is a childish affair, a place where we can let down the masks of maturity we're forced to wear as we go about our mundane affairs. Fandom is where we can be at our best rather than our worst.
I don't know what Donn might think of this analysis. It has been more than twenty years now since he gafiated for the second time, and, unlike most fans, he's managed, this time, to stay gafiated. Not surprising. 30 hours of fanediting a week for 6 years is pretty much a lifetime's worth of fanediting.
He would probably wonder how I came to invent this Brazier character and his remarkable fanzine. Donn's own explanation for TITLE's success was simple. Egoboo. Fans love to see their names and print. And nobody printed more names, more often. Still, TITLE remains my Golden Age. And though the magic may have fled the aging pages in the basement, it has not left my life entirely. After all, I first met my wife, Mary, through the bits of her letters Donn selected for TITLE.
d
On eBay I ran across TITLE #43 OCTOBER 1975 on sale for $9.99. (It didn't sell) The cover was by Bruce Townley and the contributers are listed as follows: Steve McDonald, Eldon Everett, Terry Jeeves, Will Norris, Irene Kahn, Roy Tackett, Jeff Hecht, Gary Grady, Brett Cox, Jim Meadows, Sheryl Birkhead, Paul·Walker,
12 Simon Agree, Stuart Gilson, Harry Warner, John Robinson, Marci Helms, Dee Doyle, Neal Wilgus, Dave Rowe, Malcolm Graham, Dan Dias, Mike Bracken, Buck Coulson, Ned Brooks, Eric Lindsay, Paul Skelton, Denis Quane, Ben Indick, Larry Downes, John Carl, Jane Fisher, Paul di Filippo, Stephen Dorneman, Jim Meadows, Craig Hill, John W. Andrews.
What a collection! It is hard to believe I ever missed an issue once I began loccing every month, nor is Mary listed. But you can see the wide range of participants.
This is where the readers get to croak. Some of the best stuff I've printed has been in the loccol, but isn't that the way it should be? Editorial comments are in red.
DAVE BURTON Your comments about filling out a time sheet hit home with me. My last art production job required that I account for the time I'd spent on each project. Invariably the last hour or so of each Friday saw me diddling with my time sheet, making various adjustments. We had two salesmen who were responsible for building the art department time into their quotes. One of them pretty well knew how much time something should take, and if he didn't he'd come in and ask us. The other (who happened to be the boss's brother-in-law) didn't have the faintest idea and seemed to pick a figure off the top of his head. Depending on how much the latter had pissed me off during the week, his jobs would come in various amounts over budget, while the former's always seemed
13 to come in as planned or even under budget. I always enjoyed that last hour of the week though, as my chance to get even with the idiot.
Ha! Time sheets do allow endless opportunities for innocent amusement.
Your encounter with the skunk reminded me of a description I recently read somewhere, along the lines of "That smelled like a skunk pulled from the ass of another skunk."
That simile stinks.
BRAD FOSTER Sorry to hear of all the computer problems. We've had a low-level irritant with ours for going on two years now. Sometimes it can take three, four or eight re-tries to initially boot up in the morning. Then it will shut down for no reason at random moments. I've kept a log of it all, but there is no rhyme or reason behind when it does any of this. And sometimes it'll work fine for a day or two- even had a week long stretch that was trouble free. A couple of times it's locked up totally, and that's the phone call to the computer-expert friend who, oddly enough, will still take my calls, and then talk me through trying to get it back up. So far, he has been successful with each new problem. Still, it's just taught me to constantly backup files as I work in both words and graphics.
Weird. (But then everything about computer is always weird to me...) My last computer kept taking longer and longer to boot and finally the power supply conked out. The computer I'm using now also requires multiple boot-ups to start, but less when it is hot overnight. During the winter it would take five tries to boot, during the hottest days of the summer it goes on first time. Maybe I ought to put a hot water bottle on it overnight.
"Magic Numbers". When we make a sale at one of the art festivals and I have to make change, I always tell the customer that I'll have to stop talking now and concentrate to get this right. I can do that old arithmetic thing, but math is beyond me! My favorite number is anything with a 7 in it, as when writing, it's always fun to make a flourish and pull that body down long below the line of the other numbers and letters.
I love it. Only an artist would think of a number in terms of what it looks like and its design possibilities rather than for its
14 computational value.
Regarding Taral's look at Disney's vision of "the city of tomorrow", Cindy and I actually stopped in to check out Celebration when we hit Disney World and the other parks there years ago. We could both sum it up in one word- boring. Nothing at all like we might have expected from all those Disney movies, or the theme parks themselves, full of gingerbread and visual zappers. It was boring, boring boring. Hugely disappointing.
I have never visited any theme parks, including Disney ones, and probably never will. When I think of them I think of crowds and long lines.
Your review of Jim Thompson's "The Killer Inside Me" made me think of another novel, "Blackburn" by Bradley Denton. Have you ever read that one?
No but it sounds interesting if it is anything like Thompson.
DAVE LOCKE Wrestling. Not one of my likes, though I know some fans are into it. Personally I'd rather watch a 30th rerun of an episode of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. I actually tried wrestling in gym when I was in high school, but for some reason I found it objectionable to discover guys occasionally sitting on my face. Must be a personal prejudice.
Frankly the holds which involved reaching between the opponent's legs creeped me out.
Now, boxing, that's another matter. And I tried that in high school, too, with better results but unfortunately nothing to talk about. When I was in Cincinnati, at roughly the time Mike Tyson came along I found that folks like Mike Resnick and Steve Leigh were also boxing fans. Even neater than that, Mike would invite us over for a pay-TV match and a refrigerator filled with good beer. But I mentioned this was in Tyson's early days, so of course we could barely get a beer can opened before Tyson had knocked out his opponent. Not deterred, we'd sit around and drink beer and yak. You can see the consolatory joy in that.
At one point I was scrounging ice out of the freezer section of the fridge (for someone who wasn't drinking the beer; probably Mike's wife Carol), when I noticed that he had a dead cat in there. Even under a circumstance where Mike and Carol ran a large kennel,
15 that seemed a little odd. "Mike," I asked, "do you know there's a dead cat in your freezer? Do you play Russian Roulette when there's a "what's for dinner?" moment?" Turns out the cat had died while the owner was on vacation, and it was what he thought to do with it until he could ask the owner what he wanted done.
Good thing Tyson wasn't actually there, he might have helped himself to one of the cat's ears.
At the last, or near the last, Midwestcon I attended I recall Mike coming up to me and exclaiming how glad he was to see me. There was no one else he'd encountered who he knew was a boxing fan, he explained, and had I seen the recent match between X and Y? Well, yes, I had, and then everyone around us disappeared quietly while we talked about it...
I followed boxing from the Clay/Ali era to the early Tyson days. I realize that a sport where two guys try to beat each other's brains out is bestial and odious, but it is also exciting. You could never be absolutely sure what would happen from one punch to the next and there was a lot of strategy involved. Consider Ali's "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," or "his rope-a-dope." Or Chuck Wepner whose strategy was to bleed. Or Duane Bobick whose strategy was to be white.
Timecards and accounting for time on projects reminds me of when I claimed significant time just for filling out a damned project timesheet. There were folks at that company who were unhappy with Dave for doing such a thing, but I'd kept all the backup sheets and could easily prove that what I'd claimed on the submitted coversheet had to be at least reasonable. Naturally this didn't satisfy the higher ups, so I asked if they wanted an honest report or wanted me to charge this time to some particular project or just simply fudge the report like the other middle managers were doing. A light dawned on them and they wandered away. I'm such a troublemaker. Well, you know that.
Funny how the corporate suits always get mad when you point out to them the logical consequences of their ridiculous inventions.
I'm not at all into baseball.
Please tell me you're joking!!
Golf is just as dull to me,
16 Okay, you're forgiven for the baseball crack. but at least it has nicer scenery... As a very young lad (hey, stop that; I did too used to be one!) I briefly used to play catcher. I'd squat there with my legs spread apart and listen to some asshole holler "strike two!". Finally I decided that, no, I didn't want the pitcher to strike two. They threw me off the team when I began throwing the ball over the fence instead of back to the pitcher.
With an arm like that you should've been in center field.
John Purcell tells you "Coffee is a great motivator. It definitely helps snap me awake in the morning." Fan and superSMOF Deb Geisler once disclosed: "Coffee is my only friend. It is warm and sweet and wakes me up without talking to me." Ted Sturgeon, of course, theorized that "The first cup of coffee recapitulates phylogeny", which for some reason I considered a seminal observation. And Dave Barry once revealed that he likes "a hearty breakfast of coffee with extra coffee." Definitely these are unqualified endorsements. It made me happy, too, that the latest scientific observations are that coffee is actually good for you, though whether it's good or bad does seem to flip-flop every few years. Those fickle scientists.
We'd better drink as much coffee as possible while it's still good for us.
Oh Jeebus, the draft physical. Thank you so very much for reminding me of the first one I went to. Alright, one story. There were too many of us and too few of them, so it appeared obvious that they couldn't possibly administer all the tests to all of us and get us out of there that same day. So they started skipping tests on some of us. I guess there wasn't much need for them to be very clever about these shortcuts they were taking, as which of us youngies dared to say anything about it?
Well, unfortunately I did. After being passed over on two or three examinations I took a look at the medical paper that I was carrying to see just what was being put down there. One of the more interesting items was the notation "Teeth - OK". I stepped out of line, in more ways than one, and hailed down an official- looking person. He stepped over to me and I pointed out this notation to him.
"What's the matter, son, don't you think your teeth are all right?" I took them out and held them in the palm of my hand. "What do
17 you think?" I asked. I damn near got drafted right on the spot, discovering at this point that the services have no sense of humor.
And that was one of the more pleasant episodes from that particular draft physical. I'll spare you from the others.
That's a fantastic anecdote. I figure one of the doctors at my physical must have had a sense of humor. I've always been skin and bones and for the physical I weighed in at my usual 114 pounds (height 5'11"). After I had failed due to having virtually no muscles or sight, the doctor took me into his private office and lectured me on the health dangers of starving myself to avoid the army. It struck me as pretty funny that he should be so solicitous about my health when he was looking to send me over to Vietnam to get blown to smithereens, or picked off by sharpshooters or impaled on poisoned spikes.
Wildlife, eh? Again, as a kid (I can remember all this stuff from my youth, only encountering difficulty when I attempt remembering such things as what I had for dinner last night), I was wandering around the woods on my parent's property in Indian Lake, New York, and spotted a beautiful white flower showing through a high pile of brush. Being a kid, I went over to touch it. Turned out to be a deer's tail, and for my efforts I was kicked in the chest and sent ass over teakettle. After a short bit of rest and recuperation and checking to ensure I still had an intact chest, I figured that was probably enough adventure for the day.
You were lucky. A couple times out orienteering I wandered into the middle of ten or fifteen deer. When they're shuffling their hooves, nostrils are flaring, and they're giving you the beady eye from a foot away those Bambies look big and dangerous.
Still sticking with early years is the story of the nighttime my father pumped a ton of rifle fire into a skunk through my bedroom window and yet failed to wake me up. However, the last rifle bullet was probably the one which hit the sac. That did wake me up. Then the two of us buried the skunk, which was as fun an exercise as you might imagine. In the morning the school bus began to slow down in front of our country house while opening its doors, which promptly were closed while the bus drove perhaps a half-mile up the road before reopening the doors.
Phew. And how long before they threw you off the bus after you'd been burying that skunk?
18 Taral had a good arkle. He ought to read Carl Hiaasen's book "Team Rodent (How Disney devours the world)", just for the sheer fun of it. Carl and Taral show much mutual love for things Disneyish, obviously. I know, from extensive reading of Carl's books and columns, that the Disney group hates him with a passion. For some reason, you may have noticed, large companies tend to be unhappy with silly things like truth. Well, who can blame them, besides everyone who isn't paid to think otherwise?
Like Republicans?
Andy Reiss's cartoon makes me laugh every time I see it, and of course I first saw it when Steve Stiles put Andy's cartoons up on Trufen for fen to laugh at and fanpubbers to drool over and lay claim to. How dare Andy make fun of Republicans? Life is so unfair.
I love Andy's cartoons, both the political ones and the surreal ones.
Our high-school coach was a much nicer guy than your "Ox" coach. Although, as he and his wife were the chaperones on our senior class trip from Indian Lake, NY to NYC and then to Washington D.C., I must admit that their habit of calling each other Mommy and Daddy did begin to make us all twitch after a while. I was never 'into' running or jogging but, short legs and all, I was the fastest short-distance runner our school produced. What? Yes, it was a very small country school. Long distance, even dogs
19 with broken legs and turtles with gout could have passed me by. I think. Most of the other kids did. As for jogging, I tried it once but it made my beer foam up and caused the cigarette ashes to blow back in my face, so I gave it up.
That's a great line. I once did a race put on by the Rochester CATS club which boasted a lot of hard core runners. I stood around talking to a young guy who smoked the whole time before the race. He tossed his cigarette down on his way to the starting line, then sprinted right out of my sight when the gun went off. After the race there were bagels and cold beer.
You state: "My back spasms were, indeed, an unforgettable experience, but then so was my first marriage." Try three of them. One died in my apartment and the other two divorced me. Actually, I was never married to Jackie who passed away, and lived with her for 22+ years which was longer than the two state- sanctioned marriages added together. Obviously I wasn't a quick learner on this.
I refuse, as you phrase it, "to let a zine follow its own path". I must attempt to whelp order into a pack of yelping possibilities. Okay, okay, it depends on how much material comes in. Geez.
I've had a lot of material come in for a perszine. Wonder what would happen if it were a genzine?
Jack Finney was one of my favorites, as anyone might guess from his having written a novel called TIME AND AGAIN. You've got a good review there of THE BODY SNATCHERS. The book, not the various movie renditions, a few of which were fine while the original movie rendition rose far above that (from '56, a year after the novel). Kevin McCarthy's line "Listen to me! Please listen! If you don't, if you won't, if you fail to understand, then the same incredible terror that's menacing me WILL STRIKE AT YOU!" which, I know, sounds like it could even be used when describing some pieces of fanwriting.
Like those KTF reviews from the seventies.
Ah, a review of a John D. MacDonald novel. This may be unconventional thinking, but I've often considered that we should bring him back from the dead to write more for us, or at least to prove that we actually could do it. I'm a long-time JDM fan, having read all of his novels except for the single one which I
20 just couldn't get through, and in the 70s I happily read and contributed to Len & June Moffatt's zine THE JDM BIBLIOPHILE. Was that the first mystery fanzine? Hell, I don't know. June Moffatt could probably tell us.
I asked and June replied...
JUNE MOFFATT As I recall it, Len and I started The JDM Bibliophile in 1965. The first issue was a listing of JDM's books that he had sent to Ron Ellik, and Ron passed on to us. As a joke, we called it "The JDM Bibliophile No. 1".(It was a dittoed one-sheet.)
We didn't expect the response we got, but we pubbed a second issue with an article by Ed Cox, and sent this one to The Great Man Himself. He replied that he was "non-founded and dumb- plussed". He assumed that we wanted to track down ALL his stories, and thus was the JDM Master Checklist born. I think we put out 20 or 21 issues of the JDM Bibliophile before we ran out of steam, and it was then taken over by the University of South Florida. I'd have to do some research (and digging) to find the exact names and addresses. Walter and Jean Shine pubbed a second, more complete edition of the JDM Master Checklist, which may still be in print.
Thanks for the interesting information. Although I'm a big JDM fan, and have embarked on a project to reread all the Travis McGee books in order, I somehow missed the JDM Bibliophile. The only mystery oriented zines I ran across were Ethely Lindsey's Scottishe and a zine from, if I recall, Dave Gorman where he always had a list of mystery books for sale.
NED BROOKS I remember that GROGGY cover! At the nadir of the TQM era at NASA, management actually tried to get engineers to keep a log of how they spent their time. Most refused, a few tried it and lied. I pointed out that an honest effort would lead to a psychotic spiral into records of record-keeping.
"Your purple text is too dark to be authentically dittoish or hectoish. But I have no idea what you compose in or how text color is selected. When I used to code HTML, I remember that the hexadecimal codes gave very good color control, but I haven't tried it since."
You're right about the poor color match. After going cross-eyed
21 trying to match the colors I was seeing in scans of ditto zines I finally threw up my hands and simply used the default purple provided by Open Office Writer that looked closest -- magenta. Here's some scanned ditto from Groggy 5.
Magenta 4, in an old font looks like abetter match but isn't readable.
In the cleaner, typewriter style I use, it certainly looks closer to the original. But I don't think it is dark enough to work for a whole e-zine?
Agonizing over repro problems has always been one of the joys of publishing a fanzine. Maybe we should just think of E-Ditto as a metaphor rather than a simulation.
Lloyd Penney Another E-Ditto has arrived, and I am trying to get as many letters of comment done before we head down to Reno, Nevada for this year’s Worldcon. E-Ditto 11 is next up.
Hope you have a good time. I've never been to a Worldcon, although I was once to the US Orienteering Federation Convention which is kind of that sport's equivalent to the Worldcon. Oddly, it was in Canada!
We have registry problems every so often, and we have software to clean it regularly, but the more complex the object, the more likely something within it will break down. I think in September, we will have to take the computer in for a good cleaning, and some maintenance. Outlook can be very slow, refreshes between programmes or pages is slow, too. Who knows what it could be?
It seems to have gotten impossible to avoid computer problems. I have stayed away from Outlook though.
Important numbers…I remember when I was a kid, it was 22 and 38, for the two paper routes I had. Long after I gave the routes up, I would see those numbers in combination with each other. It would have been nice to say that those were a little charmed, but it was the fact that I was looking for them, and I could find them everywhere.
22 Hey, you've got a 38 too! What are the chances? From 22 and 38 I'd have guessed you were a gun lover.
We’ve got the same wildlife you’ve got…groundhogs, skunks, squirrels, chipmunks, but because we’re further north, we do get some larger wildlife wandering down into the city. Over the years, we’ve had bears, deer, moose and even a cougar here and there. It doesn’t happen very often, but it gets on the news when it does. You’ve probably read about me having a skunk on my lap when the family was getting ready to head west…tame skunks are rare, too. They’re big, inquisitive kittens.
When I was growing up a friend's older brother had a pet skunk. I was very young and don't recall much about it except it used to ride on his shoulder.
I don’t drink too much coffee, I think, but I know I do drink far too much diet cola and other caffeinated soft drinks. There are times when I think pure liquid caffeine couldn’t keep me awake. Yvonne and I usually keep our coffee consumption to the weekend where we can make a batch just for ourselves. I plan to hit several used bookstores after we return from Reno, depending on whether we’ve got the money. Still job hunting, still networking, still nothing. I have to keep looking, or we may have to disappear entirely over the next few months in order to have the money to simply live.
Mary and I are, I think, immune to caffeine. Or something. We still crave it but it doesn't help. (Do I mean immune or addicted?) I sure hope the job hunt turns something up. Nothing worse than hunting for a job. Particularly since actual ability to do the job never appears to figure in employers' calculations.
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ENDITTO I know, I know. Twelve issues of E-Ditto in seven months....that's too many! So blame Dave Locke, and Taral, and Brad Foster, Andy Reiss, Dave Burton, Ned Brooks, Lloyd Penney, June Moffatt. For each new issue I start a template and I add material as it turns up or I write it and once it looks like enough I finish the zine up
23 and send it to Bill Burns at eFanzines. So blame Bill too. Alicia Souza, don't blame, I grabbed her cool free fonts off the web.
My cover and illo are some more old scanned hecto work in case you couldn't guess. Maybe I should quit while you still remember the stuff as being good.
I don't generally aim for theme issues but this E-Ditto turned into a faanish one. (I guess you could consider Harold Camping a fugghead). What the next issue will be about or when it will appear I'm not sure, except it won't be later than sometime in September.
Eric Mayer [email protected]
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