Yet more ICFA photos

Here are some photos I took on the final night of this year's International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. (This is the fifth post in a series of six.)Elizabeth Hand and John Kessel.Brett Cox and Jeanne Beckwith.Daina Chaviano, Ted Chiang and Nalo Hopkinson.David Lunde and Patricia McKillip.Judith Clute and Ellen Datlow.Bill Clemente, Donald Morse and Ellen Klages.

Sydney at ICFA

The most photogenic person at this year's International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts -- as every year -- was, of course, Sydney. (This is the fourth post in a series of six of my photos from the last night of this year's ICFA.)Sydney and Jim Casey.Sydney and Rick Wilber.Sydney with Jeanne Beckwith, Ellen Datlow, John Kessel and Brett Cox.Sydney admires Margaret McBride's pin.Sydney with Jacob Weisman and John Kessel.

Still more ICFA photos

Here are some photos I took on the final night of this year's International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. (This is the third post in a series of six.)Stefan Hall scares Marc Petersen.Elizabeth Hartwell tries to tow dad David back to the room to change before someone takes his picture.Edward James poses for Patrick O'Leary's cell-phone camera.John Clute reacts to my saying, "John, you're just like Brian Aldiss!" -- by which I meant, they both tend to turn their heads and open their mouths just before the flash goes off.Stacie Hanes is rightly skeptical.Alex Irvine and Lindsay Kaplan put their heads together.

More ICFA photos

Here are some photos I took on the final night of this year's International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. (This is the second post in a series of six.)Gay Haldeman shows Rusty Hevelin no respect.Ted Chiang explains all, but Daina Chaviano is distracted.Brian Aldiss implores passers-by to take a photo of him and Amelia Beamer.Gay Haldeman and Gary Wolfe flash the crowd.

ICFA photos

Here are some of the photos I took on the final night of this year's International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. (This is the first post in a series of six.)Jeanne Beckwith beams.Joseph Berlant, chair of the 2007 World Fantasy Convention, shows that power has gone to his head.Charles Brown beats me for not being Sydney.Brian Aldiss is haunted by Bernie Goodman.Stanford University student Natty Bokenkamp, winner of this year's Dell Magazines Award for undergraduate science fiction and fantasy writing, with his editor, Sheila Williams.Peter Halasz tells Brian Aldiss how things are done in Canada.

Lovecraft Land

As if the Library of America edition of his stories weren't proof enough of the mainstreaming of H.P. Lovecraft, now The Associated Press is pitching his old haunts in Providence, R.I., to tourists: "Visitors can stroll the same streets where Lovecraft imagined stories about dormant gods returning to torment or annihilate mankind."

In his 1995 guest-scholar speech at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, children's-literature expert Peter Hunt deplored the fact that great swaths of his English homeland had been taken over by promoters of literary tourism -- so that what once was the Lake District had become Wordsworth World, Oxford had become Alice-ville, and so forth. What would the civic boosters of Providence, I wonder, think of their town becoming known mainly as Lovecraft Land?

A.E.P. Wall

The humane and cantankerous spirit of the late Harry Golden, publisher of The Carolina Israelite, is alive in the Orlando Sentinel columns of 82-year-old A.E.P. Wall, collected on his website.

Of wit, an iota / In Minnesiota

Poetry lovers, please take a moment to read the text of the latest bill in Minnesota that would create a state poet laureate. (Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, vetoed a similar bill in 2005, saying the state didn't need "a state mime, interpretive dancer or potter" either.)

The Loft Literary Center offers good background on the bill, while posters to the Walker Art Center blog already are deliberating whether the bill would mandate rhymes or allow the writing of free verse as an implied power.

Another can

After reading my earlier post about the marvelous claim that WD-40 "Solves All Your Problems," my mother-in-law, Fran Bowling, told Sydney: "I'll have to get another can, because this one isn't working yet."

She also reported that Sydney's Uncle Pat Sartin used to put WD-40 on his knee. This reminded me that in the 1980s, when I wrote a News & Record feature story on folk remedies, we illustrated it with a staged photo of a Wilford Brimley-looking old-timer spraying WD-40 on his elbow.

For other claimed uses of WD-40, see this article at the invaluable Snopes.com.

Patrick's ICFA photos

Henri Cartier-Bresson, who viewed his impromptu photographs as "instant drawings," would have loved Patrick O'Leary's cell-phone photos. Patrick already has posted his photos from this past weekend's International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Patrick's photos record a happy evening Sydney and I spent with Patrick, Brett Cox and Jeanne Beckwith along the surf at Lloyd Beach State Park and then on the nearby Dania Fishing Pier.

Sydney and I enjoyed the pier so much that the next night, we returned with Brett, Jeanne and Ellen Klages and had a good meal at the Beach Watch restaurant.

Thanks to ICFA, I've been coming to Fort Lauderdale each March since 1995, so I know the area pretty well by now. Next year, ICFA moves from Fort Lauderdale to Orlando, so we'll have to find some new haunts.

Vox populi

My hero Buddy Moore writes:

Andy, I was reading your blog (and enjoying it), and showed a friend of mine the photo of the gal with the "no one cares about your blog" t-shirt.

He noted the irony of her having won a Voice of Democracy award while advertising her disdain for free speech!

Ha! I hadn't thought of that. One could argue, of course, that democracy means the right not only to say whatever you please, but to ignore whatever you please.

Our latest snow

Sydney took this photo of our front yard this afternoon, from the warmth of the foyer. (That's not an orb, but the reflection of the flash on the glass door.) Mr. Bobby Drees, who came by to shovel our driveway and walk, told us that Frostburg got 11 inches total before the flakes stopped falling, and Mr. Drees ought to know.

Whenever it snows here -- and it snows here early and often, the first snowfall of the winter having been Oct. 24 -- I think of how I warned my hero and fellow Southerner Brett Cox, when he announced a move from L.A. (Lower Alabama) to Vermont, against the dangers of shoveling snow. "Shoveling snow killed Kornbluth," I told him. Sydney rightly points out that it's in no danger of killing me, as seldom as I pick up a shovel.

Arlo

On Saturday, Feb. 17, Sydney, Lily and I drove north to the Animal Angels no-kill shelter in Mount Pleasant, Pa., and -- after he met with Lily's approval -- brought home our latest member of the household, a terrier mix. About a half-hour after we made his acquaintance, as we were pulling into a Burger King, Sydney decided that his name probably was Arlo, and she turned out to be right. He even answers to it, now.

Lily's a bit jealous, but mostly they get along fine, and they even share the living-room sofa much of the afternoon, doing their best to sleep despite the paparazzi.

So that's all right then

Since New Year's, in three separate cases, three schoolteachers in Howard County, Md., have been arrested on sex charges involving their high-school students. In response, the county school superintendent -- clearly a believer in the power of PowerPoint presentations, clearly defined meeting agendas, and stapled handouts to solve any problem -- vows that from now on, part of the orientation process for new teachers will include instruction on "how you maintain the appropriate distance between you and your students." So that's all right then, as Private Eye would say.

Marist Summer Writing Institute

I'm to be one of the instructors at this year's Summer Writing Institute at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Michael Ondaatje is the keynote speaker. I'm teaching the non-fiction track, thanks largely to Alabama Curiosities, and I look forward to it. The dates are July 31 to Aug. 3, and July 1 is the application deadline, so please help spread the word.

My photo on the faculty page is the one Jeanne Beckwith snapped of me years ago, one DeepSouthCon weekend, at the "Storyteller" fountain in Five Points in Birmingham, Ala.

Wizards cover

John Jude Palencar's cover for Wizards is up at Amazon. Click on the image to see a larger version.

I also learn from Amazon that the anthology's subtitle is Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy. I don't know about my being a master of modern fantasy, but I am pleased to have a story in this book, alongside a lot of my heroes. The Berkley hardcover is out May 1.

B&B Country Meats

Allow me to put in a plug for B&B Country Meats in the Wrights Crossing neighborhood of Frostburg, Md., where I stock up once a week on that marvelous local delicacy, Engle's Bologna.I am told that Engle's Bologna originated on the Engle farm just west of town. It tastes more like salami than bologna. It seems a shame to hide the taste by putting it on a sandwich with mustard and cheese; I eat it thick-sliced on Triscuits. In season, you can get deer bologna at B&B, too.B&B Country Meats is on Route 936, a.k.a. Upper Georges Creek Road, at the foot of Welsh Hill. From I-68, take the Route 36 exit toward town, then the first left onto Cherry Lane, then turn right at the stop sign.

A rainbow cloud

Sydney spotted this rainbow cloud over our house at midday on Feb. 11. I was able to capture two shots of it before it vanished. These two photos were taken nine seconds apart, at 11:42 a.m. Eastern.
By 11:44, the rainbow effect had all but disappeared.

Was our rainbow cloud a circumhorizontal arc, sometimes called the rarest sky phenomenon in nature? (See this National Geographic item.) I'm glad we saw it, whatever it was.

The governor's Gormenghastly green bag

I was mystified to read of Gov. Martin O'Malley's 145 "green bag" appointments to various boards and commissions, but lo, such appointments in Maryland actually are taken to the state Senate in a green bag! Here's the history, courtesy of the Maryland State Archives, official custodians of the green bag.

Like many "historical" and "traditional" customs, this one seems to have been invented within living memory. No one is sure there was an actual green bag before 1951, and the current one dates from 1983, when I was an undergraduate.

I am reminded of the equally useful customs enforced by Sourdust and Barquentine, the father-and-son Masters of Ritual in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast.

Baby Face

Thanks to Netflix and the Turner Classic Movies Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1, we just saw the pre-release, no-holds barred version of Baby Face (1933), with the terrific Barbara Stanwyck as a woman on the make, armed only with her body and a secondhand volume of Nietzsche.

The first half is astonishing, a revelation, basically a series of sex scenes with ever-higher-status men, placed floor by floor up a phallic Art Deco skyscraper. The least interesting of Stanwyck's conquests is played by the 26-year-old John Wayne, then only beginning to make a name for himself in low-budget Westerns. Stanwyck herself was the same age as Wayne, but in their brief scenes together, you sure couldn't tell!

Stanwyck has one quickie in a boxcar, another in a ladies' room. She denounces her brutish (and possibly incestuous) dad for pimping her out from the time she was 14. Upon discovering the bodies of two of the men she's destroyed, Stanwyck's look of satisfied appraisal, on which the camera lingers, is colder even than anything she gave Billy Wilder's camera in Double Indemnity, 11 years later.

The second half of the movie, alas, is downright dull, as Stanwyck's character has an inexplicable change of heart thanks to the never-very-interesting George Brent, the 1926 hit "Baby Face" is played about six times too many (minus the Al Jolson vocals), and a sorta-conventional "happy ending" is trundled in like creaking scenery. But that first half, everything pre-Paris, is something! I was reminded of Nicole Kidman's character in To Die For, or Myrna Loy as the daughter of Fu Manchu.

Alfred E. Green directed Baby Face, but I suspect what credit doesn't go to Stanwyck goes to Kathryn Scola, who co-wrote the screenplay. She specialized, for a time, in tough and sometimes scandalous dames; her other early-1930s credits include The Lady Who Dared, Wicked, Midnight Mary, Lilly Turner, Female and Night After Night -- which was Mae West's movie debut, in a supporting role.

I thought of Baby Face this morning, when I read in Ellen Goodman's column that Anna Nicole Smith "made a name for herself the old-fashioned way, using the only thing she had." Smith was one down on Stanwyck's character; she didn't even have Nietzsche.

Quotes in the news

"You do not want a varmint up in the wiring areas and what-have-you on an airplane."
-- American Airlines spokesman John Hotard, on the stowaway Eastern gray squirrel that forced a trans-Pacific flight to make an unscheduled landing in Honolulu.

"People who celebrate Valentine's Day should be pelted with shoes!"
-- Chanted by Hindu fundamentalists during their annual Feb. 14 protest in India.

"Uh, I, I can only tell you what people on the ground -- It's hard for me, you know, living in this beautiful White House, to give you an assessment, a firsthand assessment."
-- President Bush at his Feb. 14 press conference, in response to ABC's Martha Raddatz, who asked him of Iraq, "Do you believe it's a civil war, sir?"

A coal statistic

According to the cutline beneath this front-page photo in the Cumberland Times-News, a single high school in Cumberland, Md., burns about 700 tons of coal a year.

According to the "Coal Train" chapter of John McPhee's latest book, Uncommon Carriers, a typical rail car holds 115 tons of coal.

That means Allegany High School requires a bit more than six rail cars full of coal per year to keep the pipes (and kids) from freezing. Let's pull a seventh car onto that (imaginary) siding behind the boiler room, in case of a hard winter.

Keep that once-a-year seven-car coal train for a single building in mind, the next time you hear coal touted as America's energy salvation.

Gravita-tas

I enjoy reading the daily celebrity-birthday roundup in the Cumberland Times-News, and Saturday's prompted an interesting breakfast-table discussion: Who is the more talented actor, Jim Brown (age 71) or Denise Richards (age 36)? My opinion, which I unwisely expressed to Sydney, was, "Jim Brown clearly has the edge in gravitas, but Denise Richards clearly has the edge in ta-tas." This will haunt me for some time, I'm sure.

Among my faithful readers ...

... I am pleased to hear from Donovan S. Brain. The quote at the bottom of his/its blog is worth the click.

Fuzz bunnies

Phil "Dr. Phil" Kaldon writes:

Were you in Greensboro during the era of the famous Greensboro police department "fuzz bunnies"? They actually made a national ad for the relevant company, Dr. Phil writes coyly. (smirk)

Given your smirk, Phil, I sense another conversation coming on that I will have to distance myself from, but nevertheless -- Tell me about the Greensboro, N.C., "fuzz bunnies." I'm clueless.

A harsh truth

I'm sure the T-shirt worn in this photo by Megan Hott, winner of a high-school Voice of Democracy contest in Keyser, W.Va., speaks for millions.

And such a bargain

Little did I know, when I bought a Handy Can of WD-40, just how handy it was! Look at the grand claim on the back.Shoot, we ought to send cases of it to the White House, to Capitol Hill, to the Pentagon ...

The Southern model

The Taliban say they will open private schools in defiance of their nation's government. That sounds familiar.

In the lucky third

I read in today's paper that in any given year, only a third of the Earth gets any snow. We definitely now live in the lucky third.

Attentive readers will be able to guess where this snowball wound up.

The long road of George Jones

"I would have played for nothing as long as somebody would have fed me."

Sydney's faculty page

I haven't decided what to charge her for the photos.

The Assemblies of Yahweh

Also on my Sunday drive, I passed radio station WMLK in Pethel, Pa., which caught my eye because I wondered whether the call letters stood for Martin Luther King. But no; the billboard said this was the broadcasting arm of the Assemblies of Yahweh, which I looked up when I got home.

Based in Bethel, Pa., this is the largest church in the Sacred Name Movement, a Depression-era outgrowth of the Adventist movement that asserts the authority of the Old Testament, the observance of Jewish festivals and -- you guessed it -- the correct name of the divine. At the Assemblies of Yahweh website, the Statement of Doctrine reads, in part:

We affirm that it is necessary and most important to our salvation that we accept the revealed, personal Name of our Heavenly Father YAHWEH and the Name of His Son, our Savior YAHSHUA the MESSIAH. We affirm also that the most accurate transliteration of these Names from the Hebrew into the English is by the spellings employed above, Exodus 3:14-15; Psalm 68:4; Psalm 83:18; Isaiah 42:8; Isaiah 52:6; Acts 4:12.

The Assemblies of Yahweh was founded in 1969 by Jacob O. Meyer, who was fed up with the other Sacred Name churches; since then, other Sacred Name churches have been created by folks fed up with the Assemblies of Yahweh. Such is the story of Protestantism.

Roadside America

While driving through Shartlesville, Pa., yesterday, intent on getting home before night and snow fell, I passed Roadside America. Next time through, I'll do my best to stop at this venerable attraction, a 6,000-square-foot miniature village that was the life's work of self-taught artist Laurence Gieringer. Here's the writeup at the invaluable (if unrelated) Roadside America website.

For a very different miniature-village experience, I recommend my hero Jeffrey Ford's excellent novella "Botch Town," in his excellent collection The Empire of Ice Cream.

1 a.m. Feb. 3, 1959, 5 miles northwest of Mason City, Iowa

That's the time, date and place of the Beechcraft Bonanza crash that killed rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, as well as 21-year-old pilot Roger Peterson.

Now Richardson's son Jay, who does tribute shows as "The Big Bopper Jr.," is having his dad's body examined by forensic anthropologist Bill Bass, founder of the University of Tennessee's "Body Farm." The younger Richardson says he hopes to put some longstanding rumors and doubts to rest.

With all due respect to a son who lost his father -- one whose grief is made even more complex by the fact that he wasn't born until after his father died -- it's hard to imagine what more there is to know, after all these years. The Sept. 15, 1959, Civil Aeronautics Board report on the crash concluded, on ample evidence, that the disoriented pilot, flying only on unfamiliar instruments, simply flew the plane into the ground.

In the decades since, conspiracy theorists have made much of the fact that Holly carried his handgun aboard the plane, saying he might have shot the pilot by accident while horsing around, leaving a bullet wound that the local coroner might have overlooked when presented with an obvious plane-crash victim. No evidence whatsoever supports this theory, which moreover contradicts all the evidence of Holly's previous behavior that evening, and on the bus earlier on the tour. Far more likely to assume that Holly boarded the plane and immediately tried to get some sleep.

The younger Richardson says he's also intrigued by the fact that his father's body was found 40 feet from the plane to the northwest (in an adjoining cornfield, actually), while Holly's body and Valens' body were found 17 feet from the plane to the south and southwest. (The full coroner's report is here.) He wonders whether his dad crawled free of the crash. But the plane hit the ground at full speed and tumbled until it came to rest against a barbed-wire fence, and investigators found that most of the seat belts had broken; surely that's explanation enough for the scattering of the bodies.

Sometimes -- indeed, most of the time -- accidents just happen. Even if the victims are famous.

From the Land of Pleasant Living

This Baltimore Examiner article about the city's beer-brewing heritage introduced me to National Bohemian, a.k.a. Natty Boh, for generations the city's favorite home brew. Its irresistible slogan: "From the Land of Pleasant Living." The beer's mascot, Mr. Boh, looks like a German-American saloonkeeper circa 1885, the year the beer first appeared. He has a handlebar mustache and a single visible eye -- is he winking, perhaps, or did he break up one saloon brawl too many?

Natty Boh is no longer a home brew, alas; it's now brewed in North Carolina and shipped by Pabst to the die-hards in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware, and apparently nowhere else. Here's the official website, with a helpful list of distributors that carry the beer, and here's the Wikipedia entry. Mr. Boh merchandise is on tap at NattyBohGear.com, while a fellow named Shayne has devoted an entire blog, and presumably much of his life, to all the cultural manifestations of Natty Boh.

Brazelton's mom

I was pleased to read on the wires that influential pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton is still going strong, age 88. I met Brazelton and interviewed him for the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., in the late 1980s, and I liked him a lot. What I did not know before this profile was published was that his mother founded perhaps the first abortion clinic in Texas. A 1996 profile in the alumni publication at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center says the year was 1940. It also says Mrs. Brazelton was the first woman elder in the Presbyterian Church. There are two resume items you don't often see side by side!

In her blog at I'mNotSorry.net, Patricia Beninato says that in a talk in Richmond several years ago, Brazelton said:

If a baby isn’t going to be born to parents who will be passionately in love with it, then it has a right to be aborted.

To get to the quote, click here and search for Brazelton's name. I can't find online the write-up of the talk that Beninato is quoting, but I'd be keen to read the whole thing.

"The Chief Designer" on CD

I was pleased to receive in the mail today two copies of the new audio edition of my story "The Chief Designer," a two-CD set in the Great Science Fiction Stories series from AudioText Inc. The exterior of the package shows the real-life Korolev (pictured); inside, on the CDs themselves, are photos of Korolev, Gagarin and Sunrise One. The copy on the box reads:

This story, an alternate history masterpiece, is told from the viewpoints of Korolev, the 'Chief' who managed the most crucial years of the secret Soviet space program, and his assistant and eventual successor, Aksyonov. The story spans from World War II, when Korolev was released from a prison camp to design rockets, to 1997 and the Mir space station. This endearing story is many tales in one: an historical story that captures the true mood of the period; a science fiction story that resonates on multiple levels with plenty of technology and cosmonaut bravado; and finally, a ghost story as the tale fades away.

This 132-minute "unabridged reading by Jared Doreck" is the first audio edition of any of my stories. On our next car trip, I look forward to popping this into the dash and, in effect, listening to myself.

The woolly bear watch

Dr. Phil Kaldon writes:

We get woolly bears migrating across our driveway here in West Michigan. They tend to look like our cats, some are more orange and some are more black. The greater the number of darker ones you see, the more you know you are about to be screwed by the Gods of Winter.

Phil, did you see mostly dark ones this season, or mostly orange? We've had a mild winter so far, for what it's worth. And I haven't seen woolly bear One, but I haven't gone looking, either ...

In the buttocks, Bob

My hero Bob Devney -- eight-time Hugo Award nominee in the Best Fan Writer category, and author of the best convention reports ever written -- writes:

One of my favorite headlines is a golden oldie (though perhaps a falsie), supposedly from a British paper during World War II:

Eighth Army push bottles up Germans

Ha!

You remind me, Bob, of the marvelous headline all of us at the Greensboro, N.C., paper so enjoyed circa 1990, mainly because it was published by one of our bitter rivals, the High Point, N.C., paper. During a drug bust, as the offenders scrambled to ditch or hide or otherwise distance themselves from their illegal goods, one brave fellow who had been smoking cocaine in its crystalline form shoved the "rocks" up his own rectum. The police, however, had brought along rubber gloves in anticipation of this ploy, and their search of each suspect was thorough indeed, so the contraband ultimately was found. The newspaper headline read:

Police find crack in buttocks

I can't say how the staff of the High Point paper reacted, but at the Greensboro paper this headline occasioned daylong merriment. Just as the newsroom had quieted down, some newcomer would walk in, be handed the headline, and everyone would erupt in laughter again. I'm surprised we got a paper out that day at all. Finally, after we settled down and got back to work, my colleague Stan Swofford stood, hitched up his pants and muttered: "I don't know what we're laughing about. Greensboro police couldn't even find that." And we all howled anew.

Ah, journalism!

Fun with headlines

My hero Gwenda Bond had a good response to my confusion over this headline:

I think "mad" here is being used in the sense of wicked cool.

To which Dr. Phil Kaldon replied:

Why... YES!

Dr. Phil

"Everything is Physics"

Sharing my fascination with headlines is Charlie Ewers, who teaches journalism at Frostburg State University; he clips and passes me gems from time to time. For example, this:

It's a Hard Rock life

In reply to my post about the heyday of the Hard Rock Cafe, Jason Lundberg writes:

I was also caught up in the whole Hard Rock furor of the 80s and early 90s. It almost got to be like collecting baseball cards or comics among my friends: "You went to the one in Florida? Cool!" "Aw, man, everyone's got the New York one." "Dude, how did you get one from Bangkok?!"

I went on a marching band trip to Florida when I was in high school, and not only did we stand in line for over an hour just to get into the restaurant, we stood in line for another hour just to get our t-shirts. I think I had five of them at one point; I know that some lucky customers of Goodwill have them now.

While you kids were standing in line for T-shirts, I felt very smug and adult and aloof from the whole thing, being all of 26 -- an inexplicable attitude, since at the time I was spending most of my paycheck on Doctor Who T-shirts. I even referred to my Ford Escort as my "Tardis," as in: "I'll be right back, folks; it's raining, and I need to roll up the windows in my Tardis." My friends should have beaten me to death.

Multiplying rabbits

Regarding our family superstition that "Rabbit rabbit rabbit" must be said as one's first words on the first day of the month, Jeremy Tolbert writes:

In my family, we say "white rabbit" three times when smoke at a campfire is blowing your way to "make it turn away." I wonder if the superstitions are related?

I'm sure they are, like all the other good-luck superstitions involving rabbits, the proverbial "rabbit's foot" being the most famous.

Could the old superstition be one of the reasons that Lewis Carroll has Alice encounter the White Rabbit first, among all the denizens of Wonderland?

Why should rabbits be associated with good fortune, I wonder? Must be their reproductive skills.

For a very different take on rabbits, read Kelly Link's brilliant story "Stone Animals" in Magic for Beginners.

Dick Cavett's "death episode"

On the subject of on-air deaths, my hero Jeffrey Ford writes:

Do you remember the old guy who died while Dick Cavett was interviewing him on TV?

I did not know about that, Jeff, so I looked it up. Thanks! Publisher and organic-farming advocate J.I. Rodale did indeed die on the set of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. According to the invaluable Snopes website:

While Cavett was discussing politics with journalist Pete Hamill, Rodale's head dropped to his chest and he was heard to let out what sounded like a snore. "Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?" asked Cavett. There was no response — Rodale was dead. The show was never broadcast.

In the Peter Jackson version of this scene, Cavett's quip would prompt Rodale's ghost to swoop down from the rafters and bellow, "Yes ... bored unto DEATH!"

The Snopes people have a grim but fascinating page devoted to others who died -- or were fatally injured or stricken -- on the air, on camera or onstage. Though several of the deaths involve radio broadcasts, I count only one on-air death of a disc jockey: Jack Spector on WHLI in Garden City, N.Y., in 1994.

FSFS

Of the on-air death of local disc jockey Chazz Offutt, my fellow Frostburg resident Jeremy Bruno writes:

Do we ever get any good news in this area (aside from the foundation of FSFS, that is...)?

By FSFS he means the Frostburg Science Fiction Society, which I declared into existence on New Year's Day. So far there are three members: Jeremy, Sydney and me. There will be others.

I guess "FSFS" would be pronounced "fiss-fiss," but maybe a better short form would be (FS)², or FS squared.

(Thanks to undergrad math major Tricia Shore and her engineer husband for pointing out my mathematical typo earlier.)

Death on the air

Veteran Cumberland, Md., disc jockey Chazz Offutt died on the air, during his morning show, the Tuesday after Christmas. A listener told Michael Sawyers of the Cumberland Times-News:

He had just said the time, 20 minutes after 8, and all of a sudden I heard a noise and then there was just nothing. The mike was open, and I heard somebody say "Chazz," then I heard them say "Call 911."

How many times has this happened in live radio, or live television, I wonder?

Hail, cannons?

California farmers, desperate to ward off hail, are buying hail cannons again.

The best recent newspaper article on hail cannons is by Joe Garner in the July 10, 2006, Rocky Mountain News. Garner writes, in part:

The October 1919 edition of Popular Science magazine had a cover story on "Hail Fighters and Their Strange Devices," complete with an illustration of cannon barrels pointed skyward.

"By 1919, hail cannons had been discredited, but people intent on changing the weather refuse to give them up," the magazine headlined almost 90 years ago.

Today, Mike Eggers Ltd., based in New Zealand, is the principal manufacturer of hail cannons used in the United States for "horticultural protection." The sticker price is $50,000 a unit to provide coverage over a radius of one-third of a mile, would-be purchasers said. Eggers declined to talk price.

Ultimately, Eggers is selling hope, which history has shown is more potent than any cannon ...

Spreading out

The federal government, expecting the worst, is beginning to move out of Washington, D.C. We were talking about this at the 2002 Campbell Conference at the University of Kansas: The less centralized our government, our economy, our electrical grid, our population, etc., the better off we are. Why haven't we been doing more of this, the past five years?

A boy and his sword

You may have read about the lawsuit filed by the high-school senior in Rhode Island who wants his yearbook portrait to depict him wearing chain mail and carrying a sword. (He's a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism.) What you probably haven't read is that the decision not to publish the photo was made not by the principal's office, but by the student staff of the yearbook. Thanks to the invaluable Student Press Law Center for pointing this out.

Had this been a case of the principal overruling the student editor, I'd have sided with the editor. As it's apparently a case of the principal backing the student editor, I still side with the editor.

I can't understand why the American Civil Liberties Union is representing the chain-mailed teen. Going to court to force journalists of any age to publish or not publish anything is downright ... medieval.

Rabbit rabbit rabbit

One of the Giles County, Va., superstitions that Sydney inherited from the Stafford side of the family is the good-luck custom of saying "Rabbit rabbit rabbit" as your first words on the first day of the month. Most months, we forget to do this until we've said several hundred other words, and upon realizing we've forgotten "Rabbit rabbit rabbit" yet again, we get annoyed and say another word.

I'm pleased to say, however, that we did start Jan. 1, 2007, by saying "Rabbit rabbit rabbit" at midnight, before we even said "Happy new year," because Sydney's mother had reminded us earlier in the day. We missed the actual Times Square ball drop on television because we were watching the tail end of the Absolutely Fabulous marathon on BBC America (while snacking on the excellent Gouda cheese made at Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Crozet, Va.), but remembering "Rabbit rabbit rabbit" is the important thing. And now it's the first thing I've "said" on the blog this month, too.

As for where "Rabbit rabbit rabbit" came from, and why rabbits, who knows? More on the superstition here.

The most vigilant Sentinel of all

I can't find the item online, but according to the Christmas Eve edition of the Cumberland Times-News, Dave Christopher of Cumberland, Md., has not missed a single Fort Hill High School football game in the past 50 years. For more on Sentinel football, click here -- or just ask Dave.

Tree Christmas O, Tree Christmas O ...

Check out the upside-down Christmas tree in the home of Patty and Joe Hess of Augusta, W.Va. "This is my hardest tree to decorate," Patty Hess told the Cumberland Times-News. "I'm on a step stool most of the time."

Maryland's greatest spy

Are schoolchildren in Maryland taught about the exploits of Allied spy Virginia Hall in occupied France during World War II? I hope so, and not just because she named her wooden leg Cuthbert.

Teddy Roosevelt on the estate tax

From Teddy Roosevelt's message to Congress, Dec. 3, 1906:

I feel that in the near future our national legislators should enact a law providing for a graduated inheritance tax by which a steadily increasing rate of duty should be put upon all moneys or other valuables coming by gift, bequest, or devise to any individual or corporation. ... The prime object should be to put a constantly increasing burden on the inheritance of those swollen fortunes which it is certainly of no benefit to this country to perpetuate.

From Roosevelt's speech on "The New Nationalism," Osawatomie, Kan., Aug. 31, 1910:

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered -- not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective -- a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

Well, I swear

That the election of a Muslim to Congress -- a Muslim who, naturally enough, wants to swear his oath on the Quran, not the Bible -- should be controversial is a pretty sad thing in a free country, but the controversy has had a couple of beneficial effects. For one thing, a lot of people have been prompted to read, for the first time, the unequivocal Article VI of the U.S. Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

For another, we have been usefully reminded that not even all U.S. presidents have sworn their oaths of office on a Bible. John Quincy Adams swore his oath on a law volume, bless his Unitarian, contrarian soul.

Another win for Harry

A year's supply of butterbeer to the Georgia Board of Education, which sided with the Gwinnett County school board against anti-Harry Potter crusader Laura Mallory, a.k.a. the Professor Umbridge of Loganville, Ga.

Humbug!

Another reason to have voted against Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich in November: According to The Washington Post, he introduced inflatable Santas and snowmen to the governor's mansion.

Three gargoyles

A fellow tourist snapped this photo of me at Notre Dame in 1991, on my first visit to Paris.

Scary Duncan's Bar & Grill flier

As far as I know, I have no family connection to Duncan's Bar & Grill in Frostburg, so I'm not to blame for this flier, which appeared up and down Main Street before the holiday.

The decline of newspapers is old news

Those who care about newspapers should read this Jack Shafer article in Slate:

A good three decades before the newspaper industry began blaming its declining fortunes on the Web, the iPod, and game machines, it knew it was in huge trouble.

I worked at a good, 100,000-circulation daily newspaper from 1986 to 1993, and throughout that time, my peers and I had endless conversations about all the ways our newspaper, and every newspaper, needed to change: completely overhauling the outdated beats, the arbitrary section divisions, the pointless “personal columns,” the endless grip-and-grin shots, the unreadable and, indeed, unread daily updates from the meetings of the Zoning and Sewerage Maintenance Subcommittee Boards -- all of them still staples of the daily newspaper. Newspaper owners just have been too successful and too complacent to want to change anything. And most of them still are, especially the owners of small and medium-sized newspapers -- which still tend to be cash cows, thanks to local coverage, however piddling, that Fox News and Google can't match. But their day, too, will come, if they keep sitting on their classifieds and legal notices, and doing nothing.

Children of the Atomium

Fans of futures past will love this marvelous website devoted to the Atomium, built as the astonishing centerpiece of the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels, Belgium. The name may not be familiar, but once you've seen it, you'll recognize it.

Sorry; orbs aren't enough

I've always loved ghost stories and the folklore of hauntings, and the parapsychology buffs who lug equipment into old cemeteries and prisons and manor houses for overnight "investigations" amuse me no end -- though I'm generally annoyed by the wholly uncritical coverage given such expeditions by local newspapers and TV and radio stations, and I invariably marvel over the lame "evidence" these folks bring back. To me, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and simple photographs of "orbs" -- the anomalies that can be caused in any photograph, especially nighttime photographs, by dust, pollen, precipitation, etc. -- simply don't count, unless you're already a true believer. I was beginning to think I was alone in my anti-orb grumpiness, but now Stephen Wagner, the Paranormal Phenomena editor at About.com (whose news roundups I recommend), states the case very well in a column titled "Enough With the Orbs Already":

So at this point I am willing to dismiss all orb photos as non-paranormal anomalies. There seems to be no compelling reason to consider them as anything but dust and such. ... Let’s not waste any more speculation on orbs. Enough already.

Revisiting Bigfoot

As a kid, I uncritically devoured dozens of books and TV shows on all paranormal topics, especially cryptozoology. My favorite legendary creatures, unsurprisingly, were the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, and I well remember the hairs on the back of my neck prickling whenever I saw the infamous "Patterson film," more accurately known as the Patterson-Gimlin film, which purported to show a Bigfoot ambling through the California woods. It sure convinced me!

Now that I'm older, I'm a lot more skeptical, as are a number of people who have studied the film, and a number of people who claim to have insider knowledge of a hoax perpetrated by -- or, perhaps, ON -- filmmakers Roger Patterson (who died in 1972) and Robert Gimlin (who's still alive, and whose only concession is that someone, perhaps Patterson, conceivably could have played a hoax on him). Here's a fine Wikipedia summary of the claims, counterclaims, counter-counterclaims, etc. While no one has proven the film's Bigfoot is fake, certainly no one has proven the film's Bigfoot is genuine, either.

Far less impressive than the Patterson-Gimlin effort is the latest alleged "Bigfoot photo," taken in the El Dorado National Forest in the High Sierras, notable only because the photographers have helpfully pointed out Bigfoot's "male organ." Bet you'll click the link now!

[NOTE: I revised my above comments on the Patterson-Gimlin film after my favorite cryptozoologist, Loren Coleman -- a regular contributor to the Cryptomundo website, which I highly recommend -- wrote me pointing out severe problems in the claims of the Patterson-Gimlin debunker whose comments I had linked to before. So I substituted the above link to the Wikipedia article as a far more objective (and detailed) guide to this fascinating story. Thanks, Mr. Coleman.]

The online Jap Herron

Here's another reason to love the Web: a 234-page pdf of Jap Herron, the short 1917 novel that Emily Grant Hutchings claimed was dictated to her from the Other Side by the late Mark Twain, via a Ouija board. It has a lengthy introduction by Hutchings, as well it should. Thanks to Jason Offutt's blog, From the Shadows, for the link.

First the effect, then the cause

I enjoyed this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article on physicist John Cramer of the University of Washington, who plans to test whether photon signals can be sent backward in time.

Roughly put, Cramer is talking about the subatomic equivalent of arriving at the train station before you've left home, of winning the lottery before you've bought the ticket, of graduating from high school before you've been born -- or something like that. ... "People tell me it can't work," Cramer says, "but nobody seems to be able to explain why it won't."

Besides being a scientist, Cramer -- whom I met, briefly, when he visited Clarion West 1994 -- is a science-fiction novelist, an Analog columnist, and the father of prominent sf/fantasy editor Kathryn Cramer.

At the end of the article, Cramer says, "If this experiment fails in reality, maybe I'll write a book in which it works." This is the Will Jenkins approach. Jenkins, the lifelong inventor who wrote science fiction as Murray Leinster, used to say that if he decided an idea could work, he patented it; if he decided it couldn't work, he wrote a story about it instead.

After the solstice

My apologies for the long absence. Sydney and I rushed home to South Carolina on Tuesday, Dec. 12, because my mother, age 83, had taken a turn for the worse. My mother hung on longer than anyone expected, but on the ninth day of our bedside vigil, she died -- about 9:20 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 21, the longest night of the year. I am told that after the winter solstice, the days get sunnier, and I trust that this is true. I'm sure I'll write much more about this later, but for now, I'm a bit burnt-out on condolences, and I welcome comments on any other topic. My mother would agree; she always loved to change the subject.

The Seminoles rock

The Seminole Tribe of Florida is buying the Hard Rock Cafe -- all 124 restaurants, plus the Hard Rock hotels, casinos and concert venues, and the world's largest collection of rock 'n' roll memorabila.

I'm impressed. I might even be willing to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe now. Anything Native Americans come up with to take white people's money, I support.

The Associated Press reminds me that the Seminole Tribe was the first tribe to get into the gambling industry, back when I was in high school, with a single bingo hall in Hollywood, Fla. Florida tried to shut 'em down, but Florida learned, not for the first time, that the Seminoles don't take any mess. All the other federally recognized tribes followed suit, and that's why, today, little old ladies all over America can look forward to boarding the tour bus each Saturday morning and playing the slots all day.

Here's my only Hard Rock Cafe story. Back in the 1980s, I went to Washington, D.C., as a chaperone for a vanload of high-school students from Greensboro, N.C., all members of the local Journalism Explorer Post. Beforehand, I made a list of every possible tourist attraction in D.C., and asked everyone to vote on what they most wanted to see in our nation's capital. The overwhelming winner, more popular even than that perennial write-in favorite, "the hookers," was the site of the future Hard Rock Cafe. It was, at the time, a big hole in the ground full of construction equipment, but the savvy owners had rented a narrow storefront next door and already had the shelves stocked with "Hard Rock Cafe Washington DC" merchandise. The line when we arrived, I am not kidding, was the longest tourist line we saw in Washington that spring; hundreds of tourists, mostly teenagers, were lined up in an orderly queue that stretched for blocks, just to buy a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt. That was the '80s. Dang, I sound like a VH1 special.

The Dunbar Poets

I was started to read that one of the teams competing Saturday for the state 1A football championship is the Poets. The fighting Poets? Laudable, but unusual. So I looked it up and found that the Poets are, naturally enough, the teams from Baltimore's Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, named for the great poet who lived in D.C. toward the end of his too-short life. Go, poets!

God's Politics and the Christian Coalition

In abruptly leaving the Christian Coalition, which he was to have led as president beginning Jan. 1, the Rev. Joel Hunter says he's more interested in fighting poverty and protecting the environment, areas the old guard wants nothing to do with. He tells Time magazine:

The emerging constituency, especially the 20- and 30-year-olds' generation, are not prone to the old categories, they don't care about Republican or Democrat, they don't care about conservative or liberalism, they say let's just do what's right to love our neighbor. I went into the Christian Coalition thinking maybe we can turn one of these traditional narrow organizations and broaden it into these compassion issues. But it didn't work.

One wonders whether Hunter has read Jim Wallis' excellent book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. Someone should get Hunter and Wallis together. Time notes that Hunter is "now floating the idea of a new mobilizing organization to lead the Christian community into the future." That organization -- Wallis' organization -- may already exist.

Battlefield ghosts

Jim Goldsworthy's Dec. 3 column in the Cumberland Times-News is about battlefield ghosts. He cites an unnamed friend, a Civil War re-enactor, who was on a tour at Manassas, Va. The guide asked a group of children whether they knew what a Zouave uniform looked like.

"One little girl said they wore baggy red pants and blue jackets and funny red hats. When the guide asked how she knew that, she pointed to a cannon at the top of a nearby hill and said, 'One of them was standing up there.' We looked, but nobody was there," said my friend. ... My friend described a photograph taken by one of his buddies at a Georgia battlefield. It shows three mounted cavalry troopers that no one saw, and there had been no re-enactors on horseback present that day. He says the photo looks exactly like an old painting he's seen.

As is usual in the field of the paranormal, we move easily from "This happened to a friend of mine" to "This happened to a friend of a friend of mine." Often, too, as here, the related experience is claimed to be just like a previously mediated experience -- a painting or movie or photo we saw, a story someone else told -- which always makes me wonder how much of the related experience is just an unintentional Xerox of the "original."

Goldsworthy contributes an experience of his own:

When I made my so-far only visit to the Antietam battlefield at Sharpsburg 35 years ago, I actually could smell the blood. I know what blood smells like, and it wasn't my imagination.

I've never been to Antietam, though I've never smelled blood at the bloody places I have visitied, such as Gettysburg, and Normandy, and the Tower of London. I can, however, recommend to Goldsworthy and his friend and his friend's friend the American Battlefield Ghost Hunters Society, based in Charlotte Hall, Md., the only such specialty organization I know of.

Not-so-mad scientists

I really like this Wesley Haines photo from the Cumberland Times-News, of fifth-graders doing a science project, but why is the headline "Mad Scientists"?In what sense are these kids mad? Are they mad simply because they're doing science? Because all scientists are mad? Because science itself is mad?

The Martian spring

To the latest hints of water on Mars, Tim Radford in The Guardian applies a necessary, uh, splash of cold water:

Since 1996, orbiters and landers have been crashing down on Mars (in some cases, literally) every 18 months or so and mission scientists have announced the discovery of water on Mars at least half a dozen times in the past seven years. But, in each case, they haven't actually discovered water at all: just indirect evidence, either that it must once have been there, or that it could still be lurking furtively below the arid Martian dust, waiting to sneak out and leave a gully, a wadi or a wash as teasing evidence of its fleeting presence. ... The Martian water torture will continue until somebody actually lands on Mars, drills a borehole, taps into an aquifer and then makes a cup of tea with the stuff.

Holiday, Ollieday

This lead illustration in a newspaper insert encapsulates everything I love about Ollie's Bargain Outlet, a 48-store retail chain based in Harrisburg, Pa., whose advertising approaches South of the Border or Pigman's Bar-Be-Que grandeur. Note the goose (or duck?) in the background crying, "Cheap! Cheap! Cheap!" The late Ollie Rosenberg, a backer of the chain when it started in 1982, was presumably less moth-eaten in real life than his Ollie's avatar. We discovered the Ollie's in LaVale, Md., soon after moving here, and I am in fact a card-carrying member of Ollie's Army. My card:

Must be karma

Seeing this ad in the Cumberland Times-News made me realize that while I wasn't paying attention, both a 1,700-year-old Sanskrit text on the arts of love and a 1980s swimsuit model whose out-of-date calendar image once adorned the closet door of my first apartment in Greensboro, N.C., have become pillars of the U.S. economy.

Could it be ... Satan?

This saga of Lisa Jensen's Christmas wreath is my favorite holiday story of the season so far. In brief: Jensen, who lives in Colorado, put up a Christmas wreath shaped like a peace sign. Her homeowners association -- which deserves to be named: It's the Loma Linda Homeowners Association -- told her to take down the wreath or suffer a $25-per-day fine. The problem with the wreath, they explained, was that it could be viewed as a divisive antiwar protest and, possibly, a symbol of Satan. In response, Jensen did exactly what she should have done: Told the homeowners association to stick it in their yule log, and then spread the word far and wide, so that every English-language news organization on Earth (by my rough estimate) has now covered the story. Countless strangers contacted Jensen, offering to pay her fine throughout the holiday. The nearby town of Pagosa Springs put up an identical wreath to show its solidarity. After a few days of global derision, stunned by their new awareness of this divisive, possibly Satanic device called "The Internet," the Loma Linda Homeowners Association sent Jensen this note:

We had a misunderstanding with your Christmas decoration and for that we apologize. We withdraw any and all previous requests for removal of your decoration.

By "misunderstanding," they mean, of course, "We failed to understand that our pettiness and ignorance would make us the laughingstock of millions." One wonders why they didn't just say that. Oh, and the wires report that two of the three homeowners' board members have had their numbers changed; the third isn't answering calls.

Gruber's Almanack

I picked up a copy of J. Gruber's Hagers-Town Town and Country Almanack without realizing this Maryland annual is the second oldest continuously published periodical in the United States. Gruber's almanac first appeared in 1797 -- the year John Adams was inaugurated, Lord Nelson lost his arm, and Mary Shelley was born -- and still is published by the descendants of its founder, the titular John Gruber.

No longer, alas, does Gruber's almanac sponsor its annual Woolly Bear Contest, which once offered a $100 prize for the biggest woolly bear caterpillar. The goal was to examine the width of the black bands on as many woolly bears as possible to determine the severity of the coming winter; according to folk belief, the more black on the woolly bear, the worse the weather will be. In the last years of the contest, the number of woolly-bear entries had dropped off to practically nothing. (After all, when was the last time you went looking for woolly bears? J'accuse!)

I'm pleased to report, however, that the almanac still will predict the sex of your next child for a mere $5. This service is provided using the signs of the Zodiac according to the formula established by Hagerstown's own "Aunt" Lydia Cline, a retired nurse who died in 1973. The editors are careful to point out (on Page 61 of the current edition) that the prognostication works not with a first child, but only with successive children. Send the birthdate and gender of the first child, plus the aforementioned $5 and a self-addressed stamped envelope, to:

"Aunt Lydia"
c/o The Gruber Almanack, LLC.
1120-C Professional Court
Hagerstown, MD 21741-0609

"While we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the predictions," the editors note, "be assured that 'Aunt Lydia' still maintains an accuracy of other 80%!"

Since you asked: The oldest continuously published periodical in the United States is The Old Farmer's Almanac out of Dublin, N.H., which first appeared in 1792. What blog will beat that?